Doctor Crows
Hey, I have a whole career and everything, but here is where I post game projects.
You've Been Using AI Recently!
Yes! I still try very, very, very, hard --* but whether it's slop is up to you.
I've been an indie game developer my whole life, but ended up studying this budding field called machine learning.
I'm a digital artist, I've worked professionally on games with PaintToolSAI (e.g., my banner, all the backgrounds in Shiver, etc.) and GraphicsGale (Cozy, and tons of little cute animations). These days, I usually Krita and Asesprite. I've been writing production code in dozens of languages long before any of these AI tools didn't suck.
Back when I was training GPT-2 to make Chinese poetry on the first generation of buggy unreleased Google TPU chips, I never dreamed we would end up here. I trained a whole GAN just to make anime boy faces. Imagine that... training a whole model just to make a specific subtype of anime characters. Then StyleGAN came out and suddenly I was living in the latent directions... then diffusion models showed up and everything changed AGAIN. Nowadays, all of that is ancient history. In any case, I have a complicated relationship with the tools we've created now that they're generic, ubiquitous, and at risk of self-improving.
My actual first usage of AI for video game development was on my Ludum Dare game "Memory Leak" back in 2018, years and years before ChatGPT, and long before anybody even thought or cared about this stuff.
My goal is to use AI in 'high-intentionality' ways. I believe it's fully possible to make stuff that isn't slop, without resorting to asceticism. I might be wrong about this though. I spoke at the United Nations about the risks of large language models. Trust me, I'm as worried as anybody.
"Traditional Games"
I'm probably best known game-dev-wise as the co-author of Shiver (which blew up on YouTube) -- which you can now play on Steam or Itch.io for free!
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/727730/Shiver/
Our earlier game, Cozy, is also available right here on Itch.
If playthroughs are your thing, Markiplier and Jacksepticeye played our games over on YouTube.
May your builds always compile and your assets never corrupt.
*I used em-dashes before the models did, I'm still gonna fucking use 'em.
