Imho this is the perspective of inexperience in the art domain and an extrapolation from still concepts to full worlds, and not acknowledging that art is as much the skill to put things in the medium as it is to have a developed eye.
Even indie games need very bespoke art. Yeah, you can now generate images that are passable, but that doesn’t expand to making a cohesive world of items unless you’ve developed an eye for it like the person in the original post has. Hell, their post shows how important artists are because they needed that pre-existing knowledge to convert from an image to a useable state.
This also doesn’t expand to making fun animation or lighting that works for your game, or to interesting visual effects.
The concept art in the post are pretty generic looking within the genre. If that’s all people are aiming for, then fine, but it’s highly reductive to say it’ll replace artists. It’ll be a tool in the tool chest.
None of that is even touching on how much artists are involved in making sure a game also runs well on the system, while working with engineers.
I really just don’t think people understand how much art direction goes into even indie games. Something like fire watch or journey is immense.
Let’s take the concept examples in this image. Why do any of the details exist in there? Once you start thinking about the details of the world, you’ll start wanting to fine tune things. As you do this, surprise! you’ve turned into an artist yourself.
I just think we don’t teach art appreciation , or even appreciation for things outside our domain, to people. We see “image is good” and think that’s all an artist brings. Engineers are especially susceptible to this. We think in binary results.
So it’s easy to think “it’ll replace my need for artists” if that’s our mindset, but I think that line of thinking comes from not understanding that the journey is an important part of the result.
Even indie games need very bespoke art. Yeah, you can now generate images that are passable, but that doesn’t expand to making a cohesive world of items unless you’ve developed an eye for it like the person in the original post has. Hell, their post shows how important artists are because they needed that pre-existing knowledge to convert from an image to a useable state.
This also doesn’t expand to making fun animation or lighting that works for your game, or to interesting visual effects.
The concept art in the post are pretty generic looking within the genre. If that’s all people are aiming for, then fine, but it’s highly reductive to say it’ll replace artists. It’ll be a tool in the tool chest.
None of that is even touching on how much artists are involved in making sure a game also runs well on the system, while working with engineers.
I really just don’t think people understand how much art direction goes into even indie games. Something like fire watch or journey is immense.
Let’s take the concept examples in this image. Why do any of the details exist in there? Once you start thinking about the details of the world, you’ll start wanting to fine tune things. As you do this, surprise! you’ve turned into an artist yourself.
I just think we don’t teach art appreciation , or even appreciation for things outside our domain, to people. We see “image is good” and think that’s all an artist brings. Engineers are especially susceptible to this. We think in binary results.
So it’s easy to think “it’ll replace my need for artists” if that’s our mindset, but I think that line of thinking comes from not understanding that the journey is an important part of the result.