EDITOR’S NOTE – 7.22.23: There is no AI art or AI assets being used in the game! This is an old article where I talked about using AI generated assets in an earlier version of the game for 3 of the boss fights. I’ve since changed my mind on AI art due to concerns with data privacy and I have removed all AI assets from the game – more can be read about it in these blog posts HERE, HERE and HERE . I’m still leaving this article up as I want to be transparent and I think it’s interesting to have a record of the evolution of my thoughts and process I went through while making the game.
The making of Robo-boss and further thoughts on using AI art in the game
Hey all! I made good progress over the last few couple weeks on the new boss fight and actually managed to get it done – woohoo! As always, I’m going to try to make a new blog post whenever I make a milestone like this. Additionally, there’s been a bunch of controversies in the space of AI art recently that have made me rethink continuing to use assets from AI generators in the game (at least for now). In this article I’ll touch on all that!
To AI Art or Not To AI Art
I’ll start off with the non-spoiler stuff for the boss fight first and talk about AI. I went back and changed the previous blog post I wrote as I think I may have been a bit too glib in relation to using AI generated assets in the animations I’m putting together.
I’ve really enjoyed using the AI images that I can get DALLE 2 to pop out and then cutting them up and turning them into animations for a few of the boss fights – so far I’ve only used the AI images for 3 boss fights – robo-boss, bat boss and giant boss. I was planning on doing more, but I’ve decided to pull back and hold up on using the AI images anymore until more questions on the sourcing of the datasets that are being used to train the AIs are sorted out.
I do think AI generated imagery is a really exciting space, particularly when you can use it to cut and paste together new creations like I’ve been doing – I guess I kind of just see it as another form of collage art. But following the recent protests online, I think there is a good point to be made on issues around data privacy and where the art that the AI is being trained on is coming from. The main complaint I’m in alignment with is the idea that the artists whose work is being used in the datasets should be able to consent first to their work being scrapped and processed.
I think things would be different if the images that the AI was training on were getting pulled from public domain or stock image sites where people are consciously posting their pictures for open usage. However, this situation appears to be that the data is just being scraped from various websites including artist’s image galleries on their personal websites.
It’s definitely murky territory, and I’m not entirely sure where my opinion lays in things, as the images the AI comes up with aren’t just direct duplicates but are “inspired” by the styles of artwork that has been processed (I guess in a way you could consider that a form of collage art too?).
But after all is said and done, I do think it is reasonable to ask people to try and support artists in relation to concerns on data privacy. I do believe that if these AI systems are to continue to develop, they should be striving to have their datasets coming from consenting and aware contributors. I even feel like it wouldn’t be that hard to develop something like that too? Just start a website and ask people who are interested in AI art to send them a bunch of images to train the AI on. It seems to me like you’d get a ton of submissions for that – or even just use already available public domain or stock images. I’m sure there’s a scale issue to this, but I feel like you could do this more above the board.
Either way – as it is, the game doesn’t have much AI art in it all, like I previously said only 3 (of a planned 16) boss fights use it, so not using it going forward isn’t really going to hinder, slow down or change anything much. It was just…. fun to make stuff with I guess.
Oh well, thems the breaks.
I will say if anyone ever does develop a more ethically raised, free range, grass fed organic AI image generator – I’ll definitely be there for using it though.
Robo-Boss Fight!
SPOILER ALERT! – Going to describe the boss fight against mr. robot. Skip head to where it says “End of Spoilers” if you would rather miss this.
Throughout the game the player character is going to be getting multiple powers (I’m calling them Items right now) and three main weapons to use. The three weapons the player will get is a Spear (starting weapon – does medium damage and is medium fast), a sword (very fast, but does light damage unless “super charged” with a perfect block – which causes it to do heavy damage) and what I’m calling a Power Sword (slow and always does heavy damage).
I wanted to make a boss that the player has to fight when they first pick up the Power Sword which kind of trains them on the way to use the new weapon. This weapon and boss fight I’m currently planning on happening half way through the game – it will also be the final main weapon the player picks up.
The function of the Power Sword is really to just do lots of heavy damage – however the trade off to this is that it’s very slow to swing and only has a small number of combos you can do with it. As such I wanted this boss fight to be pretty simple – avoid the robot’s attack and do lots and lots of damage to kill it. The robot only has a couple attack options (punching/kicking and firing missiles at the player that randomly drop from the sky) and has no guard bar. However, it holds a very high health pool, which means you gotta do lots of big damage to it.
This boss can’t be traditionally “perfect blocked” like other enemies, but it can trigger a “super charge” state on the player – which allows additional benefits to the player briefly, including able to deal a lot more damage with Sword weapon. I’ll get more into guard bars, perfect blocks and super charging in a future blog post.
The creation of this boss fight was much more straightforward – simple animations (made pretty much the same way I made the bat boss fight from the previous blog post) and simple instructions. I’ve found a strategy that is the most effective when fighting this fella is to not worry about blocking attacks like is common with other enemies – but to instead dodge out of the way of the attacks. I’m enjoying how this fight feels as it’s almost like a boxing match, where you have to weave in and out to dodge the punches and missiles and then coming in for your own attack.
I wanted to keep this boss fight simple, so Robo-boss doesn’t really have stages and the attacks it does mostly stay the same throughout the fight. This being stated, parts of Robo-boss do start to explode off the more damage it takes including it’s arms, one leg and head. Ultimately it’ll just be a torso that’s bouncing around on one foot until you finish it off.
This was a lot of fun to animate, but getting the animations to travel to the correct nodes was really tricky given that there were basically 5 different “states” the Robo-boss will be in throughout the fight, but the movement and attack instructions were basically the same for each state.
END OF SPOILERS
So that’s about it for this update! I have to say I wasn’t too sure about this blog when I started writing it as all the previous attempts I’ve made to have a blog or a vlog (or anything that requires continuous updating) I never kept up with because it all started to feel too much like doing homework (fuck that shit).
However, I’ve actually really been enjoying writing this. It’s a very cathartic experience when you get to work out and explain your thoughts on a project you’ve literally had your whole life revolve around for years.
I’ll probably do a bit of work on concepting out the next boss fight next week before I go on holiday break (where I won’t be working on the game at all). I have a bunch of ideas but I need to nail down one of them to focus on for the next month or so (more like two months with the holiday break). I Probably won’t update the blog until next year at that too – so I hope everyone has a good holiday season and see you in 2023!
As always, you can check out the video of the Robo-boss fight on all my social media accounts, particularly TikTok and Instagram – I’ve interestingly been getting the most traction on TikTok lately, which is a social platform I’ve actually been really enjoying (despite the also controversial nature of it lol).
Thanks all!
-Charles