Gen AI First Leap to Generating Game Content, Stop Producing It! - Davy Chadwick, PopScreen Games.

[Music] [Music] [Music] now then I would like to welcome to the stage our next speaker uh a familiar face from other events of ours uh it's David Chad from popc screen games so we Round of Applause for okay uh you can come in behind there's some seats I like in school so yeah today we'll continue on the AI topic and uh we wanted to show

say we as a studio what we are producing what we call January 1 leap to lead to generating content instead of producing it and really concretely what we can do with all these new tools so uh we have three people founders of propin game uh we are a 20 people Studio raised in France and we've been around for well more than 20 years and uh had the chance opportunity to work with the big big Publishers and Studios so this is me dve this is the first picture I did with table diffusion it was probably more than a year ago so I swear we do much better things now but it was already uh something we saw the power of the toour and how fun it is and afterward how efficient it can be for mobile gaming so this is the first game we just released uh it's been live for a few months and this is a handcraft game like we used to do before I'm showing this for you guys to understand the level of quality we're aiming for with Gen so nothing is generated in this game

[Music] so all the games we want to do AI or without AI for us need to reach at one point not today this level of quality so now I'll show you something else uh wacky battle this is roughly the budget we have I'm only talking about content visual budget it's obviously music and narrative and all this it's more than 3,000 images million and a half budget uh roughly 24 months and 10 people most of it being being external so now let me

show you something [Music] [Music] else [Music] nice isn't it so this is the next title we're working on this is the teaser which as you understand has been completely generated so what does it mean for us this teaser has been done by one guy we have one we call AI designer uh one day for image generation one day for the animation and most of the work has been editing so put theic together making sure it sings for the music so roughly the cost of this teaser is around 2K

which is basically well the guy working on this for for seven days uh you'll see all all the slides I have you see at the bottom the tools we've been using to generate this so if we look at wacky battle and uh what we want to reach at one point our wacky battle as you can see on the left is very expensive in terms of content all the tiol we want to generate and this is the goal we having is to drastically decrease one the cost to the number of people and mostly of the external work uh and the timing to produce or the time to Market is much much slower than what we have with wacky ble so how can we achieve all this there's uh well three points to us is the knowledge of the tool so this is true on every kind of tools but on AI especially in a very moving market today you really need to test and understand the second part is creative control you can always brainstorm and do a very nice picture with Del with gp4 but in the end you cannot integrate it directly into the game which bring me from the last

point we are looking for direct integration from generation to integration into the game if ever there's an in between phase where an artist or someone else te to retouch or change you kind of break in the whole system so we have two Ed cases one is p trainer the other one is a space cruiser and you'll see it's two different art style especially to show you guys that despite the arar you choosing the level of quality is acceptable for a game so let's go with pet pet trainer uh so from generation to game implementation so you know maybe know this sentence ideas are easy it's the execution of ideas really separates the sheep from the gold SP basically you can have some ideas but now you need to make sure to produce them and do the execution so that was true before with Gen it's kind of Shifting and I I'll show I'll show you why we believe this so let's generate a goat um one we start with what we call the Laura so it's the model fine tuning I don't know too technical but basically we have an

artist so this has been handmade so one of our senior artists produced these 30 handmade through characters and these characters have um have a consistency so three quarter chubby very colorful so these have been created uh and we created with all this the Lura which will be the engine to generate so once we have this Laura we can generate a goat so this one is completely generated and once we have the Lura and the pipeline we can generate all the in-game units we want to put into the game so all this is generated uh and once this is in place the mean there's no limit you can launch a batch of generation in the evening and in year and you have thousand or thousand of units the the the the number of artifacts and units we need to cancel are getting lower and lower thanks to the understanding of the prompts and the quality of the tools so same for the Battleground uh very easy uh well very easy it's very easy now uh we have these battlegrounds where we have the lower part which is

simple where the units will be fighting and the top part which is the exciting part so as you can see we created this Pipeline and now the same we can generate as many as we want background for the battle scene this is a markup of the units on the battle scene and after that we integrate this into the engine so one limitation we having today is the animation as you can see the animation is not as nice as in wack battle but this is for now and we're already working on some solution for the animation so the animation here are made in eng you can see the idol animation uh camera sh and all this and F but still uh we're not saying this title could not be sold for us this is a level of quality of a spe a specific audience will be happy to release so for us pet trainer is again we want to publish at one point now we have uh this in-game unit we need to do the the gacha screen or the unit screen so we have this generated unit uh we create with Del for instance a fluffy curly hairy do we'll be using this for the texture we put all

