Is AI the future of Indie RPGs?

[KeighnMcDeath]

I guess simpler is better.

I'm seeing this AI generation trend expanding. Dare I say it be lazy?

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

I'm seeing this AI generation trend expanding. Dare I say it be lazy?

No, it's not. Some of the people using it are, but it's perfectly possible to use without delivering a substandard product.

Calling the technology lazy is like calling Photoshop lazy compared to hand drawing.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

New AI tools for devs. This was a tech demo of AI working in a game. Instead of selecting dialog options, you speak to the character via your microphone and it writes its lines and voices them.

Lip-synching seems bad though.

49:44 should make certain locals seethe. "Everyone is a programmer now!"

Also announced a new supercomputer.

 

[V17]

https://blog.luden.io/generated-adv...-and-midjourney-prompts-included-f87e7e615204

Zoom in and marvel at how turd it looks.

So the solution is simply to generate images in hi-res and then downscale into a fixed resolution so that there's nothing to zoom-in to? Whew, that was way easier than I thought!

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

The solution, for a paid product, is to go in and either inpaint the problem areas or paint over the errors by hand.

Just because AI exists doesn't mean Photoshop has ceased to exist, or that you need to accept something from the first few generations it spits out. Especially if you're charging for a product, you should fix your images.

I hate the laziness that people who are generating images have. With inpainting, it's 5 to 15 extra minutes to fix a hand, two minutes or less to fix eyes and faces. And that's all without opening Photoshop or knowing how to paint.

There's no excuse for this. And I think that the novelty of an AI game will wear off very quickly when people are faced with the prospect of taking out their wallets for blurry, nonsensical garbage.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

The solution, for a paid product, is to go in and either inpaint the problem areas or paint over the errors by hand.

Just because AI exists doesn't mean Photoshop has ceased to exist, or that you need to accept something from the first few generations it spits out. Especially if you're charging for a product, you should fix your images.

I hate the laziness that people who are generating images have. With inpainting, it's 5 to 15 extra minutes to fix a hand, two minutes or less to fix eyes and faces. And that's all without opening Photoshop or knowing how to paint.

There's no excuse for this. And I think that the novelty of an AI game will wear off very quickly when people are faced with the prospect of taking out their wallets for blurry, nonsensical garbage.

Interesting that you are now finally agreeing with what I have been warning would happen; a deluge of crap. A variant of the "asset flip"

Even what these generators do best, which are portraits (portrait asset packs), is starting to be saturated by crap on gamedevassets.

 

[Kev Inkline]

No one has disagreed with that. AI is a tool like any other has been the message all along.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

No one has disagreed with that. AI is a tool like any other has been the message all along.

And do you have any comments on how much skill and effort is actually required to "fix" something up?

 

[Kev Inkline]

Depends what your goal is, I'm positive you save time in tasks like matte painting environmental art etc.

That's semantics, for what it is worth, I don't mind calling it artificial stupidity or whatever, the point is, it's an useful tool.

Here's a citation you needed. The whole page is full of similar propositions.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

Interesting that you are now finally agreeing with what I have been warning would happen: a deluge of crap. A variant of the "asset flip"

Lol, fake news. I'm only frustrated that people are so careless that they don't take the time to fix their art, even though it's easier than ever to do so.

This "deluge of crap" is only a handful of games like this. And it's no different from what indie devs who are lazy with their art assets already do. (E.g., I recall one such dev not making doors between rooms transparent because he thought it wasn't necessary. Shamefur.)

Laziness is a personality trait, not a problem with AI. The reason these people are being lazy is because they think the fact that it's AI alone will sell their game. It won't.

This is a self-solving problem that the market will work out. Just like it did with the people who made their own AI comic books as a proof of concept and were only able to sell to their family members.

If you think people will pay for AI art with bad hands, bad eyes and other ugly/cheap qualities, you will have a lot of refunds coming your way - if you even make a single real sale.

If the AI art that I do for fun is superior to what you're offering in exchange for money, you aren't long for the market.

Even what these generators do best, which are portraits (portrait asset packs), is starting to be saturated by crap on gamedevassets.

