It’s been a while. But we’re game testing action in the Purple Zone. tryong to stay as Roguelite as humanly possible.
Early stage gameplay
Most of what we are doing is creating story and lore. We don’t just want our players to go around shooting stuff. We’re too old for that. Because our background is in screenwriting, we want characters to change and grow as they experience playing “Augment Me.”
Asset Creation
We have decided to use pre-made environmental assets for game testing. It seems non-sensical to create a world when many before us have created scenery worthy of an entire game level. Why re-invent the wheel?
Unity makes it relatively easy to create beautiful environments, but some game devs have turned this into a fine art, and that has to be respected.
So we are currently game testing with the following assets by Toby Fredson. Below is his promotional video.
Idea Creation using AI as our “sandbox”
We find AI very good at giving us ideas and opinions. Often AI “borrows” from the current zeitgeist of popular movies, games – effectively regurgitating what has been done already. But sometimes that’s what you want.
As sci-fi buffs since childhood, we can incorporate and bend some of the tropes / steroetypes into our very “human” story.
Comparing AI video creators
The following is a throwaway scene from a more fleshed out Augment Me game. I come from the film world and would budget a scene like this at many thousands of dollars. But this was done for a few cents.
We do this to see what our game might be like if it was an action movie with an unlimited budget. It’s like giving your script and a million to a big budget Hollywood Director to see what they come up with.
In all mountains we find gold. “God” is in the detail.
Ed & Phil
Google VEO3 & Nano Banana
Always blown away by this AI. One of the cheapest, too.
The image-to-video prompt for this is “A soldier leads his heavily armed robot across the windy beaches of Normandie.”
Of course, “Normadie” is not a location in Augment Me, but for game testing, it will do fine.
The original image was created in Midjourney. Alway smakes me laugh when it comes up with great looking “ideas” (see how close to shore the fishing boat is).
Midjourney version
Not as good – but MJ is fine at coming up with high concept art and starting points. No prompt was used here.
Throwaway scenes
You can’t rally get a baseline from AI, but I try to just upload the image with no prompt to see what moving image it generates.
This image is from a scene which will not be in the game. This is a white robot (the highest ranks) admiring their handywork. When some humans started breathing from oxygen bottles, they were tasked with re-wilding the planet.
Screenwriters will often write scenes that have no intention on the real script. A character at rest, a non-scene – but something which illuminates an aspect of character. That’s what this image is about.
While I can’t see this image being used for game testing, I can see this as a metopnym for the world the robots have (re)created as a result of our stupidity.
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