Speaking to Sky News this week, High On Life creator Justin Roiland revealed that AI was used to create in-game arts and voices, as well as to add some finishing touches to the game’s colorful world. He also believes that AI will take a crucial role in the future of game development, which has been attempting to incorporate augmented reality, blockchain, and cloud technology.
When asked if AI is the future of game development, Roiland spoke up about several advantages that it brings to developers: “I don’t know what the future holds, but AI is going to be a tool that has the potential to make content creation incredibly accessible. It makes the world feel like a strange alternate universe of our world, and we used it to come up with weird, funny ideas.” Roiland says. “I don’t know how many years away we are, but all you will need to be is somebody with some big ideas.“
Although most of the art in High On Life is hand-drawn, Roiland claimed that they used AI to paint original pictures that can be used in the game. According to Lead Designer Erich Meyr, it was also used to create some character voices. He also said: “You have up to four guns and every single one of them had a different line, so we had to control how wide we could go with it to make sure we could even do it.”
Roiland also elaborated what the studio’s intent in creating High On Life, revealing that they wanted to offer narrative surprises and different gameplay experiences with each gun. “It’s like writing a TV show that people can reach in and knock things around, and as a studio, we want to have lots of fun narrative surprises doing that,” he says. “An encounter with an NPC is different depending on what gun you’ve got out. Every gun has their own complete set of dialogue and reactions. You’re writing a lot more stuff, essentially.”
High On Life is an action FPS game from the co-creator of the Rick and Morty series, Justin Roiland, in which players use mouthy guns to rescue forces on different planets. Players will explore cities built on asteroids, meet hilarious characters, and collect alien technologies to utilize them in combat. Since its debut on December 13, it has received positive reviews from players and media outlets.
High On Life is available now on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
