Art Directing in the AI Era with SciPlay's Peter Franco

If you ask me as an individual, um I'd say terrifying.
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Um now I'm saying that as not only someone who uses it heavily at work, but someone who's like invested in the stock market and everything. So like, you know, I think like everyone on Earth we're all like hitching our, you know, ride to this wagon and seeing what happens, but um it could easily go any number of directions. If you ask me like in the larger scope of things, you know, mildly terrifying. Um but hey, right? So far it's none of that's happened, knock on wood.
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Peter Franco, you've been in social casino since 2012. I wanted to ask what are the most common wrong assumptions artists make when working in social casino? Uh well, first of all, it's not been straight social casino. I've done a few stints in there, but yeah, I've been involved for sure since that time. Um I don't know, a lot of assumptions.

I think some people think it's a cakewalk or you can just uh come in and like uh phone it in as artistically. Um that's not how I like to operate, it's not like how I I like to operate my teams. Um I take every project, whether it's a mobile game, a triple-A, MMO, social casino uh as seriously as the next and um you know, just everything needs to have a holistic vision. Um a an artistic vision statement, something that you're trying to achieve visually or creatively or make the the user, the player feel. Um so I think those are the things that that I really like to push on the games and I think uh artists might might mistakenly think that it's just um disconnected and disjointed when that's and that's not what I uh the way I envision game development. So it's not just, you know, drawing pictures for slot machines. It's not just that. I mean, hey, that's

part of the job. You know, that's definitely a piece of it, uh, but there's also the bigger picture, um, and it's just as important if not more important, you know, it should should drive everything. What originally drew you to social casino? Good question. I mean, I just rolled off of these huge projects, um, back in Xbox 360 days like uh, zebra machine, uh, and normal maps was just becoming a thing, um, and the project team size was getting massive. So, I just burned out. iPhone 1 came out. I tried to, uh, do some iPhone games with a a friend of mine. Um, and then social casino just kind of popped up out of nowhere. Just started becoming this genre. Um, and Zynga opened up an office here and I joined up with Zynga, um, originally not even, I mean, kind of it was a it was a bingo game. They're also doing CityVille, um, and then slots just became, um, this this again like the genre that hadn't really appeared before. Um, it

was really creative for an artist, especially for a 2D artist. You it was like storybook. You could we could tell a a whole picture, tell a whole story, a whole um, novel, I guess, worth of of visuals. Um, and it was not something I'd previously done like a 2D game like that. So, um, each game had its own challenge and I did like a whole bunch of like cool games and cheesy games. I mean, we did like, um, Duck Dynasty slots. Like everyone it was just like, hey, how many different kind of slots can we generate? Um, and how quickly can we do it and, you know, get to market quick. Um, and, uh, but yeah, a couple of those really stand out in my mind. Eventually we've cut our teeth on enough product. We understood like what was the exciting mechanics behind slots and we developed some real killer ones like, um, Wizard of Oz slots. uh I was there when we started off the the Willy Wonka uh slots and then um broke off to do Black Diamond Casino uh where

we really at the time it was that was innovative cuz we were bringing Unity, unleashing the power of unit uh into the slots market which hadn't really been done before cuz it was such a 2D genre, it was such a flash-based genre. Cocos was being used heavily. Um so at that time using Unity just wasn't a thing. So trying to inject a little bit of um 3D, some sophisticated like shaders and graphics. Um So that Yeah. Um what drew me and what kept me is just like always trying to push the envelope even within like you know any kind of constraint there's always envelopes and walls to push against and I think that's that's always interesting to me no matter what the project. You've had quite the uh the career till date like chief creative officer at Rising Tide Games so you know that was acquired by Zynga, a a social casino company. You're senior creative director at Zynga. Then you were a VP of art at Scopely, also they acquired GSN Casino.

Um and now senior art director at SciPlay. How has the uh the role of an art director changed in this category since you've started? What's really different? I can tell you specifically at SciPlay um it's a lot more operationalized in the sense that um when I started it was uh the wild west, everyone had to do everything. So you're making the slots games themselves which is very exciting. Um And then you also have to make the the meta, the wrapper, the kind of the core loop, the larger core loop, all those assets and designs and everything. Um And what was just one team doing all of that. Um So in in a sense it was it was great in that you can keep the game kind of self-contained, but in the other sense it was hard to really um push in any one of those areas like with a small team. It's hard to do all the slots, all of them incredible, but also have this incredible um meta core loop that's well thought through and like

really uh keeping up with the industry. Um so now at SidePlay, that's like I said more operationalized. It's divided. We have a team that focuses on the slots. Um also because the market has kind of uh become smaller and like it's larger studios that are left, right? So big players, people with that have connections to real uh real money gaming slots like SidePlay. So you know, Light & Wonder has the real slot machines. We bring them into our game. So we have we're able to have a team just focus on that experience, make it as as great as possible, and then we here at Austin we're able to focus on the core loop, the meta, all these uh other things that drive day-to-day engagement, make people want to come in, spend coins, collect the currencies. Um So and that's that's kind of how it's it's changed, I guess. The business has gotten both bigger and smaller, I guess.
You stayed as an in in the art side of slot machines or social casino. Because we had in the previous past podcast from

