Studio Atelico, the game studio building AI-first games, has launched a closed beta for its debut creature-battler, Bobium Brawlers.
Built on Studio Atelico’s proprietary AI engine and powered by models trained on artwork from its in-house art team, Bobium Brawlers transforms players’ ideas into one-of-a-kind creatures. The generative AI helps you finish creating your vision for your creatures.
The mobile card and dice game offers a glimpse at a new generation of pro-artist AI-powered gameplay. The closed beta will begin rolling out on iOS, starting with the Philippines. Select North American and European countries will follow in the coming weeks, ahead of the game’s launch later this year.
Bobium Brawlers is a turn-based card and dice battler where players invent their own creatures and throw them into fast, tactical duels. By describing a creature in just a few words, players generate both its appearance and a unique deck of abilities, creating endlessly varied battles inside a whimsical sci-fi world filled with silly inventions and unpredictable characters.
You can watch the closed beta launch trailer here and sign up for closed beta access here.
In Bobium Brawlers, players bring their Bobium creations to life by simply describing a creature in 140 characters. Studio Atelico’s purpose-built AI tech, which runs entirely on-device, turns that prompt into a bespoke creature with a customized image and unique deck of cards, tailored to every creation.
Using AI in a responsible way
In a press briefing, Piero Molina, CEO of Studio Atelico, said, “As a company, we’re a new studio founded by both AI industry veterans and gaming industry veterans banding together to craft AI-driven games and technologies that push the boundaries of conventional gameplay. We want to do new things, not just do things cheaper or faster, and the goal is to create new experiences that would not have been possible before, and basically to surprise players in meaningful ways.”
Molina said the company stands by a philosophy around AI.
“With our AI philosophy, it’s very important to talk about it at the beginning, just to set the stage correctly. We want to use AI to craft games that otherwise would not have been possible at all. That’s our core goal, and we want to amplify human creativity, giving them basically giving creative people new tools and not taking them out of the equation at all.”
He said it’s important that the tech for the AI runs on device. This makes the AI processing less expensive than doing the processing in a data center via the cloud. This means it makes use of the computing resources on your phone.
“Bobium Brawlers is our first game that you know embodies these values and also tries to create something that was not possible before at all,” Molino said.
The studio also emphasizes an ethical approach by licensing the style of their artist, Jose, who is compensated for his work and receives royalties for the creatures generated in his style.
Key game features
- Infinite Creature Possibilities: Players describe any creature they can imagine and watch it come to life with unique abilities and appearance. From “a dinosaur shooting laser beams” to “a spaghetti monster wielding a samurai sword,” every creation is viable and competitively balanced thanks to a thoughtful mix of hand-crafted and generated design elements like cards and deck archetypes.
- Strategic Card & Dice Duels: Players put their custom creatures to the test in fast-paced 1v1 battles that blend card mechanics with dice-rolling action. Clever combos and tactical improvisation win matches – not grinding or chasing the meta.
- Whimsical Sci-Fi World: Players work with BEPPE, a sentient robotic lab assistant invented by the eccentric Dr. Ruzzoloni, who discovered the mysterious compound Bobium after spilling boba tea during an experiment. The game’s curiosity-driven universe unfolds through quirky characters, strange inventions and absurd science.
In Bobium Brawlers, players put on the lab coat of a rookie scientist who encounters BEPPE, a mysterious and sarcastic robot capable of harnessing and fusing Bobium into an infinite array of creatures. They will then enter their creatures in the Bobium Brawler League and engage in delightfully chaotic player-versus-player battles, where every match is different.
With the game’s closed beta underway, Studio Atelico is also gearing up to reveal more details about the Atelico AI Engine, the proprietary technology behind Bobium Brawlers. Built entirely around on-device AI, the engine is designed to empower developers to go beyond the limits of today’s games by enabling new forms of gameplay and mechanics that were previously impossible.
