How to use Artificial Intelligence to create a video game

Those who deal with and develop video games know how much effort this medium requires and the support of many figures like the graphics department for the various characters and sprites needed.

Not everyone can afford to hire professionals, especially indie games, and to remedy or rather mitigate this problem, artificial intelligence can come to our aid both to give us an idea of ​​the character and in the actual creation of the final image of it.

Thanks to the collaboration between the Hoken Tech team and the Giffoni Good Games 2023 event, a video game was created, specifically a blockchain video game (made on the EOS EVM testnet for didactic purposes), where 90% of the graphics and characters were created precisely thanks to artificial intelligence.

The first step to take is certainly to start from our idea and help develop it with the support of artificial intelligence and considering that it is a textual exercise, we can use for example ChatGPT to ask for support.

In our case we ask (in technical jargon "prompt") to elaborate us an evil boss in line with the video game world:

And here we see that within seconds it creates us all the info of our evil boss with name, description, layout, powers, skills, personality and even a backstory:

Now that we have various elements, also descriptive of our evil boss, all that remains is to use another tool that exploits artificial intelligence and in this case one that can convert text into images (text-to-image) and here there really are many tools and in our case we will use ArtSmart and try to insert the description provided by ChatGPT:

Really not bad for a drawing created in a few seconds by artificial intelligence, and we will only have the embarrassment of choice for the image to be used.

The same process that we can obviously use to also create all our heroes and with the same modus operandi that we have carried out so far, moreover with ArtSmart we can also choose the type of model from a more standard one to a more photorealistic one, and even any framing:

Once we have all our graphics, at this point we can go and integrate them into our game, and based on the structure of the same create various layouts and actions as needed, or simply use the various characters within the game in various ways:

Regarding a blockchain game, which also needs various graphics, the various images are uploaded to decentralized systems and then called from the smart contract, and in this way greater security is obtained because the same cannot be modified by anyone, not even the creator of the video game itself, so they require greater care for these files as if you make a mistake, you will have to redo the smart contract from scratch and integrate the new changes.

The same applies to the boss of the video game in which we will have both the parameters and the graphics set in a certain way, especially in the case of a blockchain game where the parameters are settings that are written within the code and on the blockchain, making them immutable settings, and preventing them from being modified externally in any way or with the aid of malicious software (trainers, cheats etc.):

Of course with artificial intelligence we can not only create the graphics of our video game, but also some elements of the code itself, saving time and resources, especially for those simple or repetitive tasks that an AI can already provide the piece to add to our code.

As technology progresses, some developers have even integrated AI into some tools to create video games, such as Unity, where with some prompts it is possible to generate entire video game scenes from scratch.

Let us not forget that the gaming sector is one of the sectors with the widest growth and margin for innovation, a sector that is starting to explore blockchain by proposing video games and game mechanics previously unimaginable, working in favor of both players who will be able to use advanced systems exploiting blockchain and finally owning the ownership of their own assets, but also on the developers' side because a wider audience is reached and with something that is playful but also technically complex like blockchain, because a blockchain video game involves a direct and indirect culture superior to a traditional video game, indirectly increasing the expertise and cultural baggage of the individual, no longer as a simple entertainment tool, but also as a tool for learning.

So far we have talked and shown the various steps on how to use AI to create a video game, but we at Hoken Tech put these models and development systems into practice, and also thanks to the support of Giffoni Good Games 2023, the blockchain video game "Heros Beyond Time" was born.

A game in which the video gamer will have to face the fearsome boss Darkborne, through a hero of his choice, and together with the help of other heroes and other players from all over the world, they will manage together defeat the number one enemy of Heros Beyond Time (here to discover the various characters).

It is a video game developed on the EOS blockchain, or rather on its EVM, the EOS EVM, allowing not only to have fast and economical transactions, but also widespread integration with the most widely used tools such as the MetaMask wallet, or other decentralized browsers.

For both logistical reasons and tight deadlines, the video game, playable on both smartphones and desktops, was made on the EOS EVM testnet, in this way users will be able to navigate and learn to use the blockchain and the wallet in a completely safe way and without investing in crypto, since this network makes available test crypto, 5 EOS per day per user, usable both to pay the gas of the transactions and to buy the video game NFTs.