May I confess? I love the clips of “AI generated games” that people post on social media. Not because they’re good (they’re very bad) or because I like dumping water into the gaping mouths of data centers (I like them in moderation). I love them because it’s pure “The Emperor Has No Clothes” content. Soidisant’s technology visionaries are desperately trying to pump gas so they can’t see what’s clearly in front of them – it’s not even a game at all.
Usually, anyway. It turns out that at least one of the viral AI-generated game clips has been made into an actual game (via PCGamesN). But here’s the weird part. Its creators say it doesn’t contain anything generated by AI.
Shores of Vaelithar began as a viral five-second clip produced by Midjourney and shared on X by its creator studio, Desimulate. It showed the first-person perspective of a stylized lo-fi fantasy game, with creepy castles and rolling green plains.
This version of the game, with the addition of a Steam page, specifically lacks notifications for AI-generated content, but looks similar but slightly different. That’s because, Desimulate told PCGN, all of the actual game material is “in-game footage and does not include any AI-generated content.”
The way they say it, it sounds like they’re using Midjourney for concept art. “I still use Midjourney to realize my conceptual needs in a way that I can properly communicate them to the artists on my team. These concepts are what I call ‘pre-concept’ concept art. ”
With the AI-generated concept in hand, the rest of the development team “interprets it and turns it into reality,” says Desimulate. I suspect this continues to resonate with AI-skeptic onlookers (myself included). After all, you can always hand off the prompts you’re typing for Midjourney to a human team to interpret. those. Eliminate the middle bots!
Nevertheless, Desimulate says: “Furthermore in the future, perhaps soon, we will definitely outgrow that methodology and need a real concept artist…Our main goal is to get enough vertical slices that we can start looking for funding so we can work on this full-time.”
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