AI for Game Development: Creating a Farming Game in 5 Days. Part 1

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 1: Art Style

The first step in our game development process is deciding on the art style. To decide on the art style for our farming game, we'll be using a tool called Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion is an open-source model that generates images based on text descriptions. We'll use this tool to create a visual style for our game.

Setting up Stable Diffusion

There are a couple options for running Stable Diffusion: locally or online. If you're on a desktop with a decent GPU and want the fully-featured toolset, I recommend locally. Otherwise, you can run an online solution.

Locally

We'll be running Stable Diffusion locally using the Automatic1111 WebUI. This is a popular solution for running Stable Diffusion locally, but it does require some technical knowledge to set up. If you're on Windows and have an Nvidia GPU with at least 8 gigabytes in memory, continue with the instructions below. Otherwise, you can find instructions for other platforms on the GitHub repository README, or may opt instead for an online solution.

Installation on Windows:

Requirements: An Nvidia GPU with at least 8 gigabytes of memory.

1. Install Python 3.10.6. Be sure to check "Add Python to PATH" during installation.
2. Install git.
3. Clone the repository by typing the following in the Command Prompt: