“Making games with AI” sounds like hell… like this is what hell must be.
Sitting there prompting AI, getting shitty ass results, prompting it again and again until you eventually settle for slightly less shitty results. The frustration and the loss of agency… oh God, someone should make a psychological horror about this: a frustrated artist forced to ditch their skills and tools and use AI to bring their unique vision to life, and throughout the film you watch them descend deeper and deeper into madness and depression until they burn down a data center and laugh manically as it disintegrates around them.
Text generation is the least you can do. You can still fire up Photoshop and feed in a half-finished image. Diffusion turns whatever you have into whatever you describe. If it does decent scratches on metal, but won’t put them exactly where you want, then select them and move them, and the robot will smooth it over.
The very first article I read about Stable Diffusion, three years ago, had the author doodling mountains and flipping a spaceship. All the image-to-video stuff demands you provide art, as an input. Prompts alone are just a tech demo gone feral.
I don’t make computer games with AI, but I do create tabletop roleplaying adventures on a regular basis. I use AI for a lot of it. You have no idea what the workflow is. It’s not hell, it’s an enormous boon.
You are going to get downvoted, but you’re right. AI doesn’t need to be used for every part of the entire development process for it to be “made with the help of AI”. There are certain parts of the workflow that I’m sure is already being done regularly with AI, for example commenting code.
Mindlessly feeding prompts into chatgpt for the entirety of the core code or art would be terrible.
I haven’t been getting downvoted as much as I used to these days, at least. I think more people have started to actually experiment with AI and see what it’s good at, and are finding it to be not the Great Satan that popular opinion paints it as.
For sure, the popular opinion on reddit/Lemmy skews towards absolutely self-hosting everything they can, and multi-trillion dollar tech companies controlling AI skews the opinions of the technology negative. I have a BIL who runs self-hosted AI though (requiring 2 x 4090s in series for his use-case), so it can be done. The tech is only as shit as the user allows it to be (environmental concerns, obviously its pretty objectively shit)
I do much of my image work with local models, at least when it comes to trying to get something specific. All audio transcription is done with a local model, and a lot of the summarization and categorization of those transcripts is also local models.
The comment where I explained this all got downvoted too, though, so yeah. Still a lot of “AI=bad” regardless of self-hosted or not.
Art, obviously. I generate lots of illustrations of the characters and other things they encounter. These days image generators have become good enough that I usually just have to describe things well in the prompt and get usable results, but if I need to edit the images to get them closer to what I need I run ComfyUI locally and have lots of models for that as well.
I use producer.ai to generate custom music. Sometimes it’s diagetic - in the previous campaign the party encountered an NPC that loved to sing about important plot developments in-universe - but mostly it’s either background soundscape or supplementary songs (consider them like “theme music” that plays during the intro or credits). Producer.ai closed down new subscriptions a while back but I’ve also used Udio and Suno and they’re both good too.
I record the sessions and transcribe them using WhisperX. I feed the transcripts into NotebookLM and have it generate summaries and notes about the events of each session. It can also generate “overview” videos that work great as a 5-minute catch-up players can watch before the session if they’ve forgotten what happened last time.
Since NotebookLM has all my campaign notes in it as source documents, as well as PDFs of the rulebooks, it’s great for quickly whipping up stats for creatures when the players do something unexpected. It’s also been a good brainstorming assistant, and it “knows” the names of every random little NPC or village we’ve seen along the way.
I’ve been experimenting with the Wan2.2 video model lately. It’s not quite up to snuff for generating videos of meaningful length, but it’s still pretty neat to be able to put a character portrait in and have a 5-second snippet of them just “being alive.” I think it’ll be a neat addition to having static portraits.
Aside from producer.ai, all of these tools are free. Though the WhisperX transcription program I use is a custom Python script, I’m not sure what would be a good solution for a non-programmer to spin up.
Edit: Downvoting me isn’t making any of these tools less useful.
