Jussi Peteri Kempainen (opens in new tab)A veteran game developer based in Finland recently developed a 2.5D point-and-click adventure game using art and assets sourced from text-to-image machine learning tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Started sharing an early demo. This project convinces how individual artists with limited resources can use these controversial and ethically questionable tools to go beyond their own weight when developing games. in a certain way.
In his first blog post discussing prototyping, Kemppainen says he wants to see how far these tools can be pushed in prototyping video games. To that end, he chose to create his 2.5D point-and-click adventure. This allowed him to easily generate 2D background art in a more challenging experiment of converting AI-generated assets into textures for his 3D models.
Kempainen used AI tools to generate dozens of character concept art sheets that you may have seen in collector’s edition artbooks. He eventually settled on the weird old bearded man that came out of Stable Diffusion — the character basically looks like the stock ‘old coot, but make it cyberpunk’ . Kempainen then roughly matched this art to his 3D model he created and hand-corrected it.
To turn the AI-generated location art into a playable space, Kemppainen created 3D collision data in modeling software Blender, overlaid it on a 2D background, and lit the scene in Unity. The results are impressive, but in an unpleasant way. There are still some AI image generation weirdness—our dirty Borderlands Santa’s favorite convenience store seems to be named “PAICKTPPARRCTK: MIATIIKK PICAIKANKT”, but Stable Diffusion is a rather discordant pigtailed We birthed him on set. But as a rough proof-of-concept of the labor-saving potential of AI tools, it’s compelling.
That Kempainen isn’t a fabulist who creates images of dead-eyed anime women with 11 fingers on each hand and claims these tools will replace human artists is a testament to the project’s credibility. Helps improve sexuality. he is a veteran video game developer (opens in new tab) He has art experience and credits on multiple games including Remedy’s Quantum Break. Overall, he believes that using generative tools saved him at least five days of work compared to creating similar backgrounds and characters his art by hand.
“[AI generation] It definitely allows us to create games that would never be made due to budget or time constraints,” says Kempainen.
The open question here is that PAICKTPPARRCTK and Dirty Borderlands Santa are a morass of artwork of real people—individual artists who may or may not have succeeded in their craft. , their work is fed and trained to these AI algorithms. their knowledge or permission. Kempainen himself is not precious about the AI generation resulting from his prompts, stating that “reproduction of these images is so trivial that anyone is free to use it.” He also acknowledges that these assets derive from the efforts of other artists and, for their value, avoids referencing specific artists and instead uses the broadest or general But whatever my own concerns, Kempainen’s success AI art will never go away (opens in new tab).