Damon Daylamani-Zad

Kaisei Fukaya, Damon Daylamani-Zad, Harry Agius

Procedural content generation (PCG) can be applied to a wide variety of tasks in games, from narratives, levels and sounds, to trees and weapons. A large amount of game content is comprised of graphical assets, such as clouds, buildings or vegetation, that do not require gameplay function considerations. There is also a breadth of literature examining the procedural generation of such elements for purposes outside of games. The body of research, focused on specific methods for generating specific assets, provides a narrow view of the available possibilities. Hence, it is difficult to have a clear picture of all approaches and possibilities, with no guide for interested parties to discover possible methods and approaches for their needs, and no facility to guide them through each technique or approach to map out the process of using them. Therefore, a systematic literature review has been conducted, yielding 200 accepted papers. This paper explores state-of-the-art approaches to graphical asset generation, examining research from a wide range of applications, inside and outside of games. Informed by the literature, a conceptual framework has been derived to address the aforementioned gaps.

Kaisei Fukaya, Damon Daylamani-Zad, Harry Agius

Graphical assets play an important role in the design and development of games. There is potential in the use of AI-driven generative tools, to aid in creating graphical assets, thus improving game design and development pipelines. However, there is little research to address how the generative methods can fit into the wider pipeline. There also no guidelines or heuristics for creating such tools. To address this gap we conducted a user study with 16 game designers and developers to examine their behaviour and interaction with generative tools for graphical assets. The findings highlight that early design stage is preferred by all participants. Designers and developers are inclined to use such tools for creating large amounts of variations at the cost of quality as they can improve the quality of the artefacts once they generate a suitable asset. The results also strongly raised the need for better integration of such tools in existing design and development environments and the need for the outputs to be in common data formats, to be manipulatable and smoothly integrate into existing environments. The study also highlights the requirement for further emphasis on the needs of the users to incorporate these tools effectively in existing pipelines. Informed by these results, we provide a set of heuristics for creating tools that meet the expectations and needs of game designers and developers.