The NovelGens 2022 Collection is Almost Complete
NovelGens started as an abstract idea: with the rate of both image- and text-generation AIs improving so quickly, is it possible to blend that tech together in a package that makes it incredibly easy for worldbuilders to generate new, interesting creatures for their fictional worlds?
It’s hard to imagine what the state of the art in art generation was like last year given all the huge leaps forward we’ve seen this year, but I think NovelGens has done a great job documenting the progression in quality as advancements in AI relentlessly marched forward.
After a year of creature generations, I’m incredibly impressed with the collection we’ve made together. Starting on January 1st, 2022, NovelGens has generated and published a new species of creature — and made them available, for free, for authors around the world to use in their own creative works. As of today, there are 361 wonderful creatures on NovelGens.com that have been claimed for personal use by nearly 200 creatives.
NovelGens has been a wonderful site to work on this year. As 2022 comes to a close, I’m excited to take NovelGens to new horizons. In 2023, I’m planning on two big projects to make the site more useful to writers and worldbuilders everywhere.
Use your claimed creatures in new ways
Once you’ve claimed a creature, it’s yours to use however you want. You can already publish your own stories and artwork directly to your creatures’ official canon. I’m planning to improve these core features next year with comments, feedback, and a growing community of authors and artists to collaborate with.
I’m also exploring entirely new features that let you take advantage of your claimed creatures in new ways. A lot of these ideas are still early in development and I’m planning to dedicate a whole blog post to these ideas soon.
Generate your own creatures
The biggest piece of feedback I’ve gotten throughout the year is that you want to create your own creatures. I agree; that will be awesome! Rather than relying on the site to generate only one new species per day, I’m planning on opening up the creature generator for you to create as many creatures as you’d like, whenever you want.
And, of course, you’ll be in full control of those creatures. Whether you want to keep them private or share them with others — and maybe even allow others to claim a piece of them for their own stories — you’ll have a full suite of tools available to manage your personal bestiary and every creature within it.
So what does this mean for NovelGens going forward?
To accomplish these goals and make room to rearchitect the creature generator for everyone’s use, I’m excited to say the creatures generated by NovelGens in 2022 will become a marked, limited-edition collection and that automatic generation of new creatures by the site will pause after creating one, final species on December 31, 2022.
Our huge collection of creatures will still be available to claim and use (until each one’s owner slots are filled, so make sure you claim the ones you want!). The next creature generations will be from users like you — and I can’t wait to see what new kinds of life you create on NovelGens!
Thank you for coming on this wild ride with me!
It’s been an honor to be able to work with cutting-edge technology and wrangle it into easy tools for authors and other creatives to use. If you’re interested in more resources at the intersection of writing and AI, you can follow me here on Medium, follow IndentLabs on Twitter, or join our little community on Discord. You can also read about the other projects I’ve been working on (and a few more projects I will be working on) at IndentLabs.com.
I have so many more ideas and I can’t wait to make them all a reality. The future looks bright for writing tools and I’m so excited, humbled, and thankful to be able to work on them.
Happy worldbuilding!
— Andrew
