Buildbox 4 launches with no-code AI game creation engine

Buildbox is launching Buildbox 4, taking user-generated games into new territory with a no-code solution for AI-assisted game creation. It lets you build a game in five minutes.

The new Buildbox game development platform will let people turn their game ideas into reality faster than ever, said Jonathan Zweig, CEO of Buildbox, in an interview with GamesBeat. Buildbox puts the power of game development in the hands of amateurs, semi-professionals on side projects, or professional game developers who want to make games quickly.

You simply enter your prompt to create and watch as the AI generates game assets, entire scenes, and assists you in editing levels as you build out your game.

Zweig said the groundbreaking platform offers an intuitive, powerful AI toolset that enables anyone to create stunning, immersive games in minutes.

It lets aspiring game developers get started creating games without learning complex coding. And for seasoned game developers, it lets them prototype faster and explore innovative design ideas with the help of AI.

For game studios, Buildbox 4 lets teams build games at scale with a streamlined development process powered by AI, he said.

In an era where game development was once gatekept by complex coding and technical barriers, Buildbox 4 emerges as a beacon of innovation, tearing down these walls with its AI-first development philosophy, the company said.

By integrating AI to assist in game logic creation, scene building, and asset generation, Buildbox 4 is not just a tool but a game development partner that understands your needs and helps bring your creative visions to life, Zweig said.

Coming a long way

Buildbox has raised about $54 million so far and it has 20 people. Zweig said the company is financially solid.

Zweig started AppOnBoard as a playable ads company, which used cloud tech to deliver playable games that a consumer could play immediately upon clicking on an ad. Then, in 2019, AppOnBoard acquired Buildbox, a tool for making mobile games quickly and easily. Then he slowly transformed the company into Buildbox and rebuilt the entire engine. That helped the improve the complexity and sophistication level of the games that could be created with Buildbox.

That way, the users wouldn’t hit a ceiling with Buildbox and then graduate to making games with the Unity or Unreal engines. Ultimately, Buildbox created a custom version of the Forge engine in order to create the latest Buildbox versions and enable much better game creation.

Zweig said that Apple has featured a lot of Buildbox games that have been successful on the App Store. Meanwhile, Buildbox keeps focusing on making the tools better and easier to use.

“That’s what we’re trying to do,” he said.

The company recently launched its ability to generate story-based games. But this is more like a full game engine that you can use to make “full 3D games,” Zweig said.

“This version actually writes the code that you would need to write to for anything like special effects, adding fog, rain, fire, all the way down to “make this enemy follow me around at a distance of 10 feet when I have this item in my inventory,” he said. “But if I pull out a sword, it’s only following me at 20 feet distance. We will write the code for that. That’s the kind of leap we’re trying to make.”

Zweig said that in terms of genres, creators will be able to make first-person shooters, 3D worlds, and games that are more sophisticated than traditional Buildbox games, which are more like puzzle games or casual titles.

“If you describe in detail a first person shooter game, you could build it. It still requires you to explain to the Buildbox AI what you’re trying to build,” he said. “That’s really a delineation between AI agents and AI tools. If you are adding a character or making a character jump, that’s like a tool. A fire in the sky — that’s another tool. There’s a there’s another whole world of AI where you just let the AI to learn how to do things.”

You can use it to go from text-to-game. You describe what you want, and Buildbox 4’s generative AI will help create it. Imagine writing “make a character jump” and seeing it come to life.

You repeat this process and go from prompt to prototype. You can quickly build the foundation of your game with simple prompts. Buildbox 4 will understand your vision and get you started in minutes. With the AI-powered tools, you can let AI handle the heavy lifting. Buildbox 4 can streamline complex tasks like game logic and scene building, freeing you to focus on creativity.

A new era of game creation

Buildbox has always been dedicated to providing solutions that transform the game development landscape. It has been used to make hundreds of hit games. One of the early successes was Color Switch, which went on to get tens of millions of downloads.

With Buildbox 4, the company is aggressively moving into the AI future with features that include an enhanced graphics engine, offering breathtaking visuals and smooth animations previously exclusive to top-tier game studios.

Coupled with an expanded library of graphics and a streamlined interface, Buildbox 4 is designed to be a playground for creativity or your AI-powered game development partner.

“Buildbox 4 takes our vision of making game development easy for creators to a whole new scale,” said Zweig. ” We believe that everyone has a game inside them waiting to be made, and with Buildbox 4, we’re making it possible for those dreams to become reality. Our AI-driven engine simplifies development and sparks creativity for developers. Millions of people are developing games, but our new AI engine will open the door for tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people to build games. This is a game changer.”

There will be competition

Zweig is away that a lot of AI game startups are doing the same kind of thing.

Zweig hopes the no-code solution will distinguish Buildbox from other companies out there.

“I love that there’s all these different kinds of game development tools that are focusing on different genres for AI. The AI agents need to learn they still how to make the games you can describe.”

More than 200 people, including power users, have been trying out the latest Buildbox. The input from the community helped refine the tool.

“One of our customers put out a series of videos on how to make $6,000 a month using Buildbox,” he said. “It is getting harder and harder to make money as a one-person shop. But I think we’re finding to our delight that people are just building games for the sake of building games. Just to scratch that itch, as a creative outlet. It’s a good sign that people are not giving up.”

I asked about what Buildbox 4 tells Zweig about the game team structure of the future. He said, “We understand that even if AI is something that accelerates game development a lot, it is not there to replace game developers, it is there to help them.”

He added, “By interacting with AI, game developers will be able to do in seconds or minutes things they need hours or days, but the idea behind what is being done will always come from the mind of the game developer.”

And he said, “For sure, some generic and simple games will one day be fully created by AI. But even in those cases game developer’s customization on those results is what make those games unique.”

And I asked him about the legal position regarding training data.

“All the data we use to train our models were generated internally, bought from third party freelancers (like the artists) or we use open-source data with commercial license,” Zweig said. “For the future, we see that open-source models will become much smarter and faster compared to how they are today, which will bring more robustness to our systems to trust gradually less in LLM supplier solutions.”

Zweig is intrigued at the notion of AI playing games and being able to beat humans, just as IBM Watson was able to beat chess masters.

“I think, within a few years, we should start to see AI be able to make its own games,” Zweig said. “It will just think of its own ideas and make the games because at the end of the day, it’s just all code. I always use the analogy of a poem. Open AI is so good at writing poems. You could say, they write me a poem in the tone of your favorite poet about some random thing, and it does a really, really good job. And games are like bad poetry. There’s an art to a game. Someday, there will be an award-winning game that was built on its own by an AI agent that learned from a bunch of game development tools and people that made games. The data is there that the AI can learn how to do it.”