GamesBeat Summit 2025: Can AI boost creativity in game development?

At GamesBeat Summit 2025, games and generative AI — particularly transformer models, large language models, and image generation models — were a particularly hot topic. Chris Melissinos, principal evangelist – video games and immersive technologies at AWS, welcomed Aaron Farr, co-founder and CTO of Jam & Tea Studios; Ashwin Raghuraman, senior solutions architect, games at AWS; and Hilary Mason, co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door to examine the creative potential of AI in gaming.

AI has demonstratively boosted productivity in development workflows, but can it add similar benefits to the creative side of game design?

It’s a nuanced question with a quite nuanced answer, Mason said.

“It is not a big red “make a game” button, exactly, but it is something that then lets us ask questions,” she said. “Our cost functions have changed, our capability functions have changed. What we can let our players do has changed. What is the creative experience we can come up with and try? Maybe we can build that a little faster than we could before. It is not a black and white question about AI making me a game. It is a much more nuanced question about what I can do with this that I couldn’t do before, or what I might have wanted to do it before, but the cost function didn’t make sense.”

Farr agreed, saying it’s not time yet to throw away your old tools.

“We’re not yet ready to, if we will ever be, hit a button and get a game,” he said. “I have a repertoire of tools. What does this add to it? Where does it fill in gaps? I’m not throwing out all the old tools. I need a return on investment. At the same time, I would encourage people not to prematurely optimize. I know the costs are scary. That’s why we have wonderful partners like this who can help us navigate those costs. But I would also encourage people to build their own tools right now. If you’re not up for that, you may need to rethink it.”

The creative promise of generative AI

Gen AI offers new opportunities in narrative design, prototyping, and worldbuilding, particularly for smaller or experimental studios, and accelerates creativity.

“It’s automating, in some ways, the scaffolding that allows an artist, a writer, somebody doing a level design, to be able to then come into something without having to build all the pieces from the bottom up,” Melissinos said. “You basically give them the opportunity to create more art and more story because you’ve removed some of those pieces. It doesn’t replace the artist. It accelerates their output, accelerates their efficiency. Or it can. In some cases, if you’re not careful and you don’t check your own biases, you’ll think, that’s exactly what I imagined! Always check your biases. Always check the output. Always check those results, because it can get it wrong. And often it does.”

You need to lean into all the facets of the technology, including the oddities and the unexpected, Farr added.

“In some cases, hallucinations mean creativity,” he said. “We can roll with the punches in so many creative ways. But that means you have to have an intuition about what this technology is. There’s a temptation still for us to say, I know how these patterns work. I’m going to just apply them again. I would argue that it may be a new medium that we’re starting to explore, or pushing the bounds of what our medium has ever been before. And that means it’s going to take us some time to get used to it, and deep understanding of the technology and a creative application of it is what we’re calling for.”

That still includes all the things that make games great: Developers who think about and empathize with players, who think about what brings joy to their ideal audience, what the best experience looks and feel like. Of course, you can’t quantify fun or intent, Melissinos said, and you can’t offload that to the machines.

Hidden Door doesn’t use AI-generated art in its game platform, but it uses AI to dynamically assemble human-created art as developers create levels and characters.

“We’re not saying, no machine learning in the art process at all,” she said. “We’re thinking a lot about the visual experience at the end. How do we get to that most efficiently given the assets we have and the time we have?”

Jam & Tea Studios also doesn’t use AI-generated art in Retail Mage, but instead made the ethical choice to rely on marketplace assets and commissioned art — as it’s less expensive. Their primary aim, with generative AI, is creative innovation.

“We’re trying to apply this technology in ways that create something new and novel that we couldn’t do before,” he said. “No human, no narrative designer, no particular anyone could create what we’re doing.”

Democratizing game development with cloud + AI

Access to scalable, pretrained models is also removing barriers for small teams and solo developers, Raghuraman said.

“There are different levels of tools that are meant for certain developers, like data scientists,” he said. “People who have the ability to dive into data and dive into code. At the same time, there are developers who maybe aren’t that technology-focused. They want to just incorporate this technology into their game, into their experience.”

That means generative AI is reshaping not only how games are made, but also who gets to participate in the creative process. Tools like Amazon Bedrock, a managed service for building, training, and fine tuning LLMs on AWS, are kind of a playground for LLMs, letting developers experiment and select the tools that will best suit their needs.

There’s not really a direct science to figuring out which model works best, Raghuraman said, but Bedrock democratizes capabilities in a comprehensive platform that streamlines access to cutting-edge generative AI models developed by companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI. These models are trained on massive datasets, enabling them to perform a broad array of tasks. It uses a unified API that acts as a translator for developers working with sophisticated models.

“That’s how you use these LLMs as a tool, and not just the tool, but one of the tools in your tool belt,” Raghuraman said. “It helps accelerate that time to production or time to having a model or image that you really like — that your players will also enjoy.”

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