Welevel unveils AI-based city-building survival game SolidRiver and $8.5M in funding | exclusive

Welevel, a Munich-based game studio behind the city building survival game SolidRiver, has closed a new funding round of $8.5 million.

SolidRiver has the potential to be innovative as it uses AI to make non-player characters smarter, add dynamic gameplay and enhance the productivity of human game developers, the company said. While the company is using AI, the team really wants to make the best survival game combined with a city builder, said founder Christian Heimerl, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“There are a lot of AI conversations going on, and that’s pretty much what we’re talking about today, but in the end, what we do is a computer game, and that’s where we’re coming from,” Heimerl said. “Everybody that’s working at Welevel wants to do that survival game. Pretty much half of what we do in is going into AI, which should support us in giving an awesome experience for the players.”

In addition, Welevel is developing technology with AI that could be useful for other game studios too. Heimerl said he has a lot of hours in hardcore MMOs, like Ultima Online. He always wanted to have a world that was alive, more so than an open world. The AI should feel like it’s a real-time dungeon master, from Dungeons & Dragons.

Your townsfolk in Welevel’s SolidRiver. Source: Welevel Heimerl said that the idea for a city-building survival game blends a couple of his favorite game passions. He has put over 2,000 hours into both Minecraft as well as City Skylines.

“I was modding all of these games, and I was being part of the community from Reddit and Facebook. I was working with all the hardcore users from and players from Minecraft on making that possible, and then there were just limitations at one point.”

He said chopping down 10 trees is fun, but chopping down 1,000 trees is not. And that’s where he sees the value of bringing AI into a building game. He said it also makes sense to bring in non-player characters (NPCs) that are actually helping you. If you give them intelligence via AI, then they would naturally gravitate to tasks that can help you, like chopping down the trees.

“They should not just be city builders. They should have their own personalities and just be like a co-op player,” Heimerl said. “It doesn’t matter how much creativity and how much work you put into your Minecraft world or into your Minecraft village. It alays feels like a ghost town in the end. We also wanted to overcome that experience by bringing somebody in who’s actually living in the beautiful buildings you put so much effort into. They make it feel alive.”

You could get to know other villagers in other villages and build serious relationships with them.

Welevel’s team. Source: Welevel Christian Heimerl started the company in 2021. The team is building SolidRiver, a survival RPG city builder, in Unreal Engine 5, alongside CLAI, the studio’s proprietary AI platform that powers the game’s living world. To date, the company has raised $15 million.

Heimerl, a lifelong gamer and technology entrepreneur, founded the studio with the ambition of building the next generation of immersive survival games. Before entering the games industry, he built and scaled technology companies, gaining extensive experience in software development, artificial intelligence, and product innovation. At Welevel, he combines this entrepreneurial background with his passion for gaming to push the boundaries of what small, highly efficient teams can achieve.

“AI should make the world feel alive, not replace the craft behind it,” said Heimerl. “It’s like a dungeon master from Dungeons & Dragons, creating moments that feel personal, believable, and yours -not amass production of assets or monotonous AI content.”

Five years in, the team has now grown to 22 and SolidRiver is in closed alpha, with some players already past one hundred hours in the game. Early access is scheduled for the beginning of next year, and welevel is actively looking for more Unreal Engine developers,
technical artists, and a lot of other positions which are listed at welevel.com.

Transcend led the round with participation from Bitkraft Ventures, Burda Principal Investments, Management of Century Games, and support from the German government.

“The creation of worlds that feel genuinely alive and responsive to players is something the
industry has been chasing for decades,” said Shanti Bergel, founding general partner at Transcend. “Very few teams have the creative conviction and technical depth to turn that ambition into reality. welevel is one of them and we believe they’ll be among the companies that define the next generation of the medium. Transcend is proud to lead this round.”

Friedrich von Wulffen, principal at BPI, said in a statement, “Gaming has always been a driver of technological innovation, and with BurdaGP we’re committed to backing the founders shaping it. Welevel is exactly the kind of company this initiative was built for: one of only a few
independent triple-A studios in Germany, a cornerstone for Munich’s growing gaming ecosystem, and a team that has spent the past years building a real technological head start in AI-driven game development.”

Welevel shares the vision behind BurdaGP — Burda’s initiative to make Munich and Bavaria a
leading gaming hub in Europe. The team strongly believes in that mission and wants to help
build it.

The round closed on April 1, the same day Welevel was founded five years ago. Since day
one, the vision for the game has remained the same. SolidRiver combines the studio’s most
loved genres – survival, city building, and RPG – into a seamless experience, while letting the
player’s own ideas and story become part of it.

The intent is for the game to feel more like a very engaging movie than a vast open world. The experience shifts from playing game mechanics to interacting with a world that responds to the player.

