In a gaming landscape increasingly dominated by discussions around artificial intelligence, it’s crucial to understand how various creative minds are approaching this technology. During a recent interview regarding their upcoming cooperative RPG, Wyldheart, Wayfinder Studios’ co-founder and creative director Dennis Brännvall, along with marketing director Erin Bower, shared insights into the small studio’s stance on AI utilization.
Bower began by making their position unequivocally clear: “At Wayfinder, we are genuinely against generative AI. We do not incorporate it into our games. We have a team of extremely talented artists who dedicate themselves to meticulously handcrafting every single element within our game. So, yes, generative AI is not used in our titles. While we need to learn more about the advancements in DLSS 5 to fully grasp its implications, I don’t believe there are any plans to use that or similar technologies in our game.”
Brännvall further elaborated, providing additional context on how AI-like technology is employed in their development, mirroring practices seen in many other video games.
“As you’ll observe, there’s an expansive overworld. Each of these hexagonal sections, forming a hex-crawl experience, allows players to zoom in and explore. Every single one is designed to offer something engaging to do, and all these environments – each scene, every dungeon piece, and all the villages – are painstakingly handcrafted by our team. We do, however, embrace procedural technology. For instance, we’ve designed various types of weapon statistics, which are then procedurally generated. Similarly, while dungeon rooms are handcrafted, we utilize procedural generation to assemble them into fresh and unique layouts.”
“So, I believe we operate more within this blend of handcrafted and procedural methods. We don’t need to manually place every single tree in our game, for example. We adopt a smart approach, especially as a studio with just ten developers – a tiny startup, if you will, creating a rather massive game. We leverage decades of industry experience to get things done efficiently. However, our methods are probably considered much more traditional in today’s AI-centric world regarding how we approach development.”