In this episode, Jason hosts Kayla Comalli, an engineer at the forefront of AI integration in gaming, to discuss her company Lovelace Studio's innovative platform, Nyric. Lovelace Studio enables users to create and explore 3D worlds using generative AI, similar to Midjourney but for persistent, interactive realms. Kayla shares her journey from a background in biology and digital marketing to becoming a systems engineer in robotics, and eventually co-founding Lovelace Studio. The discussion covers Lovelace Studio’s vision, the technical and market challenges they face, the role of AI in both gaming and software development, and their strategies for scaling and going to market. They also delve into how AI is changing the landscape of game development and broader industry applications, as well as Kayla's personal journey and motivations.
In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs interviews Kayla Comalli, co-founder and CEO of Lovelace Studio. The studio is pioneering the creation of 3D worlds using their generative AI platform, Nyric, which allows users to build and explore interactive realms. The conversation delves into Kayla's diverse background in biology, marketing, and systems engineering, leading to her current venture.
They discuss the challenges Lovelace Studio faces in the market, their strategies for scaling, and the transformative role of AI in game development and beyond. Kayla also shares insights on her personal journey, and how the confluence of gaming and AI is shaping the future of digital experiences. Jason reflects on how AI tools are enabling more efficient development processes, and explores how this could impact the gaming industry and beyond.
00:00 Introduction to The Next Next
00:07 Meet Kayla Comalli and Lovelace Studio
00:55 Jason Jacobs' Learning Journey
01:40 Kayla's Background and Career Shift
02:19 The Vision and Gameplay of Lovelace Studio
04:42 Kayla's Coding Journey and Robotics Experience
08:59 Combining Gaming and Coding 11:15 Building Lovelace Studio
24:32 The Future of AI in Gaming
30:16 Going to Market and Business Strategy
32:49 Leveraging AI in Development
39:15 Final Thoughts and Farewell
Jason Jacobs: On today's episode of The Next Next, we bring you Kayla Comalli, co founder and CEO of Lovelace Studio. Lovelace Studio makes the innovative platform Nyric, which enables users to create and explore 3D worlds using generative AI. Similar to Midjourney, but for persistent, interactive realms. Kayla shares her journey from a background in biology and digital marketing to becoming a systems engineer in robotics and eventually co founding Lovelace Studio.
The discussion covers Lovelace Studio's vision, the technical and market challenges they face, the role of AI in both gaming and software development, and their strategies for scaling and going to market. We also delve into how AI is changing the landscape of game development and broader industry applications, as well as Kayla's personal journey and motivations.
It's a great discussion, and I hope you enjoy it. But before we get started
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is the next, next, it's not really a show. It's more of a learning journey to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week, we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built.
And selfishly, the goal is for this to help me better understand how to do that myself. While bringing all of you along for the ride. Not sure where this is going to go, but it's going to be fun.
Okay, Kayla Comalli, welcome to the show.
Kayla Comalli: Glad to be here.
Jason Jacobs: I'm psyched that you're here as well and so this is the third episode that I'm recording. I'm still getting my bearings and I have to tell you, I'm a little scared for this one because you're, an engineer really in the guts of what's happening in AI and I'm not so I'm trying to learn but I can't even fake it.
So that's just my caveat going into this discussion, but I'm so appreciative for you making the time to come and speak with me today.
Kayla Comalli: We'll see. Comparatively, there's a lot of folks who are really in it, and we're, at the consumer level, we have a different balance between, player exposed mechanics excited to chat more on what that means at the at that level.
Jason Jacobs: For starters, maybe just talk a bit about Lovelace Studio, what's the elevator pitch.
Kayla Comalli: Yeah Lovelace Studio we're a third place for worldbuilders. It's a game that uses generative AI. for people to prompt their own worlds into existence. If you're familiar with Mid Journey, where you prompt 3D images and you give arguments and details of what you'd we do that for persistent 3D realms.
Players can live in Alice in Wonderland worlds or Viking, Feudal Japan, Cyberpunk, different styles. And they spawn in a sort of a geographical grid, in a map, where you can interact and play with other people. And so the gameplay centers around really dynamic interactions really important sub communities and resource management.
And a lot of very, in tune and personalized experiences on the player side as well. So everything you do is a lot more like an extension of yourself, rather than like an avatar or like a character. You're playing more as a player. As an embodied experience. That's why we considered it like more like of a social platform or the future of where social media is trending.
Gen Z, Gen Alpha tends to significantly high margin of players. And that's where we think that trend is going towards is like social media is going to be in social gaming for the future.
Jason Jacobs: Nice. And it, yeah, it's interesting that you describe it that way because I went in and played with it a bit in preparation for this discussion, it did feel that way as a user that you enter a natural language prompt like you would with Midjourney, but rather than a photo, it is essentially bringing that photo to life, where all of a sudden you're in that photo, you're part of it, almost Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or Alice in Wonderland, where it's like you're part of the experience, which is mind blowing.
