My company is making pixel art games with high quality art and we released 3 titles so far. While we don't use AI at all we still do experiment with it not to miss what's possible. And so far I just can't agree you can produce anything good consistently with AI.
Pixel art production is not just about making cool lookin pixels, but about consistency. It take a lot of art direction to make professional artists working together to match specific art style.
With 3D games you can mostly use assets from stores and just cover them with effects or shading, but it's just not how pixel art works.
You can generate tons of sprite sheets using AIs and each will look good and sometimes great, but getting right style, lighting and camera perspective is near impossible.
And animations are even harder because there just so little information to work with.
These are not pixel art because they don't use a regular pixel grid. Additionally, the style is inconsistent, and there are many obvious artifacts. They're also large, which means they don't have to rely so heavily on specialized pixel art techniques. When you're working with images as small as was common in the golden age of pixel art, you have to think carefully about the meaning of every pixel.
Good pixel art is designed around human interpretation of ambiguity. The clearest examine I can think of is in Chrono Trigger. The starting room contains a representation of a typewriter, where the keys are drawn as a checkerboard dither pattern. This doesn't look anything like a real typewriter keyboard. Only the context makes it clear what it is, and in a different context it could be interpreted as a flat expanse of color. I don't think the standard diffusion model architecture is capable of this kind of judgment.
Look, I don’t really like this stuff philosophically, but also in a practical sense I think a lot of these look pretty bad and have obvious ai artifacting.
Why can’t you just find an artist who will work with you on your game? Get someone a job, make a friend, share cross-disciplinary insights and make a better game.
What makes art different from an arbitrary pretty thing?
In my view, it is the nature of art as self-expression and metaphorical, transcending the constraints of literal verbal meaning, human-to-human communication. Ergo, when there is no self to express on the other side, it could be a pretty thing, but categorically not art.
These are really nice! I've been waiting for the AIs to get good enough so that I could use them to generate game art, especially because I can't draw at all and because game dev is just a hobby, I can't spend money on it to hire someone to do the art for me.
I'm still not sure where I stand with this. It reminds me a bit of the skeuomorphic days, where we went to flat design overnight and thanked the designers goodbye. Developers got tired of waiting for a button sprite to be designed for the website. In a way it was cleaner, leaner and faster. But we lost a lot of good work in the process (I was one of those designers).
I think where I stand is AI for supplementing, yes, for replacing, no. Extend from existing work, yes. But if you distance yourself so far from the art that you don't know how it's made, you'll be flying while running out air.
Pretty good stuff! I took the opposite journey and started in games then went to big tech, though I have continued to stay with the game industry the whole time with an indie game company I run on the side.
I did take up the challenge of trying to prompt an image generator into giving me a useable 2d sprite <https://nlevel.ai/images/K4oeERN4a0By/view)> and it's much harder than it looks.
I assume you are running some type of LLM to specially format the prompts to the image models, or is it more complex than that?
Please leave creative work for human beings and teach "AI" how to do dishes or wash clothes, and other chores, that would leave more time for human beings to do creative work.
Cool, but these are all static images. Is there a way to turn these into animations, including stuff like rotation (player looking forward, player turned around, etc.)
I just want to play this game in my browser!
Same sort of stuff as the images on https://jules.google/
Looks nice enough but the pixels are not all the same size which is kinda upsetting.
Call me when AI can do animated full pixel sunsets with moving clouds, birds a stream and make it look magical.
I still enjoy Reddits pixel art sub, and AI generated content doesn't come close.
TL;DR:
I started making a video game. I assumed 2D video game art generation was a solved problem. It wasn't. I tried to solve it and ended up getting close. This post's URL provides an example of how far image generation models have come (and how far coding LLMs have come, because they built that entire website, with my assistance, in 2 months).
Long Post:
I originally started programming because, like many others, I wanted to make video games. A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a few internships in Silicon Valley, and some year-long stints at various companies that shall not be named here -later, I ended up where I started from: making video games.
I set out on my game-making journey intent to fully embrace change, because the times they are a-changing, as they always seem to do. First, I'd write the game in Rust, a language which I wish we had when I was in college (though I admit learning C is absolutely a pedagogical rite in any up-to-snuff CS program). Second, I'd use LLMs to guide me on my way.
I quickly found my bearings with the Bevy game engine [1]. I implemented Flappy Bird for practice. Sailing was smooth. It was time to make the game I originally intended to make.
Early in the development of the game I found the need to procure assets. I had already stumbled upon Meshy [2], a web app that let's you create 3d meshes from prompts. I think this is a great product and I gladly paid for it. However, I was making a 2D game, and 2D games need 2D assets. I assumed the 2D-equivalent of Meshy existed and I could pay for it.
How wrong I was. Alas, I could simply ask ChatGPT to generate 2D sprites for me, no? No. Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that ChatGPT does generate some pretty damn good looking sprites. No, in the sense that hours of painful manually cropping and Photoshop work was about to beset me. So I took matters into my own hands and tried to build it myself.
these are very nice, although I wonder if you can improve the consistency image-to-image somehow? The leading cactus image and tree images look like they come from different collections because one is black-outlined and one is not. The kelp pirates are lit differently from each other.
Most soulless looking pixel art I've seen in a while...
These look very nice, but are not pixel art in the sense I understand it. The pixel matrix is not consistent. They look pixelated, but if you zoom in, you'll notice that the block size varies quite a bit within one image and between images. There are also artifacts, pretty clear for example in the jumping deer's antlers.
I don't know what would be a practical way to do it, but I imagine some postprocessing step where a consistent matrix is enforced.