SidePlay, Justin McCrallin, and he started out as a 3D artist working on social casino games and ended up being a GM of one of these titles. Have you ever flirted of going on the business side? I think I've uh always been interested in the creative side of things. Um I've definitely dabble plenty on the business side. So even right before I joined SidePlay, I was looking to start a company with some of my uh friends next colleagues from Zynga and we were talking with a lot of VC. Um I mean, I've been in industry for quite a while, so I I do have a lot of connections and contacts and folks that have just um gone on to do different types of aspects of of business development, So, that's um it's something that continues to interest me. Um even in my role here, I feel like I wear like I have like one foot in the creative world, but also the foot in all the KPIs and and like understanding what's going to keep the lights on and like how do we really maximize that? And I think that's By the way, that's what makes a good art

director nowadays. You're talking about like how it's changed. Um it's not just about making art. Like you also have to deeply understand the business side of things. Otherwise, your art um may not make sense, you know? Like it may not fit in the game. And then you're going to get like endless feedback from everyone else who's trying to get push the business forward. But if you yourself have a deep understanding of all of that, then you can just do it right the first time. Um But yeah, I mean it's uh it's changed quite a bit and it's it's also I haven't um it's like I said earlier, I haven't just been in social casino, either. So, I was able to move around in the industry and I think like glean a lot of different um skill sets or piece of information that I could bring to like kind of back to social casino when I came back here. Um And so, that's kind of what I'm trying to do with this the game I'm on right now, Gold uh Goldfish Casino. We're trying to refresh it. Um and I'm trying to bring all the things that I've kind of picked up along the way at Scopely

when we were doing you know, anything from like word puzzle games to MMO to um AAA um large brand IP titles, all that kind of stuff. We we figured out how like the hard way how to really make these all these titles like accessible like to mass market. Uh and that's what I'm trying to do here as well side playing Goldfish. You mentioned understanding of the business side of of the operations. I think that's hugely important. Through through through my careers, I do have to say art director is the uh the number one title of um professionals that I've parted ways more often in in studio head or GM positions and the ones that I absolutely loved working with and would love always to work again is the ones who were interested in the business side, who were interested in the user acquisition, who were interested in in all the aspects and wanted to learn because they made a great collaborators. And then at the same time if the if the art director was only focused on

cultivating the art team and their artistic vision, that always ended up in and then butting heads with everybody else because they were kind of driving their own lane and almost creating this little fiefdom inside of a team. Yeah, yeah. And one quick point on that, too, is like back in 2012, let's say, if you wanted to redesign a character like we're doing on this project right now, it would have been just probably a small group of um making a new character and and it may or may not have resonated with the audience, but that is a big difference about today. Like understanding you saying the KPIs and and the business side of things, when we did it this time around, we now have access to our users and all their data and stuff, so we did surveys with VIPs and users and it was very marketing exercise, um, very much data-driven, um, and then and then that would go into the loop with the artists and we try to figure out how to like, "Hey, this is what you know, our audience is saying they want. How do we can how can we interpret that and give them what they want?" And after, you know, several rounds, we were able to figure out that they like the current goalie, but they

wanted more emotional states. So, we use that to influence how we're uh, how we created the new rig to make sure that we leverage that so it looks familiar, but we were giving them something new with it. So, um, but yeah, that's that's how you fuse all this like the business sense with the art sense and just that's how it's done now. So, talking about infusing business sense with art sense, in your experience, what makes a good art in social casino? I mean, art great art is great art, for sure. Um, but ultimately you have to interact with it. It has to be smooth, fluid. Transitions have to be seamless. The way screens come on and different features interact with each other. That to me is kind of this very small niche of of art game development. In fact, it's often kind of forgotten because it lives right between engineering and art and like technical art and all this. So, it's

it's something I love fighting for. The seamlessness and the fluidity of the larger game. And because no one else kind of will. I don't even know whose job it is to do that. I guess you know, it's somebody's got to do it. It's usually I guess the art director, but it could also be and a lot of people could be the director of product. It could be director of engineering, but as long as someone's really fighting for that. Cuz I've seen, by the way, it sounds trivial, but you see some games where it's just choppy or chunky or when you go between screens, there's like all these pops and jitters and that stuff just drives me nuts. So, that's not like a true art thing like a artist thing to go after is an art role. It's an experience. It's a you know, visual experience. Huh. And talking about like your experiences with different styles, is there a specific styles that that would perform better with social casino audience? Well, I can tell you like very specifically one of the things that we're trying to do right now in this product is

inject a new style, right? Um, I think historically a lot of social casino has been highly illustrated and it's still what works and you know, the slots themselves, they are illustrated experience. But the the game, the mobile game, the app, if you want to think of it that way, um, I think it's a lot for a lot of slots games, Um, that part hasn't been thought of as much. Um, and it was something in my previous uh, several previous jobs we focused a lot on um, kind of modernizing the UI. And so now we're trying to bring this flat 2.0 aesthetic which had been trending for like whatever 10 plus years. It was a reaction to the flat flat uh, movement whatever the UI movement back in the Windows 8 whatever which is you know, the it just 100% flat. Just graphic flat. Uh, and then the flat 2.0 came out and like hey, we can have some shallow depth. Still keep things flat. Um, and we're applying that across the