Kayla Comalli: Yeah, exactly. An image, you feel like you have a little bit less ownership or the control ends at the point of the prompt where the customized world that you create you build out and you have more control than you feel like you have a stake in that and think the world, I think generally most systems and particularly any consumer platform that tries to scale should have pretty significant agency for the players.
Give them a sense of autonomy and ownership. And the genre is survival craft gameplay. So that's if Minecraft, where you're building it up. It's not just building, the world itself. It's how you turn it into a city and how you explore and expand with other players.
Jason Jacobs: Nice, and so I'm gonna come back to Lovelace Studio, but I want to go someplace you might not be expecting, and that's that it looks like from your background you were a mid career changer, or you had followed down one path before you made the decision to learn how to code?
Is that true?
Kayla Comalli: Yes. Yeah. And not a fully self taught engineer, but I did do a coding bootcamp. My background is in biology. That's where my, one of my undergrad is. And I but I've been a lifelong gamer since the beginning and, being in Boston, huge biotech space it's a natural trajectory that you go into bioinformatics or computational bio or a graduate degree, but I wanted more of the kind of That boots on the ground dive head first into that more conventional, maybe Silicon Valley style startup experience.
And yeah, I did a boot camp, coding boot camp, quit my pretty decent job and my family was concerned, but supportive. And and then yeah, they teach you all the marketable skills. This was 10 years ago 2015. It was called Launch Academy. And they teach you all the marketable skills.
At the time it was Ruby on Rails, GitHub, SQL, JavaScript, basic HTML. It's general full stack coding. And then you go and you basically pitch to people and get your job. And so I was able to do digital marketing for a couple of years to Cut my teeth on that but for the last six years, I was actually in robotics.
So it was quite a great story of a success story of how jumping right in can put you at the same space of, my future. Impressive colleagues at the space of MIT PhD students and like literal rocket scientists. And I'm just there yeah, I just learned the stuff on the fly.
It's an amazing space and environment.
Jason Jacobs: And what brought you to coding?
Kayla Comalli: I'd always loved it or I'd always loved the idea of it. I had a lot of friends who did successful startups. And they're CEOs or CTOs or just lead engineers. And I think there's a lot of translations in game, in a lot of games that just felt right and felt natural.
So when I was growing up, I played games my whole, whole life. I think one of the kind of stories I bring into, why I'm building games now is a whole cumulative experience. But I lost my mom very early on. I was 13 and she passed away from breast cancer.
And games gave me a lot of agency and control, like I, you're a builder, you're a creator, and you have, your own stories and narratives that you're a part of at the time, the real world was a lot more difficult to handle and deal with, and having that space was everything.
And I think coding gives you that sort of same sense, and obviously they translate quite well together.
Jason Jacobs: And one thing I'm curious about is just how do you think your experience would be had you made the decision to learn how to code today now that these tools are emerging to bridge the gap for non technical people like me to learn to code. Would it be similar or do you think it would be?
different, and if different in what ways.
Kayla Comalli: Yeah, that's a great question. I definitely think it would be different. I think Ruby on Rail, it'd probably be Python. Because that's just a great it's an abstraction layer for like TensorFlow and any pretty high compute operations. It's also readable human friendly. If nowadays I think there's significant more competition.
It's almost table stakes, honestly. For any industry that isn't a tech industry, which is such a broad term. So I don't know. Yeah. I think if I was doing it and I knew what I know now, I would say robotics is like the most promising industry to actually go into, which is funny because I pivoted out of it, but I think it's the most promising and learning some like simulation tools Unreal actually, which what we build in Unreal is really great for that because it's a physics engine.
You're basically, you can also use that NVIDIA's Omniverse tools to. Simulate spaces, and it's cool because it's a visual, they call it a blueprint system. You're actually not coding, you're not typing anything. It's just high level connections. But it translates, and the same logic translates, and it's a, it's just a wrapper on C it's really accessible nowadays.
You can do a lot more top down, get going right from the beginning, yeah. Yeah,
Jason Jacobs: hearing is you were a gamer, and then you got drawn into coding for similar reasons, and then you spent many years in coding for robotics and then you pivoted out of robotics and combined the two, where now you're working in gaming and coding as one. Can you talk a bit about how those came together, when those came together, and what that process looked like?
Kayla Comalli: So I was working as a systems engineer initially but was able to move into perception engineering. I say I'm non academia. I did go to Tufts actually just part time taking courses just to learn more about the robotics and human interactions. Working with perception, it's all computer vision, it's how the robot sees, and they all emulate, the same human systems, just depth cameras, and doing cross vision analyses but they're operating as a, if you're not familiar with PubSubs it's pulling in Data telemetry at runtime very quickly.
