Studio Atelico 发布可在设备端运行的 AI 引擎

Studio Atelico, a game studio building AI-native games and the tech behind them, opened
early access to the Atelico AI Engine, the first AI engine purpose-built to power
AI-driven gameplay.

The engine enables developers to run language models, image generation, semantic search, speech systems and AI-powered character behaviors entirely on player’s devices, inside the game process and alongside the renderer. The technology already powers the studio’s debut turn-based card and dice creature-battler Bobium Brawlers, where players describe a character in plain language and get a portrait and playable deck generated right on their phone.

Built on Studio Atelico’s belief that AI should empower creators, not replace them, the engine is designed to expand what developers and players can do while keeping authored content and creative direction in the hands of the people making the game.

Piero Molino, CEO of Studio Atelico, will be a speaker at GamesBeat Next 2026 on Monday November 2 and Tuesday November 3 in our latest event at Convene in San Francisco. (You can register to attend using this code). The session at 3:30 p.m Monday at GamesBeat Next is entitled AI-native game development: Gameplay concepts that can only be made with AI and it will be followed by a deep dive by Artificial Agency.

“We have built the engine fundamentally as a mechanism for (our first AI game) Bobium Brawlers. We wanted to have these capabilities. We used AI in the game for creating decks and for creating images. And as we were developing it, realized that well, we had many more components and many other things that we believe could be very valuable also for other developers,” said Molino in an interview with GamesBeat. “We decided to package it in a way that other developers can embed it into whatever game engine they use to add AI capabilities. That’s the main goal of it, and the motivation for someone to do that is basically they can add similar things to what we’ve done with Bobium Brawlers.”

He said, “If they want to add image generation, or creation of content from user input. But you can also implement freeform dialogue, smarter NPCs, dynamic content that reacts to players and personalizes each playthrough. There’s plenty of other applications that people can come up with, putting together the components that we have in the engine in many different ways. I’m pretty curious to see what combinations people come up with that lead to new game designs.”

As developers increasingly explore AI-powered gameplay, integrating AI seamlessly into new, in-development and live-service games has remained one of the industry’s biggest technical hurdles. Studio Atelico built the Atelico AI Engine to solve the technical challenges that have historically prevented generative AI from shipping in commercial games. Through native integration with game engines and proprietary GPU scheduling technology, the engine allows AI to run directly alongside gameplay without competing with rendering performance, while eliminating cloud dependencies across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Linux, on GPU or CPU.

The Atelico AI Engine integrates natively with Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot, enabling developers to deploy AI directly on players’ devices. It supports local speech recognition, text-to-speech, semantic search, vector embeddings, structured AI outputs for game systems, adapter support, and open-source language models.

“We believe the future of AI in games isn’t about replacing developers. It’s about giving them the tools to create experiences that weren’t previously possible,” said Molino. “Until now, developers have had to choose between intelligent gameplay, performance and creative control. We built the Atelico AI Engine so studios don’t have to make those tradeoffs. The studios that succeed won’t be the ones using the most AI, they’ll be the ones using AI entirely in service of the player experience.”

Among its key capabilities, the Atelico AI Engine introduces: AI built for real-time game environments.

Unlike AI tools designed for cloud deployments or standalone applications, the Atelico
AI Engine was purpose-built for games. It enables developers to integrate AI directly
into gameplay while solving the performance and deployment challenges unique to
modern game development.

Molino said the company hasn’t released Bobium Brawlers yet. But as the company was showing the game, many developers asked if they could use its technology. So the company packaged the tools in a way so that other developers can use it in an easy way. It’s kind of like a plugin. Molino said that making the game made the engine better, and making the engine also made the game development easier.

You can import it in your engine. “In your editor, you would install it like a physics engine. And so developers are already starting playing with it and finding value from it.”

Performance without compromise

The proprietary Compute Graphics Scheduler (CGS) enables AI inference to run alongside rendering without competing for GPU resources or introducing frame drops. One reason this is significant is using on-device AI means there is no AI inference cost for studios, as the processing takes place on the player’s system, rather than in a cloud data center where the AI token costs could be very high.

There are also no latency issues associated with the cloud, and there is better privacy and control (player data never leaves the device, and studios retain control over their AI experiences without relying on external cloud services).

Origins

The company has been working on the engine for a year and a half, almost the same amount of time that it has taken to make the game.

