Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Maybe one day in the future, we need to search carefully in order to find the game that human beings have built with heart.

The practicality of AI is nothing new. In the past few years, AI has provided us with illogical literary creation, mechanical anthropomorphic dubbing, and industrial assembly line background music, but all of these are not nearly as practical as the popular AI paintings.

The "Happy Planet" more than a decade ago predicted the current state of AI drawing, whether applauded or bad, the heat of AI drawing need not be dwelt on, and the quality of randomly generated pictures is obvious to all. But while everyone is still immersed in the pleasure of drawing cards, a group of people see more possibilities behind AI painting.

Now that AI painting has lowered the threshold of art, what will be the result of integrating AI in various fields and stacking the works produced by AI into a game?

The layman who has no relevant experience wants to use AI to make a game on his own. a few years ago, it was a bit of a fantasy, but now it is just like the stereotype that AI can't draw, and with the progress and development of AI, it has gradually become a reality.

On the occasion of National Day, it is time for Novel AI, an AI drawing tool, to come to the fore. This new AI website, which was born not long ago, which focuses on drawing beautiful girls in two-dimensional style, has been widely spread after the model was cracked and leaked, and has been completely reduced to a civil production tool.

Mass-produced paintings were released in tons, and the exchange of experiences was in full swing. At that time, the atmosphere seemed to be that "AI will eventually replace human painters."

It is against this background that the first domestic game involving AI in art and dubbing arises at the historic moment. On October 9, bilibili UP host "Autumn Snow" posted a homemade Galgame video called "Mimeng at the end of Summer", a 3-and-a-half-minute Demo process that unsurprisingly became his most viewed video.

Qiu Zhi Xuehua is not a professional. In fact, he has no experience in game production before, but it is never difficult to make a human Galgame game.

During decades of development, this relatively low-barrier type of game has had too many mature game engines and even some "stupid" aids that can use templates to directly generate the effects they want. For the general public, the art that needs to be drawn by hand is often the high wall that blocks everyone's enthusiasm for creation, and now we have AI.

"A Dream at the end of Summer" is not an out-and-out AI. As the first person to eat crabs, Qiuzhi Xuehua did not seek fame or profit, and supported the three-day game production entirely on the basis of interest and love. If he had to add an attributive to his love, it was the love for Vtuber, or, to be exact, the love for Vtuber "Mishi Miki".

Missy Miki himself has seen Qiu Zhi Xuehua's work, which is why the game with the name AI seems so normal. In order to depict the perfect Mishi Miki in his heart, Qiu Zhi Xuehua did not use the incoherent AI screenwriter, but wrote it himself, incorporating his love for the anchor into it, and created this screenplay.

"Miren" is the title of fans of Miki, but outside the script, the silly AI is responsible for the "art" and "dubbing" of Galgame's three axes. How to control the incomprehensible AI to generate real characters is the most laborious part of the game. According to Qiuzhi Xuehua's self-account, although the extremely recognizable human setting of Mishi Miki can be visualized with a small amount of explanation Tag, the randomness and fuzziness of AI drawings still take up a lot of production time to repeatedly debug and screen available pictures.

The AI of the Turing test can't draw the player as for the dubbing part of the game, and AI can also eliminate the anchorman's personal voice. As early as July this year, some domestic Galgame enthusiasts were trying to imitate their favorite character voice in the process of deep learning by feeding dubbing samples in the game. Although there will be unavoidable mechanical murmur, the final effect has been quite amazing.

A grapefruit chef learned that Ning Ning's voice is no longer playing butter, which is a change in his brain. Qiu Zhi Xuehua also took a fancy to the usability of this kind of cutting-edge technology. He used a large number of recording materials to train the sound model of Mishi Miki, which gradually evolved from a substitute meal for self-entertainment to audio data in game production. His love for the anchor contributed to the birth of "A Dream at the end of Summer".

2 compared with the normal "Dream at the end of Summer", the "drawing of Hell in the Future" brought by the lemon production team is obviously much more "chaotic".

The drawing of Hell in the Future is an AI game completed by the Lemon production team on October 11. This work is more in line with people's impression of AI's "cyber psychosis". In addition to the underlying engine of the game and performance debugging, the rest of the materials, such as script, vertical painting, scene, music, dubbing and so on, are piled up by AI, and more importantly, the whole process takes only 6 hours from start to finish.

The game Staff list delegates the burden of game production to AI, this pile of code that does not understand what "beauty" is, will it move towards a crazy and crazy style, or will it maintain a relatively rational temperament of restraint?

The lemon production team chose a conservative approach, setting an outline, then letting AI play freely, and finally adjusting it according to their own preferences. after all, their original intention was to show you how much you can do to make a Galgame with AI.

But having said that, the foolishness revealed in AI's script runs through it, and of course it has something to do with the script direction developed by the Lemon production team-humans have been eliminated by AI in the not-too-distant future. AI, who is in charge of writing, needs to build a highly developed world of AI from a human perspective, with the flavor of "Cyber Civil War".

The script outline, which is automatically generated by AI, a very standard network joke, is more clumsy than childish. Unlike the ever-changing AI painting, there is still a lot of room for improvement in AI's ability to write stories. Friends who have tried AI writing in the past can see a lot of familiar shadows in this "Future Hell drawing", such as repeating a sentence three times and typing a few more exclamation points to show the seriousness of the situation.

