ITERATION IS KING

Art director Kenneth Scott on his experiences using AI tools in game development

Tell us about your process for creating artwork with the Midjourney tool.

My creation process in Midjourney ranges from: “I have this weird idea, let me describe it and see if something cool happens”, to “I saw someone else do something that speaks to me, let me see if I can repurpose it for my own needs”, or sometimes “I’m driving to a specific result and I’ll iterate with the language until I get something in an acceptable range”.

What possibilities does it open up for artists?

No matter where you are in your own growth as an artist, you have access to an enormous breadth of artistic decision making and problem solving – from any century.

Tell us about your experience of using Ai-generated art in your work.

I’ve used AI on our VR Oculus title, Lies Beneath, in the area of neural style transfer. It was a great way to assert some consistency across the game and anchor the goal of being in an 80s pulp comic book. The pipeline was clunky, but it was stylistically bulletproof. It got a small team moving fast and looking like nothing else on the platform.

In the past I have pulled some exciting work out of Disco Diffusion and WOMBO Dream, but I have more or less drifted from them both in favour of what I’m getting out of Midjourney. In a world where iteration is king, Midjourney’s speed is its superpower.