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AIEEEEEEEh

March 23, 2026 by Tesh

Ghosties Never Die is taking time to produce, as most good things do. I’ve been working extensively on planning, sketching, Blender-building, and updating the wiki, sorting out how this is all going to work out. It’s satisfying creative work, and I can’t wait to get the “vertical slice” playable demo out into the wild. I think I have something special here to offer, and I’d love to get people playing it.

For now, though, I need to pivot. I’ve done the prep work, I’ve sorted the systems, I’ve nailed down the cast, I’ve built some of the mall in Blender, I’ve figured out a lot of what I want to have done and what I need to do to get there. It’s time to critically look at what AI can do for me.

Short answer, not much. Sure, sure, I’ll use Claude for code, since I’m still not really a programmer, but that’s invisible to the player. Probably. I don’t know, maybe someone somewhere will parse how the ghosts move and have a Eureka moment and realize that I had AI work on the code. That person will have earned their applause. I simply can’t do the coding myself, so I’m stuck with this, or with hiring a guy. I know a guy. I know lots of guys, actually. I can’t pay them. I’d love to, some of these guys are great to work with. I can’t.

So, what of art? What have I used AI for so far, and what next?

First, most of the images on the wiki were made via generative AI. Specifically, I used Grok to produce my character portraits (Ghosties and the ghosts), as well as some other concept art.

It’s very stubborn about following directions, blaming the DALL-E engine for some limitations, so I had to shift over to ChatGPT for some larger scale concept art, like the concept art of the mall itself. For some reason, Grok refused to make it look like it was built at the 1200 foot diameter I insist on, perhaps observable in these two concept pieces from almost the exact same prompt in two different generators, both using a Blender model I made specifically to force it closer to what I want (though I’ll wind up using that model for the game, so it’s not a loss).

Notice how the sense of scale is significantly different, even if it’s more or less getting the same rough idea? The East Ring Mall is a big place, but Grok simply refused to cooperate.

Perchance.org made some interesting alternatives, but it’s even worse at taking directions than Grok, despite its overall prettiness. And, well, I need these systems to take directions.

AI systems, even the very impressive Meshy.ai, just don’t take directions well. Oh, sure, sometimes they get you 80% of the way there in 5 seconds, which is close to miraculous and fantastic for concept exploration (and for middle management to prompt up some ideas which they can’t normally put into artist language)… but if you want those extra 20 percentage points in the right direction, well, you’re going to have trouble. The time savings you get from the spitball phase running lightning fast are lost (and then some) in trying to get the systems to do precisely what you want them to.

More to the point, though there’s a huge consideration that has nothing to do with the technical feasibility of the tools. If players were OK with that 80%, using an AI generated asset in the final game, I’d be set. We’d be on the Fasttrack Express, running on AI steam, blasting down the rails. And, well, customers simply aren’t. Some call it a witch hunt, some call it just desserts, but whatever the rationale, AI assets in final production releases, even if they look good, trigger what seems to be an autonomic response, a sort of “activist ick” that rapidly metastasizes into shrill denouncements, boycotts and award clawbacks. If I’m actually going to make money at this, and I kind of need to, I can’t risk that response. I could probably even sneak in the “pretty good” assets without almost anyone being the wiser, but if just one player with a bone to pick gets picky, well, the response is a disproportional downside.

For some sense of what I’ve been able to do with said AI tools, though, let’s take a look at one of the key Ghostie characters. Meshy took Grok character designs I prompted up (including Grok’s “A-pose” for completeness) and made a 500,000 polygon character that’s a great approximation of what I want. It used the source image to apply textures to the mesh, again pretty well.

Meshy then reduced that to 30K and 10K, and was then able to wire in a bipedal skeleton rig. It then applied animations to that rig, allowing me to select from what appeared to be several hundred animations.

I deliberately scoped this project to just use humanoid rigs so I could use such an animation library, and transfer those animations between characters. It’s sort of a 3D version of what Fell Seal or Final Fantasy Tactics did, where artists worked with a simple set of baseline character designs and animations then did some variations on a theme to make a vast library of options. It’s a game development shortcut that works well with automated systems. And yet…

Well, even the 500,000 polygon model has weird glitches. The 30K and 10K models accentuate those glitches. The UV maps are an absolute mess. I know, I know, players don’t care about UVs, but if I have to go in and fix anything, that layout will be another time sink liability.

The meshes aren’t optimized so much as… bludgeoned.

The 30k and 10K models suddenly stopped inheriting the decent texturing from the high res model. Now on that last one, maybe Meshy is still a tool in development, so I’ll cut them slack there, but bottom line, they were only ever “pretty good”, not “actually good in an optimized, useful way”.