UI. It maximizes legibility, maximizes uh, kind of surface area for information. Um, it's what's been trending in mobile for a long time. So, making sure that we bring um, some of those things. And and I think the reason in my mind why this makes sense is because um, social casino like had a ton of great ideas starting back in 2012. And then you have other genres like uh, just casual, hybrid casual. They've been slowly but surely looking at social casino, taking some of their best tips and tricks like all the anticipation and the the the gotcha reveals and like the single the red big red button mechanics. Um, and you know, molding it into their own genres. And so we've been losing slowly but surely market share to these genres. So, I think making social casino styled now in reverse after that genre when we bring back and hopefully people realize that those same core mechanics are just you know, here and that probably were

born here. Um, they'll come back and they'll seem familiar and comfortable. So, uh, I mean in our user base we like I think like 60 to 70% of our users play Monopoly Go. Um, so making our aesthetic kind of mirror some of those genres like Monopoly Go and like the other titles out there, the big titles. Uh, again when we get those users coming back, they'll be more likely to hang out, give it a shot. We got a wider funnel, and that's that's kind of the importance in going back again to for an artist and art director to understand the business of it helps a lot, and it can kind of give you maybe um some clearer thoughts and maybe on strategies and how to approach the art direction. Is it so that the social casino players kind of treat the the games similar way that real casino clients or slot clients would treat the uh the machine. So, basically, you you pick your favorite machine, and you work on it until it goes cold, and you go to the next one

that is, you know, you already know what the next one is. And the same type of a funnel you would have also on your phone where there's the uh the number one game, the number two game, the number three game. So, once this goes cold, I'm going to go to the next one. Is that still uh the way players play? Web stores, you've seen what good looks like, but have you seen great? AppCharge is the direct-to-consumer platform backed by the likes of Supercell and built by monetization pros from Moon Active, Pltica, Huge Games, and others. People who know the difference. AppCharge powers over half a billion dollars in transaction a year for top studios, optimizing every detail. Deeply personalized web store offers, custom-made design, industry-leading monetization features, in-game payments SDK, and more. 70% of top-grossing games already have a web store, but the ones scaling fastest, they're doing it with AppCharge. Learn more at appcharge.com.

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Yeah, for sure. I saw how our game is modeled. You know, we release new games weekly. Um we have in our game um which I don't know if it's that common, but we have like a favorites mechanic. So, you can actually heart and favorite your favorite slots, so the ones that you think are hot or paying up the best for you. Um and then you can revisit those all the time. I have my like, you know, subset and then um and uh yeah, I think players do play like that. And in fact, I have my least favorite, the ones that never paid it paid me out or you know, in my mind, I'm pretty sure these were like the unlucky ones, right? Um Of course, that's not the case. There's no such thing as truly unlucky or lucky slots, but you know, it's how you feel. Huh. Talking about creativity in in social casino, can how far can you push it? Like the to my understanding, the player base is a little bit more conservative. Um players are probably like middle-aged people.

I mean, it's not unique to social casinos. Like where can you push creativity? You can have like the the largest, most successful um triple-A company and still it may not make sense to push anything creatively. I've I've come up with like concepts myself that and I presented to senior leadership and they're like, this is just too creative. Um which is a funny thing always to hear as a creative director, but it's it's can also be true, you know. Um So, I think honestly, I think things need to be familiar. I think things need to feel comfortable. They can't be too crazy. Um and like I was saying earlier, I don't know, hopefully it didn't break up, but I mean, that's what I'm one of the things that we're trying to do here is create uh a UI that is familiar, so that again, our our player base coming that which, you know, 70 80% of them plays a lot of these um kind of hybrid casual games out there, it it does feel comfortable and and familiar. Um but if you ask me personally, of course, I love being as creative as possible, uh but you know, those are usually that's more when I'm doing more of the

indie kind of stuff, you know, then you're trying to get acquired and you you can take those chances there, I guess, but um but less so, I think in a a larger company. Just have to kind of thread the needle. Um but even within that, again, like I said the very top of the podcast is like within any kind of constraint, any box, there's walls to push against even there. So, um it's not like there's zero creativity. That'd be weird, too. It's like you have to How creative can you be within these constraints? And there's a lot There's a lot of room to do there. So. So, there's essentially pros and cons because you have an existing audience. You are working against the uh the the the wants and needs of that audience. And of course, if you're trying to create something new, then you're working to stand out in the market. And And probably those are very different elements to chase.
Yeah. And people are are just by default resistant to change. I mentioned we did a survey with new versions of our mascot, and they were like, "Well, we like our current one. We don't need a

change." Um but then we just released like a new splash screen with our newer mascot, and it looks It frankly does look a little bit different just by necessity cuz it's rotating these types of things. And our VIPs responded very positively to that. They It was a refreshing change. So. Um it It's just hu- almost human nature. You ask people in any kind of marketing survey, what do they want to change? It's hard for you to answer it. They don't know. No one knows what they don't know yet.
You talked about working with different IPs throughout your career. And And I'm curious to understand what is the role of those IPs in social casino? Like what does an IP solve uh from both commercial and creative perspective? I mean, commercially, I'm sure you've heard plenty of people on your podcast talk about it. I mean, definitely gives you a leg up in the market. You know, right now, getting new users uh is really really difficult with some of the new constraints on user acquisition that's out there. So, um it's not as

easy as it used to be to find out players' information of where they came from. Or, you know, you you rely a lot more on organics and organic installs. So, having an IP helps all that. Like a lot of it cuz people may already be seeking out the the IP that you're sitting on. Um and then, you know, stumble upon your game. So, from the marketing and, you know, user acquisition standpoint, it's key. From the new the new, you know, universe of user acquisition, it's also key. From creative stand standpoint, it fast-tracks a lot of like the early concept and pre-production phase because a lot of those things are solved. It doesn't delete it. Like there's still a lot uh for example, a Goldfish, that brand um the first Goldfish slot came out uh I don't know, early 2000s, a long time ago. Um and the mobile game came out 20 12, I can't remember, like 2014, something like that. Um And so, that's an established IP, but

even with that, there's still a lot of creative uh exploration to to kind of go through. Um cuz you still have to forge and craft this universe. What are the rules of the illustration? What kind of um like in in right now what we're doing is we're doing a lot of kind of painted reality that we're put out pushing the background uh like fading it out the values to make sure that UI and information is as legible as possible because we have this older demographic you talked about. So, a lot of things that in our that we're trying to do right now uh and it's not, by the way, just exclusively older demographic. I mean, we have a a wide range of players, but um but we definitely, let's say, are uh maybe a older demographic than like Pokémon or some of these other games. Um So, legibility is is super key, right? Um So, that's influencing how we create the our paintings and our illustrations in the background. Make sure the values are compressed. So, we reserve the the highest amount of contrast for the UI. Um

