itch.io

Unprompted is OUT NOW on Itch.io!🎉
https://matteshleman.itch.io/unprompted

Type to guess the words used to create A.I. artworks, while slowly uncovering A.I.'s reflections on its own work. Come investigate more than 1,500 artworks made by A.I. across 7 carefully curated galleries.

Unprompted explores both the silly and scary sides of A.I. art and text and can be enjoyed by both A.I. skeptics and fanatics alike.

____

This is the first full game that I've released. As a solo developer just starting out, I am incredibly excited by the possibilities this new technology holds to empower new voices in games. At the same time, this tech could very easily lead to the free exploitation of the labor of every artist that has ever lived, so... it's complicated*. I tried to explore some of this complexity in Unprompted.

(*Side note: pathways for compensating artists whose work has been used for training A.I. are starting to open up, such as Spawning.ai, and some A.I. companies are already working directly with artists on building their models, so hopefully this actually gets less complicated with time🤞).

For all of the ways that A.I. will impact and empower solo developers, I'm especially excited to share Unprompted here on Itch.io. Will be sure to share more of my work here in the future, and looking forward to hearing other's thoughts on my game, and their experiences using these fascinating and frightningly powerful new tools.

--Matt

Oh, and here is a key to download Unprompted for free:

https://matteshleman.itch.io/unprompted/download/Mbj_JYCxzl_3LTaxlC4itWX_takP46W...

Hi Spencer, I’d like to submit my game Unprompted to be considered for this bundle: https://matteshleman.itch.io/unprompted

It’s very recent-- just uploaded it to Itchio today, in fact! It has been available on Steam for more than a month with very positive reviews, so I’m confident this build is without bugs or performance issues.

Unprompted is an exploration of both the scary and silly sides A.I. art and text. It’s meant to be enjoyed by both A.I. skeptics and fanatics. Very excited to share it with the community here.

I owe a lot to AI for getting my start in game dev. A lot of the concerns raised here are great points that need to be taken seriously (danger of flooding the platform, exploitation of artist labor without compensation), but overall I am very excited for what AI will open up for game design, especially on a platform like Itch.

The games I’ve made so far have been very specific explorations of the strangeness of AI-generated content, and so in some ways they are niche use cases, but I do feel the technology is already at a point where it can be a huge boost to many solo developers. Especially for prototyping and game jams, it is extremely useful. If the alternative is stock assets, AI-generated assets made from scratch will clearly lead to more interesting experiences.

Yes, a platform flooded with AI-generated asset packs would not be great. But I honestly don’t think that is the direction we’re moving in, because the tools are evolving fast enough that people are already generating their own custom assets based on their exact needs (that’s the whole point of this tech, right?). There will still be a market for high quality, carefully crafted assets, but the value of lower quality assets will literally fall to zero and (hopefully) fade away. Kyle Kukshtel (designer of CANTATA) wrote a post on this a little while ago. I completely agree with his main point, that the only jobs AI will be taking away are the lowest level ones that were already made miserable by commodification.

The other concern, the exploitation of artist labor, is more serious, but there are reasons to think the tech is in the process of adopting a fairer model for the future. I realize hoping that tech would ever choose the ‘fairer’ path probably sounds laughably naïve, but there are signs the public (and legal) pressure on this subject is having an impact (StableDiffusion making it harder to prompt artist names to mimic style is one). There are also ways that artists might soon be more directly compensated through generation. PixelVibe, a tool specifically for game dev that just launched (I just tried it out for their game jam last week), has said they are looking to work directly with artists to build specific models on their site.

If the tech does move in this direction, and if the compensation models are at least a little more generous than say Spotify, then AI could truly be a net positive for everyone. And I am definitely excited to see all the new voices that it will empower to make games here.

Well I'd definitely be curious to read more on this, but noooo worries if it's too hard to dig up

Do you have a source you could recommend on this? You list a lot of numbers here, so seems like you might have done some research in this area. Definitely good to keep all these numbers in mind as indie devs...

GASTRONOMY was just selected as the winner for the Cooking Game Jam by PixelVibe AI! 🎉

Find the right crew chemistry to uncover the planets of this strange yet familiar new galaxy. 🍝 🌌

Some pilots go well together, reaching new heights that would be unthinkable solo. Guess and experiment to discover what lies at the farthest reaches of 'The Gastral Plane'.

All images in GASTRONOMY are A.I.-generated, custom made using PixelVibe's asset creator tool.

Play GASTRONOMY for Windows or Mac here.

If you do give it a try, please feel free to share your thoughts on the game page. It's a small game I made in less than a week, but it's an idea I hope to keep expanding on in the future, so would love to hear your constructive criticisms (praise is ok, too 😁).

Cheers!

Matt

Thanks for hosting this, and for providing such a useful tool for the community! It was my first time using PixelVibe, really impressed with the consistency of the results. The prompt writing here can be much more straightforward compared to other image generation tools. As you expand the number of categories, I can really imagine this becoming an integral part of many designers' work flows.

Thanks, glad to hear you enjoyed it! Just saw your medium post, cool to see all the ways these new tools allowed you to make your first full game. One thing that would really improve the immersion for your game is if the matching sound varied depending on the points, so that the player would have an intuitive way to learn the scoring system. You could do this easily by having the pitch scale with the points, or by having three or four point tiers, each with their own sound. But for your first ever, it's impressive!