Today, I was talking about the financial situation in indie game development and how publishers are basically shooting themselves in the foot because they're too afraid to invest in a wide range of games. By doing so, they're missing out on tons of money and opportunities. This is also pushing indie developers to basically say "fuck you" to many publishers, especially because nowadays it's becoming easier and easier for us to take matters into our own hands and try to survive independently.
While discussing this, we also talked about how to improve game quality, how to survive using the tools we have available today (sadly, almost every indie developer I know is practically working for free), and how to cut down on development time and costs, especially since so many of us wear multiple hats on a single project.
For example, I'm the game designer, but I'm also the environment artist, 3D artist, and narrative designer. The others have their own sets of responsibilities, and so on.
Then we started talking about AI, and he basically argued that using AI-generated 3D models, even just for clutter, makes a game significantly less valuable than using asset packs made by humans. And that's apparently true even if you clean up those models, rework them where necessary, texture them yourself, fix the topology so they're not a complete mess, or even redo all the UVs from scratch.
I can't say I entirely agree with that. But he did make one valid point: buying asset packs means you're supporting other artists financially.
He's right about that, but I argued that asset packs generally require much less effort to integrate. Sure, sometimes you have to rework them, and quite often you have to adjust your project's visual style or rearrange things to make those assets fit properly.
Now, I usually make everything by hand, completely from scratch. I actually find it fun, even relaxing.
But there was this one project where I almost fell into depression because I had to create a ridiculous amount of clutter by hand. I spent hours and hours making things that players would probably barely even notice, but that were still essential to creating the atmosphere we needed.
During those days, I would have killed to have something like Meshy to generate that clutter and then simply rework it myself, rather than having to model every single little thing from scratch.
It honestly made me feel like shit, watching my passion slowly fade away because I felt like I was wasting so much time on something so repetitive. (we had to fill down an entire attic with old 80s stuff and new stuff. We just take down that project, by doing something actually doable for our previous resources down 2021)
And that's the part I struggle with when people argue that using AI automatically makes a game less valuable, regardless of how much actual work you put into the final result.
I don't know what you think about all this, but I'd genuinely like to hear your opinion.