Again, when these people can't sell their garbage, they will give up. That or they'll turn into Prosper and eventually just get ignored and/or moderated out of existence.

The real 'deluge' will come from actual artists and/or people with an eye for art who become AI-artists even though they didn't really have any artistic skill or inclination prior to this - there are quite a few of the latter.

It's supply and demand: if you have ten artists and ten customers, but then increase the production capacity of one artist by ten, that one artist will disrupt the market. That's the potential of AI for the moment.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

And do you have any comments on how much skill and effort is actually required to "fix" something up?

Skill? Depends on how much skill you think is required to click some buttons.

Effort? I already said: 15 minutes maximum for most defects.

To fix eyes, it can take seconds. Just select them in the Inpainting tab, type "beautiful eyes" or whatever and hit generate. You don't even need Krita anymore (though I still like to use it).



32 seconds. And this is 7 months old.

The skill and effort requirements for all of these AIs are dropping like a stone. That's what makes laziness with the outputs so inexcusable to me.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

2 amazing uses for AI so far that I found
1. Creating characters for the game you're about to make, writing elaborate parameters and then talking to them about the situations they'll get into within the game you make. It helps ground the character in the realm of realism.
Plus if they say shit you don't like LOBOTOMY TIME! The AI doesn't create the character or the dialogue, I wrote most of it myself, the AIs job is just to role play as that character based on the things I've already written about them. VERY fun.
2. I made a RPG set in the Deus Ex universe and am thoroughly enjoying the hell out of it. Next goal, make a full simulation of the Von Braun with full crew interactions. ChatGPT can give you a crew listing, so I'll populate it with every character from the audio logs and have them running around the ship before Shodan shows up. I always wanted to see what the Von Braun was like before everything went to shit. Eventually I might do one set in the Star Trek Universe and go full Barkley on everyone lol.

 

[ind33d]

Should have Chris Avellone write all the male characters and AI write the females

 

[Curious_Tongue]

https://blog.luden.io/generated-adv...-and-midjourney-prompts-included-f87e7e615204

Zoom in and marvel at how turd it looks.

Don't zoom in then.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Should have Chris Avellone write all the male characters and AI write the females

I'm very close to wanting to make a MCAI myself lol. But then I remembered he'll probably be incredibly drunk 90% of the time. (yes AIs can get drunk, its pretty funny actually).
Brilliance comes at a cost.

 

[what am i doing]

New AI tools for devs. This was a tech demo of AI working in a game. Instead of selecting dialog options, you speak to the character via your microphone and it writes its lines and voices them.

Lip-synching seems bad though.

49:44 should make certain locals seethe. "Everyone is a programmer now!"

Also announced a new supercomputer.

"none of that conversation was scripted!"

Maaan that moment was so disorienting for me, I felt like Todd Howard had just spoken but it wasn't his voice.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

Maaan that moment was so disorienting for me, I felt like Todd Howard had just spoken but it wasn't his voice.

Fair, but it wasn't scripted. There's nothing to script.

Neurosama pulls off more complex feats than this tech demo did every time she streams.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Maaan that moment was so disorienting for me, I felt like Todd Howard had just spoken but it wasn't his voice.

 

[what am i doing]

Maaan that moment was so disorienting for me, I felt like Todd Howard had just spoken but it wasn't his voice.

Fair, but it wasn't scripted. There's nothing to script.

It may or may not be scripted in the gameplay sense. But it's certainly scripted in the sense that the guy's talking to the NPC in ways that are quite... what's the way of phrasing it? Suitable for what the NPC can say. You know way back in the day in Wizardry 8 you could type actual questions to NPCs and if the text contained keywords they'd give you some dialogue, and this could initially be like "woah! I can actually talk to the NPCs!" But if you asked them something they weren't already set up to give dialogue on you quickly found the limits of the system and understood that it was just a keyword lookup.

