There’s been a lot of talk about creating images with AI this year. When it came it completely blew my mind, I spent my evenings in MidJourney, trying different prompts, seeing what it would come up with. I followed the whole “art or not” discourse, and after initially taking a neutral stand, I have to go with the artists on this one. When an artist copies another artist, it eventually leads to developing their own style, while an AI only goes as far as the images it’s been fed. Also, when people includes artists in their prompts, and then claiming copyright and to be the creators of said art, it’s just deplorable behavior.
However, what AI is great at is having an open mind. It can create unexpected perspectives, just like a child, or a randomizer.
When creating levels, I often find myself hindered by my own imagination. We’re so used to how architecture flows in real life, it’s hard to create unique ways for the player to travel in games. Then it hit me, what if AI could create ideas for spaces?
I tried some different prompts, and finally landed at the simple “underground building”. It started spitting out rooms, and while most of them didn’t make sense at all, they all had a unique quality to them. For one, it didn’t care about keeping the floor intact. In the real world, walls and roofs can be found in a lot of different shapes, while floors are often completely flat. The output from the AI however, had the floors made out on different level heights, sometimes creating holes in interesting shapes.
I ended up printing a bunch of them out, and they’ve actually been a good source of inspiration during my level sketches.
