AI In Game Dev: Let's Face The Truth

Intro

Some years have passed since the creation of the first ChatGPT. It was a breakthrough that created the AI race that we see now. Companies offer various AI based features, among them coding, animation, drawing, composing music, or talking as characters.

These are changing today's world in many aspects. From the ease of "doing" school homework to the mass layoffs in the workforce. As in everything, and from the lessons of history, to survive, or make the max out of it, we need to adapt to the new world.

In this article, we will explore how AI is changing the game development landscape and what we can do to adapt in today's world.

The Past

Let's look at the times before ChatGPT.

In programming, you had to know how to create good quality code. Despite having a lot of resources online and how-to tutorials on Stack Overflow, to manage a big project required some skill.

Regarding drawing, animation, and composing, there are many free tutorials on the internet on how to create stuff in Blender, Photoshop, or other tools. But being good at it required skill, practice, and wasn't easy. A tree that I create in Blender in many hours could be a lot worse than one that a professional in the field makes in five minutes.

There were, of course, assets you could buy online or get for free, but usually, you wanted specific content for your game and not to take things that everyone can use and will overlap between games.

The Era of AI

Students do homework using AI. Instead of writing a script for some hours, I just ask AI to do it in a few seconds. There are various AI tools that generate art, animations, and sometimes even entire games. With the rise of products for game developers, tools, game engines and marketing tools - AI is the final knockout - making games has never been easier.

We're seeing massive layoffs at tech companies, especially in the gaming industry. Why? Because one person who knows how to optimize AI efficiently and work with it is a better return on investment than a bunch of specialists that may be good at their work but work slower due to not leveraging the power of AI tools, and they're also more expensive.

In the previous article, we explored the gaming industry and how it grew from some people in a small team to behemoth companies managing huge projects with a lot of people. Now we are scaling down again to less people that can replace entire teams. Why shouldn't a company save money if it can?

What Indie Devs Should Do?

After looking at today's world, what can we learn? What can we change in our way of creating games to be more efficient?

Basically, we want to optimize various aspects of game creation using AI - reduce the time it takes to accomplish various tasks with minimal impact on quality and, most importantly, originality. The issue with AI is that often assets created by it share a similar nature and can be less unique, which will impact negatively the experience from games.

I think that there are great AI tools out there, but we always need a human touch to keep making interesting and original projects.

The Conclusion

In the new world, very experienced people in their fields get replaced by just experienced people who can use the most powerful tools as well. It may be scary, but on the other hand, it gives indie developers a chance: with moderate experience in all aspects of game development and the usage of AI, we can work very efficiently and even create great projects that stand a higher chance against AAA titles.

But the most important thing is not to lose originality, and despite significant AI usage, keep creating unique and original content that people enjoy playing. That will be an interesting challenge and an interesting era.