Echo Chunk, a company developing a Wordle-style daily chess game called Echo Chess, has raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding from a16z Speedrun (Andreessen Horowitz’s early-stage gaming accelerator), Zynga founder Mark Pincus, South Park Commons (SPC), Opendoor founder and CEO Eric Wu, and Stef Corazza, Roblox’s head of generative AI.
Echo Chunk founder and CEO Sami Ramly told TechCrunch that the main reason for the investment was to enable the community to create more puzzles with AI. While the company is currently focusing on Echo Chess, it plans to release other titles in the future.
Josh Lu, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said the company has succeeded in offering a new approach to chess. Additionally, the community is producing more content with AI as a co-pilot.
“We believe Al will elevate the ingenuity of game designers, and the Echo Chess team demonstrated this brilliantly with their first title by using AI to put a new spin on their everyday game. They did it very quickly with a very small team and have already built a passionate community of players and speedrunners with new content every day. This is something that would have been extremely difficult a few years ago,” he said in a statement.
Echo Chess, the game
During the pandemic, the word game Wordle took off. The New York Times eventually bought it. Echo Chess is trying to make chess more enjoyable for a wider audience with its version of daily puzzles.
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 Mode, Daily Epic Mode, and Blitz Mode. The last mode is a time-limited mode where you must conquer the board and capture more pieces to gain more time with the next board.
Ramly, a former product manager at VR startup Wevr, didn’t give user figures but said many streamers and creators are creating content around the game.
Creation of the startup
Ramly told TechCrunch that he has been obsessed with strategy games since he was a kid. Last year, he realized there was a real opportunity to present the game in a different way thanks to recent advances in AI. Plus, the new approach could reduce the user’s learning curve.
“I thought AI could improve game design as it evolved. You could use the game builder to iterate on the best strategy and puzzle games. With that thought process, I created this game and started the company,” he said.
Use of AI
The company uses AI for three things. Currently, it powers blitz mode to create new boards on the go.
Echo Chunk is also exploring the use of AI for multiplayer, new game modes, and new games in general. The third area is helping users create new boards and puzzles. This Echo Maker platform is currently being tested in alpha by some members of the community.
Ramly said the company doesn’t use any user data to train AI, but instead uses a game state with a mix of supervised and deep learning approaches. He’s most excited about the use cases of AI as a co-pilot of creation for users.
“One thing we found that was super powerful is that if you combine the magic of what we do best as humans, which is add character and soul to games, then you can use AI as a feedback loop and power level creators and game designers to create new things,” Ramly said.
The road ahead
The company currently has four people, but is looking to hire new people with experience in gaming and technology.
For now, Echo Chunk is not thinking about monetization and wants to keep the web version free. Ramly noted that even when the company does start monetizing games, it will make sure that this approach does not create a detrimental gaming experience.
Investors like Zynga’s Pincus and Roblox Studio head Corazza see merit in the startup’s approach of using AI to create new puzzles.
“AI has the potential to be the ultimate co-pilot for game design. Echo Chess is a great example of this with its infinite Blitz mode, and I can see this same approach enhancing an infinite variety of user-generated boards imagined by its players of all ages,” Corazza said in a statement.