Devlog: how I plan to use AI for game dev

The following blog post carries the personal thoughts of Elder Prince, founder of Blossomsoft Games.

First and foremost, let me be frank, the term “AI” is pretty broad, in my opinion. Every company renames their software with the AI suffix nowadays. There’s a lot of exaggeration surrounding Artificial Intelligence, surely driven by commercial and political motivations. And honestly, it’s probably better that way. None of us want to end up in some terrible dystopian movie, right? But out of all the AI products out there, I have to say that ChatGPT is my personal favorite! I’m very impressed with it.

About Image AI Generators

In my experience, MidJourney, Dall-e, and Diffusion left me feeling a bit disappointed and unimpressed. I can’t really see any practical professional applications for them. They seem more like a collection of royalty-free images with the ability to make random changes, which is cool, but not very useful. Even with complex prompts, they struggle to generate exactly what you want. It’s like browsing through an image gallery, hoping to find the perfect match for your needs, and it can take hours. Personally, I’ve had better luck using Stagsi to find references very quickly that inspire me to create new artworks.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with using MidJourney to quickly generate images for filling gaps in blog content or other similar purposes. But as an artist myself, I prefer to focus on honing my skills and creating my own artworks or collaborating with real artists, rather than using randomized images, even if they are gorgeous. There’s something special about developing artistic abilities and working with other talented individuals, and frankly, none of us want to become obsolete in the near future. That being said, whenever I use an image generator for my blog, I always make it clear where the images come from. Transparency is important to avoid any confusion or misinterpretation about their origin.

About ChatGPT

I have to say, though, ChatGPT is absolutely incredible.

In simple terms, ChatGPT is an AI language model. It has been trained on a vast amount of text from the internet and can understand and generate human-like text based on the prompts and questions it receives. Its purpose is to assist and provide information on a wide range of topics to the best of its abilities.

I want to be frank. I don’t want ChatGPT to write an entire story from start to finish without a large part of my involvement. The result would probably be pretty ugly anyway.

The same holds true for my blog posts.

So far, my main use for ChatGPT has been to fix typos and revise my texts. While my English has improved over the years, ChatGPT helps give my blog articles a more professional touch. It saves me time and reduces my worries. Typically, I write my blog entries from A to Z and then ask ChatGPT to revise them for a natural flow in English.

Interestingly, I wrote my ebook, titled ‘YogDeli,’ with the help of ChatGPT. See the blurb at the end of this article. Throughout this extensive project, I noticed the limitations of ChatGPT, as it sometimes acted more like a dumb “generator” than true AI. When I finished my book, I realized there were obvious repetitive sentence patterns that needed to be addressed. It was a painstaking process of identifying and fixing each one by asking ChatGPT for suggestions to introduce more variation. The main limitation here is that ChatGPT struggles with longer documents and can’t recognize if a sentence has been repeated multiple times. For example, when I once copied my entire ebook into the chat window and asked ChatGPT to summarize it, the analysis provided seemed disjointed and disconnected.

What about coding?

This awesome tech called came at the perfect time. Lately, I’ve been diving into refactoring most of the code I wrote in 2020 and 2021 and this thing has been a lifesaver, helping me optimize the code block by block. It’s making everything more efficient, readable, and easy to maintain.

One particular coding challenge had me stuck for years; I was struggling to implement a specific rendering algorithm for a complex visual effect. Despite searching on Google and YouTube, I couldn’t find a satisfactory solution in the past. However, with the aid of this AI-powered bot, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a concise and effective solution to the problem.

Man, I’m telling you, it has become my secret weapon in tackling coding challenges now. It’s like having a coding guru on speed dial. You gotta try it out sometime if you’re a game developer, it’s seriously impressive!

Oh, and it’s quite delightful to see that ChatGPT comprehends the gospel better than many dubious pastors and street preachers.

Overall, ChatGPT is an excellent assistant, and it would really break my spirit if the service had to be discontinued. I just wish it had been released much earlier.

YogDeli, Powered by ChatGPT