However, nowadays the crunch is less likely to be glamorized than to be seen as a form of exploitation that risks causing mental illness and burnout. Part of the issue is that crunch time used to be just before a game launched, but now whole game development periods are “crunchy.” With games getting more expensive, companies are incentivized to make even more short-term profits by squeezing developers.
But what if AI could help to alleviate game-development hell? It may already be happening. According to a recent poll by a16z, 87% of studios are using generative AI tools like Midjourney to create in-game environments. Others are using it for game testing or looking for bugs, while Ubisoft is experimenting with using AI to create different basic dialogue options.
And even more help is coming. A tool developed by the team at Roblox aims to allow developers to make 3D environments and scenes in an instant with nothing but text prompts. Typically, creating an environment may take a week for a small game or much longer for a studio project, depending on how complex the designs are. But Roblox aims to let developers almost instantly bring their personal vision to life.
For example, let’s say you wanted your game to be set in a spaceship with the interior design of a Buddhist temple. You’d just put that into a prompt—“Create a spaceship …”—and BAM! Your one-of-a-kind environment would be generated immediately.
The technology behind this can be used for any 3D environment, not just Roblox. My article here goes into more depth, but essentially, if ChatGPT’s tokens are words, the Roblox system’s tokens are 3D cubes that form a larger scene, allowing the 3D generation equivalent of what ChatGPT can do for text. This means the model could potentially be used to generate a whole city in the Grand Theft Auto universe. That said, the demo I saw from Roblox was far smaller, generating only a racetrack. So more realistically, I imagine it would be used to build one aspect of a city in Grand Theft Auto, like a stadium—at least for now.
Roblox claims you’re also able to modify a scene with prompts. So let’s say you get bored of the Buddhist temple aesthetic. You can prompt the model again—“Make the spaceship interior a forest”—and within an instant, all the Buddhist statues will turn to trees.
A lot of these types of things can already be done manually, of course, but it can take a lot of time. Ideally, this kind of technology will allow 3D artists to offload some of the tedium of their job to an AI. (Though some of them may argue that building the environment is creatively fulfilling—maybe even one of their favorite parts of their job. Having an AI spawn an environment in an instant may take away some of the joy of slowly discovering an environment as you build it.)
Personally, I’m fairly skeptical of AI in video games. As a former developer myself, I cringe a little bit when I hear about AI being used to write dialogue for characters. I worry about terribly stilted results and the possibility that writers will lose their jobs. In the same vein, I worry about putting 3D artists out of work and ending up with 3D environments that look off, or obviously generated by AI without care or thought.