AI-Generated Card Game Artwork — A Boon to Small Game Developers?
Making Art for Games is Expensive
As the sole developer of Legendfall I know that creating high-quality artwork can be incredibly difficult. Especially for card games. Magic the Gathering pays artists roughly $500 per card made. This (low) price bakes in the fact that Wizzard of the Coast knows that there is prestige to being featured on a Magic card. Most artists of the caliber MTG features deserve much more than $500. So where does that leave indie game developers? In the case of Legendfall I need to generate over 300 distinct pieces of artwork; at MTG’s pricing that would put me out $150,000. While I would love to write the check and support artists around the globe, in practicality, I can’t.
AI-Generated Art is Emerging as a Potential Solution
When the ground began to rumble and AI-generated artwork took root, many of us in the game development scene had their interest immediately peaked. Could this be the solution we’ve been looking for?
Many of us started with tools like Wombo Dream and found ourselves excited but ultimately disappointed… while we could generate millions of pictures of robots, the AI simply wasn’t good enough. Beyond that, there was no way to use this artwork commercially (Wombo…
