Welcome back to AI Gamechangers, your regular chat with games industry professionals doing practical things with AI. Long-time readers may remember Infinity Fiction being trailed in earlier editions, and this week we finally sit down with the brothers behind it.
We’re joined by Alastair and Alex Chamorro, co-founders of Infinity Fiction, whose debut game Tidefall is built around what they call “living world” RPGs: a text-based AI games master layered over an entirely human-written world. It’s a fascinating counterpoint to studios chasing full automation, arguing instead that AI should scale creative teams rather than replace them.
As ever, scroll to the end for a round-up of AI news, links and videos. And remember to join AI Gamechangers live next week in Shanghai!
Alex and Alastair Chamorro, Infinity Fiction
Meet Alex and Alastair Chamorro, brothers and co-founders of Infinity Fiction. Alastair (chief executive technical officer) spent a decade in telecoms and network engineering before pivoting into games; Alex (CEO) built a career in strategy consulting, including senior roles at Monstarlab, Metyis and Pizza Hut. Both are lifelong players, with a vision for how games might be made and played in future.
Together they’ve bootstrapped Infinity Fiction for two years, building the Living World Engine and its first game, Tidefall, a dark fantasy RPG currently in alpha, with advisors who have experience from Wizards of the Coast, Riot and Sega.
Top takeaways from this conversation:
Infinity Fiction’s engine doesn’t generate the game world on the fly. It simulates NPCs behind the scenes, then layers human-authored stories and game design on top, keeping token costs low.
Tidefall is built entirely on open-source language models rather than proprietary ones. Different models are each fine-tuned for a specific job.
All art is pre-curated rather than generated at runtime. AI-assisted imagery (via Midjourney) is touched up by human artists, while sound work remains human-made throughout.
The founders position themselves deliberately as a “middle ground” between AI maximalists and creatives who reject the technology outright, arguing the industry needs that conversation to happen constructively.
AI Gamechangers: Please tell us a bit about yourselves. What’s your background, and what outside perspectives do you bring to AI and games?
Alastair Chamorro: We’re not games industry insiders, but we have always played games. Total nerds. When we were growing up, Alex got me onto Counter-Strike at the age of four or something, and it went downhill from there!
I’ve come from engineering, particularly networking: telecoms, web engineering and the operations side. This is the first time my skills have been relevant to gaming, so I stopped my career and said, “Let’s do this!”
It’s very much that we don’t think AI has been used in the correct way within the gaming sphere. Everyone’s dropping creatives and trying to automate everything. From our point of view, that’s the wrong approach. You can scale human creativity, but you can’t replace it.
That’s really the core of what we’re doing. At the heart of it are writers, artists and animators, and by using AI we can deliver a new kind of experience that wouldn’t otherwise exist. We believe AI’s role in games is about personalisation, increasing player agency, and creating new interfaces: new ways to play. But the human side – the storytelling, the moment-to-moment gameplay – that can’t just be replaced.
So what we’re building is essentially a game engine, alongside our first game built around that philosophy. On the surface, it’s an AI-driven language model interface (you interact with the game through it), but behind the scenes it’s all traditional game design and development.
Alex Chamorro: In terms of our “origin story”, Alastair comes from the technical, systems, web side. And I was a strategy consultant for many years. I got involved in AI, as most strategy consultants do! And luckily, I was involved in projects where it was all about growth, about using AI the right way, and scaling businesses and knowledge to provide platforms and services. Yes, there’s always some work around automation and cost-cutting, because that’s a typical consultancy use case. But the more interesting question is always: how do you create better experiences?
So when Alastair and I came together, we looked at games and felt the industry was leaning too heavily into automation. It was all about replacing people and saving costs. The problem is, you end up with a worse product.
AI is very good at producing lots of stuff. But without humans, you don’t get quality, connection or purpose. Humans provide the intent behind what’s being made. Otherwise, you’re just generating infinite content, and we already have more content than anyone could ever consume. That’s not what people want.
So we looked at the space and thought: AI should be about personalisation, new types of experiences, simulated worlds, deeper player agency, new mechanics. That’s where the opportunity is.
And then we looked at what was already out there. You’ve probably come across other AI narrative games and platforms. We looked at their public channels and noticed everyone saying the same thing: “Please make this a game!”
Alastair Chamorro: People want games, fundamentally, not just a hallucination space with a chatbot.
Alex Chamorro: Exactly. We want to scale human creativity, so we approached it in a totally different way.
We’re using human writing to create the world (the stories, the adventures), and then AI acts as the interface that delivers that to the player. That’s the foundation of what we’re building.
“We are in discussions about bringing some exciting IPs onto the platform, but we’re not working on that until Tidefall is launched and settled. That’s the showcase”
Alex Chamorro
From there, we asked: can we actually build this? We’ve been bootstrapping for the past two years. We’re a startup and have just launched our alpha in May. It’s amazing to finally have other people than just us playing and enjoying the game!