In an interview, Brand said he was impressed with the speed of development.

“I think we’re getting to a point where people truly understand, hey, we have a new paintbrush, more creativity is unlocked, and that starts with young kids being able to make games and having the playtimes they want to make,” Brand said.

And in an interview, Bergel said he sees this as a new wave coming in, like other technologies that happened like the transition to 3D to the introduction of social and mobile. He said Transcend’s third fund is focused squarely on where AI and games meet. So far, this is the only content studio that his fund has invested in.

“I think that gives some impression of the level of excitement that we have for what Christian’s team has already achieved and what they hope they’ll achieve going forward. They’re by far the most sophisticated expression in triple-A of how these tools are used,” Bergel said.

I asked about the pushback from gamers and game developers about AI. Where does he stand on the controversy, where devs and players feel like generative AI tools are aimed at replacing human developers and putting them out of work — or creating more AI slop.

“I mean to be consistently talking to players and still be part of a lot of communities. I can just tell you my take on it. I don’t know what the future brings, but a lot of companies are going in AI. There’s a lot of big companies which are saying we do not do AI, but I think there is a lot of indie game companies, and there is a lot of companies which are just focusing on AI, which are clearly going in that direction,” Heimerl said.

He added, “And my take is that in five years the majority of companies will be using AI and producing games in that way.

Heimerl said his team started five years ago on the technology when there wasn’t much available in terms of AI tools. From his experience running tech companies, Heimerl found there were a lot of scams in the beginning, not unlike the NFT wave.

“There were a lot of things which are really, really bad, and nobody wanted to have that, but there were some things which are really good and had a purpose, but you cannot find them any anymore because there are just too many scams going on,” he said. “But I think if the [AI] field is clearing up, good applications will come with a purpose.”

He said, “We’re using AI to bring experiences to the player.”

Heimerl believes his team is ahead of others who are trying to make smart NPCs, without relying upon token-based payment systems that wind up costing too much in AI processing fees.

“For the long run, that’s just way to expensive,” he said.

Instead, his team started building their own servers and server infrastructure with local models to handle tasks like text-to-speech.

“Our model is trained on what the game is about,” he said.

I wondered if you had the NPCs help the human player, there might not be enough for the human in the game. But he noted the NPCs are not slaves. They’re living beings with their own personalities.

“You have to decide carefully by talking to them if you want to have this personality in your village, because, like, you also have to handle them as the mayor of the village, and if they have different traits and different personalities, they could also start going against each other, or they can have huge demands, or whatever. So, in the end, you also have to manage them,” Heimerl said. “If you grow your village, you also see more demands happening, and then you also have to overcome that. So, like in every city builder, you have to find the right balance to make the most of them.”



I asked Bergel, who has a lot of experience investing in games, why he led the round.

“Our view at a very high level is to invest in things that we think are have the ambition to go after something that matters,” Bergel said. He looks for the credibility of the team, and he saw a lot of ambition in Heimerl and his team.

“This is a team that has spent years figuring out the intricate details of how to scaffold the technical and creative questions that go into like how to make a living world in this particular category,” Bergel said. “How to make living worlds is something that we, as an industry, have tried for a long time with varying degrees of effectiveness, but this is, I think, one of the great promises of the tooling that the team has built against this ambitious target.”

Bergel said the team’s mechanics are interesting.

“Not only is the world deep and unique, but it is a modern attempt at delivering on that age-old promise of a living world, and I think it is one of the things that people miss in the AI debate quite a lot, is that gaming development, by definition, is a very iterative process, which is quite intimate,” Bergel said.

He added, “You have to develop in cooperation with your player base. One of the great kind of unsung capabilities that AI brings to this is the ability to absorb and react quickly to the audience, and I think one of the things that Christian’s team have done a masterful job of is bringing together the architecture that puts them in a position to do exactly that.”

He said they take a first cut at doing something quite as ambitious as this. But based on feedback, they can iterate and do many more cuts that exercise the team’s creativity and expand its ability to listen to players.

Jasper Brand, a partner at Bitkraft Ventures, said it has been incredible to see that players testing the game can spend 100 hours in it, even though the game isn’t ready yet.

“We’ve made very, very few PC first investments, and it’s hard to have PC-first games that really align with the VC fund ambition, and what we see here is real platform potential. There is so much variety in players that can come together here and have a good time,” Brand said. “The number one motivator is having a good time with your friends, and even if you look at competitive games, like League of Legends, support is very different from a carry role here. Some people can do more of the city building, some people can do more of the dungeon runs, some people can do more of the RPG element with with the NPCs, but everybody can come together and have a good time, and be in the same ecosystem with their friends.”

Brand said he sees platform potential like Minecraft with this. It’s like combining different games like Valheim, Palworld, Manor Lords and more.



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