Transcriber: Zeynep Alptekin
Reviewer: lisa thompson Today I’m going to talk to you
about AI for game development. Now, you may wonder,
what about it specifically? Everything, because AI has been going wild
with Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, thousands of open source models
on Hugging Face. And game developers
aren’t really using them. Why? I don't know, but I'm hoping
to change that. (Laughter) I’m going to show you how to use AI
to make a game in five days. Day one: Art style. The game I’m
making is a farming game. Think Farmville because it’s simple
and I only have five days. And I want to start by deciding
on an art style. And for that, I’ll be using
Stable Diffusion. You may have heard of it. It creates images from text, like this. Here, my prompt was isometric render
of a farm by a river. Not bad. And then using this concept art,
I built a scene in Unity. Now, you may think,
AI didn’t do everything by itself. You still had to do work, yes? That’s because I want to show
you how you can use AI as a tool, not a replacement for the whole process,
at least not any time soon. Okay, so guess what? It’s Day two: Game design,
and this time I’ll be using ChatGPT. You’ve definitely heard of this one. So, I told ChatGPT, I’m making a simple farming game;
what features are most important? And its response was great:
Variety of crops. Good. Rewarding progression system. Good.
Dynamic weather system. Too much work. So I implemented the first two.
But there's a problem. The game doesn't have any art. Good thing it’s Day three: Icons.
And back to Stable Diffusion. This time, I’m not using
it for concept art. I'm going to use it to create game ready
assets. Let me show you what I mean. So, first I drew some wheat. I know it’s really high quality. And then I pass it through Img2Img, which uses Stable Diffusion to transform
an image according to a prompt. So I passed it through, and this is
the result I got. Pretty good. But you may notice the wheat
has legs for some reason. (Laughter) So I edited those out in Photoshop, and I
passed it back through Img2Img. This is how you can collaborate
with the AI in your own artistic workflow. So I did that for all my icons. And now it’s Day four: 3D assets. This is where AI falls short because
the world of 3D runs on 3D models and AI isn't very good at 3D models. So in this case I just used
cubes for my crops. But I want to talk about where
we're headed in 3D. Oh, sorry, there’s the cubes
for the crops. And I want to talk about where we’re
headed in 3D because it’s pretty exciting. AI may not be good at 3D models, but it is good at images that look
3D using something called NeRFs, or neural radiance fields. These use neural networks
to synthesize views of objects. The cool thing about this is that future
games might not even need 3D models. They might just have latent
representations of objects and use neural networks
to synthesize views in real time. What does that mean? Well, it means infinitely high fidelity
graphics with constant rendering time that takes up very little storage space. This isn't here yet, but it's definitely
worth keeping an eye on. Okay, so, the game. It’s Day five: Story. And this time I’m going
to give some warnings. So, I told ChatGPT about my game
and asked it to come up with a story, and it literally gave me the story of
Stardew Valley, another farming game. Luckily, I was able to say, That’s literally the story
of Stardew Valley, be more original. And it was. But I’d say in this case,
it’s best to use AI for brainstorming; I wouldn’t suggest using it
to write your entire story. But I want to talk about something else
that’s really cool that’s not here yet but may be here soon. And that’s AI-powered NPCs. What if you had NPCs or characters
in a game like Skyrim that you could just talk to
like you would a real person? That’s the future of storytelling,
and it’s on its way very soon. Now, I know what you’re thinking. What
about the farming game? It’s finished. You can play it now
on the Hugging Face website. I hope you learned something
about AI for game development. And even if you’re not a game developer,
check this stuff out because there are
a lot of open source tools that are really useful
for whatever you’re working on. Thank you for listening. (Applause)
