Indie Game Development Studio Welevel Today we announced that we have raised $5.7 million in funding to transform procedural game development.
Bitkraft Ventures led the round of the Munich-based company. This investment will allow Welllevel’s lean development team to streamline game development and expand innovative AI tools to create dynamic and personalized gameplay, Christian Heimerl, CEO of Welevel, said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Welllevel has also announced plans to expand its development team for the upcoming Triple-A Sandbox Survival game. The project will begin development in 2021 using Welllevel’s in-house generative model and will enter early access next year.
Additional investors to the round include BMWK (DLR), Goodwater, Angel Investor Christ Carvalho (Roblox executive), Daniel Winanand (Co-founder of Shopify), High Cohue Belz (Big Point founder), Kungao (Co-founder Cruchirol), Mario Gatze, Naat Mittelsel (Cofunder ocowonder” (Co-founder of ESL), and other gaming industry executives.
Heimerl said Welevel is building a game that is driven by passion, not monetization. To compete with the huge gaming companies, Welllevel leverages AI to streamline production without compromising on quality and creativity.
Studio’s AI technology innovates world building, NPC behaviour and quest generation through sophisticated algorithms tailored to each player. This system allows adaptive storytelling where player choices shape the world in unexpected ways, providing a truly dynamic experience.
“We’re a huge fan of survival games and open-ended sandboxes, but we came out empty-handed when we looked for games in a genre that fit the scale of a massive Triple-A experience. Triple-A development requires a huge amount of resources and budgets that both indie game studios don’t normally have,” says Heimerl. “Using AI in previous companies has made it possible to create games for small, passionate teams.”
He added: “In the last four years, our team has designed tools and designed an AI platform. This not only rivals Triple A Studio, but surpasses them in a world where you make a living. With Bitkraft, we have found partners who share our passion and vision. Our development process is unique, and we can create games for many players, and for many players.”
Welevel’s debut game presents a genre shift in Sandbox Survival by introducing a living world that caters to, evolves and challenges in ways never before done before. (Of course we want to know how it differs from something like a man’s sky).
The company said the game outperforms traditional resource management systems by creating dynamic relationships between players and their environments. NPCs are real, reminiscing about the context of in-game action, forming relationships, and assisting players with their goals. Other traditional systems of survival, such as buildings and trade, are enhanced through the generation process, giving players the freedom to build the world they want.
“Chris brings a unique combination of serial exits, technical depth and exceptional audience understanding,” Bitkraft Ventures partner Jasper Brand said in a statement. “Assuming Triple A ambitions in a large genre, especially in the early stages of gaming’s AI adoption, is a high order for emerging studios to take on Triple A ambitions, but we believe that a lean team rethinking time and range development and breaking current restrictions will unlock unprecedented gameplay and distribution vector locks.”
He added: “Establishing a prominent technical foundation for four years with only a few developers, Welllevel makes creative decisions at speeds and marginal costs. Their fun and playable prototypes already feature an extensive gameplay system, high visual politics, and an experience that can capture players for over 100 hours.”
Beyond the first project, the team plans vast user-generated content and aspirations to expand into other genres and settings. The company is at GDC 2025.
Bitkraft Ventures is a global early stage investment platform for gaming, Web3 and immersive technology, with total assets under management exceeding $1 billion.
A long, winding road to Welevel
Heimel founded his company in 2021 in the middle of Covid-19. Before this round he had raised about $1 million. The company has 12 people and hopes to grow to 30 this year. However, it is rare to find a game developer in Munich. This has made me realize there aren’t that many gaming companies.
“There’s nothing crazy here,” Helimal said.
He pointed it out Grimmroad Is there any? When asked how he became a game developer, Hiemerl said he was a lifelong hardcore gamer. He played online MMO Ultima as a child and said that he “smashed my school career.” He remembers playing games like “A Madman” at age 13 or 14. But that was when you had to pay for computer time every hour. He spent something like 2,000 euros on his parents. Still, he was able to convince his relatives to give him money.
“There’s no other game that touched me online like Ultima. It just had this flare. You can hear the music from the main menu,” he said.
He was able to avoid addiction to World of Warcraft. And he was able to build and sell some early AI companies. Fast forward to Covid, Heimerl sold one of his companies. He sat in a house that hadn’t done anything.
“I was chatting with my friends and wandering around with my friends online. They told me I was going to buy a new computer to play Age of Empires. So I bought a new computer to play this super old game.”
He added: So I was thinking, “Hey, what do I play now?” ”
He tried the shooter on the PlayStation and he had a really bad aim. He went to YouTube and learned how to film. And he was distracted by people posting Minecraft videos. He began to watch people play Minecraft and he found it to be very interesting. He then began playing Minecraft and discovered how much fun it was, and he saw other survival games like survival of Rust and Ark with the Sons of the Forest. With the son of the forest, he realized you had been playing it for a few days, and it’s over.
He tried to modify the game, but it was not really successful. He then discovered City Skylines, a City Builder SIM game. He spent thousands of hours on it and modified it. He joined the Reddit and Facebook communities and talked a lot about survival games and RPGs.
He said, “People were constantly cutting 2,000 or 10,000 trees. And you know you’re enjoying cutting 20 or 30 trees. You build these beautiful towns and buildings, but in the end it’s a ghost town. I thought that would make a great combination for the villagers who live in your survival town you actually built, gathering resources. Just live there and bring your ghost town to life. That was the overall idea.”
My friend said it was the stupidest idea he had heard. My friend told him that he needed a huge sum of money, as if he was building a triple-A game. Firend said it would start with a mobile game instead.
“But my goal wasn’t to do business primarily in the gaming industry,” he said. “My vision was like I wanted to play this game, not just make a profit.”
My friend kept saying that he needed a lot of money to do this. Reminiscence of his AI company, a travel recommendation engine, he thought of AI solutions.
He was in Munich and had a terrible time before trying to find a programmer who knew about unrealistic game engines. And he turned to AI. He saw the AI was about to get better. When the generator AI took off, he explored the technology and decided that the big points didn’t have the best AI model.
“The main point is that there are systems that can work with a lot of tools. You have a very clear vision of how things are working and how things are attached,” he said.
People in the game told him that his project was pointless. He was convinced that such people would never change because they were so stuck in the old way. They wrote down the AI. In the meantime, he began teaching unrealistic engines at university. He found people who were unrealistically interested and young enough to consider new tools.
“That’s where we started to have talent in the company,” he said.
Soon, the company came up with ways to automatically generate new things, such as stories, villages, NPCs, and global contexts.
This game will be a multiplayer cross-platform title where you can play players with others and take other people’s towns and villagers into the game. Haimal said the game is about 70% Doen and the team is producing more content and polishing it. They are using AI to produce more and have begun testing the game with other players. The public test could be held later this year.
And now it’s easier to hire talent, Heimel said. And having $5.7 million in the bank could be even easier.
“Maybe people can build cheap AI games and make their dreams come true with small games,” he said. “That’s where we came.”
