The Adelaide Graduate Research School (AGRS) and Adelaide-based game developer Mighty Kingdom are partnering to create multiple internship opportunities for University of Adelaide PhD students, to contribute to the following project.

About Mighty Kingdom

Mighty Kingdom is an Australian software and game developer, which has released more than 20 games to over 50 million players globally. Based out of its Adelaide headquarters, and with a diverse team of over 100 developers Australia-wide, Mighty Kingdom designs game experiences with the world’s most recognised brands such as LEGO, Disney, Mattel, Paramount, Dreamworks, Sony and more.

The opportunity

Mighty Kingdom would like to examine the application of language models to the tasks involved in planning work for client requirements. Such an application would provide suggestions for the assets, workloads, features, systems that could satisfy a game design to assist in technical project management. The hypothesis we are looking to test is: When given a game design description for a new piece of content (e.g., a new player class, spells and abilities) could such a model be used to create a suggested set of assets to satisfy the development of such a requirement?

Internship activities

• The student will be required to produce something similar to a Jupyter notebook (or as many as needed) in an environment supplied by MKL.
• Having the model presented as a gradio or streamlit application would be ideal.
• Mighty Kingdom will provide data and expected outputs for any model developed.
• We expect the pipeline to produce suggested outputs in a structured format that makes sense for game development.

Expected outputs

• We would expect the notebooks to have clear and concise English in-line commentary about how each stage of the pipeline works, which models have been chosen and why, the limitations and strengths of various approaches, and ultimately a recommendation as to which model is best to use in a production setting.
• We would expect a structured output of work to be done from unstructured game design inputs.
• We expect the code and other artefacts to be published into our internal AI lab platform.

The internships will be undertaken remotely, with potential site visits to Mighty Kingdom’s Adelaide site. The start dates are negotiable, though the intern(s) are anticipated to commence in mid-2024.

Eligibility:  The PhD student must be:  

• within the first 18 months of their candidature,  
• willing to undertake the research internship for a minimum duration of 60 FTE business days,  
• making satisfactory progress, and  
• undertaking research in an area aligned with the proposed research internship project  

More information about University of Adelaide's Research Internships is available here.

Application Process:  To apply, please email the following documents to hdr_internships@adelaide.edu.au (HDR Internships Team) with the subject line – Mighty Kingdom PhD Internship:  

• Resume
• Cover Letter (of not more than 2 pages) outlining your interest in the internship and describing how your research area aligns with the proposed field of research internship.  

Please note that applications will be considered on a rolling basis and the advertisement may be closed earlier if a suitable applicant is shortlisted for a particular project prior to the listed closing date. Furthermore, if shortlisted, a meeting is likely to be organised between the student, their supervisor and the organisation's focal contact person within a week of shortlisting. Students may consider discussing their internship plans with their Principal Supervisor in anticipation of that.