How AI can help you in game development - useful resources on using neural networks in game development on Unity

Hey, everybody. You've probably heard many times about the newfangled AI tools that help generate a huge variety of different things, from pictures to music. In this article we'll understand in practice - how and where you can look for such tools and why you need them when developing your games on Unity.

Content Generation

Art, Graphics and Promo-Materials Generation

Neural networks with new content creation capabilities as an alternative to 2D Digital Art is one of the most emerging areas. You can find many models that allow you to geninate content in different styles just by specifying a few keywords.

Modern models such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E have made great progress, and you can use them to create art and promos for games.

Popular models at the moment:

• DALL-E (https://openai.com/dall-e-3)

• Stable Diffusion XL (https://stablediffusionxl.com/)

• DynaVision XL (https://civitai.com/models/122606/dynavision-xl-all-in-one-stylized-3d-sfw-and-nsfw-output-no-refiner-needed)

• RealCartoon-XL (https://civitai.com/models/125907/realcartoon-xl)

• InfiniAnimeXL (https://civitai.com/models/132977/infinianimexl)

Examples of Art based on DynaVision XL Model:

Examples of Art based on Stable Diffusion XL Model:

I really recommend try service getimg.ai (includes free 100 points for demo) where you can try dozens of different modern AI models for free. With free PixelCut Upscaler you can create up to 2K images for your games / promo materials.

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Code Generation

Recently, code generation has been supported by modern models such as Chat-GPT and Gemini. However, you can try more accelerated specialized tools for code generation.

The services I recommend are:

• GitHub Copilot (https://github.com/features/copilot);

• Duet AI (https://cloud.google.com/duet-ai?hl=en);

• Gigacode (https://gigacode.ru/);

Of course, you should take into account that the code quality leaves much to be desired, but you can already try to sketch a simple solution for your task. Besides, most of the tools are free of charge.

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Additional Content Generation AI

In addition, I also leave here a small list of other services and models that will help you in the development of your games:

• Evenlabs (https://elevenlabs.io/) - Make your game voice over;

• Logo AI (https://www.logoai.com/logo-maker) - Make your studio / team logo;

• Loudly (https://www.loudly.com/) - Make your game music;

• Meshy AI (https://app.meshy.ai/) - Texture painting, 3D Models generation;

In-Game AI

Voice Enchancement

If you are doing voice chat in your game - most likely you will need to implement AI Echo Cancellation and Noise Reduction for incoming and outgoing voice stream. Within Unity, some solutions such as Dissonance provide out of the box support for some models or implement your own.

I, on the other hand, recommend using the following bundle:

• RNNoise for Noise Reduction with Opus Encoder / Decoder (https://github.com/tkmn0/Caress.Unity);

• DTLN-Aec (Based on TensorFlow Lite) to remove echo (https://github.com/breizhn/DTLN-aec);

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TensorFlow

TensorFlow is one of the AI implementations for your models that you, among others, can use in Unity projects for a variety of purposes. Google's website provides dozens of different models that you can use in your projects using Tensorflow, including audio, text, video analysis, etc.

You can try examples of Tensorflow Lite on Unity:

https://github.com/asus4/tf-lite-unity-sample

Among which are:

• SSD Object Detection;

• DeepLab

• PoseNet

• Style Transfer

• Text Classification

• Bert Question and Answer

• Super Resolution

• Audio Classification

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In-Game AI Training

You can also harness the power of AI right inside your games. Many different options can be presented here - both for implementing AI behavior and for generating quests and textual content within your games. We will, however, look at options specifically with training models, such as in-game AI training.

You can use for your Unity games different plugins, like Tensorflow or Unity ML Agents (there are plenty of examples of this on the Unity website itself).

About Unity ML Agents:

https://unity.com/products/machine-learning-agents

Google Research:

https://blog.research.google/2021/06/quickly-training-game-playing-agents.html

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AI Anti-Cheat Monitoring

Anti-chit using artificial intelligence models is another opportunity for the success of your games and applications. They allow you to analyze game sessions, counter fraud, and secure transactions in your applications. In the near future, many will be able to abandon traditional anti-chit systems to reduce the burden on players' devices.

To date, there are a couple of services that provide these services:

• Sard (https://www.sard.ac/sard-anti-cheat);

• Anybrain (https://anybrain.gg/);

Analytics and Marketing

AI-Powered Analytics

Data serves as a driving force for businesses, helping to guide their future decisions based on current performance. First, this data must be appropriately transformed into the correct format for users to create various visualizations and meaningful dashboards. Then, as the business grows, companies need the capability to deal with the increased data volume and extended user base. It’s crucial that they find ways to quickly extract important information from all this data and give customers the analytics they need. Achieving this can be a challenge because the tools they rely on struggle to keep up, making it difficult to get the right information at the right time.

Services with AI Analytics Tools:

• Good Data (https://www.gooddata.com/);

• Polymer (https://www.polymersearch.com/);

• Tableau (https://tableau.com/);

• Sisense (https://www.sisense.com/);

• Akkio (https://www.akkio.com/);

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Marketing

Using the same models like Chat-GPT or Gemini you can generate text for marketing your games, such as descriptions for marketplaces, based on popular SEO algorithms. It's simple here - the main thing is to learn how to set a good Prompt for any of the models.

Try this models:

• Gemini (https://gemini.google.com/);

• Chat-GPT (https://chat.openai.com/);

Or ready-to-use marketing services:

• Sprout Social (https://sproutsocial.com/ai/);

• Keyword Insights (https://www.keywordinsights.ai/features/ai-writer/);

• Optimove (https://www.optimove.com/);

• Hemingway (https://hemingwayapp.com/);

• Surfer SEO (https://surferseo.com/);

• Writer (https://writer.com/);

• Jasper (https://www.jasper.ai/);

• Monkey Learn (https://monkeylearn.com/);

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Community Management

Including for basic support for your community-whether it's a community on Discord, Telegram, or other networks-you can connect bots based on Chat-GPT and other models that let you take most of the work off your hands.

You can see at this services for your community:

• Botpress (https://botpress.com/);

• Sendpulse (https://sendpulse.com/features/chatbot/telegram);

• Tidio (https://www.tidio.com/);

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In conclusion

Right now, you can find almost any tool that can help you create your games and apps, and speed up the content generation process. Yes, not all of them are perfect and require manual tweaking, but you can and should learn how to work with neural networks today, because it will help you stay afloat in the future.

And of course, thanks for reading the article, I'll always be happy to discuss any projects with you and help you with your ideas on Unity:

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