For example, the very standard nonsense literature, the repeated use of meaningless rhetoric to put together the number of words, to some extent, it can be regarded as acquiring the skillful skills of human college students in writing papers.

Although the disagreeable text always reminds players that this is the work of AI, remarks such as "surplus value" that emerge from these highly homogeneous beautiful girls still make people wonder in which direction AI, which understands the surplus value, will continue to evolve after that.

Screenplays are not AI's specialty. The Lemon production team set the general tone of the script with a few sentences in the first chapter of the game, but were frustrated in the text proofreading of the second chapter-yes, there was a second chapter in the game.

The production cycle and process of the second chapter is twice that of the first chapter. The second chapter is the practical result of "how to tame AI at a lower time cost". As a result, if you want to refine the text generated by AI, you might as well write your own script from scratch. To borrow their words, "if you have quality requirements, AI writing is really low cost performance."

It's not just the script, but the roughness of AI's work is reflected in every aspect. For example, in Galgame, due to the uncertainty of AI mapping, how to generate different postures of the same character has become a top priority. Short works can still muddle through, but I'm afraid it's not very realistic to put them in long works. To this end, the Lemon production team set the image of the hostess as a "maid". According to their explanation, the characteristics of the maid are more controllable, and many works can be produced with obedient AI.

The production team also admitted that the nature of the game is greater than the actual playability. As a test work for fun only, the completion of "Hell drawing in the Future" is obviously still in its infancy, and its focus is clearly on the promotion of another project.

"well Domain: Karo Blood" is an AVG being developed by the Lemon production team. The Demo of the game is released on the Game Creator platform. The script and scene art are exquisite. They have even done several good 3D animations for this small trial version of the game. Most importantly, the game does not use any AI.

There is no doubt that AI's "drawing of Hell in the Future" crushed the popularity of "well Domain: Karo Blood", with a six-hour quick product on one side and a preface that took three months to complete on the other. At least AI has been able to keep a steady hold on the humans who created it in terms of gimmick and efficiency.

In fact, putting AI into game production has long been nothing new.

As early as the 2019 Game developers Conference (GDC), there was a section called "Machine Learning tutorials" (Machine Learning Tutorial), in which a number of major game companies took part in lectures, including the established French game maker Ubisoft. Ubisoft leads the industry in AI, and recently created a "AI Zoo" that can capture complex movements of all kinds of animals with the help of AI.

However, in the game production interspersed with a large number of AI materials to assist independent game development, it is indeed a new trend in this period.

In May this year, a game called "Source of Madness" ended its initial test and was officially released. The levels of the game, art and monster animation are all the material nurtured by AI, and the official slogan "enemies encountered by players will never be repeated" is used as a propaganda slogan, coupled with the gloomy world outlook and pigeon play, AI's crazy artistic style can indeed play a good catalytic effect.

This Girl Does Not Exist, a jigsaw puzzle that landed on Steam on Sept. 8. A couple left the art, stories, characters and dubbing of the game to AI, but only two reviews pointed out the mediocre state of the game.

"Shoon", a 2D crossboard shooting game independently created by a Japanese game developer named Nao_u. The art materials of this work are taken from the hot AI drawing tool Midjourney some time ago, and even the game name "Shoon" is automatically generated by AI, and the production cycle of the game is only 3 days.

Last month, a scientist in the field of deep learning at the University of Washington even tried to show AI a similar 2D game by watching a lot of Pokemon games. Although the look and feel of the game is still very simple, it is not easy for AI to simulate such a result.

When Novel AI, a drawing tool focused on secondary beauty girls, became popular, the wind of AI games finally blew into the country.

Compared with the wide variety of games mentioned above, the learning cost of Galgame production is obviously acceptable to ordinary people. The motives of the two Chinese-made AI works mentioned in the first half of this article are very similar, because AI drawing begins to study the possibility of AI playing games, and pictures, scripts and dubbing constitute the basic elements of Galgame.

Today, with the proliferation of commercial games, the "author sex" hidden in the old games began to disappear. Having to give up those wonderful ideas for the sake of the market has become the norm, and the word "art of regret" is being used more and more, which has become a big reason why independent games are widely sought after.

The emergence of AI fills the last gap in game production, so that ordinary people without technical accumulation can also devote themselves to the artistic creation of their dreams.

However, it should be noted that there are still complex copyright problems in AI painting at this stage. How to define the scope of infringement of AI must be a difficult problem that must be solved by related industries in the future. At least, the pictures generated by AI can only survive in free peer games.

As for the current quality of AI painting, in fact, there is no need to study in detail, after all, AI is best at constantly learning and accumulating. Just a few days ago, someone has developed a new function to add new details on the basis of retaining the original drawings. Once this is put into large-scale use, the usefulness of AI drawing will take a big step forward. Coincidentally, today there is an online website called "AI painting recognized by AI" with extremely high accuracy. It can be seen that even the electronic cricket, the development and progress of AI is also far beyond human expectations.

Maybe one day in the future, we need to search carefully in the piles of industrial assembly lines for games built by human heart, but such a future seems to be no different from what it is now.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Okny

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