The next step for us is the platform side. We want to enable other creators to build their own worlds and games, using AI as a way to scale their creativity and create new monetisation models. Instead of creators having to join a studio and be slotted into a very specific role, we want to give them the tools to build their own projects.
Because one thing that really surprised us coming into games is how often creators aren’t actually leading the projects they’re working on.
What we want to do is flip that: enable creators to make the games they want to make, and let quality emerge from that. We’ve been building the tooling internally for our own writers on Tidefall, and the idea is to open that up more broadly.
AI Gamechangers: What is the experience of playing an Infinity Fiction game? Moment to moment, what kind of game are you creating?
Alastair Chamorro: We’re calling these living world games. “Living world” has been bandied around in the gaming industry for a little while, but realistically, using AI is the first time you can actually mean it.
The concept is that you’re using AI to interface with the game. Right now, those experiences start off as text-based, but over time, this changes to 2D and 3D experiences. So it’s less about “hey, it’s a text-based game where you’re interacting with a language model” – it’s more that this is an experience where you’re interacting with the AI. What’s behind it will stay the same, but what you interact with will become more visual over time.
From a moment-to-moment gameplay perspective, imagine walking into a tavern. You’re going to hear the door close behind you. We have a sound engine that reacts to what’s happening in the game, so if you hear a troll roar, we’ll play that sound as you move around. The ambience shifts spatially as you explore. There are audio engines that integrate with Unity and Unreal, but nothing exists in the web and AI space, so we’ve had to build our own equivalent from the ground up.
When you’re trying to do something in the world, that’s not going to be determined by the AI alone. It’ll be determined by rules and an engine working behind the scenes. Just like Baldur’s Gate: roll a dice; this thing is going to happen. Dungeons & Dragons is a great ruleset, and people are very familiar with it, but a lot of people try to take that ruleset and apply it to the AI space, and it’s clunky. It’s not really suitable. Our team includes some amazing and experienced game designers who are building a ruleset that actually works here.
The question was: how do we create a genuinely new type of experience? It starts text-based, but this transforms over time.
AI Gamechangers: Please tell us more about Tidefall and the team that’s making it.
Alastair Chamorro: Tidefall is a game designed specifically to showcase our engine. We’re in startup mode, bootstrapping it, so we’re launching a subset of the game and growing from there. For now, we’re going to be a one-game platform.
Tidefall is a massive world. We’re going to have thousands of NPCs and locations. The island is surrounded by storm, and there are major story arcs running across it, with individual storylines and starting locations that spiral into the same overarching narrative no matter where you begin. It’s continuous regardless of your starting point, very replayable, and you can approach it from many different angles. We’re launching with around 40 hours of structured gameplay, but really it’s endlessly replayable by its nature.
In terms of the team, we have four writers, an artist, an art director, an animator, front- and back-end engineers and AI engineers. We also have a strong advisor team.
Alex Chamorro: Our advisors are Eugene Evans (ex-Wizards of the Coast, Mythic), Aaron Rutledge (ex-Respawn, Treyarch, Riot), and John Clark (ex-Sega, Tencent and Curve Games).
They’re all advising from different angles, from IP conversations through to actual game experience. And because this is a new genre, we’re really focused on making it as fun as possible. It’s text-based, so we’re working hard to make text genuinely fun.
AI Gamechangers: Creating a world like Tidefall sounds very resource-intensive. How do you manage costs and scale?
Alastair Chamorro: That’s exactly the skill of the engine. It doesn’t burn through tokens. We’re actually not very generatively led; it doesn’t generate very much on the fly.
What we have is an engine managing everything behind the scenes: what the NPCs are doing, how they’re doing it, why they’re doing it. That feeds into the moment-by-moment experience that’s eventually presented to the player.
It’s very different from traditional game building. If you’re a traditional developer creating a quest, you have to get into every detail, every permutation of what might happen. What we’re doing instead is creating layers. Our data is very bespoke to the engine, so rather than writing every possible outcome, we’re defining each character: their motivations, who they are, why they are the way they are, what they do. Then we simulate it.
So when a player interacts with an NPC, that character will act appropriately to who they are.
Once you’ve created that world simulation, you start layering stories on top, and then on top of that you layer game design – triggered encounters, managed conversations, that sort of thing. It’s a multi-tiered approach, and there is real skill in stringing it all together.
But in terms of token usage? Actually, not that much.
That said, you still need great game design and great stories – otherwise it’s boring. Nobody wants to explore a boring universe. Which is why we need great game builders.