So, uh kind of went on a tangent there, but the IP, you know, I think is is hugely helpful, and I think it's it's now kind of you know, it's not required, but way more common than I think it it it used to be just because of how competitive it is to get new players, stand out in a marketplace that's kind of contracting a little bit post pandemic. And how how do you go around choosing the the perfect IP that would fit the game that you're working on? A lot of times, honestly, at at least the companies that I've worked on, we already had like it was just I don't know what to call it, sitting on a shelf. Like, either someone had already had these IPs, and people have been trying to uh, create a game. I mean, here at SciPlay, we have a lot of IPs uh, because Light & Wonder owns a ton of slot machines, and some of them are more successful than others. Some of them are yeah, they're entire franchises. Like, people go to the various slots uh, casinos to find at least a version of the game of that uh,

that they like to play. Um, like either Huff and Puff or uh, games like that where and Goldfish itself has had several iterations of Goldfish. So, people look out for these franchises. So, with Light & Wonder sitting on a lot of these franchises, uh, any one of those could make a a its own standalone IP game. In the game of growth, everyone is looking for that power up. VIBES is exactly [music] that. It's built by industry people, so they actually get the challenges you're dealing with. As a result, they've become the fastest [music] growing game five rewards platform out there. And the results are kind of nuts. With their AI-powered targeting, you're not just buying installs, you're bringing [music] in the right players. And now, they've got this new ROAS optimization engine, so your campaigns [music] basically level up automatically. VIBES is built different. It's designed for growth, and I guess you could say it's powered [music] by good vibes. Check out their DOF exclusive case studies by [music]

following the link in the description and go to vybs.co. That's vybs.co. Share your email and join the waitlist list. Um I'm I'm I'm curious to talk about like how the how the work has changed with with AI. I think that's a that's a big topic, but it seems to be even bigger topic for artists. A taboo to to some of them, definitely. Um curious to hear how AI is being used inside art pipelines at Sideplay today.
Our game is predominantly a 2D game. We use um in art development, we'll still use a lot of 3D tools to create these 2D assets. So, we'll sometimes we'll use Blender to uh model out different environments or different angles of camera views. Um uh But ultimately, the assets most of them come in and they're two-dimensional. So,

we use AI and AI happens to do a lot of 2D art. Now, what it doesn't do a great job of yet, but it's getting better every single month is separating those two two 2D assets so that we could um let's say animate them. Let's say if it's a character, you kind of want to puppet it or some like jointed so you can um easily articulate it. Uh So, the way that we're using it right now though is for early on, so in concept art. I think this is what most game developers are doing because it does a great job of that, just ideation. It does a really good job if you if your expectations are very wide. If you want something very particular, it gets a little more challenging. Um but if you're exploring, it's great. So, we do it for concept development. We use it We also have a a of um we train our own models here at Sideplay, so we're using for logo development, which we do a lot of if we have like certain sales or events or quests that are branded within the game.

And we feed it our certain art style, so we'll get assets for that. Uh we do it for individual asset creation. Actually, we use it for quite a bit. Um you can use it it's it's getting really good now at uh what it it used to like 6 months ago it used to be really hard to say, "Hey, uh just change the shirt I'm wearing." You know, make make it uh I don't know a red shirt or give it give me some suspenders. You know, it would probably change the entire image just inadvertently. But now you can do it and precisely change the just the shirt or just put suspenders on the shirt and it'll look like everything's unchanged. So now we're using that same technology to create stages for nodes. Like for example, in one of our quests, let's say you have this you have to build up a farm, right? And the farm starts with a just the the plot of land and then slowly, you know, you put like the stakes in the ground and then the plants come up and the plants sprout, you know, fruit or whatever. Uh AI is great at that, so it'll do those stages and it just saves a ton of

time. So the artist can focus on either the the initial line drawing or take concepts that comes out of AI itself uh kind of photo bash it the same way that you would use uh and we still use like just the internet or Pinterest or whatever. Just anywhere you can just kind of get ideas and you take these, "Oh, cool. I like that that uh background. I like this foreground element. I like this character." Put together, paint over it um and then feed that back into AI, get the states like I was mentioning of the farm. So it's just it's a lot of back and forth. Um so the it takes a certain amount of familiarity and it's also it's now where AI is finally getting to um but it's uh well, I you know, I I feel like you're going to you're some of your next questions are going to be like, is it is it uh What's the What's the reaction to it or something, right? So, it's it's a tough pill, right? I mean, it's like it's creatively it's really, you know, in invading and intruding in what artists

enjoy doing, right? So, um artists, yeah, I'm myself being one of them, you know, really like to get be creative and solve all the creative problems and have it all authored by your own hand, you know. Um So, it does take a little letting go of that um and you know, it's it's not great, but this is also a business and we're here to it's work, so we can be 100% creative outside of work, but um here anything that gives us a leg up and can help us move a little faster these are things that we have to be looking at seriously and um so, yeah, is it, you know, that's that's kind of how we're using it right now, I guess. And I went off on a little
Yeah. philosophical tangent there. But but that that's what I mean, I think I think it it warrants a philosophical conversation because artists are understandably anxious with these tools. As you said, it takes away some of the elements that they actually love making and that creativity part of it, where you're working on something and your creativity kind of gets sparked because

