London-based studio Scriptic - formerly known as ElectricNoir - has acquired $5.7m ($8.3m total) in funding in their latest seed round.
The round was led by Bitkraft Ventures, followed by others such as Tower 26 and the Amazon Alexa fund. Scriptic will be utilising the funding to “expand its content pipeline and pursue IP collaborations”, while expanding their team and also seeking to onboard outside writers onto their AI-driven tools.
The studio uses ChatGPT and DALL-E for a number of their titles including Scriptic: Crime Stories which launched exclusively on Netflix Games in 2022.
The company has been ambitious about the potential of AI tools, with CEO and co-founder Nihal Tharoor explaining to us in an interview “We strongly believe that AI can be used fruitfully to advance human creativity – not replace it – and that when integrated into a production and creative process thoughtfully, you can achieve impressive results. While we were able to produce Dark Mode [their newest title at the time] over a shorter timeframe and on a smaller budget, the end result is still compelling and sophisticated entertainment because the team was so mindful of quality.”
The power of AI?
The debate on the potential, pitfalls and ethicality of AI continues to rage. However, behind the scenes many companies are experimenting with the potential these technologies have to improve their workflow. Scriptic are certainly ambitious by offloading some of the work onto AI tools in order to accelerate the workflow of a smaller team, especially when narrative games can more easily show issues when inconsistent storytelling or art is more obvious.
However, regardless of the pitfalls, Tharoor was very positive. “As an industry, we’re still in the early phases of using AI in our creative processes, but I’m confident that generative AI is an asset that can be used to unleash our imaginations,” he said. This latest investment will certainly feel like a vindication of that optimism, and follows other companies such as Unity throwing their hat into the ring in a big way with new AI tools.
