As someone who has worked in the video game industry, I’ve always been fascinated by the endless possibilities of game expansions. Recently, after my brother saw a tweet by one of the Slay the Spire co-creators talking about some pasta based icons he’d made, we decided to put our heads together to create a demo of it using AI tools. With my knowledge of stable diffusion and animation and his of ChatGPT, we set out to bring our ideas to life.
We decided to create a full pasta-themed expansion. Our DLC content included new characters, relics, cards, quests, and enemies, all centered around a delicious pasta theme.
To achieve our vision, we used a couple of base assets from the game and ran them through Stable Diffusion and Automatic1111. While the initial results were lacking on their own, we used Photoshop and After Effects to finesse the assets and add animation, bringing them to life.
The workflow we used was impressive, and it has the potential to speed up game development significantly. In the future, artists will be able to ask AI to swap out certain elements and create variations of their work in seconds. There are ethical concerns though, a lot of artists are currently fearful that they will be replaced by technology which is causing a lot of negativity around these tools.
As a content creator experimenting with these new tools I do realise I walk along this grey area at the moment, which is why I’m constantly giving credit to the original creators and showing them in a positive light. I was quiet disheartened when it came to releasing the video and upon going to credit the lead artist on Slay the Spire Bruce Brenneise, I’d seen that he’d taken an anti A.I stance on his Artstation.
If you like Slay the Spire and want to support human artists, you can subscribe to Bruce’s patreon for as little as £1 per month on his Patreon. I suspect as time moves forward there will be much less stigma around A.I tools as they become the norm.
Overall, using AI tools to create a theoretical video game expansion was an exciting and eye-opening experience. As AI technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative uses of this technology in the gaming industry.
