Hey r/aigamedev,

I'm working on a village simulation game where players spend their day talking with AI NPCs and interacting with the world around them.

The long-term goal is fairly ambitious:

• NPCs that feel genuinely human and interesting to talk to
• Quests that emerge dynamically from interactions instead of being hand-authored
• AI-generated assets that blend naturally into the game world

Of those three, the third one is what I'm currently spending most of my time on.

The problem I'm trying to solve

I think generating a 3D mesh is rapidly becoming the easy part.

Making that asset usable inside an actual game is where things get difficult.

My current pipeline looks like this:

Pixel Art → Image Generation → Trellis.2 → Remesh → UV Unwrap → Game Asset

I intentionally start from pixel art because it helps keep a consistent visual style across generated assets.

The challenge is everything after Trellis.

Once the mesh exists, I still need to solve:

• Poly count optimization
• Remeshing
• UV generation
• Texture quality
• Runtime performance
• Generation latency

And every improvement seems to come with a tradeoff somewhere else.

UVs are currently my biggest headache

Remeshing is annoying but manageable.

UV unwrapping is where things start to feel more like magic than engineering.

I can get functional UVs.

I can get automated UVs.

But getting clean UV layouts that consistently hold up across arbitrary AI-generated geometry is proving much harder than I expected.

I'm curious how others are approaching this.

For those experimenting with AI-generated 3D assets:

• Are you relying on automatic UV tools?
• Using AI-assisted UV generation?
• Accepting lower-quality UVs and compensating elsewhere?
• Building custom pipelines?

Why I'm skeptical of fully generative pipelines

One conclusion I've reached so far:

The "generate everything automatically" approach sounds great, but I'm not convinced it's production-ready.

Most end-to-end AI asset pipelines I've tested either:

• take too long,
• produce inconsistent results,
• or require enough cleanup that the automation benefit starts disappearing.

Right now I'm leaning toward hybrid workflows where AI handles generation and deterministic tools handle optimization.

Small experiment

To explore this problem, I built a small housing sandbox where players can generate 3D objects and place them into a scene:

https://echo-town.com

The goal isn't really the housing system itself.

It's a testing ground for evaluating whether generated assets actually feel like they belong in a living game world.

If you try it and notice obvious problems with the asset pipeline, visual consistency, performance, or workflow, I'd genuinely appreciate the feedback.

I'd especially love to hear from anyone who has already fought the UV/remesh battle and come out the other side.

Looking forward to learning from others working on similar AI game development problems.