So, even if the audience would accept AI assets, and at this point, it seems increasingly unlikely (unless they don’t know they are AI, but that’s dishonest and incurs greater wrath when the secret gets out, false positives be hanged), I’d still have assets that aren’t optimized and that require tweaking to perfect. I know, I know, optimization in the days of Nanite and oodles of RAM is sort of out of vogue. And yet, there’s the ironically AI-fueled RAMpocalypse that is undercutting that trend. Some gamers really do care about getting 120 FPS out of their machines. Getting games out to Switch or tablets means optimization is actually kind of important still. If you want to get out to phones, yes, optimization is still very important. I’m not sure if my game translates all that well to phones, but a decently sized 1080p tablet or a Switch 2 could be a great fit. I really do need optimized assets.

That means I’m going to have to do my own art. I’m going to need to make my own portraits, character models, rigs, animations, environments, particle effects, textures, UI and a bunch of interesting other original, boutique hand-crafted pieces of art. The good news is, I can do that. I actually love doing that. I even like wrangling UVs, making rigs, painting weights, animating and all of those little tasks that nobody actually ever sees and even many fellow artists hate. The bad news is, it takes time.

I don’t actually mind this in principle, since I do want precise control over the creative process here. I knew, going in, that this was likely to be what would need to happen. I am neither surprised nor chagrined. It’s just interesting to me to see what the market is doing, and it makes me ask:

If AI is supposed to be an accelerant, what good does it do if it’s accelerating us face first into a wall?

I don’t need AI to spitball art ideas for me, I can do that in my head. That’s a toy for the executives who don’t know how to communicate to artists. It’s a genuinely useful bridge for that purpose, but I don’t need it. I’m running the show here, I don’t have that layer of abstraction and inefficiency. I don’t need AI to make assets I can’t use, even if they do manage to iron the technical wrinkles out. I don’t need AI to rewrite my script, it always sounds worse when it tries. I don’t need AI to analyze my designs and then hallucinate things that aren’t there. I don’t need the headache that comes with anti-AI activists.

Google’s Gemini is the most hallucinogenic, and it’s really weird to see what it does sometimes. It’s the student who reads the Cliff’s Notes then makes up weird stuff to fill in gaps he doesn’t know. Deepseek is supposedly decent, but I’m not sure I want to lean on China and trust them with my data. (Yeah, yeah, Sam Altman, Zuckerberg and Elon Musk aren’t paragons of virtue, but China? It’s the student who steals your class notes, passes them off as his own, then screws up the assignment anyway.) Chat GPT is almost as bad, but it tends to understand a little more. It’s the guy who would rather be somewhere else, but he’ll give the task a shot anyway, and coasts on mild competency without really trying. Grok is the overachieving engineer, mostly avoiding hallucinations, but fond of restating the text and calling it a summary, then breaking it down mechanically, then eagerly trying to suggest something to change. It’s the valedictorian, itching to fix everything, even if it doesn’t need fixing. Claude is so far the head of the class, even though it’s stuck in brownnose mode and “it’s not this, it’s that” analysis. It’s the cheerleader who actually does its homework and doesn’t hallucinate much, but still doesn’t quite understand the assignment.

I wind up running things like my Combat page through Grok and Claude, asking it to look for problems for engine implementation. That’s why the Combat page is so lengthy, it’s stuffed with corner cases and “prompt-speak” for Claude Code to mull over at some point. The player won’t see or need to see probably 90% of that page, but I have to keep the AI coder within bounds and on track. This is actually a useful application of the tech in my project. These things are fast, mostly efficient analytical tools, if you can keep them from hallucinating and take everything they say with a grain of salt.

Elder David A Bednar has a fantastic talk out there title “Things as they Really Are 2.0” that references some of this. His key suggestion is to use these AI beasties as a master uses tools, not to let them actually make decisions or drive the creative process. I do find them useful in that regard, helping me sort out technical glitches, helping me find places where I made typos or orphan ideas on the wiki, or even chasing down design flaws.

AI tech does have uses. It’s not all downside, and I’ll keep using Claude to sort out my Unreal 5.7 blueprints and Claude Code to do some of the heavy lifting of C++ that I just can’t do. Of course, I have to trust that it’s not as idiotic as its other modules can be sometimes, since I don’t have the requisite expertise to troubleshoot it. Maybe what this actually means is that I also Learn To Code. I don’t even mind that all that much in principle. I love logic, I just hate chasing down semicolons and apostrophes.

Again, though, if I can’t use AI output anyway, since the market will excoriate me for it, well, I’m just going to have to roll up my sleeves and do it myself. I’m OK with that. I just don’t know how to pay the bills in the meantime. I can only hope that once I get this game polished up and ready to play, my hard work will be appreciated, enjoyed, and profitable. I am still dedicated to getting this done in my spare time. I believe that it’s worth doing. Here’s hoping you all like it when it’s in your hands.