this in the tool and now we generate the goat which will be again integrated directly into the game engine and as you can see the composition of the goat is the same of the small in-game unit we just added the digital painting realistic well realistic digital painting and the the texture of the dog so we have this goat integrated into the game so it's the the game screen where you have all the uh all the statistics uh and you can level up uh your your unit and this is another example we did this with uh you can see the small unit on the left which is been uh generated in game and a digital painting version which is used for the unit screen again and again we can do produce more and more in terms of uh Pace it's much faster as long as you have senior people and I'll talk about this afterwards training and the need for senior people artist and designer uh but it's very fast to create quality guaranteed as I insist on the fact we

don't want to decrease the quality for the audience we're aiming for uh iteration if you take this one this one is my favorite uh we spent 3 Days To iterate to make sure that the background was highlighting the unit as we wanted to so the amount of work which has been done here with geni is much slower than the work we would have done doing this manually so I kind of R I love this one with the big cheeks and uh other characters from the game just to show you that these one completely different it's another species from um for pet trainer so this was pet trainer uh so again a very chubby naive style of game uh and we started to look into photo realism so this is why now we have a space cruiser as uh not is he moving well he should be moving that's fine uh space cruisers and a game and we wanted to test a completely different art style to see that uh well if with the same tools we were able to gener generate this and still keep the quality

for a game so this is the background this is a battle scene so we started by generating the background for the battle scene so we did a few this is an example of six uh always the same idea this is the level of quality we agree on to release the game we are not down downgrading what we want to do uh and this has been done with M Journey this one not stable diffusion uh and a lot of work to iterate on the prompts and make sure that it respects the constraint we have for this type of game so we have the background uh we do the mockup this is the UI mockup with the unit and uh this is where we are we now have um let's say u a one pager of space cruiser on the battle scene so we created um a few a few units uh all this has been done with mid Journey again I'm I'm I'm explaining this is done by mid Journey but we could have done the same with stable diffusion or any other tool we are trying all the tools available on the market just to be sure not to be locked with one tool and

uh every now and then we realize that this tool was a new extension which is better than the other one and uh we can continuously improve our production pipeline for different assets obviously the pipeline for marketing asset for a background for unit will be different but once these pipelines are created we can replicate the work infinitely so uh these are the uh the bosses the enemies and uh well same idea this is all fresh we just finished this last week to have a video prototype uh to show to this event so again you'll see it's still static but first it's still a very nice talking for mobile game we are really talking Mobile gaming uh and you can see the background uh we're using a depth map to see how we can animate and create these uh this bouncing effect uh so there's no 3D it's generated in a game engine and [Music] animated

so it's always the same idea be able to generate content we are working on RPG RPG as you guys know is everything about content an RPG when we love an RPG we want to play for hours or even years I mean who didn't play World of Warcraft for years over years so everything as a matter of being able to produce the content for the players contest is cost and time and now thanks to geni we're able to reduce all this so it's um it's not only um only about the battle scene I'm showing another example on the world map so we're doing some narrative game so we need a world map where the user is moving forward and seeing stage after stages the rest of the game so this is the competition work so this is the map it's been done in 15 minutes by our senior artist uh the idea is not obviously the end quality but it's the position the divers element we see on the on the final map so this is done uh really quickly again because

it's done quickly because our artists are very senior and this is not something which is easy to do it's just quick to produce so there's really a difference between easy to do and quick to produce so this goes into the tool so here we use stability Ai and uh in 10 minutes where we generated 15 images and we photo bashed it to make sure we had the final image we we were looking for uh there some UPS scalers tool one we use called magnific I didn't even know this one two weeks ago uh and as you can see uh we are reaching the level of quality which is now integratable into the game and this is next stage so for us now this is a map this is a region we can now integrate into the game so at each point 31 32 you'll be launching the battle you saw before and uh well basically this is how we are building the game we have all the bricks we have all the game modes and we are generating the content to feed this and make the game happen but it's uh not only about art and visual design uh

narrative design for us is a big big part so it's obviously a bit less exciting to show so is more interesting pictures and teasers and animation uh but narrative design as we are working on highly narrative game is the big thing we're looking into so I'll give you an example of on how we are creating this uh this narrative pipeline so let's not forget um we need a tool so we call it the pops scrip this is our internal tool it's basically relying on an llm we're using GPT 4 we are considering entropic clo to for various reasons uh we feed this llm with all the studio blueprints so all the documentation we have on the games we on the games we are producing and we are prompting in this engine to generate some content so this is some the elements we need for the type of game we are doing and it's very important to understand we have a sequence of prompting and generation because every item will be fed by what has been produced used before so very clearly we

