Josh: Hey Gus, thank you for joining us. Can you introduce yourself, tell us a bit more about your journey in gaming so far. 

Gus: It's a pleasure being here. Gus, your friendly neighbourhood UA guy. I've been doing UA and ad monetization for games for the last 10 years. You know some of those companies like Rovio, and most recently Lessmore. Now I'm here at Cosmic Lounge as VP of Marketing. 

It's been a long journey throughout those 10 years of releasing what is now, I think, 50 games and it all has led me down to this current AI craze. And I'm here to talk about that. 

 

Josh: Congratulations on the new role! Can you tell us a bit more about cosmic lounge, what is your MO? 

Gus: Yeah, it's a pleasure to talk about Cosmic Lounge. I'm very excited to be here. So the idea is, we gathered a bunch of veterans of game making people that have been on average 10 years in the industry, some of us even longer than that. Up to 23 years, as far as I know. These people are from studios that you know and love like King and Rovio, and Seriously so puzzle game royalty.  

What happened was after talking amongst ourselves, we figured out that there are better ways to create games, specifically puzzle games. We believe we can create stellar puzzle games. But in that journey of figuring out all the things that could be better, we figured out that there was a lot of room to improve and room to fit in AI to accelerate and augment those processes. So we're not a studio trying to develop any AI. We're a studio trying to develop puzzle games. And in the process we have developed a puzzle engine, which is a tool inhouse. We're not licensing it. That will incorporate in a modular way, multiple, different AI’s and helps us develop games faster and better, especially when it comes to live ops.  

We have a lot of capabilities, of accelerating the process and maintenance of casual games. But the fact that we are you know, faster at developing games and the quality of these studios that we come from. We believe that we will be quicker to achieve product market fit using these cutting-edge methods in tech. 

 

Josh: What drew you to join Cosmic Lounge?

Gus: So for those that know me, they know that I care about 2 or 3 things. One being the Finish game scene, another being startups and developing myself alongside those startups and third I like to really think of myself and my craft as a continuous journey of self-improvement. All 3 of those are perfect here within Cosmic Lounge. So let me unpack a bit. 

I believe that the Helsinki Games scene is not only amazing, due to the past that it's had releasing hit games like Clash of Clans and Angry Birds and Puzzles and Dragons and countless others. But also the fact that we all share our learnings very actively all the time. We have monthly meetups, sometimes almost weekly, between different studios, and we get to share a lot of these learnings. And it's this ecosystem where everyone is developing their crafts together. We use a lot the expression of a rising tide lifts all ships here in Helsinki. It's a very common expression here. 

When you have such an amazing community around game making. I always think to myself, how can I contribute to this astounding legacy? How can this one tiny cog in the machine make a difference? And I feel that it segues a lot into. Why I like startups so much. I feel like one way of improving the community here is really by pollinating multiple startups and watching them grow and create new giants in the industry. 

And out of multiple different startups that were popping up, and a lot of them popped up in the last year or 2 very interesting ones, the one that caught my eye the most has been Cosmic Lounge, because I think of my career as a whole, and I think every time that I made any impact, any difference was when I did something for the first time when I was at the forefront of something. 

I was at the forefront of influencer marketing forefront of blended ROAS campaigns. And now I believe that the next new frontier is AI, and I believe that cosmic lounge, not just for the seniority and the experience that everyone here already has, but also by the willingness of experimentation throughout AI. It's a very interesting studio right now. Imagine that every day you would check some new news breaking out in AI, because, funny enough, it comes out almost every day something new that happened and instead of dismissing it and continuing it, work as is, we actually take our time to look into it, maybe experiment with it and figure out, how can it impact game making in a better way? 

This might mean that sometimes we throw away some of the AI and replace them with new ones. But it also means that it keeps us lean and learning every single day. 

And I'll close it out with. despite me, having a lot of care and love for my previous job. Where I got we had to the top charts. We had a small team, and I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of the fact that almost every day here 90% of what I do is something I haven't done before. And that constant learning and innovating really excites me. For the rest of my craft development. 

 

Josh: How are you and the team at Cosmic Lounge using AI for live ops and development? 

Gus: So cosmic lounge is using AI via the puzzle engine. So the puzzle engine is our in-house built with Unity engine for creating art as its playable game prototypes AI assisted level testing and generation. 

In addition, different teams are using AI services for art production for UA and more use cases are being added every week to the puzzle engine when the games go to production. 

So what does this all mean? It means that for not just art generation, which is the hardest topic. I would argue within our industry applied to AI, in our case it's already in the engine. So imagine you're in Unity. You press a button, and it generates the art assets already within Unity. And you're already using them in the game, or you're hot swapping assets in the game based on a text prompt. So it's very active and quick and easy to use. But also the levels themselves with those art assets are generated by AI and then tested by AI and validated by AI. Gus Viegas: And all of this is possible because we made everything configurable, everything down to the game mechanics themselves. Which means live ops, for instance, becomes very easy because we can just over the air, do a config update. And suddenly, this game that can imagine multiple games in a puzzle genre.  

I'm just gonna give examples, not saying, this is what we're doing. But saying these are examples of things we can do. We can do let's say a merge game or a match free game and then over the air, create a minigame that is a top to blast minigame. Within a few hours and this is with no code. This is something that, for instance, at Roviocon our CEO, presented a game that he had developed in a few hours made specifically for Roviocon, made specifically for this presentation that he had done with no code, with no artists, with no game designers or coders and people there were wondering if we're going to release that game. But in fact, we develop games with such a speed and such precision that we end up not needing to release all games. But we could if we wanted to. And that's what excites me on the marketing front is that we get to test a lot of hypotheses very fast. 