Posted in Administrative, art, Game Design, Ghosties | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Ghosties Never Die: Vertical Slice

February 28, 2026 by Tesh

I’ve been working on the Ghosties Never Die wiki, sorting out design and writing up a script for a playable “vertical slice” of the game. This is a game development tool used to test design and tech systems before hitting a more strident stride in production. I’m using it as more than a tech demo, though, it will be the first chunk of the full game itself, fully playable and ready to expand.

It’s still largely in descriptive format at the moment, but it seems to be a good time to solicit some more feedback. If you’re interested in such things, whether a light hearted tactical RPG, video game development, or even just writing and reading, will you please head over to the wiki, or even more particularly, to the Vertical Slice page? I’d love to hear what you think of what’s there. Conversations can happen easier here, but I understand that there are discussion pages on the wiki, too.

Ghosties Never Die wiki

Vertical Slice page

Much has been made of late of the “toxic positivity” and largely deleterious weak feedback loops in AAA gamedev lately. High profile failures that never should have made it past the pitch have a way of illustrating what happens when nobody offers constructive criticism. I’m an artist, I learned early on how to accept criticism and change as needed. If you’re willing to brave the wilds of spoiler territory, I’d be most appreciative to get your honest feedback. If it’s great, hey, that’s good to hear. If it stinks, please let me know, and why. I may not make changes, of course, but I also know enough to know that I have plenty to learn and practice. You all know things that I don’t, and it might be exactly what I need to learn.

Thank you all for your interest, and here’s hoping that I can make the tech work so we can get a playable version of this out in the wild sooner rather than later!

Posted in Administrative, art, Game Design, Ghosties, writing | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Ghosties Never Die

February 2, 2026 by Tesh

The video game and film industries are collapsing. This makes it hard to find work. In the meantime, I’m designing a game and seeing just what can be done more or less solo. I’m no coder, but I can do the rest. We’ll see if I can use AI to code, and here and there, to assist with art, much as it pains my soul. In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose. I’d much, much rather do all the art on my own and hire a real coder. I know some very skilled guys. Thing is, I can’t even pay my own bills, so I can’t really pay theirs either.

Title image generated via a 15 minute argument with Grok, based on my 15 minute pencil sketch below. It’s a bit like art directing a belligerently obtuse painter with brilliantly fast rendering skills but the comprehension skills of a drunk orangutan and a deep aversion to following directions. This is the first draft, mostly just to see what Grok can do.

Ghosties Never Die will be a tactical/strategic RPG. It has DNA from the 80s and 90s, inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics, X-Com, Ghostbusters, Goonies, Chrono Trigger and the golden era of Squaresoft and Microprose. It is unabashedly and unapologetically nostalgic, tapping into game design and visual and story themes that I loved growing up. It isn’t a preachy game, it isn’t gory or profane, it’s just good old adventuring with bits of paranormal weirdness, heart and humor.

I have a wiki fired up, where I’ve set up a main page as a Game Design Document, and I’ll make other pages to dig into the design and details. This is part “accountability”, to keep myself going, part “sausage making” to show what I’m doing and why, part “exhibition” for the sake of showing what I do as part of my increasingly irrelevant portfolio. It’s about showing what is possible with some “off the shelf” tools, passion, skill, history… and a bit of desperation.

For a lot of things, especially on the code side, I’m “winging it”, just seeing what can be done. I have decades of experience as a gamer and working in film and games as a 3D/2D artist and animator, so I’m not new to this process. The AI tools are new to me, at least somewhat, as I’ve worked with Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI, but they are meant to fill the gaps (coding) and accelerate the timetable. This will be a journey for all of us, and hopefully it’s worth the ride.

I know very well that there’s a general anti-AI backlash growing. I share some sentiment with it. Sadly, I think that we’re stuck with the tech, so I want to see what can be done with it. It always seems like working in this industry means selling parts of my soul in one way or another. At least this time, I’m doing it on my own terms. Maybe that makes me a sellout, but the harsh reality is that I can’t find work doing what I’ve done to date. Activists and money men have gutted my chosen industries, strangling them with audience-limiting politics and wallet-wringing business models, chasing out quality and passion. If I have any chance of squeezing an idea out of my head into the market, I’m stuck with automation and shortcuts out here in the indie wilds. That’s kind of exciting, in its way, but not my comfort zone.

I know, I know, I’m not exactly selling this project. I’m not a salesman. I hate selling myself and my stuff more than I hate generative AI. I only ever wanted to make cool stuff that makes people’s day a little brighter, and make a living at it. I make things, it’s how I’m wired. What I’m doing here, out of a midlife crisis born of “HR doesn’t hire straight white guys any more”, is taking tools and banging them together to see what comes out. Hopefully either the final game (let’s say I get there) or the process is uplifting and informative in some way. If it works, I have more ideas. Ideas are never the hard part.

