Infinity Nikki and Love and Deepspace dev: “AI lacks the soul to replace human creators”

Infold Games, the developer behind Infinity Nikki and Love and Deepspace, has committed to keeping human creators at the centre of game development.

Speaking to IGN Japan during this year’s GDC: Festival of Gaming in San Francisco, Infold Games CTO Ji Zhang said that while AI tools can be helpful in some parts of development, it cannot bring soul to a project in the way human devs can.

“AI is definitely rapidly developing, and it is definitely going to shape the game industry,” said Zhang. “I think now AI is really in an interesting period where everybody thinks of it differently. However, I believe it cannot overcome the fact that it cannot add any soul to content creation. So it cannot replace the jobs of core creators.”

Another hot topic during GDC was the rising cost of RAM, which threatens to make the next generation of hardware unaffordable to many gamers. As Valve pauses the rollout of its Steam Machine lineup and Xbox announces a new seemingly high-spec console, many are wondering how much these new devices will cost, as component prices reach ever-wilder highs.

Infold Games makes games almost every platform, so these issues seem to pose a risk to its future prospects. But Zhang was not worried, and believes this will be a passing phase.

“I think for the cost of memory, high demand for the best memory is really common, and it’s just the same as the demand for CPU iteration, which also definitely continues to increase. This is nothing special. PC games will continue to demand higher performance, while AAA and mobile games will also see increased memory demand. We believe that the increase in cost is only temporary.”

Zhang went on to discuss the technology underpinning Infold’s two recent global hits: Infinity Nikki and Love and Deepspace.

Both titles are free-to-play, feature frequent content drops, and require developers to create a steady stream of new outfits made from realistic fabric textures. But each is made with completely different technology.

“At Infold Games, we put a lot of effort into graphics, and in 2019, with our previous game Shining Nikki, we made the jump from 2D to 3D,” says Zhang. “One goal is trying to ensure the clothing is very realistic. That includes physics-based materials and clothing simulation. On Love and Deepspace, we really focus on facial expressions and the fine-tuning of the characters. Infinity Nikki, meanwhile, is focused on an open world, which was a new challenge for us.

“Each game was initially built on a commercial game engine. Love and Deepspace was built on Unity, and Infinity Nikki was built on Unreal. The commercial engines serve as the foundation, but during development, we wanted to enhance performance with our in-house tools. We partner with the hardware companies to optimise the games as well.”

Zhang continues: “I think this process is definitely ongoing, so no pipeline at the beginning will reach the perfect state. During this process, we will identify the most time-consuming elements to develop and the bottlenecks we experienced. And then based on that, we can do the adjustment and fine-tuning.”

A version of this story originally appeared on IGN Japan. GamesIndustry.biz is owned by IGN Entertainment.