Will Text-To-Image AI Revolutionize Roguelike Art?
Although there is definitely something to be said for traditional ASCII graphics, tile graphics are becoming increasingly important as developers attempt to make their game accessible to casual players. One of the most time difficult parts of developing a roguelike is coming up with good looking representations for each possible tile state, especially because of the emergent aspect of roguelikes, where absurd situations like "petrified goblin riding a tiny glowing hydra" are common.
I recently watched a video on DALL-E and while I don't think it will work directly, with some customization a similar model could have huge potential to generate massive numbers of beautiful-looking tiles quickly and cheaply, which would probably lead to an explosion of beautiful-looking roguelikes in the next 5-10 years.
Do you guys think this will actually happen? As a developer I try to stay realistic but this too exciting to not talk about.
Posted Apr 8, 2022, 4:04 AM UTC
There is a hell of a lot more to functional game art that is different to just making pretty pictures based on a description. We use size differences to denote power levels, colour coding to make certain enemy types pop out, and distinct silhouette shapes to make enemies quickly distinguishable. You can't replace that with generic AI-generated art.
This. I was considering leaving that comment when the link first popped up, but felt it's just rehashing the same points made any time this comes up with respect to generated art or any other kind of content. It's simply not the same thing, and the quality will always be less than it could be.
To be honest this kind of thing makes me less excited because it likely means even more advanced shovelware. I'm sure there'll be a few interesting examples of using this sort of tech that capitalize specifically on what it's good at and revolving the entire concept around that, but it won't be widely applied to serious projects.
This might be a little pessimistic. Some types of art as you've said have to precisely convey important information, but many others don't.
Other kinds of art just need to add flavor and be visually distinguishable at a glance (which you mentioned, but which I don't think is difficult to achieve with AI art). The thing I notice about a lot of hand drawn art especially at small scales is I don't even know what the hell it's supposed to be. I'm thinking of the hundreds of items and abilities in League of Legends for instance. But I do recognize the art over time and associate it with the mechanic so it's doing it's job.
Consider:
I'd argue entire genres like what AI Dungeon is obviously were and will be enabled by these kinds of techniques (text in that case).
Imagine what kind of new things this could create. Maybe a game with completely procedural abilities so you see new ones every run? That kind of thing is practically impossible today because, while you could do most parts of it, it sucks without unique art.
edit: also just realized a more grounded example: augment Seven Day Band with its own art. 7DB as you know is a roguelike where one creates the monsters on the fly. It would be pretty interesting to see the art that comes out of that.
Another point I realized: size and color coding are things that can be potentially be dealt with using non-AI automated techniques, though again I will grant that monster sprites might be the worst use case here.
Something like King of Dragon Pass could be amazing with this.