start with the elemental affinities uh fire water all this uh then the faction spaces characters Etc down to the dialogues the dialogue is really the point where you need to have all the background of the characters of the territories of the world of the world sorry to produce the the dialogue so one example uh for the species uh this is the type literally The Prompt we're using I need 10 species for the characters compatible with my faction and El blah blah blah like humans please create all this give me the name and some description so this is where we have a senior designer itating because it's not automatic in yet the content needs to be proof read and driven by a designer but it's really the execution which is much much faster so this is done by a senior designer and I'll show you a few examples so we'll start with the bricks so uh I generated uh the elements so you can see two fire and plant uh with some description which has been done with pop scrip uh second one

we create infections which are compatible with the elements so colonist Earth command and some spaces replicants and human compatible with the faction compatible with the element so now we have the three first bricks we can build the fce brick which is the characters so here I created two so oilly second in command and the other one is Marcus uh and you can see well the name uh faction element species description uh all this under the supervision of a senior designer so brick four which are the characters are made by Brick one two three and uh now we have the uh we have the description of the unit well obviously we can generate the unit so it was done with stability I so we not M Journey but now we can generate the picture of the character and we have the uh the character sheet so this is what we can now use in our design to build all the rest and uh we also have some anim so there's some new tools allowing us with

this photo realistic uh art style to have these nice animation because once integrated into the game and again this is in a game you consider yourui we have this uh this unit screen which is much more lively and exciting than something very very static so very photo realism uh is very rare in mobile game and now we believe that these tools are allowing us to do this I just put this one back because he's my favorite but it's uh he's scary he's on my business card by the way but it's it's really really nice and we reach a level we would we could not have imagined just one year ago for this level of cost so now we have all this I'm going straight down to the dialogues and I'll show you an example of the dialogue scene we can do Lieutenant do we have any news from Echo 3 negative Commander their last subsonic transmission was 16 hours ago and since then it's been radio silence darn it I knew I should have sent spaces with them take Clifford with you and go

give them a hand let's hope nothing un understood Commander but may I ask what their mission was they were in charge of Excavating an ancient artifact discovered on one of our mining planets it sounds like a bad horror movie plot Commander let's hope that's not the case because I'm sending you to play the lead role well obviously if it's not synced it's a bit less exciting but trust me the original video is synced anyway you will see we are sharing all this by the way so you can see this on our on our website um so what does it mean what are the takeaways because all this is very nice but what can we do with this and what's the conclusion to this well obviously select the right AI tools this is very standard the right Adobe the right Unity whatever uh so the tool knowledge is very important as you saw we are using a lot of different tools uh it's a moving environment I'm not talking about legal because this is another another discussion uh and train your writers design and art artist whoever here is an artist a designer or

a writer use these tools I mean you have gold in your hand because these tools are just uh multiplying by one million what you guys can do so very clear we need senior people we need to keep our artists we need all this to work together because otherwise we just be generating and not able to select and to challenge if the output is acceptable second part creative control very very important to us we don't want to brainstorm we want to make sure it goes directly into the game so it's for us a way to reduce the creative barrier and multimodality uh text to image image to image voice to text voice to image is very important because depending on the people you don't have the same creative process I'm not a very good artist by the way but when I explain something to someone I can use gp4 and Del to show a picture of my idea which really reduces by 10 the amount of iteration and the last point is direct integration is not there to brainstorm if you work hard on your pipeline it goes directly into the game so you can really minimize the friction from generation into the game

and this is where it's very very interesting so just to finish uh we have a Dev blog so please follow us on this all the videos are showed you especially the uh the dialogues uh are natively on our website and we are pushing every weeks every two weeks uh new uh explanation new content we've been producing uh and obviously at the end you'll see our game being released in the coming months thank you very much that's great and yes please do go and see the videos uh running there we're a tiny little bit over time I'm going to suggest maybe if there's a question we can perhaps take one quick question from the audience there's one down here uh and then we'll um we'll need to move on because I know our next speaker is waking there's the uh the mic coming your way oh thank you um so if you uh like produce a hundred uh goats um in a day let's say using the AIO systems you've talked about how many of them need manual tweaking by artist or similar uh intervention in the output

none at all none at all no let's really the point is this is why we work very upfront on the tools and this is where we need artists to make sure the model the Laura we created need to be well designed to make sure everything which is generated is acceptable to go into the game again if we I mean six months ago we had to tweak now we don't have anymore and this is where it's it's a game changer to us perfect thank you we will have to move on but please do look up Dave on meet to match as well thank you very much appreciate it yeah