Last year, my startup launched Retail Mage as our first answer to the question of if there was any point in introducing ML/GenAI into the real-time gameplay loop. I hope this to be the first of a series of articles on what we learned.<p>Some other highlights, specific to the Hacker News folks:<p>- We have our own AI backend, running in AWS.
- Costs were a major issue and we did a lot to lower it
- We use a hybrid approach of mixing traditional game AI with machine learning
- We have not just AI NPCs, but an AI world interaction model<p>Anyway, happy to answer questions!