The haters are so mad you got the robot to do some of the things it’s for. Anything beyond ‘I click the button and it draws a pretty lady! I’m a artist!’ really fucks with their absolutism. That’s a threat to ingroup solidarity for the ones who’ve made opposition part of their identity.
Whoa this is the next level DMing. Before, to get the same result, you better have a whole team writing and producing content. You have recaps, illustrations and music for a TTRPG, yes it’s still a ton of manual work but looking at how fast things are moving, it wouldn’t surprise me if this is an app in a few years and everyone gets this amazing experience.
The point of integrating AI into games is to provide further diversity within the game.
Think Skyrim. By default you’re limited to 3-4 discussion options, right? Imagine now, if you will, that you could just… type in anything, including emotional markers, and have the characters respond interactively to the statement and tone. No longer are you bound by limited dialogue in RPGs.
visual generative AI will just spice up the visuals - hopefully. Things like repetitive textures and such will disappear as the game generates brand new textures for each grid element. Or create tons of background characters without the need to specify them. The list goes on.
I dream of AI being used to generate cool, theme appropriate NPCs for an indie dev that doesn’t have an army of talented writers at their disposal.
But honestly let’s face it, that’s never what they’ll aim for. It’s all about not paying people, for these assholes. They’ll happily fire their talented writers of they can use AI instead, never once wondering who’s gonna feed the AI in the first place.
And so it is a matter of principle to say no to AI in general, because you know they’ll always pick the worst possible way to use it.
You have optimism. It could be used for good like you describe, but most likely will be used by EA to cut artists out, slash costs, make as much profit as possible and suffocate the company until the private equity owners move on to the next company.
No, that’s exactly what this is about. They came right out and said as much. It won’t work, but they’ll cause a lot of damage in the process of failing.
Which is a different article about a (somewhat) unrelated topic.
Using AI for development is already out there, and you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. As an engineer I’m already using it in my daily work for tons of things - I’ve built separate agents to do a number of things:
read work tickets, collate resources, create a work plan, do the initial footwork (creating branches, moving tickets to the right states, creating Notion document with work plan and resources)
read relevant changes in UI design documents and plan + execute changes (still needs some manual review but e.g. with Android Jetpack Compose, it makes 90-95% of the needed work and requires minimal touch-up)
do structural work - boilerplates, etc.
write unit and integration tests, and already working out a UI test automation agent
do code reviews on changes, document them, and write appropriate commit messages
do PR reviews - I still review them myself but an extra eye is always helpful
guess what, AI didn’t replace me, it just allowed me to focus on actually thinking up solutions instead of doing hours of boilerplate stuff.
AI isn’t the enemy in software development. Companies who think they can replace engineers with AI. Middle managers will sooner be on that date, as they were mostly useless anyway.
A project costs X amount because of the standard template of pay per time unit Y multiplied by timeframe in time unit Z.
Simply said if you have 100 people working on the project, that costs 100Y per hour. If the project takes 6 months (approx. 960 hours), you multiply the two and get that your costs are 96000Y.
Now the two ways to reduce this is to either reduce the number of employees, with AI you can get rid of maybe 2/3, reducing the expenses to 32000Y…
Or since AI speeds up almost every workflow by about 8 to 10 times, you can keep all the people, but cut down project time from 6 months to about 2 months, which doesn’t just reduce the expenses by the same 2/3 but also increases potential profits for the same 6 month period by 200%, as instead of one product you’re releasing three.
Cutting jobs ain’t the only way to reduce costs with AI.
Your experience counts for jack shit. There is zero evidence that AI is substantially improving efficiency. There is some that suggests its effect is negative.
Great for you. You did say “almost every workflow”. How many workflows exist beyond your own lived experience? Do you work on games, do you know all the workflows there? Citation absolutely fucking needed.
Procedural generation with appropriate constraints and a connected game that stores and recalls what’s been created can do this far better than a repurposed LLM. It’s hard work on the front end but you have a much better idea of what the output will be vs. hoping the LLM “understands” and remembers the context as it goes.
