Revolutionizing Game Creation: The Impact of AI

If you’re interested in tech news, you might hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence (also known as AI) lately. And that’s for a good reason: ChatGPT made a much more user-friendly AI chat. With this, you can easily ask the deepest question for anything. Thus AI will also impact our game-creation process.

This brought a strong spotlight to any existing AI, including those that are not chats.

Indeed, AI was already existing before. Loquiz itself had an AI feature: The object finder.

But only professionals or scientists were using it. The large public did not have a full awareness of the power of AI until 2023.

This revolution is quite similar to what happened in 2007: Smartphones were already existing (as “PDAs“) but were narrowly used for professional sectors. Then the iPhone arrived: It made the smartphone much more user-friendly. Although the price was somehow high, back then. Nowadays, almost everybody uses smartphones.

If AI deeply revolutionizes information technology, would it deeply impact the game-creation process?

Of course. The question should rather be…

How AI will impact our game-creation process?

In general, we use AI as a shortcut for a thinking process.

Do we need a new visual style? A list of characters for a story? A suitable theme song? No need to use our brains for months, the AI can do this in a few seconds. From there, let’s see 3 fields affected by AI.

They are not exhaustive for the game creators. But they do represent an important part of our work.

1. The game illustrations

AI’s game illustrations before and now

I recall that the AI pictures trend started a bit before ChatGPT. If I remember well, it was a bit more than a year or two. However, the quality was far from today’s standards. As humans, we could easily determine if one picture was AI-generated or not.

In the next example from July 2022, you can judge by yourself:

However, month after month, AI could have time to gather a lot of input through their machine learning process. Consequently, they come up with stunning results.

To give you an example, have you seen this article’s illustration? Except for the logo, it was all made by Midjourney.

If you want to be able to create such pictures, I wrote an article. Step by step, I explain how to generate the most suitable pictures for your games (without even paying a cent!).

Will AI replace all of our graphic designers in our game creation process?

Absolutely not. On the contrary, it will help them. The graphic designers will get the ease to create illustrations from scratch.

And then, here comes the important human part: AI never makes perfect graphics. It belongs to the talent of the graphic designer (or to the game creator) to pick the right picture and refine it.

This human process is important due to the difference between humans and AI: We excel in adapting ourselves to a new context, to link any items to a current context. Whereas AI is excellent in its given field.

By the combination of fast image generation with our ability to decide, then we can make the best illustrations for our games while earning precious time. And we say that time is money.

2. The game narratives

Pictures are not the only thing in which AI can help you.

Why AI is good at bringing you a narrative

A successful game often comes with brilliant storytelling. It might not be the deepest story nor the longest. But it has to be outstanding, immersive, joyful, etc.

A human mind can be performed in finding the right story. But it’s difficult for someone to go through all the possibilities and the parameters to find the best story idea. And this is where AI excels.

If you ask an AI a story following your own conditions, it will scan hundreds of thousands (if not more) of pages before coming up with a story idea.

How can we get the best from an AI for the creation of our game narrative?

Whenever we have a story from AI, then here comes our human abilities. No matter how many details you provide them, the outcome will never be fully 100 % satisfying. Thus, we need to use our adapting ability to fine-tune the story, so that it adapts to the context, of our game.

In fact, I wrote an article on how to make the best narrative for your game using AI. You can read it here. With the AI, we built a team-building game story based on 5 animals and an orientation game.

3. The game music

AI can help us in many senses, literally. Music is one of the game contents that AI can help us with.

The game music… Important, and yet overlooked

When we create a game, we aim for the best immersion. A good theme song is important. Although they are not crucial for the gameplay, a player needs to have some theme associated with their experience.

The question is overlooked when we lack the budget for a game. Why put in many hours or thousands when many players turn off their sound?

Believe me, the best games I’ve seen always had a well thought set of sounds and songs. So as game creators, we must not overlook that.

What’s the best compromise for your game creation? AI!

Here comes a dilemma: Should we use stock songs, already used anywhere else? Or should we pay for an expensive (and excellent) music composer?

AI takes the best from the two worlds. It might not deliver the perfect content. But it always comes with a wide choice of unique songs that you can adjust yourself to.

No need to spend time creating your unique songs, AI will do this. And here again, our human mind is required to make the relation between the AI content and the final result.

If you wonder how to create songs for your game, I’ve also written an article about this here.

In this article, I decided to create a theme song for a game happening during the 18th century.

Then, using the tool Soundraw, I came up with this song.

I must say, I’m gladly surprised by the outcome. And it’s totally unique. No other game will include the same song.

AI will impact our game creation, but it will not replace us

To put it into a nutshell, we can say that AI is pretty good at what it’s doing. It will revolutionize our way to create games. But contrary to a human mind, it can’t adapt to other fields that are different from theirs.

Thus, AI is complementary to us. They help us build better content faster, and our intelligence is required to stick all the parts into one game. And that brings a positive impact on our game creation

However, I believe that one tendency will emerge: Because a lot of AI content will feel non-personal, players will strive for “hyper-human” content.

What do I mean by “Hyper-human”? I mean content that really feels personal, like an actual experience from someone alive.

When we think about our favorite influencers, they make pictures, videos, articles, etc that are related to their real life, that audience can identify in. With the game, it will be the same. If there’s a human mind behind, bringing some human feelings in the game illustrations, story, music, etc; then the game will become even more appreciated by an audience who uses AI-generated content every day.

Take the example of this illustration of our game. It took a lot of time for the brilliant graphic designer to generate these. Some parts of this artwork could have been made with an AI. However, the whole setup feels human. At a first glance, we can already guess part of the story.