AI won't make your game, but it can lighten the load

• AI can support game production but you can't prompt your way to a full game, says Ludo.ai CTO Jorge Gomes.
• Gomes believes the biggest shift the industry could see over the next two to three years is in indie production values.
• "Ultimately this must all be driven by the vision of the team, not the tools."

Jorge Gomes is the CTO at Ludo.ai.

At one end of the AI in game development debate, large publishers experiment with generative tools.

This can trigger uneasy reactions from players and even their own teams when AI is pushed in from the top without a clear benefit to the actual game. And of course, they benefit from larger teams with dedicated resources to visuals and audio production.

At the other end are small indie teams trying to get something playable out of the door with a handful of people and almost no art budget. For them, AI is not a corporate initiative, it is a practical question of whether they can afford to produce the assets their ideas deserve.

From conversations with indie developers, the pattern is fairly consistent: ideas are not the problem. The block is production capacity.

Teams can often hack together static sprites or greybox environments, but they stall when they need to turn those sprites into full animations, move beyond stock asset packs, or produce bespoke audio and SFX that match the game’s identity.

If you are a three-person team of mostly programmers, that list and the challenge of producing them probably sounds familiar.

That is why most of the real-world AI usage we see in small teams today is about asset creation and animation. Letting AI create the whole game is a fantasy - it’s just not an option. Use it to unblock the pipeline, not replace it.

Pipeline burst

The least creative, most exhausting step in a typical 2D pipeline of concept → sprite → animation → implementation is often animation. Creating dozens of frames by hand for a single character can easily take many hours of work.

Modern AI-assisted workflows can compress that to minutes: you describe the motion you want, feed in the sprite and let the tool generate a draft animation that you then review, tweak or iterate on.

The same principle applies to static 3D props. A detailed, textured asset might take an artist several days. Text- and image-to-3D tools can now output a usable starting point in a few minutes, in formats that drop into existing pipelines.

That does not remove the need for human judgement, but it radically changes how much production labour a small team can afford and what their throughput can be.

In practice, AI can help small teams at every stage of the art pipeline. In pre-production, it can generate concept sketches, mood pieces and UI ideas so the team can converge on a direction.

In production, it can assist with batches of variations, background passes or animation cycles. In post-launch live ops, it can support the rapid creation of new cosmetics and seasonal variants without needing to brief an external artist every time.

These are all optional accelerators. If a generated asset is not good enough or does not fit the style, you discard it. Control has to stay with the team.

One thing AI will not do for you is maintain a coherent visual vocabulary on its own. Left to its own devices, it tends to drift away from your style, not towards it.

Newer tools give you more control over prompts, reference material and editing, but you still need a clear style guide, someone whose job is to say “no” to off-style outputs and a willingness to iterate rather than accept the first thing the model generates.

If your game art ends up looking generic and forgettable, that is not the model’s fault – it is a failure of artistic direction.

It is crucial that humans stay central to every decision and in control. The development team has the vision for the soul of the game. They must stay true to that and care about the output or it will fade away, along with players.

Bringing AI into the development process

If you are wondering how to bring AI into your workflow without derailing a live project, a few simple guardrails help.

First, let humans pick the style and let AI fill the gaps. Art direction should be decided up front and AI should only operate inside that frame.

Second, start with production grunt work. UI elements, background images, 3D props, sprite walking animations and sound effects are safer first targets than hero characters or key promotional art.

Third, assume everything needs review. Treat generated assets like work from a junior artist: useful, but never final without human approval and tweaks.

Finally, stay curious. Tools and models are evolving fast, and the teams that benefit most are the ones who experiment regularly while staying clear about what they want creatively.

Looking ahead over the next two to three years, the biggest visible shift is likely to be in indie production values. Teams will still focus on core mechanics and game feel – as they should – but they will be able to ship something that also looks good without multiplying their budgets.

The trade-off is that player expectations will rise. If similar sized teams are using these AI tools thoughtfully, it will be harder to stand out with a great idea wrapped in placeholder art.

The core thing to remember is AI does not make games; it helps you build your game. Used well, it gives small teams more chances to try ideas, discard the ones that do not work and pursue the ones that resonate, without being blocked by art capacity.

Ultimately this must all be driven by the vision of the team, not the tools.