How AI is Going to Revolutionise Game Development

Making games is hard. Very hard. Now, that’s not a particularly mindblowing sentence, I know. But it’s worth remembering just how much time, care, and sweat go into creating some of our favourite games both big and small. Your average triple-AAA production with hundreds upon hundreds of people working takes on average 5 years and a budget of $80 million to see the light of day, though recently some games have blown this figure out of the water.?

Even smaller-scale projects take years of work and significant chunks of cash to bring to fruition. Exactly how the time and money are spent varies from project to project but it's safe to say that creating the assets that populate a game’s world is an expensive process.

However, AI may be about to revolutionise the entire process.?

You’re almost certainly aware of the AI tools currently making waves in the art world. For those few of you who have been enjoying a below-rock getaway for the past few months, tools like Midjourney and Dall-E 2 allow users to create amazing AI-generated simply by giving the tool a text-based prompt about what they would like to see. The AI then interprets these words and uses the vast library of images that it's been trained on to produce completely new and often striking works of art.?

In short, without too much undue hyperbole, they’re essentially magic.?Well, this magic is on the cusp of making its way into the game industry.While AI has long been used by developers to upscale textures and to turn small samples into full-sized assets, there are even more powerful uses on the horizon that promise to significantly alter the way that games are developed.?In the future, those creating games will be able to use AI tools to create entire assets purpose-built for the game from scratch with humans guiding the AI rather than doing the manual labour themselves.?

We’ve already seen the first beginnings of this massive shift with the development of tools like the soon-to-be-released scenario.gg. One of the creators, Emmanuel de Maistre, demonstrated the incredible power of this tool on Twitter in December 2022 where he used it to create a series of Red Alert-inspired isometric buildings exclusively with their tool through naturalistic text and the editing of the AI’s parameters.?

Now, after reading some of you have probably already gnashing your teeth and shouting that using AI-generated assets isn’t “real” game development and that it’s a soulless recombination of already-existing assets.?

However, that’s besides the point, the real potential of AI-generated is not in the fact that it can create “finished” release-ready assets but in the fact that it can allow a team to put together rapid iterative prototypes to test ideas out. The offshoot of this is that teams will be able to really unleash their creativity without having to worry so much about the development time they're committing to these ideas.?

Furthermore, games in the triple AAA industry may well be able to use AI tools to generate some of the incidental objects that populate their worlds, reducing the number of modellers a studio needs to have working on a project. Given that budgets have ballooned (putting it lightly) over the last 20 years of game development, major studios are eager for any way that they can reduce costs without sacrificing the visual quality and fidelity that defines the top tier of video gaming.?

Likewise, for indie devs, AI-generated assets provide a pathway for them to get to a stage where it’s possible for them to release the game into early access (and make money) much faster without having to make do with poor-quality assets. In this case, AI-generated assets will likely have a similar effect to the now ubiquitous store-bought assets that came before them in that they’ll lower the bar and make it easier for small developers to get their games out into the world.?

While the spread of store-bought assets did herald the rise of the minimal effort so-called “asset flip” games that plagued Steam Early Access for many years, they created an undeniably huge shift in how games were developed.?

It’s almost certain that, yes, there will be some truly dire games that see the light of day that are just a mishmash of AI assets with no original thought or care behind them. However, alongside these, we will certainly see a much larger wave of fantastic games on the back of this new technology.?