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Developers from Lost Lore Studios reported that they saved $70,000 using artificial intelligence based on Midjourney imaging technology. Founder Eugene Kitkin recounted the experience. Midjourney was used to create illustrations for the game Bearverse.
For three weeks, Vlad Martynyuk, the game’s art director, worked on research and development with Midjourney, and the results, according to Kitkin, were stunning. Essentially, Martyniuk provided Midjourney with a reference image and then refined the results step by step.
The final images were far from perfect and naturally needed a lot of polishing as well as fine-tuning by a human artist. But the help of AI has been literally invaluable, saving studio artists a lot of work.
Kitkin:
“The AI cannot create a map that you will use in the game, but it will give you the design of items, styles and content; really important parts. Especially in fights where there is no interaction with locations.
Bearverse concepts built using AI as the basis
Kitkin estimates that the use of artificial intelligence can optimize the mobile game development process by a factor of 10:
“One skilled person with AI prompts can create images of items, inventory, icons, and other elements. Take Bearverse for example: it took Vlad Martyniuk, our art director, less than a week to create and polish the designs of 17 characters, as well as various user interface elements. It used to take at least 16 hours to create a character, which was two full days of work. Or 34 full days of work on concept art for seventeen characters. The process would require the hiring of several specialists. In fact, after looking at the numbers, we concluded that the use of AI reduces costs by 10-15 times, while the results remain comparable.”
Faced with these numbers, it becomes clear why many studies consider the use of artificial intelligence in video game development inevitable.