I agree that the results will be different, and certainly a very narrowly trained LLM for conversation could have some potentials if it has proper guardrails. So either way there’s a lot of prep beforehand to make sure the boundaries are very clear. Which would work better is debatable and depends on the application. I’ve played around with plenty of fine tuned models, and they will get off track contextually with enough data. LLMs and procedural generation have a lot in common, but the latter is far easier to manage predictable outputs because of how the probability is used to create them.
“Making games with AI” sounds like hell… like this is what hell must be.
Sitting there prompting AI, getting shitty ass results, prompting it again and again until you eventually settle for slightly less shitty results. The frustration and the loss of agency… oh God, someone should make a psychological horror about this: a frustrated artist forced to ditch their skills and tools and use AI to bring their unique vision to life, and throughout the film you watch them descend deeper and deeper into madness and depression until they burn down a data center and laugh manically as it disintegrates around them.
Text generation is the least you can do. You can still fire up Photoshop and feed in a half-finished image. Diffusion turns whatever you have into whatever you describe. If it does decent scratches on metal, but won’t put them exactly where you want, then select them and move them, and the robot will smooth it over.
The very first article I read about Stable Diffusion, three years ago, had the author doodling mountains and flipping a spaceship. All the image-to-video stuff demands you provide art, as an input. Prompts alone are just a tech demo gone feral.
I don’t make computer games with AI, but I do create tabletop roleplaying adventures on a regular basis. I use AI for a lot of it. You have no idea what the workflow is. It’s not hell, it’s an enormous boon.
Those poor players lol
They have every opportunity to tell me they’re not liking what I run. Turns out I know them better than you do.
He who has never tasted bread would be contented by porridge.
We’ve been playing together for ~20 years, since long before there were any AI tools.
Once again you’re making some wildly inaccurate assumptions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
You think I have them captive somehow? Your assumptions are getting weirder and weirder.
We all have other groups we play with too, this is just the “core” group that’s been together longest.
You are going to get downvoted, but you’re right. AI doesn’t need to be used for every part of the entire development process for it to be “made with the help of AI”. There are certain parts of the workflow that I’m sure is already being done regularly with AI, for example commenting code.
Mindlessly feeding prompts into chatgpt for the entirety of the core code or art would be terrible.
I haven’t been getting downvoted as much as I used to these days, at least. I think more people have started to actually experiment with AI and see what it’s good at, and are finding it to be not the Great Satan that popular opinion paints it as.
For sure, the popular opinion on reddit/Lemmy skews towards absolutely self-hosting everything they can, and multi-trillion dollar tech companies controlling AI skews the opinions of the technology negative. I have a BIL who runs self-hosted AI though (requiring 2 x 4090s in series for his use-case), so it can be done. The tech is only as shit as the user allows it to be (environmental concerns, obviously its pretty objectively shit)
I do much of my image work with local models, at least when it comes to trying to get something specific. All audio transcription is done with a local model, and a lot of the summarization and categorization of those transcripts is also local models.
The comment where I explained this all got downvoted too, though, so yeah. Still a lot of “AI=bad” regardless of self-hosted or not.
So what’s your process and how is it a boon?
Major applications I use AI for:
I’ve been experimenting with the Wan2.2 video model lately. It’s not quite up to snuff for generating videos of meaningful length, but it’s still pretty neat to be able to put a character portrait in and have a 5-second snippet of them just “being alive.” I think it’ll be a neat addition to having static portraits.
Aside from producer.ai, all of these tools are free. Though the WhisperX transcription program I use is a custom Python script, I’m not sure what would be a good solution for a non-programmer to spin up.
Edit: Downvoting me isn’t making any of these tools less useful.
I need this more taking thing! No one in my group takes notes really and I can’t while dealing with everything else.
I need to look into this I guess
The haters are so mad you got the robot to do some of the things it’s for. Anything beyond ‘I click the button and it draws a pretty lady! I’m a artist!’ really fucks with their absolutism. That’s a threat to ingroup solidarity for the ones who’ve made opposition part of their identity.
