First of all, let’s face it, AI is not great at everything yet. But game designers, artists, and producers have adopted it rapidly because there are things it does really well. Concepting, storyboarding, and ideation are prime examples here. We’ve been doing our own exploring, and wanted to share with you the cases that have worked well for us.
We’re using examples from PicFinder, so you can explore and get inspired by each use case, starting directly from this article.
Environment concept art
Getting ideas for new games, concepts, worlds, and environments can be a time consuming concept. You can search for images, which can take hours. Or you can create them, which will take even longer. But 2D gen AI tools make environment ideation extremely fast, so you can explore many versions of a concept and storyboard your way into a crystal clear concept.
Some examples of game environments with different formats.
Action games
Robot battle – tall scene
Large battlefield – wide scene
Casual games
Green garden scene – portrait format
Castle interior scene – tall format
Character concept art
Generating new characters prevents many teams from accelerating their release pipeline. Generating character assets is also essential for monetization and engagement, as players can unlock new characters through progression or payment. GenAI makes character iteration a lot faster, for a few different genres.
Fashion, makeover, and decoration games
Fashion makeover outfits – tall format
Portrait with eye makeup – portrait format
Cozy living room – square format
Cute, cozy, casual games
Explorer bear
Girl next door
Royal cat
What we learned along the way
1. Prompts matter a lot
Using longer prompts is better. But also thinking of prompts like a Google Image Search description more than how you would describe the item in real life seems to work well. Words like “high definition” or “perfect features” help get better quality art in general.
2. Starting from an image saves a lot of time
Many genAI tools allow you to upload an image and will then create new versions in that format. This can help a lot with initial iteration, especially if you’re looking for a very particular type of art. For fashion outfits or makeovers starting from an existing outfit image will help.
3. Different image formats generate different results
Searching for a character in tall format might generate a full-body image while in square format would create a portrait. The format changes the results a lot, so exploring with the exact format you need can help get closer to what you need faster.
How can we help?
If you’d like us to share more genAI resources, drop us a note to let us know. GenAI is on everyone’s minds and we love being a resource on anything that helps you make better games.