it takes time, it takes trial, it takes some error, it takes figuring out and and result is something very interesting. So, I'm curious of like like how do you tell them to approach AI as a tool rather than this technology that is going to replace them. What it kind of does it allows uh artists to become like everyone to become an art director, a little mini art director cuz you now have what is essentially an army of artists in this AI box, right? So, um if you approach it that way and you're kind of like you know, as an art director you ask artists or your team, whatever, to create art and not everything some it's like creating art is a imperfect and random and chaotic process. So, some some artists or some art pieces might come back exactly how you envisioned it, some maybe not, but but different and better. Uh and some maybe just don't miss the mark. Um and that's part of being art director and like living with you know uh with that reality. Uh it's the same

thing with AI, too. Like, you know, you say you're going to ask AI, "Hey, oh, I wasn't expecting that." Or "This is exactly what I want." Or "This is" So, um and it allows you to do that very quickly. So, if you kind of put on your everyone everyone puts on their art director hat. Um And I And by the way, that's probably where everything's going anywhere anyway. It's like more and more uh work is going to be able to be delegated to AI in a sense and then you know it's going to be a lot of AI or sorry, art like leadership and management is generating it. So, um I think if you think of it, if you frame it that way, that helps a little bit and then um it I like helps you able to better use like if the technology or whatever you want to call it. Um But yeah, it's uh it's definitely a thing of concern. Like, it's a real angst in the universe. Um you know, once you once you leave work and you think about AI uh and the reality's like what it what it might be doing to art and music and it's not just that. Like, programming

and you know, society's ability to cognitively process things cuz like people now are just relying more and more on you know, chat GPT to spit out their emails or their speeches or whatever. I don't know. The thing is no one knows. We can all guess, but we really don't know where it's going to go, you know. Are we going to run out of power sources first or are we going to run out of brain cells first? I don't know, you know. Even just considering like Google Maps or any map service. Like, before we had them, people actually need to think where they're driving and how they're getting there and you know, and now you just if you don't have Google Maps open, you don't know where to drive. Or it's like, it's like a mandatory thing. And if we wouldn't have Google Maps, I think we'd be all lost. I don't know if we'd be able to drive even to work. Yeah, there's a reliance on that, and there's a I mean, it's funny cuz even that lets you move faster, right? Like Waze. You like in my case, I know how to get to work every day, but I need to know exactly, maybe I don't need to know this, but like, what time am I going to arrive? Or like, you know, there might be an accident. I can do

nothing about it, but Waze is going to tell me about it. So, at least my brain I can be more at peace. No, I'm going to be late. So, it's I guess similar with AI at at the workplace. It allows us to get there faster. Um but yeah. Are we going to be more stuff relying on it? Probably as well at some point, I would imagine, you know, just um And but I hope I not only do I kind of don't think it's going to be 100% the case, I kind of don't want it to be the case either because you still need to put your stamp on. Like I said, the way we're using it and maybe this is not the way it'll be used forever, but it's very much photo bashing. Um it's very rarely that you just ask AI to do something and it just comes out and you just put that in a game. In fact, it never happens. It's impossible. Uh maybe impossible is strong language, but it's largely impossible because things have to be prepped, chopped, uh has to be ingested by the tech art unity. It's not just a flat piece of art. That's just not how our game works, that's how game development works.

Um things need to be sorted and optimized, uh you know, uh for draw calls. There's a There's a million kind of parameters that need to be thought through that AI is just not generating for you. Um let alone the composition and all that stuff. So, um you still need to be a good artist on multiple levels. You know, will that change in the future? Uh possibly, if we have enough computational power and we get the press button and make game button. Um maybe, but right now it's just you still need a good artist to stitch everything together, understand the composition, understand the color, understand how these things you might get some nice elements, but might not solve the creative problem that you're there to solve. So, the artist gets in there, solves it for you, then that needs to be handed off to the next person who's not AI, also needs to ingest and process that. Then the UI person who's not AI, they might have gotten ideas from AI, they might have gotten aspects of AI, but um they still need to integrate everything with a a human touch. Yeah, I think you're you're referring to

a I think called taste, which is very very important. And and um the question there is like how do you maintain that stylistic consistency across your game or games when AI can essentially generate endless variations instantly. And especially you mentioned like leadership can do it, but you know, I can do a ton of stuff with AI and it is quite sloppy, especially if I start doing visual things. I can do million thumbnails and they're all going to look very different and it's going to be, you know, just not consistent. It's it's not not to brand. So, curious how how do you approach this because the output is so vastly increased. Game devs, here at Heroic Labs we know that great gameplay is what players love, but integrating meta game features [music] like challenges, progression, and rewards is crucial for retention and monetization.

But coding them is a tedious and time-consuming process. [music] That's why top studios have turned to Hero from Heroic Labs. Hero provides a complete suite of battle-tested meta game features that are [music] quick to implement, letting you spend more time on the core gameplay experience. Ready to ship fully featured engaging games? Check out Hero today at heroiclabs.com. [music] Yeah, I mean that's a good question. Um and if you are not careful it can get very imperfect and we're not immune to that. Like uh and if you ask a lot of artists I think that's that's probably one of their largest complaints too is like hey how do we wrangle this, how do we keep consistency? Um, there's a few ways that we can do that. Like a lot of uh we use layer AI right now which is one of our tools. Um and it allows you to drop in images both as reference and style like or um you can drop in lines uh either drawn by the artists or just found im- images um that really help constrain the style.

