What role can AI-generated art play in game design?
AI in games goes all the way back to checkers and chess programmes of the 1950s. Today, nearly every video game contains some form of AI to simulate reality and create more realistic non-player characters (NPCs). In the next few years, AI for game programming could do a lot of the heavy lifting of world creation. Game AI might even play a role in developing characters and narratives.
One of the more recent developments of AI in gaming is the use of generative AI in game design. With AI generators that use machine learning models to produce imagery, game developers can enter a text prompt or short description of the thing they want to see and instantly create an image. The technology is so fast and versatile that game programmers can follow their ideas wherever they lead.
Before you start game programming, you can use AI art to explore new ideas and multiple iterations. You can generate images for game environments and characters, create text effects for game titles and use AI to try different colour palettes and textures. In no time you’ll be moving from possibilities to prototypes.
AI art for environments.
![Firefly generated image of tunnel](./media_11634e4aa5588ac2ac2555756811753247ca8fca2.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
Decide on your aesthetic.
![Firefly generated image of houses in a village](./media_1e835c44a37d4f3b1c2318f54da4e494f258b215a.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
![Firefly generated image of a house](./media_12a0f36192d87456f231a387dc9c17952d83e1288.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
![Firefly generated image of a house](./media_120c77bacf99e998b515ac32a89073efaa581c9ef.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
![Firefly generated image of a houses by a river](./media_1a5f27907bc3daa9118f236ec92d4cb8061d52077.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
Mood Board and storyboard with AI.
AI art for character exploration.
Start with style.
![Firefly generated image of a laboratory with style selections](./media_101427408e5612b266a51acd77d747ff40ddd6631.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
Stretch your powers of description.
![Firefly generated image of a lion character](./media_1095cf3b06e073d4cd9e9dfe9db7e3649a4bc687e.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
![Firefly generated image of a character in armor](./media_10ade015008bcaae4cfb100ea91301b6c0d5b7463.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
![Firefly generated image of a character in a headdress](./media_13c705d4916c8f7f8e2278134fd792f18f3a15f9e.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
Refine your prompts.
You can use punctuation and other tools to adjust AI art prompts. If the AI struggles to understand how your words should be grouped, try adding quotes around the words that go together. For example, “little girl adventurer in dirty, ragged clothes” standing on top of a “snow-covered mountain peak” next to a “pink woolly mammoth” might work better than without any quotes.
Other refinements include noting elements you’d like to avoid, specifying the strength of your style and giving guidance to the AI in terms of how closely you want it to attend to your prompt. For example, if you want to save blue tones for a different character, just type [avoid = blue] at the end of your prompt.
The AI can do subtlety as well. If you just want a hint of steampunk, you can adjust the style strength. Type [ stylise = 20, 80] or another two numbers that add up to 100. Guidance, which is how much freedom you give the AI to play, can be a number between 0 and 25, such as [guidance = 5]. Lower numbers mean the AI has more room to ignore the prompt.
![little girl adventurer in dirty, ragged clothes standing on a top pf a snow-covered mountain peak next to a pink wooly mammoth](./media_1219dddc73c335b0ebfc2fc5677c1c2ab27e6981e.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
Edit your AI-generated characters with Generative Fill.
![“little girl adventurer in dirty, ragged clothes” standing on top of a “snow-covered mountain peak” next to a “pink woolly mammoth”](./media_1096972ccf7fac12cd6c7c44a75d15c2831cd1480.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
Stylise your titles with AI text effects.
![POP](./media_14b987147c23b843647674b3f3fac91128ba17de0.png?width=750&format=png&optimize=medium)
How to use AI-generated images commercially.
The legal issues surrounding generative AI can be intimidating for game developers, but Firefly’s first generative AI model is designed to be commercially safe. Because it’s trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired, you can leverage your inspirational images in your actual game design without worrying about infringing on another creator’s copyright.
With your imagination and Firefly, you can bring your characters and environments to life so you can share them with the world. Take your skills to the next level by learning how to make AI generated art.