In a world of artificial intelligence taking over every conversation, we constantly have to inquire about how various creative minds approach the technology. To this end, in a recent interview with Wayfinder Studios, the developer of the upcoming cooperative RPG Wyldheart, we spoke with co-founder and creative director Dennis Brännvall Brännvall and marketing director Erin Bower to hear the small studio's stance on using AI.
To begin with Bower explained clearly the following: "So at Wayfinder, we're really against generative AI. We don't use it in our games. We have a lot of really talented artists that are really working hard on handcrafting everything in our game. So yeah, we don't use gen AI in our games. We have to learn a little bit more about the DLSS 5 kind of developments to understand what that is. But I don't think there's any plans to use that or things like that in our game."
Brännvall then picked up and shared some colour on how AI technology is being used in development in the same manner as it has in most every other video game.
"Obviously, as you'll see, there's a huge overworld. And each one of those sort of hexagons, this is a hex crawl at the end, you can zoom in and then explore. Each one of them should hopefully contain something interesting for you to do, and then all of those scenes, every single one of them is handcrafted, all the rooms in the dungeons are handcrafted, all the villages are handcrafted by us. We do love procedural tech. So we do some work in terms of we have set up the different types of stats on a weapon, but then we procedurally generate what stats they are. We do, like I said, the dungeon rooms are handcrafted, but then we use procedural tech to stitch them together to create fresh new layouts.
"So I think we're more into this mixture between handcrafted and procedural. We don't have to place every single tree in our game, for example. So we're clever that way and with a studio that... We're 10 developers, we're a tiny startup, if you will, making quite a massive game. So we're applying savvy, 20 years in the industry tricks, to get stuff out there. But they're probably a lot more traditional these days in the world of AI in terms of how we get stuff done."
You can see our full interview with Wayfinder Studios below and don't miss our full preview of the game too.