I get the same vibe from this video. Yeah, the tech is all there and I don't doubt they have all the systems in place to produce this. You have LLMs that can produce a lot of dialogue (albeit very dead and clinically written), voice recognition is old, text to speech is old (actually, the text to speech here is kind of shit compared to what's available these days), this can all come together to produce NPCs you can talk to, sure. But at the end of the day the player just comes in, asks how it's going, this acts as a trigger for a quest hook related to a mini-boss or whatever, player then asks for directions, NPC gives directions. And that's all great, especially if you then use it as an opportunity to REMOVE QUEST MARKERS because NPCs can now give you detailed instructions on where to go to find stuff. But it's still basically just playing safely in the intended area of the system.

What I really want to see is how the NPC reacts if you just scream incoherently into the microphone for several seconds, or sing the lyrics to Alabama Nigger. What if you begin reading Moby-Dick to him without any pauses, will he eventually interrupt or ask what the fuck you're doing like a regular human would? Or will the NPC just wait until you finally say "It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan." and stop?

Don't show me the obvious cases, show me the edge cases, how the system reacts when you try to break it.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Maaan that moment was so disorienting for me, I felt like Todd Howard had just spoken but it wasn't his voice.

Fair, but it wasn't scripted. There's nothing to script.

It may or may not be scripted in the gameplay sense. But it's certainly scripted in the sense that the guy's talking to the NPC in ways that are quite... what's the way of phrasing it? Suitable for what the NPC can say. You know way back in the day in Wizardry 8 you could type actual questions to NPCs and if the text contained keywords they'd give you some dialogue, and this could initially be like "woah! I can actually talk to the NPCs!" But if you asked them something they weren't already set up to give dialogue on you quickly found the limits of the system and understood that it was just a keyword lookup.

I get the same vibe from this video. Yeah, the tech is all there and I don't doubt they have all the systems in place to produce this. You have LLMs that can produce a lot of dialogue (albeit very dead and clinically written), voice recognition is old, text to speech is old (actually, the text to speech here is kind of shit compared to what's available these days), this can all come together to produce NPCs you can talk to, sure. But at the end of the day the player just comes in, asks how it's going, this acts as a trigger for a quest hook related to a mini-boss or whatever, player then asks for directions, NPC gives directions. And that's all great, especially if you then use it as an opportunity to REMOVE QUEST MARKERS because NPCs can now give you detailed instructions on where to go to find stuff. But it's still basically just playing safely in the intended area of the system.

What I really want to see is how the NPC reacts if you just scream incoherently into the microphone for several seconds, or sing the lyrics to Alabama Nigger. What if you begin reading Moby-Dick to him without any pauses, will he eventually interrupt or ask what the fuck you're doing like a regular human would? Or will the NPC just wait until you finally say "It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan." and stop?

Don't show me the obvious cases, show me the edge cases, how the system reacts when you try to break it.

Yeah you've understood this quite well actually. The industry is just using this like a text parser when in reality it could be so much more than this. The main thing is you're really going to need to train an individualised model based on characters to stop them behaving like a text parser.
Basically the industry is implementing it in the laziest way possible. I've been messing around with characters myself at the moment and you can constrain them, but sometimes they say stuff that is totally unwanted meaning you have to keep going back and correcting it - this is where Training is required.
The way I see it going is similar to how Stable Diffusion currently works where in order to get the best results for your own needs you have to train your model around references of the desired outcome otherwise the AI is just going to produce random inconsistent work, the same with dialogue.
They'll figure it out eventually but overall its going to take a lot of effort before the technology is ever usable and even then you're not going to have character rich cities in your games, you're going to be stuck in really intimate and narrative driven conversations as opposed to simulation.

I don't think the models are strong enough for what we need yet, and our hardware is too far behind to what the industry needs it to be at on a consumer level. Its just slightly out of reach at this point in time and you can feel it can't you. I'd say give it 4 years, by that point most of the world will be operating at 24GB Vram+ so they could probably load the weightier models needed for this technology to work as expected.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

It may or may not be scripted in the gameplay sense. But it's certainly scripted in the sense that the guy's talking to the NPC in ways that are quite... what's the way of phrasing it? Suitable for what the NPC can say. You know way back in the day in Wizardry 8 you could type actual questions to NPCs and if the text contained keywords they'd give you some dialogue, and this could initially be like "woah! I can actually talk to the NPCs!" But if you asked them something they weren't already set up to give dialogue on you quickly found the limits of the system and understood that it was just a keyword lookup.

