A game designer Oleh Riazanov, Head of Game Design at Bini Games, former creative director at Thundermark, reveals how AI is reshaping retention, compliance, and user experience in ways every digital product leader should understand
This year, AI has stopped being a sidekick in gaming. Now it’s taking the wheel. A new Google Cloud survey shows that nearly nine out of ten developers already use AI agents, not just for bug-hunting or translations, but for design itself: crafting levels, generating dialogue, even predicting how players will behave next. In other words, that means games are no longer handcrafted step by step — they’re becoming adaptive systems, co-created with algorithms.
For anyone building digital products, that shift raises bigger questions: how do you design when the process itself is changing? What happens when AI stops being a helper and becomes part of the creative team?
These are the kinds of questions that Oleh Riazanov has been wrestling with for over a decade in game design. At Gameloft, he led more than 30 updates for My Little Pony: Magic Princess, keeping the franchise alive for years with fresh maps, storylines, and features. At Playgendary, he designed Rocket Buddy and learned how speed and retention decide whether a hyper-casual game survives. As Creative Director at Thundermark, he drove projects like Joykis and Tribute, showing how small teams can rival major studios when the pipeline is right. Today, as Head of Game Design at Bini Games, he shapes preschool edutainment apps used worldwide. He is also a member of the International Association of Creativity and Art and a regular speaker at industry gatherings such as Games Gathering and the Lviv Game Dev Conference.
In this conversation, we talk about how AI is reshaping the craft of game design, what lessons apply beyond gaming, and where the next wave of interactive experiences might come from.
Oleh, as a seasoned game design leader who has grown from designing for global franchises to leading creative direction at studios and now heading game design at Bini Games, do you see AI as a genuine co-designer in games — or still just a powerful tool in the background?
Right now, AI is somewhere in between. It’s not replacing designers, but it’s reshaping how we work. A co-designer doesn’t mean an algorithm is making creative decisions on its own — it means the system is capable of generating options, testing balance, or automating the grind of production so designers can focus on intent and vision. In practice, AI has already changed how quickly we can validate ideas, how we localize content, how we anticipate player behavior. That’s more than a background tool — it’s a partner in the workflow.
Your career spans Gameloft, one of the world’s largest mobile publishers, Playgendary with hits reaching tens of millions of players, and now Bini Games with dozens of preschool apps worldwide. In each case, engagement means something different. How does AI help you build it across different contexts?
The contexts couldn’t be more different, but the principle is the same: engagement is about understanding what keeps people coming back. For My Little Pony, it was new storylines tied to film and TV; for Rocket Buddy, mechanics that delivered instant fun; at Bini Games, ensuring a child learns while staying motivated.
AI adapts to each of those contexts. It can help predict when players might churn in a franchise game, generate and test level variations in hyper-casual, or personalize a learning path in an edutainment app. It doesn’t change the human side of design — the empathy, the creativity — but it gives us new levers to scale and refine it.
When you were in the live-ops team for My Little Pony, regular updates were the engine of retention. If you had today’s AI tools back then, how could they have transformed that process?
Back then, every update was a huge production — coordinating artists, engineers, analysts, and writers to deliver new content on schedule. AI could have made that cycle faster and smarter: predicting which story arcs would resonate, automating translations into 11+ languages, or simulating how new features might affect retention before launch.
In hyper-casual development, where you were in the team that rolled out Rocket Buddy at Playgendary, speed-to-market often makes or breaks a game. How do you see AI changing the way teams handle that pressure today?
Hyper-casual is brutal because you don’t have the luxury of polishing for months. You need to test ten ideas fast, find one that sticks, and double down. Unfortunately, we didn’t have AI during the development of Rocket Buddy. We had to manually test and rework hundreds of puzzle levels, and in those conditions, creativity fades a bit while the lion’s share of our time goes into technical iterations.
With AI, that cycle collapses. You can generate variations of mechanics in hours, simulate retention curves, even A/B test monetization thresholds before real players see the game. It doesn’t guarantee a hit, but it means small teams can fail faster and smarter, which is often the only way to survive in that market.
At Bini Games, you lead design for preschool apps that reach children worldwide, where monetization has to align with pedagogy. Could AI make educational games both more effective and ethically sound, and how?
That’s the space where AI has to be used most carefully. For us, the goal isn’t just keeping a child engaged, it’s making sure they’re learning in a healthy way. AI can adapt difficulty in real time, personalize learning paths, and even flag potentially sensitive content.
And because we design for children, compliance is always part of the job. In the U.S., COPPA restricts how companies can collect and use children’s personal data, while in Europe, GDPR-Kids adds strict rules on processing minors’ information. These laws are non-negotiable, and AI can help us respect them without slowing down development. But the bigger point is ethics: when you’re designing for kids, AI should support learning first and keep monetization secondary.
Compliance ensures safety, but it doesn’t create loyalty on its own. What can leaders in fintech, e-commerce, or healthcare learn from how games use AI to keep people coming back?
In games, engagement is survival. If players get bored, they leave — sometimes in the first seconds. That pressure forces us to understand loops, incentives, and onboarding better than most industries. AI takes that to another level: it can test dozens of onboarding flows, fine-tune rewards, or personalize progression in real time.
Translate that outside of gaming and the parallels are clear. A fintech app might use AI to adapt dashboards so people actually stick with financial planning tools. In e-commerce, it could shape shopping journeys that feel intuitive and customer-oriented. In healthcare, it might keep patients motivated over months of treatment. The principle is the same: if you design adaptively, with the user at the center, AI gives you the scale to deliver it.
Having guided projects from licensed IPs to indie launches, you also founded ILHI.gg as a kind of experimental playground. What was the idea behind it, and what have you been exploring there?
It really started from curiosity. I wanted a place where we could try out concepts that don’t fit into commercial pipelines — new genre mixes, unusual monetization models, different production workflows. With a small, flexible team you can test bold ideas quickly, without the weight of a big studio roadmap. That freedom gives us room to experiment with AI and to work directly with independent developers.
This year, you joined the International Association of Creativity and Art, which is not a purely tech-focused body. Why was it important for you, as a professional game designer with broad experience, to connect with the artistic community?
Because games have always been more than mechanics to me. They combine storytelling, visual style, sound, and interactivity into one experience — closer to art forms than many people realize. Joining the association is a way to bring game design into that broader creative dialogue. It’s also an opportunity to learn from disciplines outside our industry and show how interactive media can stand alongside music, cinema, or literature as a cultural force.
Beyond your own projects, what kinds of AI-powered entertainment do you expect we’ll see in the next decade?
I think we’ll move away from fixed, linear experiences toward entertainment that adapts to us. Picture a story that reshapes itself depending on your choices, or cooperative games where the difficulty shifts based on how the group interacts. And it won’t stop at games: the line between play, education, and even wellness will blur. AI won’t just make development faster — it will open up new kinds of experiences that feel personal in a way we haven’t seen before.
A bit of an off-topic one to close. What games do you personally enjoy playing these days?
I used to play mostly MMORPGs — Lineage II, Ultima Online, and others. But I get completely absorbed in them, so it’s hard for me to manage my time. These days, I prefer session-based online PvP games like Warcraft III, League of Legends, or Fortnite. The format helps me control how long I play, and the presence of other players makes every match unpredictable.
Working on Tribute at Thundermark gave me a lot of insight into this kind of design. In PvP there’s always a winner and a loser, and the challenge is making sure the experience feels rewarding for both sides. That balance is what keeps players coming back.
