Readyverse launches Promptopia generative AI creation tool for digital worlds

Readyverse Studios, a publisher of games and digital worlds, has unveiled Promptopia as an AI-powered generative creation tool.

Aimed at players who want to build their own immersive environments, Promptopia lets players build digital assets and environments using text prompts. Readyverse made the announcement at the Blockworks tech conference Permissionless III, and I interviewed Readyverse CEO Aaron McDonald.

He said that Promptopia is an innovative sandbox experience where players can bring their imaginations to life by creating game-ready objects, environments, music, and more with the simplest of text prompts, fed into a generative AI model. McDonald showed me a demo of the working Promptopia.

The world of Readyverse is still in the works, and it’s based on the work of Ernest Cline, the best-selling novelist and renowned creator of the groundbreaking franchise Ready Player One, which came out as a novel in 2011 and was turned into a Steven Spielberg movie in 2018.

“We wanted to create this in a way that was leveraging the technology that we’ve been building in the generative AI space, but do it as a kind of gaming experience, as opposed to just like throwing tools out there for people to build stuff with,” McDonald said. “We wanted to make the tools part of the game. That’s how the idea of Promptopia came together.”

Promptopia is going to be built inside the world of Readyverse, which is a metaverse-like experience similar to the world of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Your avatar can be dressed up like characters from the Ready Player One world, or they can be anything you want.

“If you think of Readyverse as a launcher that can launch something like [the upcoming game] Open, maybe you’re waiting for your buddies to come online so you can queue up. Or you’re you’re in the kind of discovery mode to see what’s out there. Other games can be launched from the launcher, or you just want to go have some casual fun,” McDonald said. “Promptopia is always there for you. It mixes some popular games, play styles, and the process of generating the environment, the music, the objects that exist inside of that world.”

Sneak peek

Promptopia combines multiplayer gameplay with real-time AI asset generation allowing users to build, share, and play in a world shaped by their own ideas. By harnessing the latest in AI technology, Promptopia shatters the boundaries between creators and players, transforming anyone into a game designer with ease, McDonald said.

In a sneak peek, McDonald showed more of the things you can collect in your personal lobby, in this case the Aech’s garage in Ready Player One. You can store things you’ve won during competitions or things you’ve created or bought. If you go up to an arcade machine you can go to a world dubbed Surreal Estate or a central land or a showroom.

You can jump into a world dubbed Promptopia. Things in this place are generated by the players. It’s also a space for a first-person shooter game. If you and your team capture the flag and control the console in the center of the map, you can change the environment. You can change the music and generate objects and play around with the creativity tools, resizing objects on the fly.

“These objects are exampes of what happens when you win the right to prompt the environment, like changing the sky,” McDonald said.

You can do something like generate a hoverboard and then enchant it so that you can ride it around the play space.

Promptopia provides players with creative freedom, integrating AI tools in real time to generate 3D assets and environments within the Readyverse platform, which already includes a variety of globally recognized IP, such as Reebok, Cool Cats, DeLorean and Ready Player One. From scenery to interactive objects, Promptopia opens a world of possibilities in a social, collaborative virtual environment.

“Promptopia is a new experimental game experience that allows us to see how generative AI and game mechanics can come together in interesting ways,” said Readyverse cofounders McDonald and Shara Senderoff, in a statement. “Promptopia builds the groundwork for the UGC experience in the Readyverse. We’re giving players the ability to make what’s in their mind an immediate reality, and have prompt engineering become part of a deeper immersive gameplay experience. We’ve prioritized creativity and fun at the core so the interactive user experience can be appreciated by every gamer as they bring their imaginations to life through gameplay. It’s a blank canvas waiting for your ideas to be incorporated.”

While many tech giants are exploring the possibilities of AI, Promptopia from Readyverse sets a new standard by offering a level of integration within gameplay. As part of the Readyverse ecosystem, and using the novel “Altered State” Generative 3D model developed by Futureverse and music AI platform JEN, players can generate real-time, game-ready assets, environments, and soundtracks through simple text prompts.

Promptopia is designed to democratize game creation, allowing anyone to become a creator regardless of their technical skill level.

Readyverse Studios is a next-gen technology and experience studio cofounded by Futureverse cofounders Shara Senderoff and Aaron McDonald, as well as Ernest Cline, the best-selling novelist and renowned creator of the groundbreaking franchise Ready Player One and Ready Player One film producer Dan Farah.

McDonald said that Promptopia has been the culmination of a couple of years of work. Some are behind the scenes creating AI models for Readyverse and Futureverse, which is the infrastructure company behind the Readyverse. The team has had to enable the models to boost creativity while remaining safe for users to experiment with. A few months of work have gone into the game that sits atop Promptopia, where you compete with other players in a social and creative experience.

“It has well-known game elements built into it like first-person shooter and capture the flag, where you capture the tower to control the environment,” he said.

McDonald said that players will be able to wishlist the Readyverse experience soon and it will likely have closed testing this year and open testing sometime next year. In this experience, some of the things will be built by the company’s teams and some built by the players and some by third parties. The tech will be built upon open metaverse technology, worked on by an expert staff, McDonald said.

All told, more than 200 people are working on Readyverse and Futureverse technologies. And there is support from brands like Reebok, Cool Cats and DeLorean.