Yes, but mostly active text-based and visual novel games. New projects in another genre are active mostly only when weight gain jam event coming.
Yeah, I create all my images in Daz Studio and then do a bit of extra work on them in Photoshop, if needed.
If I was starting my game from scratch now, I’d be tempted to use AI images. Some of them are pretty good! But atm (and IMO) AI images are still very much in their infancy and from the few experiments I’ve done, it can be hard to produce exactly what you’re after.
But in a few years time - when the algorithms and artwork have been improved? I’d be surprised if anyone will still be using art generation software such as Daz. Why spend hours rendering an image when AI can produce exactly what you want in a fraction of the time and without having to spend a fortune on the assets you need…
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Hello @Aeremis, thank you for acknowledging me. I really appreciate it 
My own feeling is I’m happy there is more interest in creating WG games but AI Art trained on other artist’s art without their consent is unethical. AI Art as it is currently is used as a way to remove artists from the process of creating art. The key piece of the current model’s training, LAION, is a dataset created by gobbling up public-to-view copyrighted images without consent from the creators. Artists deserve to be paid for their hard work, or they will no longer be able to be artists. As it stands, AI Art is merely profiting from artists and their work.
I too fear the end of human art. I haven’t gotten to hear a lot of accounts of how it affects artists in our community specifically, but I can take a good guess. I myself haven’t received a commission in many, many months from someone who isn’t a repeat supporter I have a long standing relationship with. I post my comm sheet into the void and hear nothing back. I’m so very thankful to my supporters and that there are people who still want human art 
For me, adapting to AI Art would be… firing people. It’s not some hypothetical situation that can be hand waved away. No, the actual implementation is I shoot a message to my background artist and let them know they aren’t needed anymore. And then I would start to wonder why I pay my color artists to help me color things in when I can just drop my line work into img2img to be colored in ‘better’ so I send a message to my color artists I’ve been working with for over a year now and let each of them know they aren’t needed anymore. And then eventually there will be a good argument for replacing everyone in the chain of drawing. My last art decision would be firing myself from drawing. I’d just be fixing fingers and such; I don’t think you’d call me a WG artist anymore.
It’s just not something I can do as an employer and as an artist.
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I can easily understand what you mean and sadly where all this is going.
So i thank you to stick with your’s thinking and moral. Also for me when Ai will be everywhere i think that human art will still be here for the human touch that will still attract people. I hope it will still be here and that you will be able to live from your passion.
And thanks for your point of view on the question.
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Thanks for your point of view.
I think that most of the WG community are more into the story than into the game (i could maybe i’m wrong). Making the creation of RPG rarer cause most of us are more the storytelling than in the gameplay and mechanics (i think).
Is it really harder to create an RPG? Not so sure, then i think that is why there is so much VN than RPG.
(Won’t lie can’t wait for orristerioso one and The House on Hog Hill - (NEW) 'Chapter Two' Update Out Now! )
Also thanks for your point of view.
No, community aren’t more into the story. It is just easier to make text-based game or Visual Novel game. For Visual novel you can use Ai art or draw your own art if you are an artist, or make rendered pictures in Daz3d. For text-based games you don’t need to draw anything. Creation of RPG is much harder and takes much more time even if you use something like RPG maker, because it is not only about telling a story, but about gameplay, level designs, events designs etc.
Okay, this is why it’s always good to see what the others think. Thanks for the information.
On a slightly separate note, does anyone else feel like the amount of new games/major updates for games on this site has sorta dried up over the past half a year or so?
Most of the more popular games here have been without updates for many months, which is understandable for some games, but the law of averages means that we should’ve had at least a few in total since then.
And as for new games recently, most of them are so early into development, it’s unlikely that the creators will commit to finishing their projects
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In terms of the impact thus far of procedurally-generated graphics, so far it is only supporting specific kinds of games, namely visual novels. That genre specifically is both art-intensive and programming-lite. As a result, “AI” art is encouraging for individual developers with minimal experience but lacking the ability of confidence to produce their own art assets. However, the technology is deceptively ‘easy’; turning algo outputs into non-horrific objects is time-consuming, the cost of hardware and power is non-trivial for the average person and the data they’re trained on is biased towards specific kinds of images.
It might also see use in RPGs but the utility outside specific genres is limited. Yes, we’ll see more games, but it will not result in more variety - nor will there necessarily be an increase in quality. I think it will make it even less likely for group projects to happen, since there’s one less reason for people to team up with a writer or an artist, when they think an algo can do both jobs for them.
Human art is not going away. What we are going to see is a combination of the cost of procedural generation going up as venture capital behind it starts looking for an ROI, with a concurrent push by art spaces and associated business to seek damages for unlicensed use of art. I highly doubt it will go fully uncontested, albeit only from those with the ability to react. A collective of artists can have an impact, but without union levels of organisation, there’s a risk of spaces like deviantart simply settling any disputes for their own benefit, such as using algo access to uploaded content as a source of revenue.