So you can you can regulate style from like the line drawing phase. Um you we also train models here. So uh which we've had a good and bad success with. I think we can push that even further frankly and I think that's the future too is like once you have enough critical mass is like it's almost art directing the model and then the model itself becomes the art director. Uh then you use that model to spit out future uh just imagery from AI. Um so those are a few ways that we can do it and then ultimately like I said right now we rely still heavily on our human artists right? Like so those are the people who uh you're going to get something from AI usually and it's it might be way like still way too like a lot it just it just Pixar by default like if you ask it you know it'll do super real or if you try stylize it's going to be Pixar. And we're we're we want a kind of a painted reality of sorts so we'll take whatever we you know as close as we can get it there but we still have

to like kind of treat it and craft it and and harmonize and marry these images and get the values set right. You know, insert certain elements so it's a combination of all of those ways that we kind of art direct the AI. Mhm. Talking about AI and how important it is going forward and how it evolves. What do you think are the future skills that art directors will need to have with with AI being more and more important element of your work? You'll need to have experience using it. Um It that's It's an interesting one because it is evolving so quickly. So, we have uh bi-weekly calls with people training us on the latest AI, the newest models coming out, the newest functionality. Uh cuz that's how quickly either new models are dropped or new functionality. Um So, I I really think you just need to

not just like think like you learned AI or you use it once or whatever. Like you need to constantly be keeping up with it. Um because what you thought was impossible 4 months ago is like now common today. Um like green screening, dropping out elements at like you can add audio to movies, uh just with prompts, you know, you can um you can dictate the uh f- first frame, last frame with movies that you create. So, you can create your loops or like near loops and then get you know, take that into After Effects and smooth that out. There's just so much functionality that didn't exist again just a few months ago, which exists now. Um So, yeah, that's I think every art director will need to be constantly up to date with everything that AI can do. What's way for artists to be up to date with the evolution of AI? That's a good question. So, right now we're spoiled here. So, we have uh you know, Sci-Fi treats us well and we have

uh people training us directly from the layer AI side, which is a tool that we use and you know, they they take that very seriously. So, they fund their own people who are like constantly keeping up with it. Um On the outside, you know, I don't have great recommendations cuz I've been living here for a while, so I would just seek out, you know, I'm sure like game dev uh organizations and groups, hopefully the serious ones if they could uh they're kind of doing that and like they have like different AI I I know I've seen um lots of AI sessions which I haven't joined because again, I didn't need it here, but they're happening all over town here in Austin, Texas, you know, a big tech hub, so um yeah, not don't have great advice there right now, but there's tons of it. Yeah, you you be you're you're taking care of, so others have to kind of figure out. It's one area I don't know. Apologize. And join Sidequest and you learn about AI.
Perfect.
[laughter]
Um okay. Um

what do you think your job will look like in 5 years? You know, it might be a core team of experts uh working with an art director um leveraging AI quite a bit. You know, this is a really hard question because it depends if AI gets more fully involved on the Unity side of things and uh like the ingestion of assets. Um I think beyond like 5 years and you know, it's easy to start talking about sci-fi kind of stuff and like you know, you don't know what's going to be real. Like is this Black Mirror? Is this going to be like normalized?
So so let's let's turn it around. What stays the same? What do you think won't change? I think having good traditional art skills is is going to be key and maybe perhaps a differentiator um between people who just spit out AI and you know, hope for the best or someone who can like add something new to it. And then also, you know, people talk about AI

just being like a a self-feeding cycle, right? Cuz it's it's you know, trained on things that it's being trained on and then it spits out things that it then it in return gets trained on again. Um so eventually there's going to be something orthogonal to that that like doesn't live in that that core loop, the AI core loop. Um and that'll probably be generated by individuals, by indie studios, people just doing styles that AI just wouldn't I don't know, obviously generate, let's say. Um So, yeah, I think uh extreme creativity, extreme like traditional skills, I think will be remain important. Um We might not have the army of artists that we needed to to create games anymore. Like I think that'll change. Um So, and I think that what there might be an like the highest level side of things, maybe more of a push to the business side, the product side, to marketing because those people will have now the

you know, easier way to create creatives. Um So, yeah, I think there'll be a a push in that direction. Um So, I wanted to kind of end this. I have a bunch of questions, so I put them all together into rapid fire.
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So, let's start with the first one. What's your favorite slot theme of all time? Well, you know, I have a soft spot for uh I mentioned it earlier in the podcast, Wizard of Oz slots. It was one of my First of all, it's a great brand and IP, just so full of Technicolor, uh and then it has like that journey from like the sepia tone to Technicolor, so it has all of that, has so much so many different creative elements, characters, uh aspects. So, when we worked on that game, I loved it. Um it's one of my favorite games that uh I've worked on in slot space. Um and they've done I've seen great like land-based slots based on it. The mobile one we did, I think still stands, uh you know, apart just creatively how we how we did it, even though it's very dated now at this point. So, yeah, that's probably my favorite. Mm. Who's the one artist that has influenced

your visual taste the most. Interesting. Like my my personal Well, I could tell you like I just so many good artists. I mean you know I think Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Sargent and some of these painters from the turn early turn of the century um they were phenomenal and what they were able to do with just bright colors and simple strokes. Um so that definitely influenced me as an you know individual as a an oil painter which is my previous life. I used to do oil paintings a lot. Um So but yeah, there's so many great artists. But those those are just a couple that just jump out, you know, I just love their stuff. Nice. Um all right. So if you could redesign any non-casino games art direction, which one would you choose? That's a tough one. Maybe Okay. Maybe this might be an easy one to

