I think when you’ve got a small enough team making something as multifaceted as a video game, there will be parts of it you find boring and relatively unimportant. If you can make it cheaper, you get that much closer to the possibility of breaking even. Parts of this can scale up to larger projects, but in the end, this is a matter of choosing your battles. There’s an adage that’s something like, “Your game is never done; you just stop working on it,” and the sooner you can stop working on it while still delivering a product that people are interested in, the more sustainable the whole endeavor becomes. Chunks of it will be filler or less important than other chunks, always. It’s why there’s a Unity and Unreal asset store; and why you can hear the same sound library used in Devil May Cry, Soul Calibur, and Dark Souls menus. Those parts of the game were less important to be specifically crafted for these games, and they chose other battles to care more about.
Carnelian@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Eh, the small team argument doesn’t really carry any water I think. Some of the most beloved indie games of all time have simple, geometric graphics. Thomas Was Alone even managed to tell a tear jerking story between characters who were monotone squares and rectangles.
Using AI to totally gloss over some of your most basic creative questions, such as “what are my capabilities?” And “What can I do given those limitations?” Isn’t going to lead you to a better product. If something is truly that unimportant it can be arranged trivially or cut. Even choosing to cut something is an inherently creative decision; another layer of the process which is lost if you train yourself to reach for AI to implement something that suits your first whim.
The asset store angle is also not really comparable. You’re still collaborating with another artist. We could ride this train all the way down to you didn’t personally mine the silicone for the computer you personally designed if we felt like it. It’s disingenuous and ignores the material differences between these technologies.
In summary, I basically think that you are narratively framing this as something that empowers the little guys, but I disagree that it is actually doing so in practice. It’s a product that’s only on our minds because of a massive concerted effort on the behalf of mega corporations whose explicit goals are to rob and disenfranchise us
WaitThisIsntReddit@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It does empower little guys. It empowers everybody, for good or ill. That’s a what a tool is. I can hammer a nail, I can hammer a nail that shouldn’t be there, or I can hammer a person in the face. Is any of that the hammer’s fault?
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 hours ago
Gen AI is not a hammer, it is an auto-construction machine that removes you from the process of building. It doesn’t empower people, it sidesteps them.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m not a fan of AI; I’m indifferent to it. What your capabilities are will vary based on which tools you’re using, and that can result in a very different scope of game. The part where it’s collaborating with another artist doesn’t matter to me if I can’t tell the difference, as long as the intellectual property rights of how the AI was trained are handled properly. I won’t be able to tell the difference in something like My Summer Car, because the prop artwork hanging in the room isn’t why I would be playing that game. If it has a tangible effect on the quality of the game, and I can tell the product is sub par because of the use of gen AI, that’s when it was the wrong tool for the job, or that it should have been cut. I personally wouldn’t care about how those scientists in Jurassic World look (there’s more important, attention-grabbing stuff in that game), but seemingly, plenty of people do.
Carnelian@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s exactly the point. Sometimes you shouldn’t even try to do certain things. The 15 minutes you spend shimming your AI assets into the game are ironically stealing your time from the 15 minutes of thoughtful consideration that would have resulted in a manageable project. Again my friend; your first thought for the project is not the point when you have finished the important thinking for your project.
Anyway we can keep going back and forth about your narrative framing of the technology all day, but you say you don’t really care, so why try to justify anything beyond that? If the devs don’t care about the phenomena I’m describing, and neither do their players, then of course it’s a match made in heaven. Please feel free to enjoy your pastimes without any concern for these conversations. People who think like me will occasionally meet you with scrutiny (we obviously think you should care very deeply about the art you choose to fill your life with) but I suspect in time our groups will naturally just see less and less of each other
shoo@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
You’re certainly free to lovingly craft every byte of a game but that doesn’t automatically make it a better product. You’re describing a creative outlet, not something that needs to appeal to some random customer in the 10s they skim your store page.
Regardless of how important it is to your creative vision, there are some boxes you need to check. Visual texture on an otherwise forgettable wall is that exact case. If you need some background wall art your options are:
Or everyone could take your advice: if you don’t have the time or money to approach your dream game, don’t even try! In my opinion, more people making their art is a good thing, even if it doesn’t pass everyone’s purity test.
If you’re (rightly) worried about the livelihood of the displaced background artist that’s fine, but complain about the economic system and not the tool.
WaitThisIsntReddit@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is some luddite logic. If man were meant to fly God would have gave us wings.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well, AI is largely a solution in search of a problem at this point in time, but I’m very glad that people found ways to make games that got beyond telling stories with colored rectangles, because I don’t think I have it in me to play more than one of those. Fortunately, better tools and options can exist so that there’s not some arbitrary reason to choose to do less when you could have done more. The actual value of gen AI right now is propped up by investments and not actual profitability, so we’ll see where its value falls in the marketplace once gravity pulls it back down. I expect the better option will still often be just the asset store when the dust settles. And this isn’t some total disregard for what art we fill our lives with. There’s art that people care very deeply about in My Summer Car, just not the framed pictures hanging on the wall.