Echo Chunk, developer of the Wordle-style daily chess puzzle game Echo Chess, has raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding from a16z Speedrun (Andreessen Horowitz's early-stage games accelerator), Zynga founder Mark Pincus, South Park Commons (SPC), Opendoor founder and CEO Eric Wu, and Roblox head of generative AI Stef Corazza.
Echo Chunk founder and CEO Sami Ramley told TechCrunch that the main reason for the investment was to enable the community to create more puzzles using AI, and while the company is focused on Echo Chess for now, it plans to release more titles in the future.
Josh Lu, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said the firm has tried a new approach to chess that has paid off, and the community is churning out a growing amount of content that uses AI as a co-pilot.
“We believe AI enhances the ingenuity of game designers, and the Echo Chess team has demonstrated this brilliantly in their debut release by using AI to add a fresh twist to the daily game. They've done it very quickly with a very small team and have already built a community of dedicated players and speedrunners with fresh content every day, which would have been very difficult to do just a few years ago,” he said in a statement.
Echo Chess game
Wordle, a word-based puzzle game that gained popularity during the pandemic and was eventually acquired by The New York Times, is now available as an app for people who want to play chess on their smartphones. Echo Chess is a daily puzzle-solving version of the game that aims to make chess accessible to a wider audience.
Instead of playing against an opponent, players must capture all the pieces on the board to complete the challenge. There are three modes: Daily Classic, Daily Epic, and Blitz mode. The last mode is a timed mode where you must knock down the board to capture more pieces and earn more time on the next board.
Image credit: Echo Chess
Lumley, the former head of product at VR startup Wevr, wouldn't disclose user numbers but said many streamers and creators are making content around the game.
Startup Founding
Lumley told TechCrunch that he's been obsessed with strategy games since he was a kid, and last year he thought that with recent advances in AI, there was a real opportunity to present games in a different way, plus the new approach could potentially shorten users' learning curve.
“We thought that as games evolve, AI could improve game design. Using Game Maker, we could iteratively create the best strategy and puzzle games. We built this game and founded the company around this idea,” he said.
Image credit: Echo Chunk
Use of AI
The company is using AI for three things: Currently, it is using AI for Blitz mode to create new boards on the go.
Echo Chunk is also looking to use AI for multiplayer modes, new game modes, and new games in general. A third area is helping users create new boards and puzzles. The Echo Maker platform is currently being tested in alpha by select community members.
Lumley said the company doesn't use any user data to train its AI, but rather uses game states that combine supervised learning and deep learning approaches, and he's very enthusiastic about the use case of AI as a co-pilot of creativity for the user.
“One of the things we've found to be really powerful is taking the magic we do best as humans, which is adding character and soul to a game, and using the AI as a feedback loop to let our level makers and game designers create new things,” Ramly said.
The Road Ahead
The company currently consists of four people but is looking to hire new talent with gaming or tech backgrounds.
For now, Echo Chunk isn't thinking about monetization and wants to keep the web-based version free to play, and Ramly said that if the company does start monetizing the game, it will be careful that its approach doesn't create a harmful gaming experience.
Investors like Zynga's Pincus and Roblox Studios head Corazza see merit in the startup's approach of using AI to create new puzzles.
“AI has the potential to be the best co-pilot for game design. Echo Chess is a great example of this with its infinite blitz mode, and we think this same approach will power an endless variety of user-generated maps imagined by players of all ages,” Corazza said in a statement.