4 ms·

How do you think AI and tools like midjourney could improve this asset creation process (if you think they can be used in this scenario)?

andrewmcwatters 3y ago
I think AI can be a force multiplier for asset turnaround time by helping artists who don’t have particular preferences for vision make generally real-world recognizable objects quickly and build meaningful libraries of models to help build world building sets. Theres also non-AI work that can help dynamically fill scenes with world meshes to help create seamless transitions between spaces as a part of overall terrain development. A lot of this tech will be proprietary in nature, and it may be a long time, think decades, if ever that we get to use it as general creators. It means that the gap between studios and bedroom professionals who used to create the mods that became full fledged intellectual properties that dominated for years will widen and there will be fewer opportunities for individual authors and small teams to become the next generation of production studios. This will happen while large organizations enjoy extreme technical leverage while not having many great ideas to execute on simply because there will be fewer fiction writers and fewer studios who have concentrated technologies. I currently don’t see much room for the next Zoid to create the next CTF gamemode. I don’t really see anything meaningful come out of community contributions to games anymore ever since the introduction of the UGC model which has superseded the traditional modding model. Instead of modders using game software mechanisms to create something new and interesting organically, UGC structures in games are explicitly designed so that creators can only do nominal things like create hats and skins for the most part. It’s shifted the mentally from, “Here are the tools we used to create the game,” to “Here’s what you’re allowed to create and put on a marketplace so we can take a cut of profits.” It’s gross, it sucks, and it’s another example of rug-pulling. Future generations will completely miss out on the previous paradigm because there’s so much focus entrenched on user-generated content versus modding.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

I think AI can be a force multiplier for asset turnaround time by helping artists who don’t have particular preferences for vision make generally real-world recognizable objects quickly and build meaningful libraries of models to help build world building sets. Theres also non-AI work that can help dynamically fill scenes with world meshes to help create seamless transitions between spaces as a part of overall terrain development. A lot of this tech will be proprietary in nature, and it may be a long time, think decades, if ever that we get to use it as general creators. It means that the gap between studios and bedroom professionals who used to create the mods that became full fledged intellectual properties that dominated for years will widen and there will be fewer opportunities for individual authors and small teams to become the next generation of production studios. This will happen while large organizations enjoy extreme technical leverage while not having many great ideas to execute on simply because there will be fewer fiction writers and fewer studios who have concentrated technologies. I currently don’t see much room for the next Zoid to create the next CTF gamemode. I don’t really see anything meaningful come out of community contributions to games anymore ever since the introduction of the UGC model which has superseded the traditional modding model. Instead of modders using game software mechanisms to create something new and interesting organically, UGC structures in games are explicitly designed so that creators can only do nominal things like create hats and skins for the most part. It’s shifted the mentally from, “Here are the tools we used to create the game,” to “Here’s what you’re allowed to create and put on a marketplace so we can take a cut of profits.” It’s gross, it sucks, and it’s another example of rug-pulling. Future generations will completely miss out on the previous paradigm because there’s so much focus entrenched on user-generated content versus modding.