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WANAKA · AI GAME STUDIO
A game studio you can talk to.
Wanaka turns a chat into a playable 3D game — the assets, the world and the logic included. I have been designing it since the team fit around one desk.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
Founding member — joined at 3, now 30
Scope
PC studio end to end · companion mobile app
Status
Closed beta · 20K+ signed up
THE PROBLEM
Everyone has a game idea. Almost no one can ship it.
Three walls
Making a game takes three crafts most people never learned. Art — models, rigs, animation. Worldbuilding — a setting that hangs together. Code — turning rules into something playable. Wanaka's bet: let AI carry the crafts, so people only bring the idea.
My canvas
I joined at three people, before the product had a shape. Since then the whole PC creator experience has been mine to design — the Studio editor, Character Factory, the landing page, the business model, and a companion phone app that turns photos into game props.
LEVEL 01 · "I CAN'T DRAW"
Character Factory
Assets
Describe a character — or photograph one — and Character Factory returns a rigged, animated 3D model that drops straight into your scene. The phone app goes further: shoot an object in real life and it becomes a game prop. The design problem was trust — showing enough of the pipeline that creators believe the magic, without burying them in it.
LEVEL 02 · "WORLDS ARE COMPLICATED"
The Studio
The editor
The Studio is where AI orchestrates many models into one coherent world. My job was to make a full game engine feel as light as a document: conversation on one side, a live 3D scene on the other, and complexity that only appears when you ask for it.
Month one — three people, one prototype
Now — the same product, in closed beta
LEVEL 03 · "I CAN'T CODE"
Level design, by conversation
The agent
Game logic is planned with an AI agent instead of a script editor. You talk through the levels — goals, pacing, win conditions — and the agent turns the plan into playable rules. The design work was the conversation itself: what the agent asks, when it proposes, when it stays quiet.
CO-OP MODE · HOW I WORK
I design the way our players create.
The workflow
We ask players to build games with AI — so my design process runs the same way. AI sits in every step of the week, and the team reviews working software, not slideware.
Explore
Directions, variants and edge cases are explored with AI before Figma even opens.
Produce
Marketing shots, icons and 3D references are generated, then art-directed by hand.
Ship real demos
Flows are rebuilt as working code and pushed to GitHub — the team clicks a link instead of imagining a prototype.
Decide
Product direction is sparred with AI first — fast, tireless, and unafraid to disagree — then brought to the team.
The onboarding and landing demos linked across this site were shipped exactly this way.
STATUS
20,000 signed up — before the doors even opened.
Where it stands
Wanaka is still in closed beta — and more than 20,000 creators have already registered to get in. Launch metrics will land here when the gates open; the demand already speaks for itself.
20,000+
creators registered — during closed beta
3 → 30
team size since I joined
1 yr
from first prototype to a working studio