2D Asset Generation: AI for Game Development #4

Welcome to AI for Game Development! In this series, we'll be using AI tools to create a fully functional farming game in just 5 days. By the end of this series, you will have learned how you can incorporate a variety of AI tools into your game development workflow. I will show you how you can use AI tools for:

1. Art Style
2. Game Design
3. 3D Assets
4. 2D Assets
5. Story

Want the quick video version? You can watch it here. Otherwise, if you want the technical details, keep reading!

Note: This tutorial is intended for readers who are familiar with Unity development and C#. If you're new to these technologies, check out the Unity for Beginners series before continuing.

Day 4: 2D Assets

In Part 3 of this tutorial series, we discussed how text-to-3D isn't quite ready yet. However, the story is much different for 2D.

In this part, we'll talk about how you can use AI to generate 2D Assets.

Preface

This tutorial describes a collaborative process for generating 2D Assets, where Stable Diffusion is incorporated as a tool in a conventional 2D workflow. This is intended for readers with some knowledge of image editing and 2D asset creation but may otherwise be helpful for beginners and experts alike.

Requirements:

• Your preferred image-editing software, such as Photoshop or GIMP (free).
• Stable Diffusion. For instructions on setting up Stable Diffusion, refer to Part 1.

Image2Image

Diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion work by reconstructing images from noise, guided by text. Image2Image uses the same process but starts with real images as input rather than noise. This means that the outputs will, to some extent, resemble the input image.

Image2Image allows Stable Diffusion to be used as a tool, rather than as a replacement for the conventional artistic workflow. That is, you can pass your own handmade assets to Image2Image, iterate back on the result by hand, and so on. Let's take an example for the farming game.

Example: Corn

Next, I used Image2Image to generate some icons using the following prompt: