Notes on game development, AI, startups, and the Finnish games scene.
Our AI agents know when they're working around a missing API to get the job done — and now they propose the engine improvements to fix it. Prompt something today that doesn't quite work, and tomorrow it might, because the engine improved itself overnight.
Five hours, zero plan, 13,600 lines of code, a live multiplayer game with 25 concurrent players on stage. Ilkka Paananen's all-stars team — 140 combined years of game dev experience — landed in Lapland with nothing but plane tickets and built Grand Life Online from scratch.
On a Dallas–Helsinki flight, my seatmate and I both skipped the wine for coffee and spent nine hours vibe coding — work that used to take two weeks. In the era of AI agents, you almost can't afford not to.
CEO Forum was once again my highlight of GDC — great discussions with Ben Feder, Bernard Kim, Laura Miele, Brendan Greene and many others, hosted by Moritz Baier-Lentz and Hemal Thaker.
Bitmagic now supports online multiplayer. How hard is it to convert a game? I took my Box Car racer, typed "make this multiplayer," and that was it. Done. Welcome to the future.
Adapting all 108 chapters of Journey to the West into an action RPG, solo, using only prompts as my interface to Bitmagic. Half my time goes into fixing the engine, the other half into teaching the AI to generate chapters autonomously.
91 prompts, two days, zero code written by hand — Box Car Racing is done. All code and art is AI, but the vision and game design are mine. Easy to pick up, hard to master, and finally scratching my long-running itch to build a racing game.
Years ago I turned down the Lead Programmer role on Civilization IV at Firaxis — one of the few decisions I still second-guess. Now my colleague Markus, who doesn't code, just built a full Civ clone in under a week using our AI game creation system.
Bitmagic took 7 minutes and 57 seconds to one-shot a working Vampire Survivors–style prototype in voxels. A few more prompts refined it into a playable game — survive 5 minutes, collect and upgrade auto-fire weapons, just run and dodge.
A year ago Bitmagic won Game Changers in the Generative AI and Agents category — and we weren't even using agentic AI yet. Now V3 is a 100% agentic vibe coding platform running on our own engine, built from scratch for AI.
Two years ago, turning a game screenshot into a playable world felt like a distant dream. Today I took a Red Dead Redemption 2 clip from YouTube, ran it through World Labs Marble and Bitmagic V3, and got a street scene running at 60 fps on a phone.
Hunting ghosts in a haunted cabin, fully prompted gameplay running on a Gaussian Splatting scene from Martin Casado. Bitmagic V3 ships to first users any day now, and for the first time, the AI actually does what people ask it to.
Voxelizing 2 million Gaussians at 0.25m resolution produces 10-15k polygon colliders in about a second of TypeScript on the client. Discard the near-transparent voxels to kill dust and flares, then merge what's left — accurate enough that players never notice.
We turned a single photo of Supercell London's break room into a playable Bitmagic V3 level, then prompted block monsters to invade it. Gaussian splats blend with polygon graphics surprisingly well — and this is just the start of a splat-to-game pipeline.
This is a little PSA for those who have been friends with me on Facebook. Unfortunately, the way things seem to many of you might be that I have somehow unfriended you. I wish. The truth is, my original account is disabled and not visible to anyone anymore. If we have Messenger history, you will see it (I can't access old messages anymore!), but if you attempt to send me messages, you'll get an error message. This is nothing personal though - the whole account is disabled, with all the history,
Bitmagic Supercharges Game Development with Instant 3D Character Creation
Like many great inventions, Bitmagic happened almost accidentally. We were building something else - a role playing game where one of the players would be the game master - and we needed a tool that would allow creating and modifying game worlds really quickly based on instructions given in natural language.We had a prototype of this tool ready in early 2023. To me, this started to feel like something much, much bigger than a tool for game masters. I believed that the power of generative AI woul
Play Guntech 2 for Nintendo Switch now! Guntech 2 is a twin-stick shooter that offers fast-paced arcade action, co-op multiplayer for up to 4 players, tons of weapons and ships and many hours worth of exciting levels to beat! Add to the mix epic boss battles, incredible graphics and fast framerate, and you have a real classic in your hands!Guntech 2 is also available for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Atari VCS and Steam (Windows, Mac, Linux).
Guntech 2 is a return of the good old “cave flyer” shoot ’em ups genre. It's a retro-style game where state-of-the-art graphics and visual effects are combined with classic gameplay. It’s a twin-stick shooter influenced by such classics as Thrust, Oids, Geometry Wars, and Asteroids. You can play in single-player, or couch co-op with up to 4 players!Guntech 2 is now available for Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One and launches for Steam (Windows, Mac, Linux) on February 9, 2022.Guntech 2 in Xbox store:
My latest game, Utopos, will be released in just one week, on March 22, 2021! This will be an Early Access release, meaning that the development will continue after the release. I thought the best way to keep the community up to date on the development is by starting a video blog. So I did!Utopos is an online multiplayer, a twin-stick shooter with rocketships! Utopos will be released on Steam and Atari VCS, and there's also been talk about an Xbox version. Check out the video and let me know wha
Atari VCS dev kit introducedA few days ago I posted some photos of the Atari VCS dev kit I had just received and promised to post more as soon as Guntech is up and running on it. General comments:- Atari VCS is easy develop for. I use Unity, so making a build for the VCS happens by building for Linux, connecting to the dev kit using ssh, copying the file and running it. - I can't comment on the performance in detail yet, but I'm positively surprised so far. For the most part Guntech runs 60 fps
Atari VCS unboxing pictures and information on one of the first games available for the new console!
I'm still shaking, after submitting my competition entry with just 4 minutes left on the clock! Ludum Dare is one of the most famous game development contests. Contestants spend a weekend creating new games from scratch around a topic that is announced when the contest begins. This round was the 46th Ludum Dare, and thanks to this weekend's efforts, the world has almost 5,000 new games to play! Head over to my Ludum Dare page to try it out now, or keep reading to learn how it all happened.This w
This is my story as a game developer. It is also a story of how the Finnish game industry came to be.
My new game, Guntech, was just released for PC and Mac!
Serial Entrepreneur and founder of Transfluent, Jani Penttinen, joins early stage venture capital fund byFounders as its first EIR.
The Transfluent Story tells the story of how a game developer ended up running a fast-growing translation company with IPO ambitions.
Ever since Transfluent's crowdfunding round was announced, there is one question I have been asked over and over again: Why crowdfunding?