Last year, my startup launched Retail Mage as our first answer to the question of if there was any point in introducing ML/GenAI into the real-time gameplay loop. I hope this to be the first of a series of articles on what we learned.

Some other highlights, specific to the Hacker News folks:

- We have our own AI backend, running in AWS. - Costs were a major issue and we did a lot to lower it - We use a hybrid approach of mixing traditional game AI with machine learning - We have not just AI NPCs, but an AI world interaction model

Anyway, happy to answer questions!