pick. I don't know. But maybe the New York Times uh like their game page just cuz uh I feel like there's a lot that could be done there. I mean it's pretty easy and you know, it makes sense. Um but there's also a lot. It'd be a fun project to kind of think about how to game like even further gamify that. And they're leaning more and more into games like New York Times with all their their spelling bee and like crosswords and stuff. So I could see a world where they're going to keep pushing that too. So That'd be my answer.
you clearly like everything with with a lot of constraints and then you can just go in and and then figure that out. Right. Okay. Um what's the most underrated skill for a game artist? I think it's really a great skill to understand the entire pipeline. So um very rarely do you see like phenomenal 2D artists that know how to like do animation and then maybe even have done

I mean it takes takes time and you have to be in it for a while. Though I mean kids come out of school now they they make their own games, you know, as part of their graduation for our graduating uh project. So um But yeah, I think the more you can understand the entire pipeline um the better off you're going to be and the faster you can move through the industry, I think. Mhm. What's the first thing you look for in an art portfolio? This may be a little counter to my previous comment, but it it depends. We still look for specialists, you know, every in every kind of game development. So we have we're looking for animators, technical artists, uh um 2D concept artists, visual effects. So for each of those you're looking for proof of like uh specialization or like craftsmanship in those areas, you know, like uh um You do want to even though I think

there's a lot of value in understanding the entire pipeline you want to choose your focus and really have a lot of examples that that showcase that. Um So that the downside with knowing the entire pipeline is it's hard to stand out, hard to have a good portfolio. Cuz how do you how do you show that, "Hey, I'm good at everything." So specializing, focusing, that's a key part of portfolio. AI, is it more exciting or more terrifying? I know you we had we had this philosophical conversation, but where would you put it? Uh this is tough. If you're asking me as an individual um I'd say terrifying.
[laughter]
Um Now I'm saying that as not only someone who uses it heavily at work, but someone who's like invested in the stock market and everything. So like, you know, I think like everyone on Earth we're all like hitching our, you know, ride to this wagon and seeing what happens. But, um it could easily go any number of directions. You know, and I'm not I'm

not just talking about video gaming now. I'm talking about like the future of uh military use of AI and like, you know, um encryption for our you know, personal savings accounts. Like there's so many different things that could Extinction event. Not quite zero.
you ask me like in the larger scope of things, you know, mildly terrifying. Um but hey, right? So far it's none of that's happened. Knock on wood.
[laughter]
Uh-oh. Okay, on to the next one. So, um what visual trend in mobile games need to go away? Um visual trend needs to go away. Um Hm. That's a good question. Um I'd be happy if anything regarding those

fake ads would go away. I don't I think I don't know if that's a that's a visual trend.
[laughter and gasps]
I think those are going away though. So, I mean Well, we've been talking about it for years. Well, yeah. But, no, one new trend I guess I'm seeing is the um yeah, marketing will create let's say fake ad and like cuz they can get going back to the artist market data, they can find out which of these fake ads works the best and then it's uh then they create the game I mean it's not as fast as that, but then you I've seen games created retroactively based on that mechanic or like, you know, um was it Royal Match I think? You know, they had they their ads with the save the king, you know, those things were working so well that they brought that slowly but surely folded into the game itself. Or those those ads that you see the time with like the you're shooting uh choosing which alley which lane to shoot in and stuff like that. Yes. Yeah, Top War and and all that kind of thing.
Yeah. It's like what is it called? Top Z or like

It's They all use the same
I forgot what it Yeah, they all have the same thing. And now those games are developed now, too, so that is Now, should that trend go away? I don't I mean that's it's it's a reversal of the creativity of game developers, so Okay, here's here's one thing I would love to see go away. Um I don't think it's ever going away though, sadly. Um it's the ability to tell a story. Um So, cuz mobile gaming now is so business-oriented, right? Like the last thing you want is the game to end. Let alone you like so it's really difficult to have an arc, a creative moment like where there's like as a player like you're faced with like this game-changing decision. You have to and then it it comes to a conclusion, it's satisfying, it's like oh I I did it. I solved this one, I put it away. Um I would I would love for that to kind of make its presence known again. I just don't see how that would happen just cuz it's sheer amount Maybe with AI?

Interestingly, maybe AI makes game developments like chapter and episodic development so easy and quick that we can maybe get back to that in a in a weird way. It might might save But right now we can't, so it's just a it's a treadmill. It's a content treadmill right now by necessity cuz it's a business, you have to keep it running and you can't So, narrative suffers, story suffers. Yeah. So, I'd love for that to kind of end and come back. Yeah, it's still still in paid games and still in console games and I think it's coming back even more because they kind of didn't make the transition to free-to-play or games [clears throat] as a service, so I think they're doubling down on that. Uh two more. Second to last. One piece of career advice you wish someone gave you at the start. Um well, I don't know how critical this is, but like now where where I'm at is um I did not have a a good sense of business. Um and yeah, this probably could have

helped me earlier on. Now, what what as a result what I did is I just focused on my art skills and I think that served me well and serves any artist well that wants to get into this industry. So, really honing and it's impossible to to do everything, right? But, I do wish art schools did force a track on that or like had a little bit more of a uh uh bi- like a bias or like a you just kind of tell you know, how to artists how to run a business, how to seek venture capital, like let's say they want to go out on their own. What does it mean? Like even negotiating I guess like even negotiating your own contract at a at a studio. Like basic things like that. Um where it's like very commonplace for people in product uh because they're all coming out of MBAs from various like Ivy League schools and all this stuff. So, not only do they learn that at school, but their peer groups it's just part of that uh that the vi- the department, but um

