Creating casino content with AI prompts? You can do that!

Mark Flores Martin has been explaining how XGENIA designs slot machine games using artificial intelligence for a half hour when he decides to offer up an impromptu demonstration.

“You want to come up with a concept for a game?,” the founder and CEO of the startup asks, sharing his screen on a virtual meeting. “Let’s see it go to work.”

“I'm going to want a leprechaun, and he's going to be taking a magical journey looking for gold,” comes the response.

Flores Martin taps the description into XGENIA’s chat protocol and a group of specially-trained AI bots built off the Llama 3 model - one nicknamed ‘Chief’ - begin virtually spit-balling the idea, hashing out digital thoughts in dialogue boxes until they settle upon a compromise. Then they begin building the prototype.

Flores Martin interjects some variables into the conversion: the “magical stuff,” mischievous forest creatures.

“We should include icons like pots of gold, rainbows, four-leaf clovers, shamrocks, horseshoes, leprechaun hats,” he continues, tapping away. “They're going to call it Lucky Leprechaun’s Gold Quest.”

In ten minutes a fully-functioning prototype replete with editable art, music, storyline, game-play is ready for consideration.

This rudimentary dry run can be honed with any level of interaction or detail, and the time elapsed remains virtually the same. It’s a fraction - as in weeks - of the time a team of human designers would require to replicate such a result.

Finalizing the game is also a rapid proposition.

“You type in the type of mechanics that you're looking for in mathematics, the [return to player], the volatility you want, and it'll output that engine for you,” Chief Revenue Officer Adam Davis explained. “You can go back and refine it. And in terms of like comparisons to the more traditional process, if you're going to go to a game studio to produce this game for you, where you can lay out use case to give them some kind of description and concepts, they're going to take a minimum months to come to finalize the product for you.”

That XGENIA builds so quickly - with multitudes of prototype options - made it a winner at the SiGMA Europe Startup Pitch contest recently and an attractive option for a gambling industry that constantly craves new game options to engage demanding and fickle players.

“We're focused a lot on delivering not only slot games, but now we're focused a lot on the visuals, animations, and the stories that go with every slot game that makes it very exciting,” Flores Martin told Betting Startups News. “We're using AI video stories to come up with something quite beautiful and captivating, something that wasn't possible up to, well, a couple of months ago, let's say.”

The next iteration of the company’s AI engine is expected to reduce the 10-minute development window to one.

Then what?

Game-building studios and gambling companies with their own capabilities in-house transform the prototypes into either online or retail games. Flores Martin said XGENIA currently has three clients - one a major American brand - that should be on-boarded by January, but he’s forbidden from naming them because of non-disclosure agreements. He said that the company put two more American clients “in the pipeline” during a junket to the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas in October.

Flores Martin foresees gambling companies like MGM and game-designer Aristocrat as future clients. AI will make scaling up a simple process, he said.

“We can now handle any amount of clients, really,” Flores Martin said. “Our systems were built to scale infinitely.”

XGENIA will eventually expand from slots, Flores Martin said, into the production of crash games, lotto, “to any type of game you can sort of imagine” including sweeps casino.

XGENIA was founded in June of 2023 and has grown to around 20 human employees. It’s difficult to keep track - maybe Chief could help - because not all of the founders or executives have met in person.

Flores Martin began his career as an ethical hacker working for companies and governments in the United States, then transitioned into game development and eventually gambling 11 years ago.

Heiti Kender, the VP of Games, helped develop Disco Elysium the 2019 “Game of the Year,”  according to numerous publications.

Davis brings global marketing experience.

Chief Business Development Officer Monte Singman helped develop EA’s Madden franchise and other iconic titles.

“We're all friends of each other, not necessarily connected,” Flores Martin said. “Each of us has done business together in one way or another. We were a group of friends who were looking for something new at the right time and we all came together to build something a little bit wild in the AI scene, in the game scene. 

“I brought in the gambling side, Heiti and Monte brought in the game side, Adam came in with the marketing side, and then the other guys, numbers and legal and the boring stuff. … Our origin story isn't as exciting as Spider-Man's, for sure, or anything like that.”

But the future, perhaps.