BRAVE NEW WONDERS SHALA CHEN
Having become slightly obsessed with the demo for Brave New Wonders,
Matt Broughton spoke with City From Naught’s Co-Founder, Shala Chen, about this AI-smart new title
M
att: Shala, could you firstly give us a bit of your own industry background? Shala: I went to the University of Waterloo
for a master’s degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering. Before founding City From Naught, I worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at Google. Since 2019, City From Naught has been committed
to creating immersive gaming experiences. My cofounder Leon was also an AI director in a tech company. We have always wanted to make video games. At one point, a friend of ours shared that she was being stalked. We managed to track down the stalker, and we found the process surprisingly fun. That experience inspired us to turn it into a video game. The result was Keyword: A Spider’s Thread, a story about a father searching for his missing daughter using various hacking methods. The game was released in September 2021 together with our publisher, Gamera Games. After Keyword, we began developing a 3D texture
generation AI tool, as well as the sequel, Keyword 2: Nightfall. During our fundraising process, one of the investors asked, “Why don’t you combine the game and AI together?” That question sparked the beginning of our latest project, Brave New Wonders.
42 | MCV/DEVELOP February/March 2026
Instead of using AI simply to streamline development, we wanted to make it an essential gameplay feature, enabling experiences that are only possible with AI. We launched a demo in July 2025 and are currently running an ongoing playtest.
Matt: The Brave New Wonders demo hit Steam a little while back – how has the response been? Shala: We gathered a group of players who are truly passionate about this genre. They’ve been giving so much feedback, and in the meantime, are obsessed with finding bugs. This is why we launched the demo very early on; the gameplay was new, one of its kind, and because it involves AI, no one has ever played anything like this before. Players can easily pick up the factory part, but it takes time to get used to the AI instruction to the automatons. The demo helps us to hear thoughts from real players, and since then, we have had to make a specific tutorial session for the AI components and design tasks around it, and adjust the difficulty level, pacing, whatever upsets players, we change it. We want to build the game together from the
beginning. On the top of the screen, there’s a feedback bar where players can leave comments at any time
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