Ludo: AI-Powered Toolkit Helping Developers Create Games

Introduction 

My name is Tom Pigott and I am the creator of Ludo and the CEO and Founder of Jetplay (Ludo’s parent company). I’m a tech entrepreneur and small business advocate with a passion for building and supporting start-ups.

In 2016, I started to invest in tech start-ups, including mobile game studios and VR companies. Through these investments, I found that ideating new game concepts was not a straightforward process for studios, especially in a highly competitive industry where developers have to stay on top of the latest gaming trends. 

This challenge within the design process sparked the idea that machine learning could be used to support developers and creators to generate new game concepts, and Ludo.ai was born.

Launched in 2021, Ludo is my latest endeavor, empowering the world’s game creators through the power of AI-powered software. 

Ludo

Ludo is the only toolkit that uses AI to help game developers to come up with their next hit game idea. Ludo utilizes the latest machine learning models, including GPT-3. 

Being multifaceted and almost a swiss army knife of cool tools and features, the Ludo platform provides multiple services, here are some of them:

• The Game Ideator: a tool that lets you create hundreds of game ideas an hour with the click of a button. By typing in your keyword and choosing a genre and platform, you can make Ludo create new game ideas for you to give bursts of inspiration. 
• Image Database: understanding that Google doesn’t always give the best image search results and trawling through the App Store can be slow at best, the Image Database is the ideal image search tool built for game developers. The Image Database is a library of over 6 million images that has an advanced search function, helping you find what you want fast.
• Daily Trends: a hub of games that shows you what is performing well. This is updated daily and can be split across stores and geographies to show the optimum genres and themes for your situation.
• Game Elements: similar to The Ideator, the Game Elements tool allows users to input a keyword and then, based on the elements they want to be selected – mechanics, story, characters, and more – Ludo’s powerful AI produces new, never-before-seen ideas.
• The Game Design Document (GDD): a page on Ludo that helps centralize all these amazing features and what you can produce with them. Favorite your results when using any of the above tools and find them available in your GDD to help present the scope of what your new game can look like.

Ludo launched last year, in 2021. It combines solutions to what I found to be the challenges of mobile game studios and provides support in developing new ideas in an innovative and exciting way – not having to reinvent the wheel but recreating it on a centralized platform. 

Alongside all the above features, Ludo also publishes blogs to support all developers throughout the gamestorming process and has a great support team on Discord, with a strong community of hobbyists and professionals as well. 

Everton Vieira, CEO and founder of Izy Play studios, spoke about how he uses Ludo with his team and how it’s transformed their creative process here. By using the Image Search to help influence Izy Play’s prototype games and using The Ideator to fuse two successful game ideas together, Viera has reaffirmed to us that Ludo is one of the tools he likes to turn to for inspiration when creating a new hit game.

The Image Generator

Ludo’s Image Generator provides developers with the opportunity to be inspired by simply inputting search parameters. The new feature uses highly advanced machine learning to scan millions of gaming images to then generate new images based on keyword or game title searches. This makes it a truly unique tool for game developers worldwide. Moreover, the generator is constantly learning and will continue to grow and advance, getting more intuitive as more users try it out. The beta for the new Image Generator is out now and available to try for free at Ludo.ai.  

Ultimately, the Image Generator is our take on user-generated content and lets users create their own art. At its core, it is a way for users to easily create within the design process whilst utilizing an inspiration tool to develop their work in a tangible, design-oriented way. Developers can use the Image Generator however they want! We see it as best used to help inspire icon creation for mobile games, where creators can take this AI-created artwork and transform it into something that exactly works for their game.

Ludo utilizes various machine learning and AI models, GPT-3 being one of them. GPT-3’s “text in, text out” functionality is used by Ludo in a unique way that focuses on games and their features. Still exploring its uses and potential limits, Ludo is ever-evolving and growing, with new features and updates being added regularly.

The Payment System

Ludo was originally operating a free trial service that was eventually locked behind a paywall for members. However, after testing and trialing different payment methods, we’ve settled on a new credit system for Ludo. With this system, all features remain accessible to users for free, but it only allows a set amount of interactions before needing a membership.

The credits refresh each month allowing users to come back and continue testing the platform or experience limitless usage when paid for. This caters to our key audience groups, allowing those who need to use the platform with no limits an option whilst those who perhaps can’t pay for a subscription are still able to use the platform and derive real value from it. Our community is a mix of the two, so it was important we found a business plan that worked for both.

As we develop, we have every intention of keeping the user (and the game developer) at the heart of what Ludo does. We are always open to feedback on Twitter and Discord and regularly promote smaller devs' games across our social platforms to help inspire and connect networks within our great community. Beyond social media and reaching out, the very nature of AI and machine learning allows for improvement over time. Ludo is a tool that the more it is used, the more we can gain a better understanding and detail of what answers our users want.

The Future Plans

Technology is constantly evolving at such a rate that we know we will always need to keep track of new AI models and what our developers want. Agility will be the key for Ludo (and other technology companies) in the future. The possibilities of what comes next are endless, so it’s important to be ready to adopt it when it lands and integrate it into your work.

2022 is set to be another big year for gaming. There are currently over 3.2 billion gamers worldwide, and the video game and eSports industries have grown by 14.4% since 2020. With recent releases of the Image Search, Image Generator, and new user experience changes on their way, Ludo is the go-to platform for developers and studios in their search for inspiration for their next successful game, offering developers everything they need when working on their latest project.

Tom Pigott, CEO and Founder of Ludo

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie