One of my least favorite things about game development is the tedious, time consuming task of decorating the world.
Scratch that, it’s actually my favorite thing.
But that’s the problem. I’m so interested in seeing what the final product might look like that I fall into a decorating hole. Every time I want to create or edit a new level, I have to decorate.
It’s tedious work.
A far more efficient strategy would be to ‘graybox’ the levels out first. Grayboxing is a process of defining just the functional parts of a stage, only decorating when most of the design is locked down:
The problem is, this gives you little idea how the game will look and feel to a player in the end.
I’ve wanted to solve this problem for a while. Instead of decorating a level by hand, why not have an AI do it? Then you could edit to your heart’s content, watching the final version appear magically before your eyes.
Despite being interested in creating this for several years, I’d never gotten around to tackling it. That all changed a few weeks ago, when I was playing with a 2D platformer concept. I ran into the same old problem and began to think about how an AI Decorator might work.
A couple days later I had turned this:
Into this:
This was done in one click. All the artwork has been placed by the computer, and it only took a couple seconds. You can’t tell here, but there are several layers of parallax being generated. You can see it better in this video:
There are a few wrinkles in the results, still, but nothing that can’t be ironed out.
So how does it work? Black magic. But really, I’ll write about it if people are interested (it’s simple, actually, but a bit technical). All in all, though I’d call this experiment a success, and it was far easier to accomplish than I’d anticipated!