How it was made: Generative AI runs the game itself. Death by AI comes from Playroom, which Inworld describes as part of the studio and publisher Little Umbrella. Playroom says it soft-launched the game as a web open beta in the first week of November 2023 and built it in eight weeks; Little Umbrella later told TechCrunch it took 10 weeks to develop and launch, and TechCrunch reported that it drew more than 20 million players in its first three months. When the game was shown on the three.js forum on December 2, 2023, Tabish Ahmed (tabs), the studio's CEO, wrote that it was built with Three.js, React and Playroom's own multiplayer kit, and Discord's case study says it drew close to 7 million users in its first few weeks as a Discord Activity.
Inworld's customer story about the game, written by the AI company itself, says it launched on OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for the story text and ElevenLabs for the voice of Bob, the robot host, then moved to Inworld's language-model service and text-to-speech to cut cost and lag; Inworld says the game became profitable after the switch. Discord's case study lists OpenAI, Llama models and Inworld for text and ElevenLabs and Inworld for speech, with different models used for languages other than English. Playroom hasn't said which models power the game today, or whether AI tools helped make its code or art.