Sometimes 20, 20 Hertz or like 20 times a second. Like you're just getting, odometry. What are the wheels doing? What's everything happening. And it, and I felt like there was a lot of potential seeing how, we have these remote systems. They're self autonomous driving vehicles, by the way, it was e commerce fulfillment, so warehouse two day shipping fulfillment.
And seeing that, these tiny GPUs, these large warehouses with completely unreliable Wi Fi could have this sort of compute happening. It really showcased where we're at in terms of Not consumer level, but like applicable pipelines and architectures that are really complex.
And basically to summarize, I was like, this could be really powerful in the gaming space. Because games are typically pre built content. There's open world, sometimes infinite probability spaces of what you can create. Especially in Survivalcraft.
But There wasn't that, dynamic, we're listening to you, we're following your inputs and we're adjusting to the game according to that. And so with the simulation systems I saw in robotics, it was like, yeah, we have adaptive tooling, we have the sort of preventative or predictive analysis that could make gameplay really personalized and cool.
Jason Jacobs: So once you got there how did you proceed? What did the next steps look like? And at what point did it go from dreaming To making the decision to build the company.
Kayla Comalli: Yeah. So we were acquired by Shopify that the robotics company was acquired by Shopify in 2019 for 450 million. I was employee number 30 when I first started there. And I was their very first junior hire at the time. So I was able to being so early on, I was able to bootstrap this company the startup.
I realized I didn't have professional gaming experience, and you definitely need that to build a game. So I joined the Boston Game Dev Slack channel, met my co founder, Alex, who's amazing. We've been together since two and a half years now.
Jason Jacobs: Professional gaming experience, meaning building professional games or meaning playing professional games.
Kayla Comalli: oh industry experience. Yeah, professional yeah, he's a game, he's a game
Jason Jacobs: come out of coding and you're a gamer, but you hadn't worked in gaming companies.
Kayla Comalli: Yes, exactly. I built some games here and there small games that I didn't ship for fun, but nothing like that, Alex comes in he's worked on Eve Online, one of the most successful MMO games out there a really interesting showcase of social systems and culture structure, really interesting game.
Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones Star Trek, tons of stuff. We also shared this vision of what could be. And the last two years have been narrowing down that infinite probability space. It's so much that you can do with it.
From a vision side, there's like multi modal AI you could do. NPCs, non player characters that, that can learn from you. The player inputs could be expanded if you went to VR or XR. And then, of course, Web 3 and blockchain was emerging at this time too. So there's so many. Like different sub-sectors of gaming that was also exploding at this time.
So we had to be really intentional on how we navigated that and where, what design choices we made and what scope what our scope cuts were gonna be. And it's a constant process. It's a constant iteration. But, we feel pretty decently airtight, I'd say comparatively to the normal startups out there.
Jason Jacobs: And you said that there was a shared vision that you both had when you made the decision to work together. What was that initial shared vision?
Kayla Comalli: Yeah a space where people can come together, create amazing things and live in those worlds, like a digital, almost like a, if Dungeons and Dragons, like a digital role. playing community in a way. But there's a lot of different ways to define that. So that's why, the five word pitch is a third space for world builders.
It's your cafe, your gym your area that you go to and you connect with your communities your sub communities. But ultimately there's the opportunity to influence this, the kind of like greater space you can have macro influences if you grow you'll want to be like a dedicated, leader in this space. A lot of opportunities for people. It's,
Jason Jacobs: huh. And every question I ask, there's a caveat of I'm not a gamer. But what I envision is that you have, Gamers who play these games like some of the ones that you were mentioning that Alex had helped build And then you have these companies that are building games and some might be small companies, small upstarts Some might be big established companies that you know that have a whole suite of games that they've built over time and big teams working on them when you think about the lane that Lovelace is trying to step into is it about enabling gamers to build worlds?
Is it about enabling the game companies to incorporate the world building into their products? Or is it about something different than either of those?
Kayla Comalli: Yeah, no, that's a great question. And Yeah, it's good to clarify because you're like, Oh, you're building spaces for people to build games. It's a studio facing. No, we're consumer facing. We're building up what will be a UGC platform, user generated content platform. So think like Roblox.
Maybe with a little less we're definitely not targeting children or it's a we're young adults, 18 plus, but yeah, exposing those tools, exposing gameplay opportunities for them to build out worlds. So it's, it could be like loosely a B2B2C, a gig economy in a way.
But we just say consumer generally for ease. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: And are these worlds that if I go and create a world, for example, then I might invite my friends in and then so it's me and my friends and maybe I choose to make it public and have anyone be able to join and people could join my world that I created on Lovelace's platform. Nyric?
Is that what it's called?