 

Josh: We talked about application of  AI already but I wanted to talk about implications. When it comes to AI, how do you think companies should be adapting to the evolution of AI? And what advice do you have for employees in embracing AI? 

Gus: I think, for companies AI is kind of a make-or-break moment. So it's very interesting, because I believe the processes should shift akin to the introduction of the computer to a company. So it might mean that the strategy overall doesn't change or the end goal doesn't change. And maybe the products themselves don't change too hard. But the way we get to that output, the tools that we use to get to that output change dramatically, and this affects a lot of the processes and affects a bit of the culture of the company as well. 

Which means quite frankly, one of the reasons why we're excited about Cosmic Lounge is because we had to create a company from scratch to reinvent itself towards these new processes towards these new tools. Because we truly believe that this is the advent of the computer yet again. And would you be doing art without Photoshop? You wouldn't nowadays. Would you be doing code without a computer? Well, that one kind of answers itself. 

But we believe that AI is akin to that level. Which means that companies then need to. Maybe for some bigger companies it won't be as easy to reinvent themselves, but they might want to reinvent one department at a time and really stop and question everything. I really do believe this is a make or break moment, because the acceleration that you get from adopting these processes is so prominent. It's so impactful. You might be generating games. Prototype games for instance, 10 times as fast. 

And if you're generating things that fast it might be okay to stop. And actually I think from the start, how would you develop these processes? How would you absorb these results into the process sees themselves because you're also going to get learning way faster. So it's also good that you're ready to accept those results faster for employees. 

For employees this is a very interesting time as well. A lot of the people are panicked about loss of jobs. A lot of people are thinking that this is a perfect ripe opportunity for downsizing companies in terms of staffs. And we we're already seeing a lot of layoffs in the last year or 2, but I think this is unrelated. Of course I believe this has to do more to the economic climate. But I wouldn't worry too hard. I think that this might be maybe at the executive level. I can imagine this fought coming coming up, but I think that would be very erroneous of leadership. Because you need to train so many new people and so many new tools. Currently, you're going to need prompt engineers. You're going to need automation specialists. And you're going to need to reinvent all of these different crafts. 

So let's imagine Francis, the marketing artist, instead of the marketing artists developing multiple storyboards and concept art before they start doing their project. They might generate those. And so, instead of having one concept or one storyboard similarly to have 10 and it means that they use the same amount of time, possibly maybe less. But they output so much more ideas and so much more directions that are possible. That they end up still spending a lot of time, and their output increases in quality, or at least in product market fit so much more for doing so. 

But you still need to touch up the end result of the AI. You still need to decide what is the right direction for the audience. You still need to coordinate all of this, and someone actually needs to be there. Prompting and prompting is not you press one button, and it comes out. You actually need to do it over and over again until we get the right result. So it's almost like you're mining for diamonds. And you're picking at the rock over and over again until you find that diamond. But it's not instantaneous. It's different from art where you're crafting the diamond from the rough. 

So it will take time, but you know where you're headed, and you know how to get there with AI. It's more like prospecting. You're going to find more diamonds overall, and you're going to find maybe diamonds that you wouldn't have found otherwise. But the process is different, and it does still involve manual labour. So I wouldn't be worried. I would train myself in these as soon as possible, and this is one of the things I myself am doing. 

 

Josh: As one of our UA advisory members and a speaker in Barcelona, what can our attendees expect to hear from Gamesforum Barcelona and you as a speaker?  

Gus: So I believe Gamesforum Barcelona is going to be an amazing event, and I think that one of the key reasons is because we actually listened to what people were saying, what people were requesting to hear about in various different fields. So you're going to have a growth tract that is curated with some of the top minds in the industry talking about the topics that are not just the hot topics like AI, not just the evergreen topics like creatives. But a lot of topics in between that have been requested. 

I would check out the whole track listing, and see which parts interest you the most. And, funnily enough there are 4 tracks this time, and in that process you might find that alternative ways to achieve growth. Which will also be an interesting alternative to the same kind of professionals which kind of opens up the field of topics that are possible to cover and covers some very pressing topics right now. Like CTV, like Google Privacy Sandbox. There's a lot of interesting factors there. 

And my talk in particular will be more around what happened in 2023, and how to take those learnings from 2023, some success stories from 2023 free and vault them into 2024. Using learnings that I'm getting from the AI side, how to apply and use AI. What are some good foundations for a good growth team in 2024, and how to wrap this all around into kind of a journey towards the universe of UA. 

 

Josh: Hypothetically every time you walk into a room, what song plays for you and why? 

Gus: So this is a very, very interesting question, because I have done them a theme party with this exact theme. And I have actually seen multiple people do Imperial March from Star Wars or Eye of The Tiger. It's a classic. It's a very good go to. And at that time, I was going some drum and bass DJing. So at the time it was a drum and bass track. But I have since mellowed and now I would love to give a shout out to my favorite band, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. And they have attracted not just the name, but also the umph, when it shows up. It kind of encapsulates, how I feel which is, If Not Now, Then, When by King Gizzard. Because it starts with a bang! But then it mellows out throughout time, and it's a nice psychedelic experience that I personally enjoy thoroughly. 

 

Josh: What a great song. Thanks for joining us Gus and can’t wait to catch up in Barcelona!