Unity AI (Unity)
It seems that it is already difficult for us to see our lives before the arrival of AI, and every day a new field arrives that smart robots are also reaching. And who is on the grill this time? The gaming industry, of course, that's what we came together for. Along with companies like Ubisoft announcing the use of AI in its open-world games, one of the world's most popular game engines, Unity, is also likely to receive a traditional robotic upgrade.
Robot, draw me a game
It seems that our feed has already become a collection of unreal photos, of unreal people, and I'm not just talking about Instagram. Popular apps like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and of course ChatGPT started the wave, and others like it now know how to do much more than they did in the past.
Produce articles, posts, images, videos, code, produce presentations and more. It's all from a single Prompt generate, and for those hiding under a rock, it's writing sentences in natural language for software like "Draw me a picture of a cat next to grass in the desert, with a 25mm f/1.6 lens, long shot. And the magic happens.
The cute cat isn't real and is courtesy of Leonardo.ai set on Stable Diffusion v2.1 (Photo: Walla!, Leonardo.ai, Stable Diffusion)
But at the time of writing, technology doesn't stop and there are already smart innovations, and Unity enters the game with a promising video. The video, which was uploaded about a month ago, no longer shows results, only the prompts, but it is clear that there is tremendous potential with requests to produce sets, environment, atmosphere, sound and more. Are game developers starting to get stressed already? Wait a minute.
Lower barriers to entry
Take off the axe for a moment, the computer is not to blame, it is advancing at exactly the pace we tell it, and if we look at all robots as helpers and not enemies, things will look different, Skynet (not yet) here.
I hang out a lot in LinkedIn and Facebook groups of entrepreneurs and startups, and what many of them say is that AI and all the smart bots that like to write "take away our gentlemen" often help young entrepreneurs, and allow them to reach prototypes, especially in software, and it's happening faster than before.
If in the past, in order to produce an MVP, which is the technological development that can be produced in the least time and money, it would take a few months, today you can reach very impressive MVPs, and even with a little UI/UX design in a few weeks or days.
These numbers should come as no surprise to anyone who follows the development of the computer as a whole and the development of the gaming world. The more hardware, and in this case, software, the more powerful we can achieve, the more impressive performance we can achieve in a shorter time. And somehow still in 2023, bug-ridden games like Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Redfall, or the PC version of The Last of Us are coming out, but we'll leave that discussion for another time.
I'm here to help, dear entrepreneurs
So we already realized that AI, even if implemented in one of the world's most popular game engines, can shorten development times and maybe even allow people with developed imagination and no development abilities at all, to reach an MVP, a demo, or even an entire game.
This is already happening today with Midjourney and other apps that support Stable Diffusion, we see people who have no design knowledge at all, and haven't even installed Photoshop, from amazing content generators, and that's without studying 4 years in college, and getting arthritis from a cheap stylus.
Think of those entrepreneurs who have amazing ideas, really, one in a generation, the Elden Ring of gaming ideas, but have no development knowledge, at all. Most game engines require knowledge of languages like C# and C++, but mastering them will take time and investment. If we now start a development course in Unity, by the time we can get to the point where we can contribute to a game engine from our knowledge, it will probably be a long time.
So boom, we now have AI tools, tell him the whole idea, introduce mechanics (probably), AI (lol, not like that, for enemies and NPC), economy (if possible), environment, characters, stages, story, narration (we saw a hint of sound in the video) and more. And boom.
In let's say 10 hours, we have a fully working game that can be exported to familiar platforms with one click, which will probably start on Android and itch.io, because that's where it will be easiest and cheapest (we said small barriers to entry).
Case study about an entrepreneur who did just that
Don't see it as a fantasy, Uri Bejarano, he's just like that. Came from the world of marketing and advertising and quickly became a rising star on social networks with original, funny, exciting and sometimes controversial photos of him. I took him for a brief talk about the subject and understand directly from him "who's afraid of AI": "I am a digital marketing and advertising manager with over 15 years of experience. I entered AI relatively as a hobby around September 2022 (in terms of AI development sounds like an eternity) before most people even knew what it was all about. I started tinkering with DALL-E 2 and the first time I touched the tool, I realized there was a revolution here."
He says that he was among the first to see the potential, and you may have even seen his first project that was almost everywhere last year: "It seems that we are at the end of an era in which technical capabilities are needed to create, and thinking and creativity are taking center stage. Later I discovered Stable diffusion and published my first project, Pixar's versions of the Israeli borekas films, the project was published a few weeks before the field of artificial intelligence took over our lives and is considered by many to be a groundbreaking project that brought the field of generative AI to the center of the media stage in Israel and inspired many creators."
This week, Ori raised the level with an amazing video he created together with Omri Sadeh in honor of the arrival of the famous metal band "Guns and Roses" or Guns N' Roses (depending on how old you are), which took over 60 hours! A person who didn't open Photoshop or After created a whole clip, all in AI! Astonishing!
"I believe that technology is here to stay and that we must all embrace it so that we can remain relevant in a world that is changing before our eyes with each passing day," he tells us, and also explains how to make money from it: "Since then I have continued to create, give lectures and workshops to companies and organizations, work on commercial collaborations and advise startups."
Today he has turned it into a real profession and if you go to his LinkedIn profile you can clearly see the headline: "Generative AI artist and mentor". So not only did the AI not harm him or "steal" his livelihood, today, with the help of AI, he creates new work with tools that didn't even exist six months ago.
The future - the rise of machines, and then they become partners
We've all grown up with apocalyptic movies like Terminator 2, where the machines not only don't help us, they actually try to hurt us, especially if we're gnarled Austrian body builders with accents that never cease to surprise. (And yes, literally, a new movie of his came out this year, check me out, he's not getting old!), but that doesn't mean it's really our future.
They also talked to us about flying cars, right? I don't think anyone really anticipated the AI revolution, but just as Uri decided to ride it, see its benefits, and grab it with both hands, game developers, in my opinion, can see the sweet lemonade that will come from such a lemon. You can sign up for the Unity beta here.
And yes, we should also say a word about developers in companies. So there may be a "slight blow on the wing" and maybe even more, as we saw with IBM, for example, but in the end, again, it's about shortening development times, the rise of creatives, and I totally see the creation of new roles like "Gender Astim", "Gender Environments" and more, without extensive programming knowledge.
And no, this articlewasn'twritten with AI, there are still people who value creativity, I hope. AI is also a great tool for content professionals, but it's a tool, like the error corrector or Grammarly, designed to help rather than be "in place."
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- artificial intelligence