Kayla Comalli: Yes. Yeah exactly. So discoverability is a key. Part of the gameplay, pioneering Pioneer Craft is like exploring and being able to learn, see other worlds, but the initial communities, there's gonna be a lot of locally hosted servers. There's gonna be a lot of people bringing in their own friends to this space.
What makes it a bit more unique is that the worlds that are created are like a digital real estate. It's a Web3 term, but we're not Web3. But you have a space in these worlds, you have your own realm and it's interconnected.
So the realms that spawn are hex grids. So there's six different sides. You're connecting to each of those, you're connecting to other player worlds and you're managing your resources. You're basically creating trade routes. If like diplomacy in a way you're managing a mutual partnership and what's really cool about that is that this graph style network is.
Basically a digital emulation of a social network. There's a lot of exposure opportunities for early adopters. People, it's an unsaturated space, and if you get a good location, you can get a lot more inherent discoverability, and you can get a lot more influence. You can connect with other super connector players, and so it becomes a really cool problem as we grow and expand.
We're still young, but we have a bit of a roadmap ahead of how it can become An interesting use case of graph neural nets and graph transitioning.
Jason Jacobs: And how is your space protected? Is there equivalent of land rights or like digital land IP?
Kayla Comalli: We, so the best way to do that if we wanted to protect player creations would be NFTs probably, or you min your own NFT or you have a token basically that you could trade or share up share for your place. We do wanna get into that eventually. We aren't Web3 now.
We've, had a, our alpha last year we did actually. Do just what you're suggesting is you players create their own world. It has its unique assets. It has metadata around the characters and the space and the biomes and we mint that into an NFT. But that was just through a partnership, a company, Lamina One, that we did for a proof of concept. I think that's probably going to be the path we ultimately take is like some integration with that some authoritative blockchain live validation server or something, maybe through Beamable, there's a few folks that we've worked with but we want it to be accessible that's why we pivoted for VR, we didn't do Web3 because we, there's too many layers and accessibility and approachability for players is really important and a key to what we want to make this a space that anybody could jump into really quickly.
Jason Jacobs: And what can one do in the world that they create today? And ultimately, what do you hope and plan that one might be able to do in the future?
Kayla Comalli: Yeah, so today we're in beta, so we're on Steam, but as our coming soon page but later this year, Q3 this year is when we're targeting to release. At the moment, you can spawn your worlds. You type, like we mentioned, that mid journey prompt. This is the gameplay sort of loop. The world gets broken down into metadata, different biomes, different climates, styles, themes characters there's, our characters are Faebots, they kind of power all the gameplay, they power the traversal, all the abilities that you can have in those worlds.
are driven by them and they have unique personalities and archetypes. They can be snarky. People love snarky robots. It's a very common trope in games. Like Halo and Portal, like spherical companion bots. That's basically what we have. And so you use those to Power your traversal with these within these spaces.
There's a lot of environmental hazards. There's sand clouds. There's bees. There's like bad cold and freezing and burning temperatures that you need to craft and build up your like protective worlds protective sort of cities around while also creating these sort of like beacons, path markers of resources to explore those edges, to explore other Player edge worlds and potentially create your own sort of like subspaces.
So that's the gameplay That's what we call it survival craft It's centered the minute to minute is centered a lot around building your own space at the moment And then as we grow with multiplayer There's gonna be probably a divergence of player types There's gonna be the creator player type and then there's gonna be the social player type who's the super connector
Jason Jacobs: And what are the closest comps or inspirations, if you will that you think about when creating Nyric and what is it about Nyric that is different and that gave you conviction that the existing landscape wasn't providing what you came to believe was becoming possible?
Kayla Comalli: yeah, it's been a confluence of a lot of games. The Sims is a great inspiration with its diegetic kind of gameplay. It can be there's emergent behaviors that you can. That player can experience while playing after, hours and days that the NPC can express.
It's oh, I remember, I'm drinking this tea while sitting in this living room whereas multiple days earlier there was, like, you just find parallels. They're like, oh I'm upset because, this they're, I don't know how exactly they do it.
I don't know if it's exposed, but they monitor Patterns, if you're familiar with like vector databases, it like finds overlapping style like overlapping themes necessarily, it's like a high level try to explain that differently. Yeah. Basically, there's like just emergent gameplay that is found through pattern matching, that's the player experience it and think, whoa this is a lot deeper than I realized.
So that came into play with our character design with the Faebots. They're basically summarizing events that are happening in the world. It's creating a ledger, a whole history of experiences that you can have in the worlds. And it can, dynamically Conditionally expose those those events as as emergent or ongoing story arcs.
So yeah, so basically taking that Sims idea and then expanding that a lot further. Valheim is a, is another inspiration for survival craft. Their world building system is really appealing and really nice and fun. Rust for the UI. I love radio menus. I think they're really powerful and awesome.