AI Gamechangers: Let’s talk about game philosophy. Even though you haven’t come up through the industry, you’re inspired by games, and you have great advisors. Are you striving towards a system that replicates the role of a human dungeon master in some respects?
Alastair Chamorro: In some respects, yes. The AI acts in that games master role in the sense that it’s perceiving the world around the player and rendering it for them. But we also have lots of other game systems doing that work too, so it’s not a full AI games master. It’s more about how the player interacts with the world.
What’s exciting is that our engine can handle almost any genre in this format. One of our writers is a former detective with a degree in criminology and interrogation science, and he has a game he’s keen to develop: a deep detective crime and interrogation role-play game leaning heavily on nuances, emotion and subtle NPC behaviours.
Alex Chamorro: Every game we develop will have its own unique mechanics and features. With Tidefall, we will have co-op multiplayer, and other games will have systems where you can interact with other players’ worlds. There’s a lot you can do by enhancing traditional game mechanics with AI, and there are genuinely new features that haven’t existed before.
Tidefall was our starting point: a Dungeons & Dragons-style foundation, but with its own unique elements like the storm madness system, factions, and other features you’d expect from a big RPG. Some of that is driven by AI; some of it is handled programmatically in the traditional way. It’s not just an AI engine; it’s an engine of many things.
“We have an engine managing everything behind the scenes: what the NPCs are doing, how they’re doing it, why they’re doing it. That feeds into the moment-by-moment experience. Rather than writing every possible outcome, we’re defining each character”
Alastair Chamorro
One question we had to answer early on was whether to anchor the game on an existing ruleset. We spoke to people from the industry who’ve built rulesets for major brands for years, and the feedback was that a lot of traditional game systems are designed to solve problems that our engine handles inherently. Relationship-building is a good example. In our system, it’s not just what you do but how you do it. If you’re captured by cultists and you kill your way out and brutalise them in the process, a nearby village finding out about that is going to be scared of you, even if escaping was the right call.
We also have a character called Tabitha, the landlady at the hub of the starting village. When you first arrive, she’s cold: you’re a stranger. But if you start helping people around the town, she warms up: friendly conversation, a free drink here, a free meal there. You’re building a genuine long-term relationship with an NPC.
So we’re building our own ruleset for Tidefall, because what we’re doing doesn’t exist in other game systems. We’ve deliberately simplified some areas like combat, for instance, since this is text-based, but then gone deeper in others.
AI Gamechangers: Are you using one of the familiar foundation models as your AI platform?
Alastair Chamorro: We’re not using any proprietary models – everything we’re doing is open source, and we’ve built everything from the ground up. There are a few reasons for that: proprietary models are too limiting, they’re too expensive, and frankly, they’re not particularly good at what we need them to do.
Our engine can call language models up to 15 times during a single turn – say, while the game is in exploration mode – and those might all be different models, each tuned specifically for the task at hand. This model is good at this particular job; we’ve made it good at that, and it’s going to perform that specific function. It’s not generating the world from scratch; it’s pulling from the human-written world and lore as well as the history of the game.
A lot of the art is generated using Midjourney, but everything is touched up by a human afterwards. We want to use human artists as much as possible, but at the scale of thousands of NPCs and locations, it simply isn’t feasible to rely on humans alone.
All our art is pre-curated. There’s no AI generation in-game. It’s not real-time – no one is making new stuff as they play. It’s all totally consistent, and it’s all a decision, not made by the engine.
We’re working with some really big IPs, and one of them said, “We’re not too keen on AI art.” They’ve suggested their own artists, their own art – all great. But our first game, Tidefall, is bigger than Skyrim; with a team of two artists and four writers, we made a choice to get AI to help. But if other IPs say, “No, we’re going to create our own; we don’t want AI art in the game”, that’s fine.
That said, it does all stem from human creative direction. We’ve established an art style, and our art director, who is ex-Bethesda, is overseeing that.
You need a strong justification to replace a human in the workflow, and we’re very functional about where and how we use it. We’re rendering a world of thousands of NPCs and locations: it’s a practical choice, not a philosophical one.
AI Gamechangers: There has been pushback from gamers, creatives and IP holders about the use of AI. What have you encountered in the industry – and how do you approach the topic in a responsible way so that game-makers and players want to come with you on this journey?
Alex Chamorro: There are broadly three buckets of people when it comes to AI. You’ve got the early adopters who love it. You’ve got those who want it used the right way. And then you’ve got a third group who are strongly opposed to AI.
We’ve actually had very little pushback from that third group. If you’re strongly against AI, you’re simply not going to come to us.
Alastair Chamorro: There’s an important conversation that needs to happen here and isn’t happening yet, not meaningfully.
On one side, you’ve got tech people charging ahead with AI. On the other side, you’ve got studios looking at AI as automation tools that will replace creatives.
