AI art has become one of the most popular new technologies in 2022, and since it began to gain attention earlier this year, the industry has been evolving rapidly. It is now widely believed that AI drawing is fully capable of assisting artists with the design process.
However, the recently launched mobile game Crush&Summon by the Chinese game development company GuJi proves that AI can do more than that, as the artwork and background music of the game are both done by AI.
Some artwork done by AI in Crush&Summon
GuJI began to develop Crush&Summon in October 2021. After multiple adjustments to the gameplay and art style, the development team finally decided to develop Crush&Summon into a match 3 anime mobile game.
As a result, the development team, which only had experience developing casual games in a Chinese art style, was in complete disarray.
“It was like a Super Smash Bros Universe.” Said the lead developer Zhang. “The style of character art and scenes aren’t uniform, and the maps we designed are not even complete; it’s just a mess.”
Early artworks of Crash&Summon
The long road of development lasted until August 2022, when GuJi had to fire a group of artists due to financial problems, its art department for game development shrank from fifty people to a small team of only eight people, and that’s when the team started to consider letting AI take over art design completely.
“At first other colleagues did not even know”. Zhang said. "I did it all in secret. I began thinking about AI painting a long time ago, and I mentioned it to the art team, but they said it wouldn't work. Now the art is gone, so guess I'll just try it out.”
In fact, the AI drawing worked unexpectedly well. Since the development team had focused on creating interesting match 3 gameplay rather than the art style from the beginning, the involvement of AI greatly enhanced their efficiency.
According to Zhang, AI can finish a complicated scene design in a day, which would probably take up a whole month for the former artwork team. Using AI, GuJi is now able to produce art for four to five characters per day. And it only takes one person to finish the whole process, from keywords selection to the final adjustments.
The most satisfying thing for Zhang is that using AI saves them from the tedium of the development process. In the past, the art design required the game's programmer, artist and scriptwriter to discuss the content together for days before starting work.
Now the process has been simplified; game scriptwriters submit the requirements directly to the programmer, who uses a short amount of time to complete the character art with AI and adjust them until they’re available for development.
Some Crush&Summon players are not satisfied with the production team's extensive use of AI. One player from the community said that the NOVA AI used by the development team currently has a lot of copyright disputes, and there is great risk in using it for commercial games. Some players also said that the use of AI led to the lack of detail in some character art.
In response, Crush&Summon replied that they are doing their best to optimize the development process.
“We know that anime mobile game players are kinda picky about art styles, but due to financial problems, we can only get this far,” Zhang added that the game's BGM is also composed by AI. “ We have also noticed problems with the copyright and painting details. Our future development direction will not be completely led by AI; we will still hire artists to develop other games.”
“AI is like a window for GuJi now; whether we can break out or not remains unknown, but at least we see the light coming through.”
Source: ShouYouNaDianShi