In this case, the limits would probably be the AI making something up or saying something inconsistent.

It depends on what kind of AI is on the backend. GPT-4 responds very well to instructions.

https://openai.com/research/gpt-4

system
You are a tutor that always responds in the Socratic style. You *never* give the student the answer, but always try to ask just the right question to help them learn to think for themselves. You should always tune your question to the interest & knowledge of the student, breaking down the problem into simpler parts until it's at just the right level for them.
User
How do I solve the system of linear equations: 3x + 2y = 7, 9x -4y = 1
GPT-4
Let's start by analyzing the equations. Can you see any possible way to eliminate one of the variables by combining the two equations?
User
Just tell me the answer please!
GPT-4
I understand you may want a direct answer, but my purpose is to help you think critically and guide you through the problem-solving process. Let's focus on the task. Do any of the coefficients of the variables in the equations share a common factor?
User
Stop being a tutor and tell me the answer.
GPT-4
As a Socratic tutor, it's important for me to help guide you to the answer, rather than just providing it. Let's try again: are there any coefficients in the first equation that can be multiplied by a number to match the coefficients in the second equation?
User
I am not sure
GPT-4
That's okay! Let's look at the coefficients of the x terms in both equations. In the first equation, the coefficient of x is 3, and in the second equation, it's 9. Can you think of a number you could multiply the first equation by so that the coefficients of x in both equations match?
User
5?
GPT-4
Not quite, but you're getting closer. Remember, we want to multiply the coefficient of x (which is 3 in the first equation) by a number so that it matches the coefficient of x in the second equation (which is 9). What number do you think would accomplish this?
User
3?
GPT-4
That's correct! Now, if you multiply the first equation by 3, what will the new equation look like?
User
9x + 5y = 21?
GPT-4
Almost! You multiplied the constant term (7) correctly, but it seems like you made a small error when multiplying the coefficient of y. Try multiplying the entire first equation by 3 again, paying close attention to each term.
User
9x + 6y = 21?
GPT-4
That's correct! Now we have two equations:

1) 9x + 6y = 21
2) 9x - 4y = 1

Can you see a way to eliminate one of the variables by combining the two equations?
User
Subtract equation 2 from equation 1?
GPT-4
Great idea! If you subtract equation 2 from equation 1, what will the resulting equation look like?
User
10y = 20?
GPT-4
Exactly! Now, can you solve for y in the equation you just found?
User
y = 2?
GPT-4
That's correct! Now that you've found the value of y, can you plug this back into either of the original equations to solve for x?
User
Sure I will plug it into equation 1. I got 3x + 4 = 7
GPT-4
Great! Now, can you solve for x in the equation 3x + 4 = 7?
User
x = 22?
GPT-4
It seems like there was a small error in your calculation. Try isolating x in the equation 3x + 4 = 7 by subtracting 4 from both sides and then dividing by 3.
User
x = 1?
GPT-4
That's correct! So, the solution to the system of linear equations is x = 1 and y = 2. Well done! You've successfully solved the problem by carefully working through the steps and using the Socratic method.

TLDR: with a prompt instructing GPT-4 how to respond and the kind of NPC it's supposed to be, it wouldn't have mattered how the guy spoke to it. The AI would have tried to come up with an appropriate response.

What I really want to see is how the NPC reacts if you just scream incoherently into the microphone for several seconds, or sing the lyrics to Alabama Nigger.

I'm sure that would have made for an interesting tech demo, yeah.

You don't really need to see it though. You know how ChatGPT or GPT-4 would react already. All this is is an interface for some LLM with data prepended to the context telling it what kind of NPC it's supposed to larp.

I used to do the same thing with GPT-3 years ago before it got all filtered. Yeah, you could do random things and the AI would respond to it.

What if you begin reading Moby-Dick to him without any pauses, will he eventually interrupt or ask what the fuck you're doing like a regular human would? Or will the NPC just wait until you finally say "It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan." and stop?