So, thank you for your time, and if you’ve further interest, please check out the wiki! I’d love any feedback you have. I probably won’t respond to insults, unless it’s fun, but I’ve learned enough about constructive criticism over the decades that I value well thought out rationales, even if I don’t agree with them. Steel sharpens steel. I appreciate your time, and here’s hoping we all learn something useful!

Ghosties Never Die wiki over on wikioasis

Posted in Administrative, art, Game Design, Ghosties, writing | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

A Tale of Three Dusts

January 30, 2025 by Tesh

The video game industry is undergoing some dysfunction and disrepair of late. Despite Chinese games like Black Myth: Wukong selling well, and “free to play” gacha games like Star Rail, Wuthering Waves and Genshin Impact making decent money, western studios like Ubisoft and Bioware are imploding. Our first “AAAA game” was less than successful. Concord, meant to be the new Star Wars, performed poorly enough that it was pulled from the market in less than two weeks despite 8 years of production and many millions of dollars.

And then there’s Dustborn. It’s technically still available, but not selling well, and reviews are, well, mixed. As a case study, let’s compare it to Dust: An Elysian Tale and Dustforce DX. These comparisons will be somewhat apples to oranges, to be sure, but there’s still value in poking a bit at what these games are and how well they have been received.

Dustforce and Dust are each more than a decade old at this point, which has allowed them to accrue more word of mouth success than Dustborn. Dustforce is available primarily on PC and Mac, while Dust is available primarily on PC and XBox 360, though both were ported elsewhere.

Dustborn, being a more modern game from 2024, is available on PC, PS4, PS5, XBox One and XBox Series X/S.

Dustforce and Dust are platformers, each with their own twist. Dustforce is a highly skill intensive, flow-based time-important game with retro visuals, while Dust is a “metroidvania” with a focus on appealing “Disneyesque” visuals and intricate combat. Both are 2D games, with excellent production value in their chosen style. Dust is also notable for being produced almost entirely by a single person.

Dustborn, on the other hand, is a 3D adventure sort of game, heavy on sociopolitical messaging and narrative. It has a modern cartoonish visual style, and it was partially financed by political organizations.

Gamalytic is a website that estimates sales numbers for games, and Steamdb.info also has some useful data. With a quick perusal of those sites for these three Dust games, we can see that Dust ($5,000,000) is the clear winner, Dustforce ($400,000) has met with good success, but Dustborn ($100,000) is less successful.

Gamalytic Dust: An Elysian Tale

Steamdb.info Dust: An Elysian Tale

Gamalytic Dustforce DX

Steamdb.info Dustforce DX

Gamalytic Dustborn

Steamdb.info Dustborn

For how long it has been out, Dustborn certainly has time to catch up with the others, so we will see what happens in the longer run. In the meantime, reviews are another consideration. Dust: An Elysian Tale is well loved, Dustforce DX is likewise popular, but Dustborn is less appreciated. Word of mouth has been unkind to Dustborn, largely because of the polarizing nature of the political messaging that it offers.

The political nature of Dustborn is a recurring theme, with politics being a problem with Ubisoft’s pending Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and Bioware’s Dragon Age Veilguard. These games all embraced sociopolitical themes and pushed political agendas as a key component of game design and promotion. Veilguard may yet spell the end of Bioware, Dustborn could end the otherwise decent career of Ragnar Tørnquist, and Ubisoft is likely to have a rough time with the pending launch of AC:Shadows on top of a string of recent underperformers.

This sort of political agenda naturally limits the sales of games. Dust and Dustforce had no political ties to the real world. They were crafted as games first, not vehicles for outside agendas. Their potential audience is therefore much larger than games that aim specifically for adoption by sociopolitical niches. The “Sweet Baby Inc.” effect has made mainstream gamers less interested in such political games.

Writ elsewhere, this sort of sociopolitical posturing has disrupted Disney and almost every other major Hollywood studio, literature and other entertainment. Writers and producers who see their products as political vehicles are naturally seeing smaller audiences. Setting aside moral arguments for or against using art mediums for political grandstanding, the natural stifling effect of this approach has predictable results. Western entertainment is falling apart, and many developers don’t even seem to understand why, preferring instead to blame customers.

This, then, is where I’d draw a distinction between the desire to make games, and the desire to make money making games.

Video games are an art medium, perhaps the best one for audience agency and end customer customization. They have vast potential for storytelling and play experiences. As with any art medium, they can also be used for less ambitious projects, propaganda and vulgarity. This is inherent to art, part of the human condition, and wholly expected of any avenue of human expression. As such, if your aim is simply to make games, what is considered “in bounds” is entirely up to you. Dustborn and games in its political stable were made to push or embrace certain ideas, and gameplay was a secondary consideration, merely the vehicle for the messages. Dust and Dustforce were made as games, with the play experience itself as the goal for the customers.

