As I said, I don't know about wavy hair (what is it even doing? is there a paper on that somewhere). PSSR2 and Sophy are great though.
AI wouldn't get games out the door faster. It would just reduce headcount and get games out in the same timeframe with poorer quality. I'm not sure increased output would even help the industry, there are a lot of game releases as it is and things often get buried.
There are lots of problems with current games production cycles.
E.g.
- Talent ages out faster than you can ship a trilogy (or burns out and leaves to go make indie games)
- Product risk is sky high, meaning creative experimentation takes a back seat to "EVERY FUCKING STUDIO w/ PEDIGREE MUST GAAS!!"
- Sunk costs of bad decisions early in production make it harder to pivot and change course later as you've spent literally half a decade layering in content and code committed to the previous efforts that came before
- Etc etc
Of course AI can help get games out faster.
With the right tooling, production companies can shave years of man-hours off iteration work:
ART
- Concept artist use AI to rapidly assemble reference work, consolidate and align on themes & concepts to go into early sketches
- Artist start with by-hand low-fi sketches and then use AI to generate hi-fi pre-vis versions, review and tailor rapidly to align on initial design drafts
- Once design is locked they can either by-hand tweak or used tailored AI rework to get to the final designs
- 3D models AI-gen'd, tweaked and topology cleaned, bones, skinning, weights all gen'd & then by-hand tweaked
- End-to-end process is now 2-4 weeks (AI-assisted) vs 4-6 months (w/ mass off-shore outsourcing + onshore clean up)
CONTENT
- AI gen all "white box" NPC voice work, scripts, animations etc, to help designers get into higher fidelity pre-vis way way earlier. This means gameplay & scenario designs can be tested earlier iterated faster and polished faster one they're fully signed off.
Much much quicker to get to "Is this cool/fun?"
- AI agentic QA; armies of QA bots should be used for the simplest of QA testing, noddy regressions can be caught super quickly and remedied early. Even more sophisticated AI agentic teams can be used to plan and test gameplay section walkthroughs, verify against progression breaks & showstoppers, etc
CODE
- Claude. Not much else to say here. This is the easiest area to see huge wins in code turnaround. Fully AI-assisted; no dev replacement needed
AUDIO
- AI-gen basic sound effects, no low-fi placeholder effects ever need to be generated by hand or sourced from commercial or royalty free databases. They can be tailored more closely to final SFXs to better aide designers to test immersion and verify quality earlier and faster
Basically, so much of games development is about experimentation. There is no world where AI tools and solutions don't help every aspect of this to allow teams to iterate faster because the cost of change is now far lower than it has been.Then once changes are locked then AI-assistance can help quality-mastering and really drive production values up higher than before (especially for smaller teams without e.g. world-class talented art teams).
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