The evolving world of LLM and “AI” tools mean incredible opportunities. While the machine learning tools available aren’t close to useable for things like creating pieces of a game, they are still excellent tools for almost any studio. Merlin, our home made AI assistant, is exactly that. Given the wide range of expertize our studio offers on a global scale, we knew our magical expert companion needed to be ready to deal with the varied array of requests that might come his way.
What does Merlin, the AI Assistant, do day-to-day?
As mentioned, he’s not a game development tool. However, he is certainly useful around the studios as assistance to all of our staff. Learned and trained on all of the requisite knowledge bases and our own internal procedures, Merlin is a ready companion with many masks and pre-prepared prompts to ensure that any can use him.
Regardless of your familiarity with LLMs and machine learning tools, our development and tech team ensured he was built with these masks and pre-prepared prompts to assist any member of staff in the pursuit of their work. From marketing and HR to developers and security engineers, Merlin is truly a magical individual with a knowledge base to rival any other mage (or LLM!)
How was Merlin created?
Going into this process, our team knew that LLMs are new tech. There’s plenty around already, being used around the world by millions if not billions of people. Given how saturated the market is for LLMs that can handle a variety of different tasks, we saw no need to reinvent the wheel. So, what was out there that we could leverage? What could we use to make Merlin truly magical?
As a base, we used the open-source framework of LangChain. This interacts with LLMs and allows us to build tools on top of their existing features and capabilities. It has a strong capacity for testing to see how effective features are and for benchmarking those potential features. With anything new like this, and with anything as massive as an LLM, you can never know what to expect! This helped us a lot with debugging and improving Merlin overall.
We wrote a lot of code ourselves on top of this framework and integrated more than a few tools. For image generation we have DALL-E and Midjourney. Flux, a new open-source image generator is also being incorporated! For text, we have GPT 3.5 all the way to 4.0 turbo and Gemini including all of its versions up to the latest of Gemini 1.5. Finally, given our security engineers and plethora of coding experts on staff, Claude and Claude 100k was also built into our system.
It’s an ongoing and constant process, this type of thing is not plug and play! When we were originally setting it up, and now continuing its growing capacity, we’re configuring the actions it can take and integrating further LLMs it can talk to. We ensured it had the capacity to fully understand our internal operations and connect to our confluence so that project management would be streamlined even further.
Building Merlin for an entire company
Building an LLM from scratch is a rare idea today, we saw no need to do so. However, we wanted to ensure that it would function easily and be user friendly for any staff member. Regardless of how familiar they were with Chat GPT and Gemini or any of the other tools on the market, it was important to us that it was as easy as possible.
That’s where the “roles” or “masks” come in. The roles or masks it can take are something that our tech team are quite proud of. Depending on what you need, there’s a role to help you out. Sometimes it can be tricky to generate a prompt to get you the answers you need. In many cases, you can spend a significant amount of time generating and curating the exact prompt required to get it to answer as you need it to. The roles we’ve created cut that down, giving you a long list of pre-prepared prompts that easily get you started. Everything from marketer, coder, copywriter, and more, they allow our team to generate results faster and more efficiently!
Lastly, given the free version on which many models use their prompts as further training data, Merlin allows our staff to keep their information and prompts private from all eyes!
If you’re interested in our tech prowess or perhaps more of our game development or game art services, get in touch with Magic Media today! Our global team of tech, entertainment, and gaming experts are on-hand to tackle your challenges and bring your dreams to reality. Leverage our expertize today and let’s create magic.