Notably, these two latter titles, designed as games first, with a much larger potential audience, have found financial success. They helped their creators make money making games. Dustborn, on the other hand, is less effective at making money, but is an effective title, inasmuch as it embraced and embodied its sociopolitical agendas, with little regard for what customers might want. It’s doing what it set out to do, but one big trouble is that such actions curtail widespread interest.

This, then, becomes the question that game developers (and Hollywood and other entertainment producers) need to look at when they put together their productions. Highly honed games, with a focus on how the game plays, will naturally have more financial success than a roughly equivalent game that naturally limits its potential player base due to political presentation. Are you, as a creator, trying to make something that pushes your views out into the world, or are you hoping to entertain customers and earn their money, and maybe even loyalty? Sometimes it’s possible to do both, but more and more, customers are becoming sensitive to agendas of any sort, and in many cases, rejecting them. Games that are built for the play experience first (and only) are much more likely to be profitable, and effective at building brands and possibly even careers.

Which way, then, my fellow developers? Do we embrace the dusty path of making messages in a unique medium, or do we make games for gamers who wish to shake the dust of daily drudgery off of their weary souls?

Posted in art, economy, Game Design, writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Danger in the Desert Part 1 – Arches

September 8, 2023 by Tesh

Warmachine is a tabletop wargame that I’ve had my eye on for almost 20 years. I purchased some of the rulebooks and pored over them, thinking that maybe some day, I’d dive in and get some models, paint them up, and play a few rounds. The steampunk-magic craziness is a theme that is near and dear to my interests, and the small squad play is far more interesting to me than fielding a Warhammer army of dozens. I’ve always loved tactical games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, and the gridless system of Warmachine seemed fascinating. (Behemoth model photo below shamelessly swiped from eBay for reference.)

Privateer Press has relatively recently announced that they are moving to a “Mark IV” for their game, which is jettisoning their previous design ethos of always allowing any produced models to be played. They are making a whole new range of minis and moving their fictional world ahead in time some decades or so. This has pros and cons, which I’m not really going to dive into here, since I’m still mostly an outsider, but suffice it to say that it’s causing some friction. On the upside for me, Privateer Press has put most of their models on sale, and it’s a great time to pick up deals on Facebook or eBay as people sell off their collections.

Sure, these deals that I’m picking up are the old “legacy” models, so I won’t be able to go to tournaments or the like with them, but I intend to play with my kids and maybe a friend or two here and there, so I don’t really care what the cutting edge of the game is doing as far as what I’d need to play there. As such, I can get small battle groups from just about every faction and have a ton of play options. Yes, I’m cheap, and way behind the adoption curve, but that’s just how I do most things.

Also, I’m going to be “proxying” several things, making my own minis to use in the game. I’m using this “abandoned wild west” of the game as my playground for testing out small scale sculpting and painting. I’ve wanted to do this sort of thing for decades. I work digitally professionally, and it’s great to have tangible work as part of my skillset. That’s part of why I ran the Tinker Kickstarter campaigns, making physical goods of my designs (plenty of leftovers are still for sale over on my shop site!). There’s just something satisfying about real world art that my days full of digital work don’t quite match. I do love a lot of what I do in the digital world, it’s just not the same, especially as AI gets weirder, and I want to have more skills I can call on if needed. These proxies can also be useful when I play D&D with my kids and cousins, since that’s a thing we do here and there.

This project started in my sketchbook, of course, like so many other fun ideas.

I’ll be doing something for most of the factions in the game, but to start off, I’ll be digging into a faction from the complementary game, Hordes. (Warmachine and Hordes are designed to work together, and indeed, are rolled together under one banner for Mark IV. Warmachine is more about the tech side, Hordes is about monsters.) I’m taking the Hordes “Circle Orboros” faction and changing them up a bit. Instead of the standard “forest monsters” theme, I’m taking their “wold” stone monsters and reimagining them as a squad of beasties that protect their world’s equivalent of Goblin Valley. This means some custom units I’ll be sculpting and painting, and taking some of their units and painting them in a style that evokes that weird-but-beautiful red sandstone feeling so famous in the Utah deserts.

Tangentially, I have a bunch of my own photos of Goblin Valley that may be of interest over on Pinterest.

To get started, then, I’m sculpting my own Sentry Stone, themed around Arches national park and the iconic Delicate Arch and double arch. It’s a cousin of sorts to Goblin Valley, so it fits the theme well.

Here, then, are some of my process photos for my unit, meant to be a stone arch trio, on a 40mm round base. I started with a wooden base, lasercut by a friend of mine. I drilled some small holes and added some artfully mangled paper clips and a bit of superglue.

Then came the Sculpey polymer clay, carefully molded and detailed by finger and toothpick.

After the first baking pass, some sand and a Burnt Sienna wash…

…I decided that I didn’t like part of the interior of the large arch, and sculpted in an addition.

