Supercell AI Lab Hackathon: Ilkka Paananen's All-Star Team
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.
What do you get when you put a group of veteran game founders in a hackathon with the brightest young AI founders from all over the world?
That’s what we were about to find out when Ilkka Paananen’s all-star team took a flight to Lapland to attend the Supercell AI Innovation Lab hackathon. We were some of the first game devs in Finland 30 years ago and over the years we've been part of some of the world's biggest gaming success stories. Could we go back to the roots and work together as a nimble demo scene crew for a few hours?
Aside from Ilkka, the team consisted of Antti Ilvessuo (Channel37), Johannes Vuorinen (HypeHype), Mika Tammenkoski (Metacore) and myself from Bitmagic. Combined 140 years of experience.
The lab is a cool and unique concept that brings together the best of AI from San Francisco, Tokyo and Helsinki for a 9-week bootcamp where Supercell covers all costs, including a $50k inference budget per person. Goal is to do things that were not possible before. Really great folks and we all enjoyed interacting with them!
A while back I got a text from Otto Söderlund that Ilkka wants me in his “all-stars hacking team”, and a plane ticket. No other information was provided, but it sounded fun so I accepted. At the airport I bumped into the other team members, and nobody else had any idea what was going on either. Ilkka showed up, and he was equally clueless. All he got was a plane ticket to Ivalo, just like the rest of us!
It turned out it was Otto who came up with the concept of "Ilkka and his all-stars team" and he had kept everyone, even his boss, in complete secrecy. 😂
Due to flight schedules, we had just 5 hours to go from scratch to presenting on stage. Our superpower is that we all are rooted in the early stages of the Finnish game industry. Back then, we didn’t have hierarchy or structure. You’d just do what makes the most sense.
We quickly picked “A game you can never leave” as the topic and started building. One of us set up a server, another created art while others took care of the UI and client gameplay, and we hot-swapped roles on the fly.
I’m impressed by how well we worked together. If anyone claims leaders don’t know how to do real work, it’s now proven wrong in the Finnish game industry. Our freshly founded team worked like a well-oiled machine!
We built Grand Life Online, a multiplayer game where you collect empty cans and take them to a store to earn money. You can steal cans and money from other players, creating fun dynamics.
The twist: there's a learning AI that monitors every player at all times. You go offline, the AI takes over your character, which continues to live and play, simulating your behavior. You never truly leave. This quickly becomes a Black Mirror episode!
25 people joined the game during the presentation, out of 50 AI lab members. 5 hours from zero to a live game with 25 CCU and 50% share of TAM. 13,600 lines of code, bunch of art files and one song, using various AI models. Not bad! | 29 comments on LinkedIn