Some creatives understandably don’t trust AI. The risk is that creatives are removing themselves from the discussion about how AI is going to be used and what the future looks like. And so the tech side just keeps going, which is what we’re seeing everywhere.
“We want to enable other creators to build their own worlds and games, using AI as a way to scale their creativity and create new monetisation models. We want to give them the tools to build their own projects”
Alex Chamorro
This is one of those projects that can be a space for that middle-ground discussion to actually happen. We want to use AI responsibly (that’s the whole goal), but that conversation isn’t happening constructively yet. We want to be a breeding ground for discussions that actually make progress.
Alex Chamorro: And the way we run the company reflects that. Our writers and game designers say, “We need these features, we want to deliver this kind of story and experience,” and the tech side says, “That’s really interesting, let’s work that out together.”
Alastair Chamorro: We are completely creatively led. This is not a tech firm.
Alex Chamorro: Exactly. Infinity Fiction as a platform will keep improving technically, but the quality of the game is going to be human-led. The strength of the human element, the human story, is what makes these games great. We’re building a platform with new features and new ways of interacting to enable that. Ultimately, it’s going to be the humans that drive quality.
It can’t be AI versus creatives. It has to be: how do we scale what creatives do, bring them closer to the product, and make better games?
AI Gamechangers: Are you having conversations with many IP holders about working with them to build experiences this way?
Alex Chamorro: Our focus right now is Tidefall – we want Tidefall to show what’s possible.
What we’ve found is that IP holders have been looking at AI the same way everyone has: what can we do with this? We haven’t found many projects like ours that are trying to do both – scale human creativity while keeping it front and centre. And that’s landing really well with the IP holders we’re talking to.
We are in discussions about bringing some exciting IPs onto the platform, but we’re not working on that until Tidefall is launched and settled. That’s the showcase. We’re not ready to announce anything right now.
AI Gamechangers: If this kind of approach becomes common, if we see new games enabled by AI, what changes for the industry? How disruptive is this, and are we looking at whole new genres of gameplay?
Alastair Chamorro: I think there are two swim lanes here.
Swim lane A is traditional game design and development, a slow-moving beast. You have large companies tackling that problem, and it’ll take years.
Then there’s swim lane B, which is us: what does a fully AI-native experience look like, where you’re interacting with the game entirely through AI? That starts in a more basic format (though we’re going to make it very compelling), and then it evolves and evolves. Internally, we ask ourselves: how would you make a AAA text-based game? It starts there, but the format keeps developing until potentially, some years from now, you have a new paradigm for AAA game development altogether.
But this conversation has to happen alongside a serious discussion about the role of human creativity in game-making. Otherwise, you’re just going to have everything replaced. It’s that age-old argument: is there art without the artist? You might have something pretty on a wall, but what’s the story behind it?
AI has a space, but it’s functional. It isn’t there to replace the human element. The best AI games will be deeply human.
Further down the rabbit hole
Some useful news, views and links to keep you going until next time:
Roblox unveiled its mobile-first AI game creation Build tool that will enable users to turn text prompts into basic games. Public-alpha testing begins in New Zealand on 28th July.
A survey by the Japan Online Game Association found that 100% of the Japanese online game companies polled use generative AI, most commonly for user-preference analysis and behaviour prediction.
Yikes. When identical AI-assisted CVs were presented under the names Emily and James, evaluators were twice as likely to question Emily’s competence, while James was twice as likely to be seen as showing initiative, according to a recent study (reported by Forbes).
Yield Guild Games is sunsetting its YGG Play platform with 35 job losses, despite more than $9m in lifetime revenue. The guild is pivoting to supplying gaming datasets to AI companies building the new world models.
There’s a Best Use of AI category in this year’s Mobile Games Awards. Industry voting has now closed, but you can still buy tickets to the ceremony in Cologne next month.
AI is now “an important foundational technology supporting our strategy”, says PlayStation, framing it as a long-term opportunity stretching to the PS6 era. Sony stresses the “enhancement not replacement” line, pointing to synthetic voice placeholders and its Mockingbird facial-capture tool.
There’s an upcoming AI Gamechangers Summit! On 29th July, industry leaders will tackle the questions that matter: how AI could transform gameplay, creativity, investment and the future of games. Grab a ticket to PGC Summit Shanghai to check out the AI Gamechangers live conversation.
People are using Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to create wild games. Here’s one where Thomas Dimson recreated Quake in Roblox.
Thomas Dimson@turtlesoupyhad a crazy idea on Friday: port Quake to Roblox. After a /goal, $3000 of Fable tokens and four sleepless nights, meet Robloquake, a function-by-function port of Quake, Quakeworld and mods to luau. Open source and playable in Roblox today
8:02 PM · Jul 8, 2026 · 114K Views49 Replies · 66 Reposts · 1.03K Likes
