FACE/LINK
Timeline: September 2023 – January 2024
Team size: 4 people
Engine: Ren’Py
| ROLES | SKILLS |
| – Lead character artist – Co-writer/narrative developer – Research – User testing | – Adobe INdesign – Adobe Photoshop – Clip studio paint – REN’PY – Trello |
Project aims:
For this collaborative project, our topic delved into the relationship between humans and AI and tested if people can tell when something is made by AI by exploring peoples reactions to situations.
We opted to explore this in the form of a psychological-horror visual novel game. Within this narrative we opted to create 4 characters, each one with a different personality, dialogue and storyline. One of the characters was written by AI through a software called InDesign. Whilst the other 3 characters we wrote ourselves.
The overall vibe of the characters dialogue was decided to be relatively over the top to try and throw the user-testers off.
Video of the final project:
- Character Art
- Development
- Co-writing
- User-testing
ART
The art direction we decided on was a heavily stylized, colour-saturated anime art style that contrasted with the overall unsettling atmosphere of the game.
I worked on bringing the artistic visions of the group to life, via delivery of rendered sprites and concept character designs.
I sketched out each character based on the descriptions of the group, adding various different expressions and movements of the hands and shoulders to compliment the nature of each character’s differing emotional states. And I worked on the line art and final renders and composition of each character, adding heavy stylization that achieved the final aesthetic of the game.
Character archetypes and concepts:
in progress! 🙂
Character Designs:
JAY:
From line-art to fully rendered
SAFFRON:
From line-art to fully rendered
Original Saffron before redesign:
Before Saffron as we know her now, had a name, the original design I concepted was known ‘Iris’ who would portray the same storyline and dialogue. However, she was quickly changed and iterated on until I landed on the fiery character in-game today.
You can see her headphones, style and interesting haircut were focal points from the beginning.
Final in-game images:
DEVELOPMENT
Our objective is to understand if people are able to
pick up on subtle differences of the AI-generated
script whilst it blends in with our other 3 character’s
dialogues, all of which are written by people.
We executed this vision by using the Ren.Py engine, a reliable and easy-to-use program known for developing and aiding in the creation of a plethora of well-known visual novels such as “ERROR 143”, “Doki-Doki Literature club” and “Higurashi when they cry”.
CO-WRITING
The dialogue for Jay’s character was heavily inspired by the game ‘Doki Doki Literature Club’, particularly looking at the twisted romance, horror elements and fourth wall breaking . The horror behind him stems from his sudden obsession with the player character, with a mysterious entity warning the player, telling them to exit the game as soon as possible. We wanted this theme to run through the game, but included it heavily in the first chapter to hopefully act as a hook for the player, to immediately spark their interest
For Saffron, we made the decision to contrast Jay’s personality as much as possible. We therefore went with a colder, personality and a blunt conversational style.
Many iterations and tests were done to produce as much text as possible to allow for multiple dialogue paths. The final character involved small changes to Character traits, speech patterns; setting and situation as well as many differing prompts from the player.
‘Dialogue tree written and organized’
USER-TESTING
Based on the survey results, including those gathered during our presentation, we concluded that most players found Saffron to be the most interesting and enjoyable character to play. This was particularly surprising, as her dialogue was entirely generated using Inworld AI.
Despite the challenges we faced when working with the AI requiring significant iteration and refinement to achieve suitable dialogue, the final result, combined with the artwork by myself, resonated strongly with players.
In fact, Saffron was perceived more positively than Jay, a character whose dialogue was written manually.
After the playtest, participants were informed that one of the characters had been written using AI and were asked to guess which one. Interestingly, the majority believed that Jay was the AI-generated character.
A common reason given was that players did not expect AI to produce dialogue with the level of aggression and personality displayed by Saffron.
This outcome suggests that AI technology is more advanced than many people assume, particularly in its ability to create convincing and engaging character dialogue.