The game will be available in the Philippines for its closed beta. In a few months, the team will likely expand the tests to new markets.
The AI engine
Some creatures look good. Some don’t. You can redraw the characters that you want to change. The game uses both larger models and smaller models. The team can control the output so the model doesn’t create anything obscene or inappropriate. The tech is all made possible by the Atelico AI engine, which functions akin to a physics engine.
“It’s not really a game engine, but it’s like a plugin to a game engine that handles everything AI, like a physics engine handles everything physics,” Molino said. “It’s proprietary tech, and what it does is that makes it possible to run these small AI models, adapting them to the specific game.”
He said it is adapted to the specific game.
“It’s not like a generic sloppy image generation. It’s focused on the specific game with specific art. And it’s pluggable in any game engine. Unreal, Unity, and Godot, and any custom game engine,” Molino said.
The engine can be adapted for other types of characters, dynamic dialogue, or other types of games like simulation games, RPGs, detective games, and strategy games. The team is also working with other development studios that are partners using the tech for their games. Some of those games are likely to come out next year.
Built by Studio Atelico as an AI-first experience, Bobium Brawlers uses on-device models trained by the studio to generate both gameplay mechanics and visuals in a consistent artistic style. The result is a game that prioritizes player expression while keeping matches strategic, surprising, and deeply personal. Launching on iOS later this year, Bobium Brawlers offers a new take on competitive play where no two creatures, or battles, are ever the same.
Studio Atelico is an AI-first game studio built by industry veterans from Uber, Meta, Sega, and Creative Assembly. Their goal is to craft AI-driven games and technologies that push the boundaries of conventional gameplay, creating new genres that captivate and surprise players in profound ways.
For this purpose they are building the Atelico AI Engine, which unlocks uniquely immersive experiences like:
- NPCs with lifelike intelligence that remember player actions and learn autonomously over time, like in GARP
- Real‑time procedural generation game worlds and game mechanics, adapting dynamically to each player
- New interaction systems like negotiation and persuasion mechanics, inspiring or rallying allies, and on-the-fly improvisation
- Emergent quest creation based on the evolving game world state and the player’s prior choices
They are redefining interactive entertainment with AI, unlocking unprecedented creativity and creating deeply immersive gaming experiences that inspire curiosity, connection, and wonder.
Why making your own creature is more fun
Molino said one big point is that you don’t you don’t pick the creature from a pre-canned set of creatures. You create a new one. Or more than one.
“You do that by just fundamentally writing a sentence that describes the creature. And you know, BEPPE, the character in the teaser, builds this one-of-a-kind creature for you,” Molino said. “Both the image of this creature and a deck of cards that represents the abilities of this creature, and so player creativity is very at the core of the experience here.”
Because the creatures are unique, every single battle is alsos different from the previous one, Molino said. You can name your creature, and a card gets created with the creature’s abilities. If you use a lot of “mana” to create the creeature, the stronger it can be.
In the battles, you can engage in friendly matches or ranked matches. You can also fight in different arenas. Molino showed his character going up against OctoBeats, who is an octopus drummer.
As he did the demo, Molino said, “We’re leaning into the silly here.”
You roll the dice and that determines what cards you can play. You can have a dodge card to dodge attacks. If it works, you get a bonus you can use in the round to do more damage to the opponent. With every turn, more die are added, and the combination of the dice roll, attack type and category will determine what happens. You get a clue of what your opponent will do and then you can decide if you’re going to change your own play as a result.
A battle takes about three minutes, which Molino said is snackable. Once you level up your creatures, you can adopt a variety of upgrades. You can increase your creature’s hit points or strengthen another ability. You wind up with a stronger deck.
The creatures start out with basic styles and forms created by Studio Atelico’s artists. Then the team trains an image generation model on these images, and so then you can generate new characters that have some of the characteristics of those original images.
“For these AI models, the more data you give them, the better they become,” Molino said.