Video Game Assets

When it comes to video game assets, there’s no shortage of options to choose from. Even here on itch.io, there are dozens of assets available. However, I find that they often lack one important thing: variety.

Variety is something that many game developers don’t think about until they encounter issues with it. For most developers, the issues with premade assets fall into one of two categories:

1. There’s not enough variety.
2. There’s too much variety.

It can be frustrating to find perfectly shaded toon-style items, only to have hyper-realistic environments and characters. Or, if you’re creating a Western-style game, you might find mostly anime-themed sprites. Even if users don’t mind it too much, there’s always a certain stress or dissonance about the sprites and art not fully matching the general style. In my own work, some of the backgrounds don’t match because I didn’t have enough time to fix them, but I plan to fix them down the line.

Enter AI

For my novel, I wanted a comic-style feeling. This meant going on a hunt for assets, sprites, and backgrounds. However, I had very limited time to spend looking for assets that were “ok” but didn’t really fit my use case. That’s when I turned to NovelAI image generation for the character sprites (which are available on the project page under Concept_Art.zip). As you can see, all of the sprites had the “Superhero Logo” on their chests, which is where Krita came in handy for editing out the logo.

I also used the “color” layer option to change the color of the outfit. For the casual outfit, I used a color dodge and a splatter brush, which was an on-the-moment idea that worked really well!

No matter where you stand on the matter of AI-generated artwork, I’m convinced that there’s a right way to use it, and together, we can find it. The benefits of getting it right are much greater than the benefits of not using it at all.