Epic Provides The Real Litmus Test for the Generative AI Push

Hello one and all and welcome to . I hope you’re well. I am still feeling rather cruddy. This cold is just not shifting fast enough for my tastes. But still we managed to get another newsletter out to you today.

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Announcements

Before we kick things off a quick thank you to the team over at Game Republic for a great couple of days at their New Horizons event up in Middlesborough. I hosted a panel with fellow AI and Games Conference organisers Duygu Cakmak and Matthias Siemonsmeier to give a “hype-free” assessment of the state of AI in the games industry. It seemed to be pretty well received, and we had some interesting conversations with folks afterwards off the back of it.

Somehow even in a panel of three people I’m the only one talking.

As always it’s great to catch up with so many folks I know across the UK sector. It’s a nice reminder not only of how our industry is just full of awesome people, but also it’s motivating when people let us know they value the work we’re doing. This is particularly useful when I feel like I’m screaming into the aether every week.

AI and Games Conference 2026

Speaking of events, we’re now only three weeks out from this years AI and Games Conference (THREE WEEKS!?!?!). Sally and I went down for a final visit to our new venue at HereEast earlier this week to run through the 101 gubbins that we need to think about, plus I just did a run in a rental van today to drop off a bunch of equipment with our friends at Staffordshire University London. In the meantime we have updated the full list of talks and the schedule to the conference website for you to check out. But of course, I’m still going to give everyone their flowers in this here newsletter.

Grab Your Tickets

Tickets are selling quite handsomely now, and we’re expecting that we’re on track to break our attendance record for 2026. But for now, here’s a few more talks to get you excited, plus announcing a new format for 2026!

New Talk Announcements!

Unpredictable Encounters: Designing Glitchy NPC Animation and Behaviour for Horror
Tania Dales / University of York

First up we welcome Tania Dales who is a PhD candidate as part of the Intelligent Games and Gaming Intelligence (iGGi) programme at the University of York. In this session Dales will discuss how glitches in games can provide a powerful mechanism for eliciting discomfort in horror games. How user studies highlight the ways in which players resonate with glitches and explore how developers can foster, rather than suppress, these unintended behaviours as means to drive home more engaging experiences.

Shipping Bobium Brawlers with AI That Fits in Your Pocket
Piero Molino / Studio Atelico

Last year we welcomed Studio Atelico’s founder Piere Molino who gave a great talk on the work the studio had achieved in reproducing the Stanford GenAI simulation paper to run on local models. This year we’re getting a deep-dive into the studios first title: Bobium Brawlers. As we discussed in the newsletter earlier this year the team built their own collectable combat game and soft launched on mobile. So we’ll get to hear a whole lot more on the successes and challenges of this project in just a couple of weeks time.

From NPCs to Teammates: Building the Next Generation of Game AI
Hyunseung Kim / Krafton

Earlier this year Krafton held a public beta for PUBG Ally: a new system for creating smart and intelligent NPC characters in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The idea being to create teammates that respond to your voice commands and interpret the gameplay situation in ways that support your goals. We’re excited to welcome Hyunseung Kim, the research lead on the project to share some insights into how it all works.

Generative Remastering: Shipping AI-Generated Levels, Autonomous Augmentation and Geometry-Preserving Art in a Commercial Platformer
Johannes Pfau / MAXYMUM

In an age of gaming remasters, questions have been raised about how or if generative tooling could prove useful in supporting the process. We welcome Johannes Pfau, head of research at MAXYMUM and Assistant Professor at Utrecht University to discuss their research in building a production-tested pipeline for remastering classic games using an existing 1993 title as a benchmark.

AI for Game Accessibility: Auditing Prototypes and Mapping Released Games
Nadia Di Leo / University of Foggia

Next up we welcome Nadia Di Leo, a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at the University of Foggia in Italy. In this presentation, Di Leo will be discussing how multimodal AI systems can be deployed to help support auditing games against accessibility guidelines. Plus by exploring the use of LLMs to cross-reference player experiences against guideline audits, we can build more comprehensive reviews of game accessibility.

[Workshop] Creating Test Automation Feedback Loops with Agents and GameDriver
Andrew Fray / Automated AF

Last but most certainly not least for this week’s announcements is the first of our new workshop formats we’re hosting this year, and to kick things off we welcome Andrew fray: a BAFTA-winning games programmer and automation consultant. You might recall that Andrew hosted a QA panel with us in August as part of the AI tracks at Gamescom Dev. This session will be a workshop showcasing how to build meaningful automated test workflows using GameDriver’s tooling systems. Andrew’s going to be live-building some of these automations in the room, and highlight how coding agents can help bootstrap your testing frameworks. A great opportunity to learn from one of the best in the field.

Even More to Come!

We still have a handful of talks to announce in the coming days, including talks from Riot Games, Databricks, AWS for Games (yes, another one) and Qualcomm. Plus we have three more sessions being conducted in our new ‘third room’. These are going to be a bit more experimental and allow for delegates to have some time carved out to discuss topic areas in even more detail. More details next week!

Epic Games Big GenAI Push

In the past week or two there’s been a whole bunch of big AI-related stories in and around games - we’ll get to (some of) them, I promise - but the one that I think best reflects the state of things was Jason Schrier’s reporting on Bloomberg about Epic Games new project. A collaboration with Disney that has been in development now for a couple of years the company has acknowledged that it has failed to hit its intended production targets, with an original launch date set for around March 2027. To mitigate these issues, and speed up development overall, the company’s leadership has instructed developers that going forward they have to make greater use of (Generative) AI tools to finish the game.