Square Enix's Splatoon Clone uses AI-generated art

Foamstarsthe Legally distinct spoon cloning Published by Square Enix It will be released on February 6. Along with this announcement, we learned that Square will be launching a shooter PlayStation Plus subscription service, which will likely provide it with a large audience at launch as subscribers can play without having to purchase the game (you need Plus to play online anyway). We also learned that Square Enix is ​​using AI art creator Midjourney to create some of its in-game assets.

Talking to Video Game Chronicle At a press event, Foamstars Producer Kosuke Okatani said that while most of the game's artwork and assets were hand-made by artists at developer Toylogic, some of the artwork was created using artificial intelligence.

“All the basic elements in Foamstars“The core gameplay, the things that make the game fun – they’re all handcrafted,” Okatani said. VGC. “However, we wanted to try artificial intelligence as well.”

“In terms of in-game content, that's about 0.01% or even less, but we got involved with that by creating these icons in the game.”

In a follow-up statement to VGCA Square Enix representative explained that Midjourney was specifically used to create album covers for in-game tracks, and that everything else was made by real people.

“As developers, we are always looking for new techniques to see how they can help develop the game. In this case, we experimented with Midjourney using simple prompts to produce abstract images. We loved what was created and used them as the final album covers that players will see in the game. Everything was created Completely post by our development team.

It was mid-flight Subject to ongoing legal disputes Regarding scraping of copyrighted material, it was It was recently claimed that its creators deleted art from Magic: Gathering cards To teach the program how to create works of art based on text prompts. Using AI-generated art is disrespectful to all the artists working in it Foamstars and other projects at Square Enix, and became more prominent in the video game industry as corporate VIPs X-Box, UbisoftAnd Niantic They rely on it to promote their work without compensating the artists.