Introduction

AI is becoming all the rage at the moment. I use AI in all sorts of ways in my daily life and job. My full time job is working on a well known mobile football game, I use AI to help me produce better code and documentation. I specifically use Git copilot and Chat GPT. Both leave a lot to be desired and often get things unbelievable wrong, but the times they do get it right makes them quite useful and fun to use.

In my personal life and my personal; projects I use Chat GPT 4 for learning / brainstorming ideas and various image AI generators such as Playground AI to generate art work and designs.

I used AI quite extensively in the production of this game. AI was used in a number of ways including:

• Art work production, my art skills are terrifying and as this game is never likely to be popular I don't really want to spend tens of thousands of dollars that I cannot afford on art production.
• Quest ideas / story ideas

Art production

I primarily use Playground AI because images generated by this service can be used for commercial purposes, such as added to a game, used in marketing materials etc.. The main downside to image generation with AI is that it does NOT listen to you very well. You have to carefully and very purposely craft the instructions you give to the image generator. You can spend hours if not days generating garbage.

One of the great features of Playground is the filters, they are simply incredible, they can turn a pile of rubbish into something AAA. I find that the ultra lighting to be one of the best filters for producing realistic RPG character portraits and scene backgrounds.

If you are looking for a quick set of settings to generate them in Playground use the following:

• Negative prompt - ugly, deformed, noisy, blurry, distorted, grainy
• Model – Stable diffusion XL
• Filter – Ultra lighting
• Prompt Guidance – 10
• Quality & Details – 50
• Samples – DPM++ 2M

Even with these settings and the correct description you will still struggle somewhat to generate something that is close to what you want. Luckily Playground allows you to generate more than one image at a time so you can iterate through many images quite quickly. This is also a useful feature for getting ideas.

Depending on your style of game and the style of art work you are looking for you can play around with the huge number of filters in Playground to get the look you want. Just remember that the AI is as dumb as an ox and it will take you time to get where you need to be.

Oh and long winded descriptions will work against you, try to be as concise as possible.

Here is the character Jon Stoneheart from Kingdom Aria and some of his iterations:

The first iteration was completely useless as the AI decided to just randomly draw it on a sheet of paper and add pens, at that point I am "just why? I never asked for any of that".

The second iteration was more like it but the character style was wrong, I needed a younger character that looked more like he ran a base camp.

The third iteration was very close so I went with that. When I say iteration, I went through far more than 3, this is just an example for this article.

How does Playground do at generating UI content? Hmm, painful, very painful. I did manage to generate some backgrounds for dialogs but it was a struggle. I also managed to get it to generate some buttons and the artifact icons but the pain I suffered was not worth it :).

Quest / idea generation

Chat GPT can prove very useful when you want a list of things, for example character names place names etc.. I used it to generate the following lists:

• Place names (not the main town names, I had specific names I wanted for those)
• Tribe names for the war manager
• Town area quests, these had to be specific to each town, I fed the AI a description and then asked it to generate X number of random quests. I had to be very specific about how many words to use and the formatting. I eventually had it formatting it in code.
• Town area activities, these are again custom to each area and formatted.

And of course player quest generation. There were a lot of town upgrade quests in the game all very similar but each needed to be tailored to the characters and area that the characters lived in. Chat GPT was good for helping to generate these quests, I even managed to get it to format them into code so I could copy and paste them. I still had to modify the language and add proper meta data afterwards but it did save me some time. The AI can't help but want to be verbose so much of the text needed cutting down and rewording, but the base was good.

I find with Chat GPT it helps If you firstly set the scene, tell it about your game, its setting, the world, its characters etc.. You will find once it has a good deal of information that it will generate content more tailored to what you are looking for. It does however and often seem to become senile so you have to remind it now and again.

At the end of the day, working with AI assistance is frustrating and painful but somewhat fun and rewarding. I would much prefer real human beings but who can afford those? :D