2023 Is Going To Be A Rough Year For Game Developers

I try to convince people to slow down slow down AI to regulate AI. Okay, so I think that 2023 is going to be [music] a rough year for game developers. And trust me, I don't like saying this. Um, I'm a full-time indie game developer myself. I pay the bills for my family by making video games. But what I'm starting to see in the industry regarding, you guessed it, AI is kind of scary. [screaming] But hopefully by the end of this video, um, I'll have a a game plan or a blueprint for you. And I'm going to be using this strategy to be relevant and profitable in what I think is a difficult year, probably a difficult 5 years for indie game developers. So the reason, you know, why AI is so scary is because all of the aspects of making games are becoming so much easier with AI. So for example, story generation or there's another tool called Jasper AI. These tools can generate stories for us and the stories are more than competent. Um, they're better than most stories that I hear

from some of my, you know, friends when they have story ideas for a video game or a movie or something. My favorite is chat GPT. So, for example, if I wanted to create a story about, let's say, a rat whose mother ate rat poison and she was sick. Once there was a small [music] rat named Rascal who lived with his family in a cozy nest beneath the floorboards of an old farmhouse. Finally, [music] after many long weeks of travel, Rascal arrived at a distant land where he had heard there was a rare herb that could cure any illness. He searched high and low until he finally found the herb growing on a cliffside [music] high above the sea. So Rascal's journey had not been in and we can even use this as a baseline for stories that we want to use in our game. Or we can use it entirely. All right. Also art generation. Now obviously you guys know this, but Mid Journey and websites like Night Cafe, they can create some really good concept art, some 2D sprites, [music] or even some textures. A website that I really like to create textures is crayon.com. And you can generally create seamless textures, although you might need to go in Photoshop and tweak it to ensure that they are seamless. One of my favorite

aspects about art generation. I think this is kind of a missed opportunity for a lot of game developers. They don't realize this. You can create some really awesome concept art pieces, right? You can then pull your audience on which one they like the best or you can just look at the results, right? Upload your your concept art pieces and say, "This is a level that we're working on." And if it gets a lot of engagement, that means that it's a good piece of art. And you can utilize this poll to then decide which levels are going to look a certain way. You can maybe throw out some ideas that you thought were cool and rather pursue the ones that your audience thinks are cool. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, if your audience 90% of the time thinks one screenshot looks better than another, it's likely that all of the gamers who play your game will really like that level. The next thing that really scares me is sound and music generation. Now, the tools available like sounddraw.io or melabytes.com, these tools, they're not

that mature yet. Um, they're definitely in their infancy, but I think they're the most scary because in in their infancy, I'm still impressed. right now. Soundtrack.io, it's honestly not that impressive. We're going to talk about meabytes. Melabytes is very impressive. But soundraw.io, it just takes loops and chord progressions and, you know, tempos and then puts it together and creates something that sounds pretty good, but it sounds very generic. Melobytes.com, however, is remarkable. If [laughter] I wanted a song that sounded like a rat, I could upload an image of a rat. And the music that's outputed is bizarre. It's not wonderful. But you'll notice that it sounds kind of like a rat, right? And that's because I think that it's pulling data from this neural network or whatever, however it works. And it's finding that the tropes associated with rats are are instruments like accordians for some reason. Maybe it's from Ratatouille. I don't know. You can say do the same with sound. So, if you upload an image of Mario or like a

coin from Mario, you're going to get a list of sounds like, I don't know, change falling on a counter or a bag of coins or even like jumping sounds. You're going to get this big list of sounds in one audio file and you can cut those sounds up and use them in your game. Now, I I have no idea of the legal implications here. And I think we're going to start seeing some legislation, especially in America, about whether sourcing this kind of material, cuz I know these sounds are probably being sourced from all over online and brought into one file. Moving on is code generation. This one is I said sound was scary, but this one is is the cherry on top. Yesterday I decided to play around with chat GPT and see if it could generate code for me specifically for let's say like a platformer with floating islands with a firstp person character controller collecting coins. Okay, at first I was getting some really crappy code uh from my first person character controller. Sometimes my character controller would just fly off

the map for no reason. Other times I could look vertically but I couldn't look horizontally. [music] Right? But I slowly started to learn how to work chat GPT to get better code. I started small. So I would ask to just create a character controller. Then I would say I want it to be able to look right and left with the mouse. Then I would ask it to be able to jump and then double jump. And then I created a new script, a coin [music] uh generator that generates coins and places box colliders all over the scene. And I wanted them to be a yellow material. If you want to create code, you start small. You don't say some big elaborate game idea. [music] You start small and you slowly stack those scripts on top of one another. The final result was in certainly [music] bizarre, but it was impressive because all of this code was generated from chat GPT. The character control, the coin generator, the coin collection system, [music] the

island generator, the rotation of the islands. I even was able to generate code that created a humanoid with box colliders. This is not that bad. I don't know why his legs are all in one direction, but that's amazing. I was also able to get it to generate kind of a house, which is just remarkable. In its infancy, it's already doing this. [music] What's it going to do in 10 years? And that brings me to why all this is so scary. I think it's scary because anybody, even like a 5-year-old, can make games, [music] right? This is scary not because suddenly your great game is going to be overshadowed by a better game. Not necessarily. It's that all of a sudden the ocean of Steam, all the ocean of games that we're competing with, it's now a a universe, a galaxy of crappy, mediocre games that we all have to wade through and your great game is suddenly overshadowed. That's a scary thing. Now, even worse, if you decide to not master AI, then the individuals who master AI

and are also just generalists, those individuals are going to make better games because AI is a faster way of making games. And so, you can generate code in like 30 seconds that might take you [music] an hour to write. What do we do about being overshadowed by a lot of mediocre games, but a lot of also just great games that are utilizing AI? How do we win this race? Well, first, this is going to sound uh counterintuitive, but remain human. Okay? And the reason why I say this is because any art form, whether it's music or film or storytelling or games, is going to shine when it connects with a human being. Right? Your consumers are human beings and if your game really connects on a human level, whether it's the story or the music or everything in between. If it connects with a human being, it's going to be more profitable because people are going to love it. At the end of the day, someone playing your game,

they want to feel like you hear them, you understand them, but you also need to become ultra AI. I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm just saying that this is probably going to be the golden ticket that helps game developers win the race. Be ultra human, but be ultra AI. Meaning, I need you to understand how to speak the AI language, aka use AI tools with your current game development tools to create better games. Not only is this going to make you the fastest to market, but oddly enough, this is going to make you the most human. But here's an example. Let's say you jump into MidJourney, right? Um, which is the AI art generation tool. If you know nothing about Midjourney, your art looks like AI art. It's super bizarre. It almost looks demonic. But the more you understand how to use Midjourney, the more human your artwork looks. So, the better you understand AI,

the more human your game is going to look. And remember, that's the goal. The goal is to be the most human. So you need to on one hand understand human psychology and create beautiful human games, but you need to utilize AI to do it quicker and better, which is such a it feels counterintuitive, but that's going to be my goal. Some of you might be thinking, well, that games are different than than the arts. No, the arts are games. The arts are all encompassed in games. I think games are like the pinnacle of of human expression. That's just my opinion. Um, so anyway, be sure to uh to give that a try, guys. To master AI while also mastering being a human, right? Aka learn the tools, guys. Learn how to use them in 2023. All right. Leave a like. Subscribe.