After the second bake and another thin coat of Burnt Sienna, it was time for some other light glazes in bands to get that sandstone layered look.

A bit more detailing, and I’m ready to call this done. The Circle “Blackclad” druids do tend to sculpt runes into their work, so I might revisit this with some runes at some point, but I’m undecided on the colors for that. I mostly want this to stand on its own visually, but the runes would help it look more consistent with the official models when I get to those.

This was a project I tried mostly to see if I could sculpt well enough, to test the Sculpey itself, the paints and the paint scheme, and the overall look and feel. It’s a bit more banded than the proper Goblin Valley bits will be as I proceed through the project, but overall, I’m very happy with how it turned out. I’ll put together some of the “mannikins” with toothpicks, string, superglue and some sort of thing for the leaves of the original. I’m using juniper and bristlecone pine trees for inspiration instead of deep forest oaks and such, so I may just do some pine needle sculpting or go scrounge up some actual tree bits for use on those. I do have some proper models from Privateer Press for this project later on, but I’m using these homebrew experiments to nail down my process before I go all in on the painting for those models.

I’m looking forward to doing more of this, and I hope that you enjoy the trip as well. Thanks for stopping by!

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Authenticity and Artifice

November 30, 2022 by Tesh

AI Art was all the buzz a couple of weeks ago. That chatter has died off somewhat, perhaps as people got tired of the shiny new toys like Midjourney and Dall-E 2, but it’s a Thing that will only get more technically impressive and practically useful as time goes on. The pros and cons of that can certainly be debated, but I don’t think that we’re going to see that genie go back into the bottle. Like “Machine Learning”, which improves things that the Money Men care about in production, like schedule and headcount, using AI in art is a tool and a toy that is too useful to go away. At least, until the inevitable meltdown of society and technology, and we’re back to drawing on stone cave walls with charcoal-tipped sticks, but that’s tangential.

“steampunk floating island apocalypse” via NightCafe

This particular bit of buzz is of interest to me both in the abstract and professionally. I worked in video game development for a decade, and I’m working in film at the moment. I haven’t had occasion to use these particular tools for anything more intense than helping my kids with homework, but I do use Houdini, which is built on “proceduralism“, which is more or less the engine that drives AI art.

I’m already using a tool that takes inputs, runs simulations and variations, then spits out something that I can sort-of art direct. The computer does the heavy lifting of calculating all the bits and bobs bouncing about, and if I’ve set up the parameters for the procedure correctly, that calculation comes up with something usable. My job is then mostly about setting up the system for success, and inevitably wrangling things when the computer mangles them somehow. I’m not drawing and painting frames, like I grew up wanting to do, watching the Nine Old Men work their magic. No, I’m a desk-jockey cowboy-mage, desperately trying to harness eldritch powers in a digital wilderness, hoping to produce something that the art director will be happy with.

I’m using a tool to produce effects. It’s not the same as using a ballpoint pen on paper, which I can do, as seen here with my Dwarven Tinkerer, but it’s still a tool. It’s a tool with a bit of a mind of its own, and a black box heart that I hope I can channel to great effect. Sometimes it does as predicted, but sometimes it gets a bit flipped somewhere, or an assumption inverted, and things go awry. This, to me, is the most irksome part of using such tools from a production standpoint. Yes, the simulations get faster and faster every year, the results cleaner and more useful… but sometimes I just don’t have the control that I have with much less ambitious (and much more time consuming) tools.

Maybe I can have the spiffy AI system generate 200 different trees, all variations on a theme based on growth rules and parameters, but none of them are what I actually want to use for a “hero” tree. They can be good for fillers to back up the Potemkin Villages that games and films build as part of their magical facades, but for things that get the spotlight, that Uncanny Valley effect where computers still don’t quite get reality is still a hurdle.

We’ve known this for a long time in film; that’s part of why filmmakers can get away with matte painted backgrounds and greenscreen tricks, even as they spend an inordinate amount of time on actors and their makeup and lighting. Backgrounds can be simpler, counting on viewer assumptions and interpolations to gloss over imperfections. We also see a similar “audience interpretation” filling in the gaps when we look at concept art. Even masters like Daniel Dociu, for all their incredible skill and intricate detailing, still don’t work out and carefully render every little detail when they produce concept art. Zoom in on something like his “Tectonic Dystopia” piece…

…and note that even as he bombards the viewer with detail, it doesn’t always bear heavy scrutiny. He’s put in a lot of work, but a detail like a single road is largely a suggestion, a brushstroke or two, maybe a few blobs or smudges, and the viewer’s assumptions of what a city looks like at scale fills in the mental gaps. It’s a fine dance between just enough detail to be plausible without having so much detail that it triggers our sense of wrongness if something’s not perfect.

