Studio Atelico has announced its debut game, Bobium Brawlers, a turn-based card and dice creature battler. The unique twist is that players use generative AI to help create their unique monsters to fight in the game.
In Bobium Brawlers, players create unique monsters and pit them against each other in strategic duels where no two battles are ever the same. The game will launch this year, and fans can join the Studio Atelico Discord server to participate in upcoming beta tests.
“This game started with a simple belief: player creativity should be at the center of gameplay,” said Piero Molino, CEO of Studio Atelico, in a statement. “With Bobium Brawlers, we’re bringing players’ imaginations to life through on-device AI, used thoughtfully and intentionally. This is only the beginning of a new kind of experience that empowers self-expression and feels truly personal and original.”
Bobium Brawlers is a mobile card and dice brawler game where you play the game and also help create it, he said in a press briefing.
“We use a little bit of AI magic to allow the players to create creatures that no other players has ever seen,” he said.
Then you can battle with your friends in a fast-paced online fight.
“The design pillars of the game is that we want to empower players. Player creativity is at the forefront, and we make it possible for them to mold their creatures, defining their looks and their gameplay just by describing them. And this is kind of like an unprecedented mechanic, with this AI-driven creature generation. Each creature has an associated deck. We enable basically personalized, unlimited content,” he said.
And he added, “That makes every single battle very fresh and unique because you never know what creature you’re going to fight against.”
The story starts with a silly scientist who discovers Bobium by dropping his boba tea into an experimental tank. It creates a new compound that allows you to mold anything into a sentient creature. you can create your own creature and then enter it into an intergalactic Bobium competition.
Enter the Bobium Brawler League
Players put on the lab coat of a rookie scientist who discovers Beppe, a sarcastic robot with the power to transform the mysterious compound Bobium into living creatures. Armed with creativity and a 140-character description, players craft monsters and enter them into the Bobium Brawler League, a competitive arena where weird science meets tactical PvP combat.
Key Features:
- Infinite Creature Possibilities: Describe any creature you can imagine, and watch it come to life with unique abilities and appearance. From “a grumpy cloud made of lasagna” to “a disco-dancing cactus knight,” 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: Quick 1v1 battles blend card mechanics with dice-rolling action. Clever combos and tactical improvisation win matches, not grinding or chasing the meta.
- Whimsical Sci-Fi World: Meet BEPPE, the monster-making machine invented by the eccentric Dr. Ruzzoloni, who discovered Bobium by spilling boba tea during an experiment. The game’s silly, curiosity-driven universe unfolds through narrative events and quirky characters.
How Bobium Brawlers Works
Players create their personalized creature by typing a short description. The game then adapts that description into the Bobium Brawlers art style and creates a custom suite of abilities and attacks that lets every creature feel distinct and tailored.
This is possible due to Studio Atelico’s proprietary on-device AI technology delivering consistent, high-quality results.
To achieve a consistent visual style, Studio Atelico’s art team trained a custom AI model, which works in concert with a custom deck generation model to vividly bring each player’s creation to life. Artists were fairly compensated for their work in training the model, which follows Atelico’s human-first approach to utilizing AI in games.
“Our mission is to craft games and technologies that are like AI first. And the intent for that is to push the boundaries of conventional gameplay,” Molino said. “And for creating new experiences and for captivating and surprising audiences. This is only possible thanks to the fact that we are a team of veterans, half of us from the AI industry and half from the gaming industry.”
He said the team is “a blending of these two sets of people who make it possible to actually push forward what’s possible in gaming with AI.”
He added, “Our philosophy is that we want to use AI to craft games that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. We’re not specifically interested in creating games that were possible before in a cheaper way or faster way, or to reduce the creativity of the game developers. We want to amplify it in an ethical way, keeping artists in control.”
To play the game, you interact with a sentient robot to create the creatures. Then you fight brawlers in PvP battles. You earn Bobium in the fights as in-game currency and use it to upgrade your brawlers in the lab or to create new creatures from scratch.
You can create the creatures by typing 140 characters of text. You get a number of cards and you use mana to play the cards in battle.
“Every single card reflects the personality of the character, and it’s like really hilarious most of the time,” he said. “No creatures are the same. So every player has very distinct creatures with very distinct traits and distinct card decks, and every collection is also very different and personalized for each player.”
The battles are turn-based, kind of inspired by Pokemon, but with a little bit more depth, he said.
“At the beginning of the turn, players roll dice and they accumulate mana and use that mana to play their cards,” he said. “You can immediately name the creature. It’s important to make it so that there’s really a strong connection with the creature and it’s really personalized. And then each card of the deck that is associated with this creature is revealed, so that the player can start to form an idea of what is going to be the best strategy to play with this creature.”
A beta test for community members is planned for the coming months. Players can join the Studio Atelico Discord to stay updated and secure early access.