Whoa this is the next level DMing. Before, to get the same result, you better have a whole team writing and producing content. You have recaps, illustrations and music for a TTRPG, yes it’s still a ton of manual work but looking at how fast things are moving, it wouldn’t surprise me if this is an app in a few years and everyone gets this amazing experience.
Gross.
That’s… not what this is about?
The point of integrating AI into games is to provide further diversity within the game.
Think Skyrim. By default you’re limited to 3-4 discussion options, right? Imagine now, if you will, that you could just… type in anything, including emotional markers, and have the characters respond interactively to the statement and tone. No longer are you bound by limited dialogue in RPGs.
visual generative AI will just spice up the visuals - hopefully. Things like repetitive textures and such will disappear as the game generates brand new textures for each grid element. Or create tons of background characters without the need to specify them. The list goes on.
I dream of AI being used to generate cool, theme appropriate NPCs for an indie dev that doesn’t have an army of talented writers at their disposal.
But honestly let’s face it, that’s never what they’ll aim for. It’s all about not paying people, for these assholes. They’ll happily fire their talented writers of they can use AI instead, never once wondering who’s gonna feed the AI in the first place.
And so it is a matter of principle to say no to AI in general, because you know they’ll always pick the worst possible way to use it.
You have optimism. It could be used for good like you describe, but most likely will be used by EA to cut artists out, slash costs, make as much profit as possible and suffocate the company until the private equity owners move on to the next company.
You wish, this will be about money.
No, that’s exactly what this is about. They came right out and said as much. It won’t work, but they’ll cause a lot of damage in the process of failing.
Which is a different article about a (somewhat) unrelated topic.
Using AI for development is already out there, and you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. As an engineer I’m already using it in my daily work for tons of things - I’ve built separate agents to do a number of things:
guess what, AI didn’t replace me, it just allowed me to focus on actually thinking up solutions instead of doing hours of boilerplate stuff.
AI isn’t the enemy in software development. Companies who think they can replace engineers with AI. Middle managers will sooner be on that date, as they were mostly useless anyway.
How do they reduce costs with AI if not by eliminating jobs?
By improving the cadence of projects.
A project costs X amount because of the standard template of pay per time unit Y multiplied by timeframe in time unit Z.
Simply said if you have 100 people working on the project, that costs 100Y per hour. If the project takes 6 months (approx. 960 hours), you multiply the two and get that your costs are 96000Y.
Now the two ways to reduce this is to either reduce the number of employees, with AI you can get rid of maybe 2/3, reducing the expenses to 32000Y…
Or since AI speeds up almost every workflow by about 8 to 10 times, you can keep all the people, but cut down project time from 6 months to about 2 months, which doesn’t just reduce the expenses by the same 2/3 but also increases potential profits for the same 6 month period by 200%, as instead of one product you’re releasing three.
Cutting jobs ain’t the only way to reduce costs with AI.
Citation fucking needed.
My own fucking experience. Which I’ve already explained in detail above.
Your experience counts for jack shit. There is zero evidence that AI is substantially improving efficiency. There is some that suggests its effect is negative.
Great for you. You did say “almost every workflow”. How many workflows exist beyond your own lived experience? Do you work on games, do you know all the workflows there? Citation absolutely fucking needed.
Procedural generation with appropriate constraints and a connected game that stores and recalls what’s been created can do this far better than a repurposed LLM. It’s hard work on the front end but you have a much better idea of what the output will be vs. hoping the LLM “understands” and remembers the context as it goes.
Sorry but procedural generation will never give you the same result as a well tuned small LLM can.
Also there’s no “hoping”, LLM context preservation and dynamic memory can be easily fine-tuned even on micro models.
I agree that the results will be different, and certainly a very narrowly trained LLM for conversation could have some potentials if it has proper guardrails. So either way there’s a lot of prep beforehand to make sure the boundaries are very clear. Which would work better is debatable and depends on the application. I’ve played around with plenty of fine tuned models, and they will get off track contextually with enough data. LLMs and procedural generation have a lot in common, but the latter is far easier to manage predictable outputs because of how the probability is used to create them.