Tokens & Tactics #15: Building AI-Native Games
Alastair Chamorro on starting a gaming studio that blends AI tech with human creativity, using ChatGPT to fix his 90s 4x4, and why local AI models will transform personalized gaming experiences.
Welcome back to Tokens & Tactics, our Tuesday series about how people are actually using AI at work.
Each week, we feature one person and their real-world workflow—what tools they use, what they’re building, and what’s working right now. No hype. No vague predictions. Just practical details from the front lines. This week: Alastair Chamorro.
Tell us about yourself.
Hi, I’m Alastair, an engineering leader based in sunny United Kingdom. My background is Telecoms, network, infra and software engineering, and more recently AI/ML, but I have always dreamed of getting into game development. The onset of AI has brought with it an incredible opportunity to apply myself to building games where my skills weren’t relevant before. Suddenly I’m on the frontier of adding new technologies and methods to the gaming sector to create new experiences for players that they haven’t seen before. My brother and I started Infinity Fiction to do just that! We are a blend of a gaming studio and AI tech firm in one and focusing on pushing the human factor which I think is at real risk of being lost these days.
ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude?
ChatGPT, the most boring answer but it’s the best all-rounder. For specific tasks like coding I’ll use Claude or some of the more recent open source models that are now so good, like QWEN3-coder.
What was your last SFW AI conversation?
I’ve been learning to revive and maintain an old 90s 4x4, and unsurprisingly GPT knows a lot more than I do about older diesel engines. After almost everything has either stopped working or never worked, GPT has been really strong with old, well-known topics even with strange and nuanced problems in my engine: most recently I found cracks in the pre-combustion chambers in the head, which turned out to just be business as usual. At this point I’m basically badgering it every time the car makes a new noise… which is daily.
First "aha!" moment with AI?
AI is the great horizontal scaler. When starting a business, you suddenly need skillsets you don’t have, and this isn’t just for leaders but for every founding employee. AI gives you a baseline of understanding and competence in almost any area, technical or not. But it’s a double-edged sword, because expectations quickly rise alongside it. In games, the same applies: AI gives us a baseline for design, dialogue, art, and mechanics. It lets small studios like us experiment with ideas that used to require huge teams.
The real “aha” isn’t just the automation of tasks, it’s the way humans can now think, research, and act so much faster. At a startup, there’s nothing more valuable than that.
Your AI subscriptions and rough monthly spend?
Actually, not too many! What we are building uses our own proprietary engine leveraging cloud inference.
Personally, I have subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, and Magnific.
Who do you read/listen to to stay current on AI?
BAIR Blog (Berkeley AI research)
The TWIML AI Podcast
Your most-used GPT/Project/Gem?
I use Obsidian for all of my notes and scraps. They have a feature called ‘canvas’ where you can visually plan/map objects. The raw file is essentially just JSON and I have a tool that dumps it out as a dictionary to be used by whatever I’m currently working on.
The AI task that would've seemed like magic two years ago but now feels routine?
Rather than some specific use case, the ability to quickly research and summarise topics has become so mundane and frequently used that it has fundamentally changed the way I work. Looking back, I wonder how I used to get anything done at pace.
Magic wand feature request?
Tiny efficient, effective models. Imagine the complex agentic applications the industry is currently using, placed onto local devices. Local AI will change the nature of home computing and especially gaming. I know these things are already coming, but I just want them now.
At the moment, game worlds that truly react to players in a simulation-like way are mostly limited to text-based experiences. We’re already trying to make those experiences highly immersive and high-production, but the real leap will be when models are seamlessly built into traditional (or entirely new) game engines running locally on consoles or PCs. Suddenly, every gaming experience becomes personalized: how players act, what they say, the choices they make, all of it can be leveraged to create a bespoke experience tailored just for them.
If you could only invest in one company to ride the AI wave, who would it be?
The ones betting on humanity. As AI lowers the barrier to entry and also creative quality for almost everything, the risk is a flood of homogenised boring content. The real opportunity lies in platforms that amplify human creativity, not replacing it, that increases both the ability for human connections and personalisation. That’s where the future value will be.
Have you tried full self-driving yet?
Not yet! But I wouldn’t have an issue with it at all.
Latest AI rabbit hole?
MemGPT, now Letta. What a cool project!
One piece of advice for folks wanting to get deeper into AI?
AI/ML skills doesn’t mean you’re excused from software engineering best practices or knowledge: get the foundations right. Things are moving so fast in AI fields that it’s almost impossible to keep on the pulse, just remember nobody else knows what’s going on or what they are doing either, and focus on building value rather than using the latest shiny thing.
Who do you want to read a Tokens & Tactics interview from?
Harrison Chase, Langchain
If you have any questions, or if you’d like to contribute to Tokens & Tactics, please be in touch.
Thanks for reading,
Noah and Claire