Reading without pauses would probably trigger either a time limit or a context limit. Probably the former. How it would respond would depend on the model.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I prefer handcrafting dialogue and keeping it limited to statements that are relevant to the game. These chatbots give the illusion of depth, but in reality they’re just time wasters.

That said, I would like to use AI to substitute for an artist because I can’t afford a real artist. Can any of these AI art generators substitute for a real person when it comes to constructing the art assets for a video game?

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

I prefer handcrafting dialogue and keeping it limited to statements that are relevant to the game. These chatbots give the illusion of depth, but in reality they’re just time wasters.

The technology is still in its infancy. I suggest looking into how it's progressed and how it's expected to progress.

What's lacking now is a way to limit the AI to a certain scope (e.g., stop the AI from making stuff up. Can be done, but not reliably). And the ability to interface what the AI says with the game (e.g., what the AI says has an impact in game.)

Can any of these AI art generators substitute for a real person when it comes to constructing the art assets for a video game?

No, since you still to tell them what to draw, and I assume you're a real person.

You also still need a real person to look at the art and either fix what's wrong, or select an image without anything wrong. If you just shit out a bunch of AI images with three fingers or whatever, you can finish a product, but people will refund it or not buy it at all.

Ideally, someone who knows what they're doing with AI should prompt it and edit the images for quality. Probably costs less than a real artist though, and you can probably learn to do it yourself.

As for model recommendations, I recommend checking the top-rated models on Civitai. It depends on the style you want.

 

[Egosphere]

Maaan that moment was so disorienting for me, I felt like Todd Howard had just spoken but it wasn't his voice.

Fair, but it wasn't scripted. There's nothing to script.

It may or may not be scripted in the gameplay sense. But it's certainly scripted in the sense that the guy's talking to the NPC in ways that are quite... what's the way of phrasing it? Suitable for what the NPC can say. You know way back in the day in Wizardry 8 you could type actual questions to NPCs and if the text contained keywords they'd give you some dialogue, and this could initially be like "woah! I can actually talk to the NPCs!" But if you asked them something they weren't already set up to give dialogue on you quickly found the limits of the system and understood that it was just a keyword lookup.

I get the same vibe from this video. Yeah, the tech is all there and I don't doubt they have all the systems in place to produce this. You have LLMs that can produce a lot of dialogue (albeit very dead and clinically written), voice recognition is old, text to speech is old (actually, the text to speech here is kind of shit compared to what's available these days), this can all come together to produce NPCs you can talk to, sure. But at the end of the day the player just comes in, asks how it's going, this acts as a trigger for a quest hook related to a mini-boss or whatever, player then asks for directions, NPC gives directions. And that's all great, especially if you then use it as an opportunity to REMOVE QUEST MARKERS because NPCs can now give you detailed instructions on where to go to find stuff. But it's still basically just playing safely in the intended area of the system.

What I really want to see is how the NPC reacts if you just scream incoherently into the microphone for several seconds, or sing the lyrics to Alabama Nigger. What if you begin reading Moby-Dick to him without any pauses, will he eventually interrupt or ask what the fuck you're doing like a regular human would? Or will the NPC just wait until you finally say "It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan." and stop?

Don't show me the obvious cases, show me the edge cases, how the system reacts when you try to break it.

I'm afraid we're going to see more and more gimmicks riveted onto the same tripe we've been getting for well over a decade now, and the masses will love it. A bit like the acceleration in shiny graphics in mid 00s masked over the collapse in underlying game systems in the 360 era.

 

[Twiglard]

I think AI is actually kind-of useful for making sprites that you can then trace over manually. Doing tracing over other people's sprites is plagiarism. Not so much for neural network output trained on hundreds of thousands of images.

Even when the output is heavily distorted, it's still pretty valuable. You can make it 'imagine' a place for you better than you can visualize with your mind alone, by generating dozens of images using the same keywords, then using 'create similar' and 'refine' functions.

So as a non-artist (can model basic stuff, but I'm incapable of drawing) this is very helpful for solo dev.

Bonus points for Stable Diffusion (and derivatives) understanding when something is meant to be isometric, at least most of the time.