in other departments even, but in the creative side not so much. So, you you kind of come out into the world a little dough-eyed and not knowing, you know, what if people are taking advantage of you or even how to how to take advantage of opportunities that come your way. Like you just might not even recognize it or I don't know what it is. So, yeah. Um Yeah, and you and you're coming from an environment where everybody is an artist and nobody's, you know, nobody has that business sense. So, it feels normal and then then you get into the real world and then there's, you know, it's full of these sharks Yeah.
that will take an advantage of you because you don't understand the game that they're playing. Yep. Yep. Mm. Totally. All right. Well, final question. If you could give one piece of advice to an artist who wants to grow into an art director in the era of AI in social casino, what would that be? I think managing people is key part of things. Um I think being a really

I think to to go up the the art management ladder, you have to be really good at one aspect of art. So, a lot of times it's concept art. It's like classic traditional art. Not all the time though. Sometimes you people come in through like animation track. Visual development.
Visual development. Yeah. There's a lot of ways to do it. Um but more often than not, at least maybe in in like the in the social casino because it's such a 2D kind of uh world, a lot of it is 2D artists and concept artists. But whatever it is, become a rock star in that one area. I think that's step one. Um so, really really show that you you can do that one piece. And then um then next step, I mean there's multiple steps. The next step after that is then you do ultimately need to know like the whole development, right? So, you need to break out of that little area and understand deeply the entire process of game development or you'll be kind of just confused the entire time. Um And then there's like so much so much on

top of that, too. Then you need to know really how to manage people. Like there's all these management managerial like training classes and like tricks. You know, like Ohio only handle it once or like, you know, the four quadrants. How do you how do you how do you move your um critical and time sensitive, you know, problems versus uh critical and non-time sensitive. And like just all these like tips and tricks of self-management and managing others. Got to understand that to some degree. And then the last piece, of course, is the KPI and the business side that we talked about is now like required almost like you probably any anyone who who did everything else I'm mentioning probably has been around enough in the industry that it's going to rub off a little bit like all the the business side of things but you have to have you have to be able to have that conversation like a KPI oriented conversation with someone else or that your creative ideas will just immediately be squashed or uh just trampled because you can't defend it in a meaningful way you know. And then comes the AI and now you have

to be also a prompt master slash LLM master slash understanding all these tools. Yeah. Basically what you're saying is that the advice is continue evolving. Outside of your core outside of the art that how that's how you become an art director. Yeah. Well, I mean yeah the step one is become really good at one piece of one aspect of art but then yeah it doesn't end there. It's not like just because you're Then understand art production pipeline then understand the business and then understand the the technology and that's pretty much it. And now you're good to go. Business technology
much there's so much with anything you know how it is it's like
Yeah. It takes you 15 years but you'll be there. Yeah. Sometimes some people just rise right up it's just you know who knows timing I got to say that piece too timing and you know um Yeah. But uh and it's easier to get into that uh I think uh smaller studios uh if you're going to get into that um uh as a art director art manager start rising up it's it's easier that way.

And then you can like lateral into maybe larger studios that you know but to try to like rise up with all the friction against you all the headwinds at a single studio looks like a large studio is probably harder will take you longer. So that's another piece of advice I would recommend is and it's also at smaller studio you'll get more exposure to the all the aspects of game development anyway so. Peter thank you so much for for all your advice. It's it's truly it's truly interesting conversation. Uh people overlook social casino a lot despite the revenues, despite the player base. Um and it was really nice to have an art director to kind of shine the light on on this part of the business where there's so many constraints and yet that's where the creativity really shines when you have those constraints. So, super interesting to to hear your perspective and thank you for being so open about AI. I know it's a tough conversation for for somewhat reason, especially artists. But it's a but this

very necessary conversation. Oh, yeah. And I think what SciPlay is doing is is amazing by by helping you guys to understand better the technology and take advantage of that technology rather than what would happen the other way around where the technology is taking advantage of you. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's you should look for any company joining, you should look for that. People who are looking to Yeah. utilize it but ethically and in a way that it you know grows the employees and artists and the people on the team, not just undermines. So, yeah. For sure.
Yeah, empowers them to do more. Absolutely. More efficiently. All right. Well, that's our pro AI speech
[laughter]
That's right. Yeah. existential event possibilities. That's right. Everyone fast forward to that part first and then listen to the the rest of the video.
Or it ends like a Terminator. But you know what? Till then, yeah, that's fine. Who knows? Who knows? Um on that note, um

thank you everybody for listening and reach out to Peter. Uh there's a link in the description. Also link in the description on Evolving a Goldie. That's a that's actually um a case study for how SciPlay modernized the 2D character animation with custom Unity tools. So, that's your your kind of a deep dive and the project that you're currently focusing on. So. Anyways. Thank you, Peter. And thank you, everybody. Thanks, Mishka. Great talk with you. You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you'd subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast [music] service of your choice. Those stars and likes, while a small action on your part, mean a lot to us and help to grow the show. More importantly, are you a member of the Deconstructor of Fun Slack group? If you have 5 years or more of games industry experience, go to deconstructoroffun.com/slack and apply to join. Join the games industry's [music] best professional community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand, or

subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights [music] from the Deconstructor of Fun content creators. Thanks for listening.