The 2D UIs sorry, 2D you don't necessarily need a UI a screen to come up a box to show you your list of inventory. You can have really immersive gameplay where it's just zooming in on your backpack. And you can click and choose those kinds of buttons equip different Fae and move those around, like little keychains.
There's a lot of cool, creative ways to do that. So a lot of games also do that. Sorry that was another long winded explanation, but
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And and why hasn't something like NYARIC existed to, to date? Is it because someone hasn't trained it or have there been technical limitations that that, that would have not made it possible to produce until Now
Kayla Comalli: definitely, it's definitely the latter for sure. I think API driven gameplay is, that's, that was the, this. A big selling point of Web3 is this dynamic content delivery network, where things are adaptive and dynamic, but in the game space traditionally, it's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of pre existing IP, or there's themes and styles that you have, but.
It's expensive to, pull keep that loaded up on a server and have, every player profile, every player potential interaction, could get exponentially more expensive over time. So it the pipeline for how this works in a cost effective way is is a challenge. Even now, it is still a challenge.
You have to be very, way we, fine tune the models the language models for breaking down the worlds, how you keep and store engagement with the characters is it, you have to think at the level of gameplay more so than the layer of conversation or engagement.
So we see a lot of competitors. What I mean is by that is In world AI is a studio facing, so it's a B2B n PC generative platform. They have an SDK on Unreal. You can download it and you can create really compelling characters that have style, have their own themes, maybe even existing characters like the Joker or Willy Wonka.
Any kind of like style or. Character type you can you could have in your own space. But it doesn't necessarily like how it how those how the fact that it's a character type affects gameplay is that is the question that we are really fascinated with. It's how do we break down the categorical is this a antagonist? Is it a sidekick? What are its motivations? What is it like? What exists in the world to make it want to do something at that current moment? What other factors can come into play to sway or adjust? And I think that's basically an entire pipeline that you have to build out that you can't, that can't necessarily translate to other games.
So it's it's it takes like a pretty large internal pipeline to be able to emerge those elements. And a lot of companies tend to just opt to go to B2B to do they're like, oh, a lot of people are trying to build this. We're gonna sell to other studios to, to have these these capabilities in your game.
But it's difficult because every game is, highly, we mentioned, infinite probability space. There's a lot of different ways to do a lot of things. Yeah, it just takes a lot of resources.
Jason Jacobs: And I'm early in my exploration, but I'm already noticing there are there are people that say AI is fundamentally changing everything and if, fill in the blank, if law firms or accountants or engineering teams or film studios or whoever don't lean hard into these tools, they're going to get left behind.
And then there's another school of thought from some very established players in each of these areas that they say, you know what it's another tool, and we should leverage it where it can be helpful, and we should not leverage it where it can't, but it's not going to change everything, it's just another tool, and yeah, it can drive some efficiency, but it's not the right tool for everything, and we'll use it where it makes sense, and we won't where it doesn't.
What are you seeing in the gaming world?
Kayla Comalli: In the gaming world, we're seeing, it's definitely that, that that, that narrative is, yeah, I'd say 50 50 probably with studios, there's, pre existing studios, they'll do platformers, they'll do like roguelikes or different, maybe 8 bit style gameplay and, they're still focusing on content, it's like the branding and the IP, they have, characters and it's a I don't want to say like a theme park, but it's like maybe a walled garden experience.
You're not going to, you're not going to expand or branch out. And doing so just doesn't make sense for the vision. Like gamers are unique and different from other developers because they're, they chose to do something that they love at the sake, like they're passionate about gaming. They've like games have been a big fundamental part of their life.
They're doing. Game engineering at a significant cost, like at a price cut that a normal game developers, or sorry, a normal engineer salary would be, but at the, on the other side of that that, that means that, burnout is a lot more prevalent, the average cycle for game developers is about five years.
You you can get really tired if you're, if you get into the space, you get disillusioned. You're not doing the things that you really love. And and that's the whole reason that you went into that space. Sorry, it's a bit of a derail here. But it, that kind of thinking or like that foundation of, a lot of visionaries a lot of people in the world that, in this space that have been doing it for decades that have hit through, hit, gone through that bottleneck and have established their, their Influence in the space.
They have a very clear idea of what they like and what they want in the world. And how that translates, obviously, on the consumer place, how that's appealing and how they understand what other people want. But it makes it maybe a little less flexible or harder to see the other side of where I can come into play.
As readily, I think, as other industries.
Jason Jacobs: And where do you think AI is best equipped to shine in the gaming world, and how do you, how pervasive do you think it will ultimately be? Will there be a genre of kind of AI first and tip of the spear, and that's like a, almost like a boutique model in the overall category, or will it fundamentally change the category holistically?
Kayla Comalli: I, that's a great question. I think. I still believe that it's not, it's going to truly change the game space at the level of AR, oh sorry, AR, VR, any XR applications. I think that's really where it's going to take off and that's where you're going to get like those true metaverse style worlds really adaptive and just wild experiences where, you know, from a haptic, from a full sensory immersive space, you can.