“We were building it for ourselves, and then the moment that we discovered that it had all these components that could be useful for other people too, we decided to a package this in a way that could be useful for other people,” Molino said.

Part of the reason that the company is releasing the AI engine is that it hasn’t seen that many games released that use AI in their gameplay as originally expected in late 2022 after ChatGPT burst onto the scene.

One of the reasons has been cost. If you use a cloud-based solution that taps into a big data center to handle AI processing, the cost for a million users could be $1 million a day. That is not a sustainable cost in terms of AI tokens, Molino said. But to do the processing on the users device shifts the cost and brings it to zero for a machine owned by the user.

“For us, it was like obvious that we needed to build an on-device solution because the on-device cost during gameplay after Studio Atelico releases the game is zero.

The other reason to do the engine was that if something runs on device, if a cloud provider changes the model or changes their costs or changes anything really, it doesn’t impact the developer, he said.

“We are independent and can fundamentally make it so that we are owners of our own destiny, and I think game developers like that,” he said.

Developers really want to control the experience that the players have when they play. They are crossing their fingers and hoping the cloud provider will not change the model under their feet.

“We optimize the engine in a very extreme way to the point it runs on a phone. Obviously, it runs also on PCs as a consequence,” Molino said.

And the costs of AI hardware continue to decline for users.

Studio Atelico argues that this AI engine enables new gameplay mechanics that were not previous possible, expanding what developers can create with AI. It also sees near-instant real-time image generation on-device.

The engine can generate high-quality images in ~1 second on Apple Silicon and in <0.25s on the latest desktop GPUs, dramatically faster than typical local or cloud-based approaches.

Developers stay in creative control

“We have many components in the engine, and the components can be combined in many different ways,” he said. “We are combining these components in a specific way for Bobium Brawlers.”

The engine has an image generator, and it also has another component that filters the user input.

“So, for instance, if the user input is not safe for work or insulting or whatever, we have a component that filters that,” Molino said. “We have another component that generates the cards. Another component creates fortune cookies in the game that are just little messages that are bespoke for each specific creature, and so on.”

The company broke down these capabilities into the individual pieces. This way, even if a developer is not doing exactly the same thing that Studio Atelico is doing, they can use the same pieces like Lego blocks, and put together a different kind of structure, which could be very bespoke to their specific game.

The engine is designed around the idea that authored content is the foundation and AI enhances it, rather than replacing it. Semantic retrieval, structured generation, state-driven dialogue and layered guardrails systems ensure AI remains consistent with a game’s creative direction, narrative and design intent. A built-in, multi-layer safety pipeline can rewrite problematic outputs instead of simply blocking them, helping studios maintain immersive player experiences while enforcing their own content policies.

AI-native gameplay systems

The engine includes a Character Behavior System that allows developers to define character personas, backstories, emotional baselines, relationships, motivations and behavioral tendencies, while also collecting memories that influence their future actions, enabling NPCs that evolve naturally over time rather than following fixed scripts.

Private and on-device by design

All AI processing runs locally across supported platforms, so player data never leaves the device. Studios avoid network latency and recurring server costs, and keep complete control over their AI experiences without relying on external cloud services.

Near-instant image generation

The Atelico AI Engine includes proprietary image generation technology capable of producing high-quality images in approximately one second on Apple Silicon, so players and developers can bring their ideas to life in-game.

The company is not announcing any customers yet. But there are developers using it in ways that are slightly different from what Studio Atelico has used it for.

Some of them are using it for NPC behavior and interaction. Some others are using it to create like a little brain that can be used by characters not only for interaction but also for like emotion and dialog. It can be used to create smart NPCs that generate responses for dialogue on the fly, depending on user behavior or input.

“All of these things are made possible by these components, and these components can be put together by a coding agent, but can also absolutely be put together by human developers,” Molino said.

Molino said the company’s engine specifically runs on device, making it unique. This engine can run multiple large language models. It handles image generation, text to speech, speech to text, lip syncing, and it handles guardrails and the content moderation.

The Atelico AI Engine is available today through Early Access. Developers interested in
building AI-powered gameplay experiences can learn more and request access at
https://atelico.studio/.

Studio Atelico is an independent game studio building AI-native games and the technology behind them. Founded 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 developed the Atelico AI Engine, on-device middleware for Unity, Unreal and Godot, and its debut title, Bobium Brawlers.

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