Creating concept art for games, with genAI

First of all, let’s face it, AI is not great at everything yet. But game designers, artists, and producers have adopted it rapidly because there are things it does really well. Concepting, storyboarding, and ideation are prime examples here. We’ve been doing our own exploring, and wanted to share with you the cases that have worked well for us.

We’re using examples from PicFinder, so you can explore and get inspired by each use case, starting directly from this article.

Environment concept art

Getting ideas for new games, concepts, worlds, and environments can be a time consuming concept. You can search for images, which can take hours. Or you can create them, which will take even longer. But 2D gen AI tools make environment ideation extremely fast, so you can explore many versions of a concept and storyboard your way into a crystal clear design.

Some examples of game environments with different formats.

Action games

Robot battle – tall scene

Large battlefield – wide scene

Casual games

Green garden scene – portrait format

Castle interior scene – tall format

Character concept art

Generating new characters prevents many teams from accelerating their release pipeline. Generating character assets is also essential for monetization and engagement, as players can unlock new characters through progression or payment. GenAI makes character iteration a lot faster, for a few different genres.

Fashion, makeover, and decoration games

Fashion makeover outfits – tall format

Portrait with eye makeup – portrait format

Cozy living room – square format

Cute, cozy, casual games

Explorer bear

Girl next door

Royal cat

What we learned along the way

1. Prompts matter a lot

Using longer prompts is better. But also thinking of prompts like a Google Image Search description more than how you would describe the item in real life seems to work well. Words like “high definition” or “perfect features” help get better quality art in general.

2. Starting from an image saves a lot of time

Many genAI tools allow you to upload an image and will then create new versions in that format. This can help a lot with initial iteration, especially if you’re looking for a very particular type of art. For fashion outfits or makeovers starting from an existing outfit image will help.

3. Different image formats generate different results

Searching for a character in tall format might generate a full-body image while in square format would create a portrait. The format changes the results a lot, so exploring with the exact format you need can help get closer to what you need faster.

How can we help?

If you’d like us to share more genAI resources, drop us a note to let us know. GenAI is on everyone’s minds and we love being a resource on anything that helps you make better games.