VR is incredible, right? You put the headset on, you're like, I am, like, my brain truly believes I am somewhere else, and we're already at the frame rate where the saccades, the eyes that move the things that make your eyes move 160 times a second or whatever that adjusts, you don't only 20%, maybe 15 percent of people get cyber sickness now from VR.
But it was still so far away from the approachable level. So I think that's where the real power comes in. When I was talking about telemetry and a lot of inputs and monitoring that's going to be the translation layer. So it's going to be under the full infrastructure, the multimodal AI, the audio AI, the visual spaces and the ways it all comes together as a confluence.
Otherwise, from our side on the PC right now is a PC gaming side. We're just trying to make the gameplay more fun. We're trying to allow for more emergent experiences for the players, give them more control, give them more stake in the world immediately, being in this existing ecosystem, this graph layer and being automatically connected to other players.
It's something new. It's something there's not that necessarily interoperable exposure that you get like maybe Minecraft or other worlds. And so it's easy to just stick with your local teams or build up your own single player experience. So I think that in the short term to answer your question, AI is going to allow for more dynamic social experiences.
And we hope that, it will be the beginning of the future of like dynamic social media, dynamic social. Let content that's more persistent. Not just short form. It's a building. Story building. Ideally.
Jason Jacobs: And so if I'm hearing it's like mid journey is the first step. And then this is a next step where now it's bringing mid journey to life. But are you bringing mid journey to life for, for, for a little scene or are you bringing mid journey to life for a whole movie or game in in, in this example.
Kayla Comalli: Yeah, exactly. It's like a, it's your own sort of multiverse. It's an ongoing canon I don't want to say Game of Thrones, because there's a lot of associations with that. Or Lord of the Rings. It's your own, yeah, building up your own I. P. So yeah, more so is very much that persistence layer.
That's what we're focused on.
Jason Jacobs: Cost is one barrier in terms of. bringing this to life. How, what are some other barriers? If any, and are they technical or yeah, I, before I start asking leading questions why don't I just stop with the open ended one, which is other than cost, what else is holding back the vision from reaching you?
wide scale commercial adoption.
Kayla Comalli: Yes. Yeah, I'd say the technical layers of this like cost wise, you need to engineer like engineering expertise. That's on the compute side. That's on the runtime, content delivery side where, The APIs are transferring tons of data. It's on the concurrent sustain the concurrency level scalability.
How can you have this many people interacting in these different worlds in a way that's performant? Because MMOs if we were, like, a massive multiplayer online game, like World of Warcraft it's not locally hosted servers. It's dedicated servers, and they get exceedingly expensive.
Really quickly. And so that's a huge barrier to entry. That's changing now. That environment there's a lot of cool companies out there like MetaGravity that are doing really creative ways to host thousands of people in the same space in a really cost effective way. I'm optimistic about that too.
Let's see. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: And how are you thinking about going to market as you get more people using this and creating worlds and as the world's get more immersive and more robust how it is a company. So what are you envisioning in terms of the business model or will you figure it out later once you first get a a big engaged case, that base of users.
Kayla Comalli: Yeah, great question. We're there's a lot of different areas right now where we are launching a few different campaigns, short form social media campaigns, letting people build their own worlds and engage, comment, what world you want and we will create that for you.
And then it's self self propagating a content pathway for us. So we can get those videos out at a pretty high frequency and give people like that experience that, that they're. They can see the world that they create. We under that vein, we want to get tokens out through Steam.
Players can download closed closed betas and try that out. And eventually I'd like to integrate, an easy way for them to automatically, some OAuth or something that lets them expand port that out to TikTok really quickly, to start automatically sharing that content. We're talking to influencers existing, people who, who do Let's Plays other survival craft communities, and a lot of publishers.
We're looking to talk with folks, get a, get them our press kit, get them, to start talking about our game now that we're launched on Steam. I think there's a lot of, excitement in that space. Yeah, trying to be very, trying to go to market is always the biggest challenge of consumer.
And yeah, we definitely have a lot of ways that we're trying to do it.
Jason Jacobs: Huh, so it sounds like there's some areas where you'll push on and experiment and then you'll see where there's demand and also what's best suited for the company and platform and user base and make that determination later.
Kayla Comalli: We're, yeah, we're definitely trying to be fluid with, the early user testing concurrent with this go to market strategy. We have our target market is creators and like Dungeons and Dragons. Those are like the definition of world builders. But, There's a lot of emergent campaigns and mechanics that, that can come from that.
Once we raise, our next round, we'll definitely be bringing out a full time marketer too. That's going to help with that strategy and help, help, what channels make the most sense. But we have, yeah we've we've been working with it with a few folks already on just. Getting the most highest return on your investment on the videos of content we're creating. It's, tick tock short form content is really conducive to our gameplay because the worlds are so beautiful and awesome and really the low poly, but really colorful and fast Fast run time or run frame rate is it's it looks good right now.
We're leveraging that with the state that we're in for the platforms that make the most sense for sure.
Jason Jacobs: Huh, and we've talked a bit about how AI is enabling functionality for the, world builders themselves using your platform. What about just the development process in general? How much are you using AI internally and how much has it altered how you're building the company and building the product versus before these tools existed?
Kayla Comalli: Yeah. It's great for SQL. I love using it for database cleaning up our databases and establishing, because we have so much metadata around the worlds and persistent. Data like content, storing up dialogues histories and such. And so yes, understanding, the best way to like structure tables.
AI I use OpenAI personally. Constantly. It's just, it helps me define my code. You can write entire scripts if you know how to describe exactly what you need quick enough. And you can literally plug it right in and get it working. We're using a Node. js pipeline, Node. js Lambda, for some of the runtime world creation and just Python scripts for just parsing up that metadata, creating the world themes, the attributes, everything, and the characters.
And, I think the development on that has just been really fast. We were able to get that out really quickly. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: One thing, one interesting observation I found is that it, it seems that for for software engineering as a craft that AI tools, at least in their current form while they help people without technical training, they maybe enable more leverage for people that are trained as engineers than they do for People that aren't and I've noticed that some areas are are the reverse.
So there was a BCG study, and I talked about this in my episode with Rob May, where where the top half of the consultants it, made them more productive, but not nearly as more productive as it did the bottom half of the consultants in the organization, so the flip and what, and I guess my question for you is, you're enabling world builders to use natural language to create these beautiful worlds.
What do you think about these tools for coding using natural language? And will robust software ever be made that way? Or is learning to code still going to be a necessity?
Kayla Comalli: That's, yeah, that's an interesting question. I did see I did see that if you're talking about that, that Harvard article, which is shrinking the delta of low level engineers and yeah, high skilled engineers. Just making that more accessible. But you do need that baseline coding experience right now.
Do we not, will we never could people just jump in with an idea and like a top down approach and just go from talking to a, like having a conversation with an API and then creating an entire product? Yeah, it seems like it, I think, yeah, I think there will be a threshold to, No, I, I don't think there's actually, I don't think there are any thresholds.
There's if you're trying to do like 3D graphics, you'll need to know linear algebra. You'll need to be able to implement like calculus and different like automated tools. But if you can break down your needs into like atomic problems then cumulatively it's, you could certainly probably do it right now with AI or just as a language.
But yeah, having a baseline code understanding of code and knowing what, when it's not working and why it's not working would certainly help, but yeah, the the The base experience required seems to be much lower now.
Jason Jacobs: When you think about scaling your team as you bring on, whether it's engineers or designers or product managers or otherwise is AI causing you to rethink the profile of what you're hiring for? Or is it the same as it would have been three years ago, five years ago if you were building the company then?
Kayla Comalli: The best of my knowledge, I've only been in the game space for a few years, but it definitely has shifted who, how many, Technical engineers, we need the, there's a lot of li it's, and it's just other partnerships. Yeah. Folk like working with Be with Beam Able, like I mentioned, which just live services and player profiles and in-game currencies and persistence and it's just, there's so much more out there that's just really plug and play.
You could get all of your animation through motion capture and then you could just import that into the game. You don't have to like, actually, either hire a studio, which could take a lot of time to, to do all of your like. Standard animations, it can just, it's all, I don't know it modularly adaptable from the get go.
At least on the Unreal side. We, we did pivot from Unity to Unreal, because that's, because it's been advancing so quickly. But we do still need tech artists. There's still definitely a lot of in any space, there's a lot of roles that are, Harder to refine or to like harder to know, without that fine tuning human side attention to detail.
Yeah I'd say we need a few, fewer roles, but higher skills roles for our specific needs, we, what we would do on AI engineers, but the, a, the AI side isn't just LLM kind of Oracle breakdowns. It's, general generative adversarial networks to competitively balance those worlds that well, it's a lot multiplayer geared tooling that will need a graph as a graph neural net is represented as a graph neural net, where you want to dynamically match make players together, according to their personalized gameplay.
And they're like their idiosyncratic idiosyncrasies and say, you guys are we think you guys would be a good match. of, you're both very curious, and you both like these kinds of styles of worlds, and you should explore this other world. Versus traditional, matchmaking, which is mostly competitive, it just takes numbers.
It's, oh, you're this rank, you're this rank, we can put you in a game together.
Jason Jacobs: So how are you thinking about capital requirements and milestones and how is that different, if at all, from how you would have been thinking about it before these AI tools were enabling you, as you said to do more with less?
