Pixels, Protocols, and Privacy: Rethinking AI in Game Development

Over the past eight years, I’ve navigated the rugged and often unpredictable terrain of game development. My journey has spanned projects of various sizes - mostly indie productions - targeting platforms as diverse as consoles, mobile devices, and VR headsets. Game dev is rarely a smooth ride. It’s blood, sweat, and pixels. But it’s also the deeply rewarding experience of transforming abstract, often wild ideas into living, playable worlds that invite exploration and evoke emotion.

Game development is inherently complex. It’s a layered production process, full of pitfalls - many of which you must fall into once, to learn how to avoid them next time. But lately, I’ve found myself thinking more about something that often gets sidelined in small and mid-sized studios: protecting our intellectual property, our creative DNA.

In the era of generative AI, we’re at risk of losing control over the very essence of our work. Feeding cloud-based models with our assets and ideas can compromise the uniqueness of our worlds - and worse, train external models with the outcomes of our hard-earned labor. And yet, the use cases for AI in game development are undeniably compelling:

• concept art prototyping

• procedural generation of environments and characters

• 3D model optimization

• level design

• system-wide performance analysis

• quest branching and scripting

• emergent mechanics

• code assistance and refactoring

Every creative discipline: art, design, narrative, engineering - can be amplified by AI. But to maintain quality and soul, I still believe in the primacy of human creativity. In that light, AI should serve as a power-up for developers, not a replacement.

But here’s the catch.

Relying on public, cloud-based models exposes us to two major risks:

• Unpredictable costs - especially for graphic-heavy workflows where dozens of iterations are discarded or shelved. That’s budget potentially wasted or locked away.
• Unintentional IP leakage - subtle, but real. Feeding proprietary content into external systems is, in essence, a silent data leak.

From a data privacy and product integrity standpoint, the smarter move is to build a fully private, on-prem AI environment. A local system gives studios the tools to speed up production, iterate with confidence, and retain full control over cost, quality, and IP. About that costs - the AI models usually needs a lot of processing power, but obviously game studios already should have such power in most cases. 

The final hurdle is integration - but we’re approaching a tipping point. Emerging protocols and MCPs are already bridging the gap between local AI engines and the wider tech stacks used in creative pipelines. It’s only a matter of time before private AI becomes a standard part of the game dev toolkit.

At Simplito, we’re building exactly that: a private AI framework designed to run entirely on-premise, tailored for creative environments like game studios. Our solution integrates seamlessly with local pipelines, allowing teams to prototype, generate, and optimize using AI - without sending a single asset or prompt outside their walls. It’s a secure, modular system that empowers developers to harness the full potential of AI while maintaining complete ownership of their data, creative output, and intellectual property. Whether you’re experimenting with procedural content, refining game logic, or iterating on visual assets, our stack is built to support the creative chaos - privately, efficiently, and on your own terms.

Conclusion

A lot of friends have asked me: “Mirek, how do you connect your experience in game development with your current focus on privacy-first technologies?”
I think this is finally a good moment to answer. This text is my way of showing that these two worlds aren’t as far apart as they seem - and that ideas from one can actually support the other. It’s not a big manifesto, just a practical bridge between two areas I care about. And maybe, just maybe, it’s also a small tribute to everyone who’s ever tried to combine curiosity with conviction.