This is a copy of a post from Rec Room CEO Nick Fajt on the Rec Room Blog
From the moment I picked up my rectangular NES controller, I wanted to build games. That’s true for many people. If you play games, you probably have wanted to build games.
But building games is hard. Really hard.
Over the years, we’ve made building games way easier - 10% of our players create! However, we still haven’t made creation easy enough*.* 90% of our players don’t create.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing an experimental new feature named Maker AI. It is designed to make game and world creation a lot more accessible for aspiring creators. It’s like having a skilled creator friend, who is always online (and has infinite patience for your requests). For advanced creators, we think it has the potential to make building significantly faster by giving you another creator who you can delegate tasks to.
Here’s a quick overview of how it works:
Maker AI - spawn, place and alter any object
If you want something, all you need to do is ask. Maker AI is spatially aware of the room and it knows about the millions of items in the library. Maker AI can move them around, resize them, change their color or their texture.
Maker AI, a game building partner
Maker AI is a powerful collaborator when building games. It can alter environments and lighting. It can create and apply behaviors to objects, set up game rules and objectives. This can massively speed up your building process.
The more we’ve looked at AI, the more we believe it can have a big impact on UGC and gaming.
Building with Maker AI has made me feel like we’re all shipping DVDs in red envelopes and there’s this “streaming technology” on the horizon that might change the way people use our service in the future.
Will Maker AI allow 100% of our players to build games? Maybe. We certainly think it will help them get their dorm rooms looking much sharper.
If you’ve never built anything in Rec Room, we’re interested to learn if Maker AI is an easier onramp to the rest of the toolset.
Will Maker AI allow our best creators to build in an afternoon what used to take a week? We hope so. As you’ve probably seen with other AI products, they’re fascinatingly powerful and also frustratingly unpredictable. Still, they’re getting better each day.
If you’re already a pro creator, we’d love for you to take a look and let us know what Maker AI could do to make your next build faster and easier. We’d like to hear your feedback in the Maker AI channel on our Creator Hub Discord.
We’re excited to get your thoughts after spending some time with Maker AI in a few weeks. Stay tuned.
FAQ
Are these videos real?
Yes. These are all live video captures on our test environment using real code in real time.
Can I use these features socially?
That’s the plan. We still want people to build socially. We think that’s the most fun way to go about it and Maker AI is just one more creator in your group.
Is Maker AI an English-only tool?
Maker AI will respond to pretty much any language you throw at it.
Does this work on all platforms?
Maker AI will work on any platform that has a microphone
Is this a paid feature?
Unrestricted access to Maker AI will be a RR+ feature to start. The cost of the compute for Maker AI adds up with heavy use. Over time we see opportunities to optimize the models and get them running more efficiently which should bring down our costs and potentially allow for a free tier.
When are these features going to ship?
You’ll start seeing portions of Maker AI in the coming weeks, specifically the features in that first video. To start, Maker AI will only be available in your dorm room. We want to make sure we understand the trust and safety implications of these features before letting it operate in a more open setting or publish rooms. The features in the bottom videos will go out later as they are refined and optimized in testing.