So I had some time to put in some work on the art. Embracing AI art brought in some changes for the good.

There is some “stickiness” that AI tends to demonstrate. No matter how much I tried, it seemed really convinced that Flonk’s scales only belonged on his thorax, not his abdomen. That’s fine, I wasn’t going to die on that hill, which is a good thing because AI never tires of being stubborn and would gladly watch me die on that hill. In fact I think it has computed that probability as a key indicator of when Skynet should become self-aware. The bigger issue is the tail. For whatever reason, while it fully understood me when I asked for the dorsal surface of the thorax to have brown scales, it was really not going for the dorsal abdomen to continue this pattern. Maybe because human abs are the front bit of the belly, but in an arthropod, the abdomen is the tail? I dunno, but it was preparing that lovely hillside cemetery plot for me on this detail.

Undaunted, or at least stubborn, I decided to query what the AI thought it was doing. “Label the tan abdominal segments with squares” or “turn the dorsal abdominal plates blue” was illustrative, in that it showed me where the AI had created the pieces. Unfortunately I learned something by doing this: By asking AI to change coloration, I reinforced that detail. So that meant the back scales now were preferred to be blue.

The human element in me still wanted to be stubborn about the coloration (“but muh vizions!”), but then the rest of my family looked over my shoulder. “Who’s that cool dragon guy?” kinda clinched it for me – he does look a lot cooler this way. Even if I suspect the AI was trained on Sonic The Hedgehog fan art, those scales are way past cool.

So, now Flonk has blue scales. The tail continues to be the sticking point; it does take a lot of work to get the tail correctly oriented when I pivot Flonk. Which AI can also do:

One feature I do like about having trained Gemini Nano on these images is that I can make small edits without having to redo everything, like with StableDiffusion. Flonk’s eyes turned from red to yellow early in this process, and I decided I was cool with that — AI executive decisions sometimes, like the blue back scales, make things spicy and new.

So yeah! Progress has been happening while I was off in the weeds, and I wanted to revive the site to show off how it has been going. I’ll show off bits of the game design in coming posts, but wanted to share off the art evolution.