Leaps and Bounds

Now I know some of you might read that title and be like "This guy is gonna go on and on about that demon deer." Well put your somewhat warranted assumptions to rest, I promise to refer to said fawn minimally in this post. Nonetheless, we have been a busy little blog team. 

We still want to locate an artist to commission, but that is proving to be an enormous task. To give us a little boost in the art department we have paid for an AI art program. We have chosen to utilize Izea's platform and AI. While there have been a handful of successes there have also been numerous wasted opportunities.

When requesting images of Gryphons the AI at times would deliver three legged results. No, I do not mean male versions you pervert. I mean a four-legged creature that was simply missing a leg. When the AI produced two-legged versions the decision to save and set those images aside was made. To take advantage of  this result we created a mount class of smaller two-legged gryphons called gryphonettes. These became our elven version of winged mount.

Someone gives you lemons you make lemonade, right? You have to keep in mind that it costs around $80 for 5000 points. The AI then produces 4 images for every request, costing a total of 20 points. And this AI is far from creative, it is mimicking what it finds on the internet. We asked it to draw a Cyclops and it created a character similar to the marvel's superhero. Every iteration that it created had two eyes!

When asking it to draw something I came up with, like a black Pegasus, feet would be distorted or legs and wings would be missing. Requesting an image of a block of black marble, a slab of black marble, a cube of black marble all gave black monoliths. Okay, the cube request churned out some interesting results. However, in the end it created hundreds of useless images. No folks, no refunds.

Lemon's in hand we started making lemonade. So there are aspects of the game that have been derived directly from making unrelated content fit into the game so that we could make use of our purchases. But one cannot craft a game like this. There are steps, or milestones if you will, that need to be accomplished.

The positive is that there are also hundreds of images that came out fantastic. It cost $120 to commission Valentina's remastering. She came out simply amazing. With Azea's AI we have accumulated a couple hundred images for $80!! So I would say that the pros outweigh the cons.

Images from the AI have been used throughout several of the lairs (different creative pages linked to  blog). In fact, most of the resources were created by the AI. Approximately 30% of the images created were sufficient for their purpose.

This inspired me as an artist and I recrafted the title images for all of the lairs save for the World. Those labels are the images you see included in this post. But to the task at hand: this wildlife page has been greatly fleshed out. You will find many images of new wildlife, dragons and the undead. We hope you like where we are going with this.

What do you think? Is something missing? What do you want to see? Give us a shout at nathan.epimetheus@gmail.com, let us know your thoughts.