Studio Atelico is an AI-first game studio founded by industry veterans from Uber, Meta, SEGA, and Creative Assembly. The studio builds innovative games that blend generative AI technology with player creativity to create new kinds of gameplay experiences that inspire curiosity, connection, and wonder. Bobium Brawlers is its debut title.
Costs of image generation
I asked about the costs of the AI image generation, given early models were quite expensive when it came to every action the players took.
The team focused on bringing those costs close to zero. They can do that by using the user’s own device to generate characters upon being prompted. Some very small parts of the process are running in the cloud, but not much. The result is that it costs Studio Atelico less than one cent per creature in terms of AI generation fees.
One of the features is that the game runs on your device, using the processing power of your machine, without going out to the cloud much. That makes it cost-effective and still enables personalized gameplay.
The approach to art
Mollie Boorman, art director at Studio Atelico, said in a press briefing that the team went with a 2D art style that looked like cartoons, with bright colors.
“It has kind of a broad appeal to a wide audience, and it works really well with our lore, which is a little wacky and fun. Yeah, it’s also very flexible stylistically,” she said.
The image generator isn’t perfect. And if a character gets generated with an absurd number of limbs, then the generator learns to deal with the irregularity.
“It also never creates the same creature twice, which is maybe a problem in some other industries, but for this game, it specifically works because no two creatures will ever be the same,” Boorman said. “It’s really cool for our players because everyone gets a unique character.”
The team is creating the original creatures in the game by hand, using human artists, Boorman said.
“What we want to do is we want to use the generated creatures as examples for us to assess. We look at them and we decide if it’s going in the right direction or not,” Molino said. “Is it going in the right direction in terms of style and in terms of like coloring, and in terms of everything, and we decide to add more creatures to the training set, either created by us by hand or the best ones we have seen generated.”
The work started with a small team of artists creating just a lot of training assets. The artists created a wide range of creatures that span a lot of different genres. It has everything from humanoids to standard aliens or swarms of bees.
“Those images are then paired with the written description of the creature, and we use that to train our model and then our game on the fly will use that information to create creature images and a corresponding deck of cards based on what the player has put in as a description,” Boorman said.
Over time, the AI learns about generating creatures that look like they fit into the canon of the game.
“This is something that we can’t do, even if we had 1000 artists working behind or a million artists working behind the screens, around the clock. This allows players to sculpt their own play style and see it reflected in their game based on the prompts they put in,” Boorman said.
Keeping controls on players
The game does not hand over the keys to the entire creation of characters. Otherwise, as one member of the press said, it would have a “completely bonkers game that has lost its art direction.” Boorman said that was a good point and players likely would try to break the rules of the game to make it generate things it should not. She said the team is using strong filters to avoid that and it would also have a kind of reporting system for violations.
“We can delete things that are not cool,” Boorman said.
The game will likely have a minimum spec of an iPhone 13, and it will play on both iPads and iPhones.
The ethics of generating creature art
She noted the team is not using AI to create everything. The company has artists that it is paying to create the game’s visual style and character.
“We’re using artists to create the bulk of the game art that isn’t creature creation. We’re only using AI as a way for players to create their own creatures on the fly. We’re paying our artists, not only for the game art they make, but for the style they create, and that includes training assets, but also royalties created in the game, or for creatures created in the game using the image generator,” Boorman said.
Molino said that the game puts player creativity first. Second, the infinite and personalized creative mechanism is only possible thanks to the AI engine. And third, the approach towards AI is ethical.
“We are pro artist, pro player and pro human in more broad terms,” he said.
I noted they appeared to be taking an ethical approach to AI, but I also have seen AI is still meeting resistance from players and other developers. How could Studio Atelico convince them that they should give this a try?
Molino said he understands the resistance because so many tech companies are adopting the technology without regard for the people that make the technology possible. mage generators have been trained on work made by human artists.
“So it makes total sense why there’s this kind of pushback. We totally understand that and we are approaching it from a different point of view,” he said. “We are paying artists and giving them royalties on what is being generated. We don’t want to exploit anyone. We want to just use the technology to create new mechanics that were not possible before. And so I strongly believe that what players and people in general are opposed to is not actually AI, but what actually they’re opposed to is the exploitation of people, and they are opposed to slop.”
He said these are both things that his studio is trying very strongly to avoid.
“We are like supporting the people who make it possible to create these models. And we are not creating slop. We are like trying to have a specific art style that is tailored to our specific game, thanks to the work that our artists are doing,” Molino said. “And so we hope to disentangle the general sentiments towards AI and actually show what is possible when you’re using it in a very positive way.”
“We’re using this to really enhance gameplay for the player and doing things that have been impossible before,” Moliono said. “It’s not about replacing parts of your pipeline. It’s not about getting rid of creatives. As most creatives know, there’s more to making assets than just content. That’s where we’re standing on that one. It’s not about making things faster and cheaper. It’s about making a good quality product that we just couldn’t have made before.”