Leveraging the viewer’s imagination and interpretation is indeed part of Dociu’s mastery of his craft, and while I may sound disparaging, I recognize and am impressed by his genuine skill in performing such feats. Sometimes, we want to be fooled. Art movements and forms of entertainment have been built on this sort of shenanigan, tricking the viewer’s eye, like pointillism, impressionism, or the mental assault of cubism and lesser imitators in more modern art, bluffing with balderdash to give the impression of depth.

The principles at play, then, those of dazzling with detail, or overloading with obfuscation, well, those are age-old fine art traditions. When it comes to AI, though, it’s still learning. It’s only as good as the material it’s trained with, and the assumptions built into the generation systems. Those assumptions aren’t always built with fine art principles in mind, or are built to function first, rather than consider fripperies like composition, emotional appeal or verisimilitude, much less photoreality. Perhaps such considerations will continue to be folded into the frameworks of these tools, but for now, there is a lot of room to grow.

Deep Fake videos are one branch of the technology that is getting particularly interesting and potentially troublesome. Sure, being able to fake Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford is a humoresque parlor trick, but more nefarious uses abound in an era of political disarray and general lack of fidelity to truth. There’s a moral dimension to art, and there always has been, so it’s wise to be aware of how technology can engender trust when it is not warranted. Again, sometimes people want to be fooled, though, for better and worse.

Similarly, there are revolutions in animation brewing. Motion is especially tricky, and much more likely to faceplant into the Uncanny Valley. The technology keeps improving, however, as noted over here, and here. This will definitely make some production faster, especially for midground and background crowds and such. It will be interesting to see how well it fares in the foreground. I’m not convinced yet that it will work as well as some would like, but there are already real consequences for production pipelines.

In the meantime, however, I’ve found that I increasingly value authenticity. From OK GO‘s oddball music videos that bank on their intense efforts in production to Wintergatan’s fascinating machine, from anachronistically authentic YouTube gamers (the older gentleman known as TinFoilChef just played Minecraft the way he wanted to and built an audience that loved his affable curmudgeonly ways) to hand-carved woodworking, I find value in things that appear to me to be genuine and honest. I still carry pens and a sketchbook most places I go, after all, and I’m almost always drawing something, even if it’s just odd designs to keep myself focused. There is value in things that have been made by hand, though whether that value can translate into a career is certainly always a question.

The sky isn’t falling. New tools mean more ways to fool people, with all its attendant implications for an increasingly dysfunctional humanity. “All is vanity“, though, and we must always consider truth and our own decisions. It was ever thus. My profession is definitely impacted, and my personal interests in creative endeavors will be perturbed somewhat, so I’m not neutral on this. I simply see yet another set of shenanigans. Artists have always borne responsibility to be uplifting and useful, since their tools are inherently not honest, as mere representations of reality. Far too many fail miserably at this, and new tools will not compensate for moral failures. Those of us in the audience will always have to be wary, or at least, we’ll have to choose which artifice we want to accept as authentic.

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OCD Mondrian Cube

February 16, 2022 by Tesh

The Rubik’s Cube was a Big Deal for a while when I was young. Nobody I knew understood how to solve it, but we liked trying, at least, until we got tired of failing. I think I managed to get the top layer solved, but never made much more progress, so I shelved the thing and moved on to more solvable puzzles like calculus.

Now that I’m older with children of my own, I figured I ought to learn how to solve the ‘Cube. I’m not talking about speed solving, here, either, learning those skills are far beyond what I want to spend time on. I settled for learning the simpler algorithms that other people have devised, and memorized how to solve the basic 3x3x3 standard cube, as well as the 2x2x2, the “Megaminx” dodecahedron variant and a pesky little version called the Ghost Cube.

I’ve since collected a couple dozen of different iterations of the Cube, as well as some other oddments like a barrel and flower, collectively called “Twisty Puzzles” in some corners of the internet. They are a fascinating fusion of function and fun, experiments with spatial and tactile troubleshooting with strong visual appeal. The mechanical engineering on display is almost as fascinating as the puzzles themselves.

Speaking of engineering, take a look at Oskar van Deventer‘s work. Some of his puzzles look amazing, and more impressively, function in weird and boggling ways. There’s a whole world of puzzles out there, and I’m slowly collecting some here and there to keep my brain and fingers nimble.

I’ve also recently taken a simple shape-shifter version of the ‘Cube and inflicted a bit of graffiti on it. I call it the OCD Mondrian Cube for now, though it’s more colorful than a proper Mondrian painting, almost more like a stained glass sort of thing, as my eldest noted. Proper Product Name Pending, and so on, etc.