Kayla Comalli: Yeah, I'm, in general, capital efficiency is the, it is the zeitgeist right now. That's what VCs want to see, they want to see that you can, Do much less. Sorry. You can do much more with less. And so yeah. We've scoped back our raise. We're doing a two million pre seed. We're also, we're a full time team of five with, they, the other teammates take the majority of this.
But 80 years of game development experience total. And for 500, 000 that we've raised so far in a pre seed, we've managed to build this out for two and a half years. And so we made it through a pretty aggressive bottleneck last year. There was a ton of layoffs. There was a lot of tightening, especially in consumer gaming for investment just because the returns it was harder to see returns in a very saturated market right now.
A lot of games are coming out. It's easier with AI to make more games. So that's another challenge. And so you really need to like competitively differentiate yourself. So yeah so our unique spelling point, how we competitively differentiate, how we scale and how, or how we go to market.
What is our market strategy from like a consumer? How do we gain that early user traction? And then how do how are we doing more with less? And that's, yeah, it is completely shifted. I think we, if this was five years ago, we'd be asking for so much more. We'd be hiring a lot more people. Yeah, definitely. And we'd we could, we'd have the luxury of being early on, earlier on in our development too, so we could still be at the ideation, early concept, prototyping phase now, and you can't, you have to like, you have to be pretty close to market now at this stage.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And what advice would you have if if there's other founding teams out there that have technical backgrounds that are gearing up to build games, or otherwise for that matter, and maybe have been kicking around with AI tools but but aren't that deep yet, what advice would you have for them in terms of just how to think about these tools and how much of it is hype versus, is necessity and just what should their mindset be as they're setting out to build again.
Kayla Comalli: Yeah. That's a great question. I definitely would. I don't think, I personally don't believe much of it is hype. I think if you're going because it has made game development easier, there's an oversaturation in the space. If you're going for traditional game styles, or you just have a genre you want to make, and I want to do a hack and slash game and that's fine if you love it, but just check yourself on the, on what the returns are and how they've changed because the median revenue is a lot lower.
If you wanted to go, if you did want to incorporate on the AI side, pick yeah, pick just a small, I would say pick like a small genre or a subgenre that you're passionate about that you love and see, Try to think about the ways that AI can make it better and think about it from a multimodal perspective.
Think about it from the audio, from the visual tooling. It doesn't have to be, like, what we're trying to do with the big API of content delivery. There's local models you can incorporate that can, break down just language and conversations. Players can have that model existing in their game.
They don't even have to, Go external to target it, but it's a lot of power there. Like I was just saying, yeah I would say check it out, check out natural language processing. Like how that works. We have prompts. We were, we're all familiar with chat GPT, but like understanding how, like what it does with sentiment, what it does with like your key concepts and how it like breaks down, like like the lexicon of what you're trying to do.
Just like when I looked into that, like deeper and understood it a little better, I was like, this is so crazy powerful. I don't know, it's like the new Vienna circle are changing, like deconstructionism is turning on its head.
Jason Jacobs: And Kayla, for anyone listening who who's inspired by the work that you're doing who do you want to hear from and how can we be helpful to you?
Kayla Comalli: Oh yeah. Anybody who's yeah, checking out or interested in the gaming space from the business side anybody who's obviously we are about to raise. So any investors who. Look at consumer, look at AI, deep tech and gaming intersection. Obviously that's, happy to chat, but many marketing folks, actually, anybody who has expertise in go to market strategies, where we're definitely looking for some folks to to work with us on that for sure.
And then on the other side, anybody who's interested in the game, check it out. It's Nyric on Steam, N Y R I C, and happy to just chat with any. Prospective indie devs or people who are just curious about the product. I always love just sharing it and learning more about other people too. So yeah, everybody, yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Sounds great. Anything I didn't ask that I should have or any parting words for listeners?
Kayla Comalli: No, this is great. I love the thanks to thanks for letting me be a host and let me come on especially so early in, in, in the journey for it. Excited to see what's going on with
Jason Jacobs: I'm sorry for my lack of sophistication in gaming, but I'll tell you, if I bring on the, the next entrepreneur in gaming, I'll be a little more sophisticated than I was today and that's thanks to you.
Kayla Comalli: Good.
Jason Jacobs: discus yeah. Fascinating discussion, I appreciate you coming on and essentially tutoring me for an hour and putting up with my beginner questions.
Best of luck to you and the team, and I will absolutely be following your progress and cheering you on.
Kayla Comalli: Thanks so much, Jason. Appreciate it.
Jason Jacobs: Thank you for tuning into the next, next. If you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player. In addition to the podcast, which typically publishes weekly, there's also a weekly newsletter on sub stack at the next, next dot sub stack. com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground.
I'm covering areas I'm tackling next and where I could use some help as well. And it's a great area to foster discussion and dialogue around the topics that we cover on the show. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week.