Heuristics for AI-driven Graphical Asset Generation Tools in Game Design and Development Pipelines: A User-Centred Approach
This addresses the problem of effectively incorporating AI tools into game development workflows for designers and developers, but it is incremental as it provides heuristics based on user feedback rather than a new technical breakthrough.
The study tackled the lack of research and guidelines for integrating AI-driven generative tools into game design pipelines by conducting a user study with 16 participants, finding that users prefer these tools for generating variations early in the design process and emphasizing the need for better integration and common data formats.
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.