Deep Takes #4

Deep Takes #4. It's in the game.

This week we focus on AI's impact on the largest media market- video games. We start with a run-through of the game creation process, showing you a slew of tools you can use today, and finally end with a startup game idea that cleverly leverages generative AI as a core mechanic.

The AI-powered Video Game Studio

The video game market is big. Really big. Bigger than movies, books, and music.

So it's no surprise that developers are already building AI-powered software to help developers create games more efficiently. VCs are lined up and foaming at the mouth.

If your gaming startup needs to raise capital in 2023 and you haven't yet changed your domain from ".gg" to ".ai", you are "ngmi".

UGC platforms like Roblox and engines like Unreal and Unity have all driven step-function changes in the cost and quality of games, and the AI revolution is accelerating the pace of content production even further.

A small, scrappy team can now produce a full game in just a few months with the help of AI tools and pre-eminent game engines. Just a few years ago the same level of production quality could have taken 10x people and years to complete.

Below we show you the AI tools applicable to the games industry that you can leverage today to produce better games with fewer resources.

Cheaper. Faster. Better. Embrace it!

• Productivity

  • Generate written brand assets for your studio or game that can help raise investor capital and generate pre-orders.

  • Blast potential investors (or fans) with personalized cold emails.

  • Generate trending game ideas with AI-driven research from Ludo.ai.

  • Replace your producer with AI with AI-powered calendars that can integrate with production tools like Jira and ClickUp.

• 2D Art

  • Create style-consistent, shippable 2D assets with Scenario.gg. Try these prompts to find your style!

  • Perfect your 2D AI creations with these 17 tools.

  • 1-click pixel art for your next nostalgia-inducing game.

  • Get the best out of the top generative AI engines with Prompt Hunt.

• 3D Art- the new frontier!

  • Generate unique repeatable textures for your environmental assets.

  • Early text to 3D models from Nvidia and OpenAI.

  • Convert 2D to 3D assets instantly with Kaedim and 3DFY. None of these products are perfect yet, but they can shave hours off of your asset production pipeline and allow you to focus on texturing and fine-tuning your 3D assets.

  • Promethean AI helps bring it all together with AI-assisted environment building.

• Sound

  • Spin up original tracks for your next soundtrack with Boomy. Get paid when your track is played on Spotify and other streaming services.

    • Can confirm this even works for the rhythmically challenged.

• Narrative

  • Write a compelling story with ChatGPT. It can even help you properly position the camera in cutscenes.

  • Rytr is a user-friendly solution for expanding upon your high-level narrative to generate detailed plots.

• Programming

  • Translate standard text prompt into code with OpenAI Codex.

  • Fix buggy code in an instant with ChatGPT (Unreal blueprints and Roblox Lua examples). Get not just clean code back, but an explanation and often a more elegant solution than you could find on GitHub.

    • Works great for long-tail problems that may not be easily searchable online!

• Quality Assurance

  • Unleash an army of learning smart AI bots to break your game. Modl.ai has also launched an AI-level generator to accelerate level creation for Match 3 games.

AI-Generated Startup Game of the Week

Free idea of the week: Pictionary.ai

• This one is pretty simple. It's classic Pictionary where your teammates must guess a word through just a drawing, but online!

• Instead of drawing, type in a prompt to generate a 2D image (using a plugin to Midjourney or similar), that your teammates must use to guess the word.

• Setup a list of banned words that can't be used in the AI prompt for each specific word.

• Play!

• For example:

  • The word is Mario. You must create an image using one text prompt that does not include any of the banned words below.

  • Banned words include: Mario, Luigi, Red, Italian, Plumber, Nintendo etc.

  • Your teammates then have to guess the word based on the image.

AI-Generated Tweet of the Week

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