It has two “solve states”, but it’s more precise to say that those two solved states are each “half-solved”. You can either make it into a nice, smooth cube (scrambling the colors), or you can group the colors in the six cardinal directions (scrambling the shape). You cannot solve for the shape and the colors at the same time. It will either drive your OCD mad or overload it and help you relax, maybe even allowing you to just play with the thing and find a completely unsolved state that you can find beauty in. I’m not sure how it would actually work with someone vexed with such a psychological condition, so it may be more trouble than it’s worth for some people, to be sure. Even so, I’m fond of the thing, and I’ve half a mind to see about getting it made more officially than this permanent-marker version I’ve prototyped.

Puzzles are good for the brain, I think. There’s value in learning methodical approaches to problem solving, and I see some extra value in this half-solvable mutant I’ve cobbled together. Sometimes life simply doesn’t have simple solutions. You can optimize for one thing, but you have to let something else go. I believe it’s a valuable life lesson to learn that sometimes solving things doesn’t mean they are then perfect. Sometimes “good enough” truly is enough, and while we’re commanded to “be perfect” in holy writ, that’s only something we can do with divine help. Sometimes all we can do is make life a little bit better, or simply find joy in the journey.

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Inktober 2021, The Scarbots, Week One

October 8, 2021 by Tesh

I introduced the Scarbots a bit last time, and have since produced a couple more of them. I’ll save today’s for next time, but these two get to join their brethren to finish up Week One of Inktober 2021. I had a little more time on these, so I managed to finish up the inkwork. I do clean them up a bit before coloring them, so that’ll wait, but for now, that’s 7 new Scarbots in the sketchbook for the year!

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Inktober 2021, The Scarbots, Days 1-5

October 6, 2021 by Tesh

Inktober is an annual art project, intended to get people in the habit of drawing a bit with ink every day. I’ve never really had time to fully commit to such a thing, but I’ve been trying to do a bit of ink drawing each day this October. I’ve only “finished” one of these, and I suspect I’ll go back and do more with each of them at some point, like I did with this, the first Scarbot I ever produced (there’s another over on my Artstation page):

The Scarbots are a remnant of a forgotten war in an alternate Earth history’s northern Europe. They are part of the Project Khopesh storyline that I work on when I can make the time. They are expert scavengers, repairing themselves and each other as often as they need in the Northscar badlands. No two are the same, and though they are expert mechanics and very skilled in improvisation, they aren’t all that intelligent outside of their mission expertise and maintenance.

This new batch of Scarbots are certainly rougher, but these are the raw scans, straight from my sketchbook. I did some pencil work first, then inked in with a simple Uni-ball Onyx Micro ballpoint pen. If nothing else, I’ll have a new herd of Scarbots to play with at the end of the month. It will be fun to “flesh” these out, as it were, one of these days.

Thanks for stopping by, and we’ll see what else I can come up with!

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Library of the Lost: Free D&D 5E Adventure Module

May 15, 2020 by Tesh

I was recruited to produce an adventure for my local library’s teenage D&D event that will be running tomorrow, and while it’s taken more time than I thought, I’ve had the opportunity to learn to use a half dozen new pieces of software and brush up a bit on my writing, editing, sketching, painting and cartography.  Some of the need to learn new tricks is due to the midstream switch to using the Roll20 website for remote play instead of just meeting at the library in person.  I like learning new things and finding ways to make old tools do new things, so this has been a good experience.  It does wind up taking longer than just using old, mastered tools, but I like to think that the ability to learn new things is a healthy one, even if it hasn’t led to more employment opportunities.

This “module” of sorts is offered as a free download.  It was done for the Orem Public Library, using some of my own art, a bit from my daughter, and free assets from other sites, noted in the text.  It’s designed as a toolkit; a setting, maps, an adventure, a handful of monsters and some NPC “seeds” to spur adventures.  You can play through the adventure or just noodle around in some of the maps, fighting monsters.  It’s an introductory sort of thing, meant to engage teens who may never have played an RPG before.  I haven’t yet produced the “printer friendly” version of the file, since making the Roll20-ready assets was the priority, but I’ll see about getting those optimized monochrome assets done in the next week or so, time allowing.

If you do poke around in these files, I’d welcome feedback of any sort.  I believe it will serve its stated purpose, even as I admit that I’m new to the 5th Edition of D&D, as well as the production software, so this isn’t going to be as polished as some of those glossy minibooks that the Pathfinder or D&D people produce.  I may also note that I’m not attached to any particular RPG, and this production was meant to be flexible; it could be tweaked fairly easily for use in other systems.

Please feel free to download these files and reproduce them for personal or nonprofit use.  Tangentially, I also modeled a sculpture of the “Gyro Golem” for use on the library’s 3D printers, but that sort of fell by the wayside.  It’s also available as a free download on Thingiverse or Pinshape.

GyroGolemRenderCropped

Thank you, and hopefully these are of some use to you!

LibraryOfTheLost2020

(Link above is to the master PDF, the following are supplemental images for Roll20 usage)

 

Roll20Prep

 

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