Can I make a confession? I love those clips of ‘AI-generated games’ people post on social media. Not because they’re good (they’re very bad), or because I love dumping water into the gaping maw of a data centre (I like it a moderate amount). I love them because it’s pure ‘the emperor has no clothes’ stuff: cadres of soi-disant tech visionaries desperately trying to gas themselves and everyone else up into not seeing what is clearly in front of them— something which could never be a game at all.
Usually, anyway. It turns out that at least one of those viral AI-generated game clips is now being made into, uh, an actual game (via PCGamesN). But here’s the weird part: its creator says it doesn’t have any AI-generated stuff in it.
Shores of Vaelithar got its start as a viral, five-second clip generated by Midjourney and shared on X by its creator studio, Desimulate. It showed a first-person view of a stylised, lo-fi fantasy game—foreboding castle, rolling green plains and all.
The version of the game which now has a Steam page—and, notably, no AI-generated content notice—looks similar but a touch different. That’s because, Desimulate told PCGN, all the material in the actual game “is in-game footage and free of AI-generated content.
The way they tell it, it sounds like they’re using Midjourney for concept art: “I still use Midjourney to realize my conceptual needs in a manner that can be properly communicated to the artists on our team. These concepts are what I would refer to as ‘pre-concept’ concept art.”
AI-generated concepts in hand, Desimulate says the rest of the dev team “interpret it and turn it into something real!” I suspect that will still stick in the craw of AI-sceptical onlookers (myself included). After all, you could always just give the prompts you’re typing up for Midjourney to your human team and let them interpret those. Cut out the middlebot!
Regardless, Desimulate says that “further down the road, probably very soon, we’ll definitely outgrow that methodology and require a real concept artist… Our primary goal is to get enough of a vertical slice that we can start looking for funding to enable us to work on this full time.”
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