Party games will exist as long as groups of friends can get together and have a good laugh, and one of the latest looks to use the advent of AI to elicit that laughter. Anyone who has seen an AI image gone wrong knows how funny it can be, andLAIzy Picture Phonelooks to capitalize on that.LAIzy Picture Phoneis an online multiplayer party game where players write a prompt that gets made into an image by Generative AI, and players must figure out what they each wrote as the prompt.
Canvas Ink. Games founder Eduardo Saffer Medvedovski spoke with Game Rant atGamescom LATAMabout this upcoming party game, the expanding game industry in Brazil, and much more.
The following transcript was edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: How has the game development scene here in Brazil changed over the past few years?
A:I believe that we are in a more mature state. There are mobile and PC markets, which are PC premium, and they are very different because mobile has some very big companies involved. Some of them got to a certain scale, and eventually, some of them got purchased. There are more than five big companies that are purchasing from the outside, and in this way, it becomes more competitive.
That’s what I’ve been seeing. I’ve mostly been in the mobile space for the past 10 years. There’s an opportunity for a lot of small indie devs in the mobile space to get funded, and I’ve been seeing many studios mature. In the premium PC space, I would say we are a very big country in terms of having a lot of states, and every state has a different scenario. Mine is Rio de Grande do Sul. We have associations there with more than 30 companies and some of them were very successful in something. We always have this connectionto share what we learn, how to self-publish, or how to make good pitches. We do sessions between ourselves to train ourselves. We have contact with the government and this also passed to other states as well. In this indie scenario, we’ve learned how to go to a publisher and not say something that burns our tape. We have this expression in Portuguese.
Q: What drew you to make a party game likeLAIzy Picture Phone?
A:I’ve always been very fond of party games. I’ve had a lot of sessions in my house with my friends, playingmanyJackboxtitlesand alsoGartictitles. In the pandemic, we had a lot of sessions online like that, and it was like, “Oh, maybe it’s a fun way to play with AI.” We did some like that just creating images and chatting about them to see if it was fun, if it worked. And it did work because the thing is, people haven’t really used these AI images for fun yet. They use them more for doing serious stuff or concepts, but a lot of people were making fun of AI images online. We saw an opportunity to get a laugh out of it because the human connection, in terms of communication, is always noisy in party games. Even if we ask someone to draw something in a party game, we have this noise, and it’s all part of the fun and the mechanics itself. It’s not really about the individual drawing; it’s about how we try to make ourselves understandable and how AI fails at it.
Q: You mentionedJackboxthere and when I was looking at it, your game has a very strongJackboxvibe. Was that intentional?
A: A little, yeah, it’s a little bit product-inspired. Building the UI, we are trying to usecolors and shapes that make it fun, and we see some internet games that are very thematic like that. This is, I guess, some of our inspirations. MaybeGartic Phonealso inspired us, but it’s hard to say because you always get inspired by so many things.
Q: How has past games that you’ve worked on informed your approach to this game?
A:I worked on some multiplayer games in the past, more PvP-like, and games for children. Having this mindset a little bit when you are not designing a game for adults, having some nephews to try it out, helps a lot. What makes an impact on the pre-production side is having strong pillars, even in the narrative and art style. One inspiration I forgot was the robot voices because people were already making fun of these AI-like robots. That’s why we decided to make avatars that are robot versions of some famous paintings and painters. But honestly, making party games and board games is what we are trying to do. We just have the experience as players, and I think that was good enough.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about how you worked AI into the gameplay loop?
A:As you write the prompt and create the image you pass to someone else, you try to guess the prompts by describing what you see. You never get something as you would like to, but sometimes it’s close. That’s the fun of it. It makes more than one picture so people can select, and this is already fun. Sometimes, players are just frustrated with the AI because they didn’t get what they want. Our incentive is this, something that is fun between friends. Sometimes these images are common or use a crazyart style similar to surrealismor Picasso, and it’s always fun to mix things that are just impossible to mix.
We’re not here to replace or say thatLAIzy Picture Phoneis better than drawing games. It’s just a different way of being funny when you do drawing games and do prompt games. If I say five random words like “scissors flying with lasers in space,” I can’t draw that quickly. But AI is very fast, very confident, and always very funny.
Q: Canvas Ink. Games “focuses on the mobile market and easy marketability.” When you say you’re looking at easy marketability, what do you mean?
A: It’s great to have an easy way to access the game. We are mostly now focusing on some web games that you just click and play like we do. We want to do apps and port them to every platform eventually, but for now, if you want to play a match, you just scan a QR code and you are in the room. Another game that we are doing isMusic Rush,a classic music gamewhere you can play samba music or another type of music. Easy marketability is just focusing on ways people can easily relate to and play the game.
Q: Being here at Gamescom LATAM, has there been anything special that has really caught your eye about this whole event?
A:I’ve been here a lot of times when it was BIG Festival, so seeing it grow has been amazing. We have much more access to local and international media. People are paying attention. It’s a great way to get everyone here together in the business area and they incentivize trying to connect good projects. Here in Brazil, you know, it’s a lot like “Oh, we are Brazilian. Let’s help each other.” I don’t like this concept so much. We must help each other because we see marketing potential, we see the fun of it, and we must know how to present ourselves before that, so of course, we help each other and we must in some ways. But now we can escalate things that already have a good momentum, easier.
Q: What has been the biggest difference you’ve seen this year compared to BIG festival?
A: There are a lot of different standsthat I’ve never heard about, and there is a stronger differentiation in the market space. There were a lot of crypto games standing out in many events here before, and now they’re gone. Now, you see more big players such as Nintendo or Xbox wanting to come here, and we expecteven more Latin American channelsand maybe international ones to come too. Publishers as well, I have seen many publishers that have never come here before.
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