About a year ago I finished a prototype of a game that I’m building. In order to make the user interface (UI), which is essentially images with buttons on them, I searched for appropriate google images, usually with the keywords “fantasy art” to try to keep a steady visual theme.
Recently, after being given access to DALL-E, I decided to try to use it to generate unique images to replace the prototype ones I had been using in the game’s UI. Hopefully this would also bypass copyright issues. I’m told that DALL-E asks that you keep the multicolored squares in the bottom right corner.
Anyways, I thought I would post the results here. It was a fun and involved project, and I just think DALL-E is interesting and worth exploring. In case this helps anyone, I’ll give pretty detailed explanations of how I was thinking of everything throughout the process.
First, here are all the new generated character cards. Each one was some iteration of the following prompt:
3d papercraft style render of a black, gold and silver warrior with large sword and shield with glass fragments breaking off in front of epic dark portal fantasy digital art
Everything in the subscript is a variable that I would change depending on the image. The rest is constant and related to my game.
Papercraft is a recognized style that makes objects to look like they’re crafted out of paper, which seems to take advantage of DALL-E’s high capacity for visual detail.
Below, I have a bunch of screenshots from stages in the process of generating and iterating more UI images. I’ve written captions on each photo, trying to describe my thought process at the time.
My game is called Amethyst, so I went with a gem theme for the item shopI also needed a new button that helps a player bank one energy for next turnI thought this one in the bottom left corner was especially interestingSince it has a tile above it, and a metal frame, it looked like a trash canThe concept fit well, i decided to edit the top of the metal with a new captionincluding the words “metal canister” gave the visual effect that DALL-E had inspired me to imagine and convey 🤝Here is a step by step process of Generating a Character CardI find this bottom right image pretty, and it fit best with the other cardsIn this case, I would always generate another 4 based on this original, and if the original is still the best, I keep itWe see a similar process here, I have a typo here but I’m happy with the img!With these UI images I’m trying to mirror the characters we already madeI choose whichever 2d image is closest to my imagination of our 3d characterHere im creating the buttons that players will click to do different actionsThis one looks goodNope!What if I try to do all the buttons in this theme. Lets try the attack button.I edited the middle out and changed the description to include a swordI found out that it will be hard to get the kinds of detail I want in this styleSo I made a new caption. Really like the one in the top right, so used thatHere’s an interesting slide. Looking for an original image for “MultiAttack”Love this picture, and DALL-E’s interpretation of “magical heroes” As usual, I made a variation, all of these were interesting as wellHere’s a closer lookBit of an ambitious caption here, but it’s good to know what you wantSurprised that it actually came togetherDid some variations of those, any of these would work really.I needed to generate a series of 10 buttons to replace my Level IndicatorsWorked through some variations till I got this set of tomes that I likeI tried to edit the numbers and add captions to get it to read from 1-10I couldn’t leave this variation, because they have to all look the sameSo I just decided to cut out the buttons and generate the numbers one by oneHere’s the result after going through and lowering the saturationsIDK what is going on here but I think it might be the key to the UniverseThis is probably my favorite image that was generatedThe top left one I considered too but the detail on this gem is hard to createThis image was the base for the Attack Wheel in the screenshot at the top
