AI art and graphics

The point and click interface works by breaking up the gameplay into scenes. Each scene contains a background image and elements. Clicking on an interactive element takes you to another scene. There are also scenes that are only visible for a predefined period of time and then a new one is loaded. I have called these slides and they basically act as cinemtaic transitions in the game.

I decided not to draw the images, but to create the slides half with AI and half with photoshop and tell the story through them. Most people think it's very easy to take these pictures with Ai. However, this is not quite the case. Of course, it helps a lot to have AI, it would have taken a lot of time to find the right images for landscapes or backgrounds on the web and more time to draw them. On the other hand, if you have a very specific idea of what you want, it's a lot of headache if the AI doesn't understand it. 

Many times I have been in the situation where, even though I wrote the promt, the end result was only roughly (or not at all) what I wanted. Another problem is that the game contains not only images but also "spaces". Spaces in which you can move, turn, move forward, etc. Even if the AI can draw a good sci-fi interior, it will have problems later on if I want to see the same space from a different angle. Not to mention that I had two fixed protagonists who had to be recognizable down to the face.

So I was left with photoshop. I had to paste the faces of the two characters everywhere, edit the interiors element by element and create the extra graphic elements myself. The AI is good for generating backgrounds (which can be blurred to make them unrecognisable), clothes and landscapes. We took a day to take the photos with the two main characters. One of the models is me so I could make addition photos later, during the dev process.

I also had problems with ageing. Actually, this was also an experimental area to see what I could get out of this technology. Often I got what I wanted the first time, but I had to spend long hours editing my face to get it right. (This probably took the most time with image editing.) The biggest problem with AI aging was that it couldn't consistently age the same. Sometimes I had to age myself even by manually drawing wrinkles or graying my hair. Now I would say that if I were to start over, I would rather ask an older model to do this.