Lucid Nightmares | Portifolio

Lucid Nighmares

2024

Função: programador.

Scripts: https://github.com/AbnnerU/GameJamPaia

Description: Casual game with horror elements, where the objective is to not let the alarm wake you up.

Download game : https://abnner.itch.io/lucid-nightmares

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ab_Urz.LucidNightmares

Mechanics

Basics:

WASD or arrow keys to move;

[SPACE] to run/interact.

Enemies:

Normal:

Just teleports the player to a random room.

Crawler:

Teleports the player to a random room and turns on the room's alarm.

Ladrão:

Teleports the player to a random room and steals all coins.

Trapper:

Teleports the player to a random room and locks the room's doors.

Shooter:

Chases the player, shoots projectiles and repositions itself if the player gets close.

Blinder:

Stands still in a room and blinds the player.

Development

Lucid Nightmares started at Game Jam Praia Games, with the theme "Dreams and Nightmares". In it, we decided to compete in the artificial intelligence games category and experiment with development with the help of AI tools.

With the project finished and posted, I want to share what this experience of using these tools was like and how impactful artificial intelligence has been in different areas.

ARTS:

In addition to being one of the main reasons for using AI, since we didn't have any artists in the group, it was also the biggest disappointment, in terms of saving development time. For the images that were in the back of the room, the tools proved to be useful, since we generated a series of images and simply chose the best ones.

Now, when we got to more specific elements, such as the player sprite, enemies, clock, hud and effects, things started to get complicated. To begin with, no AI generated sprite sheets or isolated elements in a satisfactory way, which forced us to do two things: spend hours making cutouts and be creative to use what we had available.

A good example of using creativity is for the animations of the enemies and the player, where we had to cut out the limbs of the character that the AI generated and animate them directly in Unity, using scale and rotation changes to give the effect of movement.

In the end, it turned out that using AI gave us almost no advantage, because in addition to all the problems mentioned above, we still had to deal with the visual inconsistency of the project, since even though we kept the style the same in the prompt, the generated images inevitably ended up with differences between them. Luckily for us, the JAM theme of dreams and nightmares opened up an opportunity for this type of thing, since dreams have this tone of "disorder" and "psychedelic". Even so, we saw that the competitors who did not use AI had an infinitely superior result than ours, at least in terms of visuals.

The tools we used were Mid Journey, Bing Image Creator and Canvas. Each one was better or worse in some aspects, but overall I would say:

Mid Journey: this was what we used the most. The images generated were good, and there was also the option to generate based on one already generated;
Bing Image Creator: The images were OK, but Bing is terrible for game sprites. It was the one we used the least;
Canvas: the impression is that the images generated in Canvas are less "creative" compared to others. However, Canvas excelled when it came to individual elements (such as generating a key or a cage) and was excellent for generating HUD elements.

Music/Sound Effects:

Here, the AI tools really shined. The quality of the music that the artificial intelligence was able to generate was impressive. At first, we wanted the music to be distorted and kind of scary. But the results weren't that good, and there were 46 rooms, each with its own music. That's when we thought, "why not put a description of the room's image in the prompt?".

We did this experiment with room 35:

In the prompt, we put something like "A man in a suit lying on the grass..." and specified the style, which in this case was jazz. The result was so cool that we decided to use this methodology for all the other rooms.
But AI didn't just stand out for music. With Eleven Labs, we were able to create excellent sound effects, without having to spend hours searching for a specific sound in sound banks.

By far, the sound part was where the AI was most useful and delivered the best results, not to mention the fact that it saved a lot of time. After this experience, I imagine I'll use these tools more, especially the sound effects one, which is really good and really helps a lot. However, the art AIs would serve more as a reference; I still don't see myself using them as the main source of assets.