In addition to the above, all art generation tech around today is heavily flawed and in most cases, isn’t reliable enough for high-end commercial applications. These are just some of the things that will stop it being used everywhere. Even as it looms large, I think we’ll ironically see artists paid to clean up its mess of black voids, extra arms and wavy buildings. Giving control over this tech to artists would be super cool, honestly but lbr artists will get priced-out of the tech the moment it starts getting good.
Despite the above, automation has already devastated other jobs and I don’t see any way to fully close the pandora’s box of algos and techbros and people on the edges of the market are gonna get screwed. Specifically, artists reliant on small-scale commissions eg; fanart, personal avatars, OCs, with their commission pages on twitter. It’s not a problem of technology so much as a problem of technology under capitalism, where the worker gets the short end of the stick via whatever means available and corpoate interests will block any attempt to protect those actually doing the work that algos feed upon.
Government support for the arts is the sort of thing that can help short of legislation restraining unethical use of algorithms (good luck getting any good laws passed in the US). All of the (non-fetish) art spaces I’m in are also alarmed but most are already talented enough that their labour can’t be reproduced (yet). It will hit hardest on those with less experience (especially those still studying) and/or in niche roles (you mentioned colourists, but lineart, shading, typesetting are some other jobs non-artists here might not know about) that are easier for an algo to replicate.
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I’m more surprised that the overall number of good games on the site is very high. Game development takes a huge amount of time and projects are stagnant with no updates simply because the developers don’t have time for them or they are not interested in further development. This is not surprising since most of the projects do not bring profit to their creators and they has no motivation in the further development of the project. When there is game jam event with a cash reward at stake we get a lot of new projects since a lot of people get motivation to make them.
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Well I’m not an expert on the subject of Ai art. However, I have noticed that many games (especially visual novels) have started using it. I am not against or in favor of this but, like you, I am also paranoid that one day all the games will be with Ai art. However, if this happens, I think it would take a long time since I think it is still something recent since I notice some flaws such as the hands with 6 or 8 fingers and sometimes when they tell you that a character weighs a certain weight but in the image it doesn’t seem that way (this happens a lot when a group of images are part of a sequence of increase or weightloss). 
But in the end this is just my opinion 
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Year ago Ai couldn’t draw proper hands, fingers, faces. Now we can use Control Net and improved trained models to fix this issues. I think AI will surprise us no less next year as it develops incredibly fast.
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I do think there’s going to be an increase in games that would have just been text based getting algorithm art put into them where there would have otherwise been none, but I’m not sure how many quality games are going to get made with algo art. I am seeing some VNs pop up using it, but if the writing isn’t the main draw then there’s not much appeal, since that kind of art is readily available to just about anyone now. Basically the fact that anyone can get 100 pictures that look mostly the same means it’s all going to be ubiquitous and nearly worthless soon enough, both monetarily and in terms of attention.
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This is exactly why this trend is so disheartening to artists. The attitude that gaining/improving ones skills is seen as a waste of time because you can get a “good enough” alternative for cheap.
Personally I think that most of it looks like “don’t let your wife see this game!” spammy ad art and just kinda gloss over it.
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It’s great that more smaller creators can get their games out because sometimes getting an artist for your game just isn’t possible at times although I’m still very scared about how far these people will try and take the AI thing there’s already been some very awful things that have come out and the fact that once you make something in AI art the ownership gets a bit complicated
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I mean, it’s pretty well established that things generated by a program without sufficient human creativity are un-copyrightable. Folks will claim there’s grey areas around that, but there’s a reason algobros fighting over ‘’‘stolen prompts’‘’ and whatnot is a funny meme.
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Right, but that means there’s nothing stopping someone from just taking all of the algo images from your game and making their own thing.
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Pretty much. It kinda has to be that way or stuff like the bs Hero Forge pulls would be even more onerous. Even if the law changed, you best believe that the copyright claim wouldn’t go to the end user, it would go to the person that created the algo itself. The technique on its own makes it impossible to determine original authorship.
However, I suspect that if someone were to give legal advice they would suggest that if you used methods derived from your own original artwork (see; BoboTS2’s use in Fill Me Up), it would still be protected.
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I feel AI art is only a good thing for our game genre. There are a lot of people out there who have amazing story ideas but just lack the creative ability to bring it into fruition and most fans enjoy having visuals to the story they are playing through.
So many people are complete luddites towards AI in general; they hate it just for the sake of hating it and progress. AI learns and borrows from artistic styles the same as any artist who is learning to draw; almost everyone references their artistic style and design based on those who came before them so that whole can of worms seems like a hollow argument. That is the entire point of studying and learning. Not to mention AI will only keep constantly improving; progress is inevitable thus we should embrace it.
People who have the creative ability will likely still make their own custom art as that will make them stand out from the AI stuff so I don’t think that should be a major concern for quite a while. Even then, artistically inclined people will still stand above the rest in a post AI art world as they will have the creative mindset to create and touch up AI art better than those that don’t.
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having a robot or AI replace you is something that’s been going on since the days of the assembly line now they work with the robot to improve speed and accuracy so too shall art follow.