"Not A Single Pixel" Of The New Ecco Game Will Be Generated By AI, Insists Series Creator
Good to know, but sad that it has to be said.
https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/01/not-a-single-pixel-of-the-new-ecco-game-will-be-generated-by-ai-insists-series-creatorOpen linkView original on lemmus.org441
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I knew that "No AI used" is going to become a huge selling point for many products. And I think this is just the start.
That's excellent. And as these mega corps watch consumers favor those products. Maybe, just maybe they'll fucking implode. That's just a fantasy I know.
Unfortunately they won't. They are earning tons of money.
Earningburning. Fixed it for you.I'm gonna have my kid add "No AI used" to his lemonade stand sign. He'll probably double his profits.
(so like $4).
The reality is software engineers will use AI or will find themselves out of work as they won't have the skills to get hired.
Customers may never know if AI is used as a tool in game creation but it will always be part of any software and development studio.
Using AI for music or design assets is totally different from using it for the code base and blanket statements don't improve the situation
I disagree with your statement, unfortunately.
I could see a refusal to use codegen as a potential liability, but that's not "skills". The biggest thing about codegen is you have to review it and just lower your expectations that the code comes from a technique dumber than the dumbest human intern you have ever seen and approach it with supremely thorough skepticism. It's exhausting how dumb it can be and how you have to be paranoid for every single piece of output. But it's not a "skill"
While we don't do game development, my company has investigated using gen ai for code and we found that it doesn't reliably assist us in anything other than boilerplate code. I personally found that it hallucinates APIs on the regular which made it a massive waste for me as I basically had to go back and rewrite most of the code myself. Using gen ai for code reminded me of every time I've worked at a company that outsourced code; we rarely ever got what we asked for and by the time we got something usable it still wouldn't be up to our standards, which generally resulted in scrapping what was delivered and having to rewrite the whole thing internally.
Using AI for code requires a high level of specificity, software houses that are getting the most out of it are not using it so much inline or vibe coding because as you say that leads to hallucinations or having to repeat yourself.
The common approach now is to use multiple agents with different responsibilities, the human effectively becomes a team leader and uses one chatbot to orchestrate a plan being very specific about the outcomes and the requirements and breaking the plan down into phases,
Another agent will be used to write the code, they will have set rules files to keep them on guard rails, they will check their work as they go and deliver a pull request at the end of it for the human to check and approve
The next agent will be there to write tests and check the work of the second agent.
It's a lot more work than writing a single prompt and expecting a good outcome or close approximation, but it is getting better results now.
I made a post about thia exact thing a couple of weeks ago! I will give my money to people not using ai bullshit, and if theyre liars, they wont see a cent from me again. People need to stand up and have some damn principles about this.
And what's funny is we all know they're going to use it somewhere.
Ok sure, but how much of the game will actually be generated by dolphins?
This will probably be just another example of HUMAN appropriation when plenty of dolphin developers are struggling to even find work in this industry. Maybe when dolphins are literally the subject matter of the game we could consider inclusivity in its development?
#dolphin_life #Phins_In_Gaming #NotMyEcco
Look buddy, I don't give a single fuck about your #EccoFascist bullshit.
#AdolfPhin #PhinLivesMatterToo #NotAllPhins #ReleaseTheEccosteinFiles
In the original game I’m sure you had to be a dolphin to beat the first level
You know, I recall playing this at a friend's house decades ago and being totally, utterly, stuck on the first level for like... many hours.
So yeah, you may be right about that.
Was there like, a maze in that level? I think I remember a maze that ultimately led to a smaller area of open water, where you were just like "well fuckin' now what?"
Oh come on, I see right through your posturing to be allowed to open an all-dolphin game dev sweat shop. Stop it, it's a waste of money because the whales always interfere and get the dolphins to unionize after the dolphins earn their programming degrees and then they go out and write emulators (because obviously we just close the shop). One of these days they'll get in contract with the penguins and might start pumping out Linux distros!
What if I use DLSS to upscale and add frames?
Maybe the new Ecco game will be optimized well enough to not need or include DLSS and frame generation. 🤷♂️
If they use that stuff and it's still a 2D platformer, holy fucking shit. 🤣
I need 800fps. One of my Steam games was 800+ fps on its HUD even though it was on a 60fps monitor. My GPU was going at 100%.
The game can run faster than the refresh rate; you just won't be seeing more frames than 60 a second.
I paid for whole GPU.
DLAA then
Well it wouldn't be a single pixel then, would it?
AI is quite bad at pixel art in fact.
It understands things must look roughly made by squares, but it doesn't understand what pixels are and their fixed grid.
To be fair, humans are also bad at it these days, judging by the amount of mixels.
even if it is exclusively trained on pixel art?
Yep. It will create something that at a glance looks like pixel art, then you zoom in and find anti-aliased rectangular pixels made out of three different shades of the main color, a weird line, and no clear grid.
If you use a pixel art export node in ComfyUI that won't be a problem. There's a whole guide about it here:
https://inzaniak.github.io/blog/articles/the-pixel-art-comfyui-workflow-guide.html
A whole song and dance to post-process a broken pixel art image into a fixed grid. I'd rather just have talent or pay a human being that will make art in the first place, thanks.
Also, the example shown would be a terrible image to use as an asset, by the way. It's a clear example of not pixel art, rather, 2D art forced to be interpolated in a "pixel like" fashion (aka what happens if you do a few nearest neighbor passes and then a fixed grid downsampling)
Note that there's more than one model to do pixel art and there's pixel art LoRAs that do a decent job. There's loads of flexibility when generating this kind of thing.
Also, you can just tell it to generate a thousand over like 10 minutes and pick the best one and use that as a base to improve upon. AI is just a single tool in the workflow.
I also want to point out that not everyone can just pay someone. Don't be paternalistic: If people want to use AI in their workflow for any reason that's their concern. To angrily throw your hands in the air and say, "I'm not touching it because AI!" is like giving free money to the big publishers.
You're setting a completely unnecessary high bar, "you must be this rich to ride."
I'm not touching it because AI. Thanks.
The person above you is wrong, while a generalist model will struggle to make valid pixel art, either a specially trained model or one with elements to force a specific structure could make generative pixel art.
This seems like a valid example - https://pixel-art.ai/
They can base their pixel art off ai art, that resembles pixel art. Would still count as "no ai in the game" I guess.
What about the code?
Written by an actual dolphin
OMG NEW ECCO GAME
I'm so fucking pumped for new Ecco games. I loved the original on Genesis and it's about damn time we get some fresh stuff in the series.
Even better with this statement
I hope they make an effort with the soundtrack. For me that was a big highlight on all games (specially Sega CD).
Undercaves song goes so hard
YESS. I'm super eager to hear the sounds they come up with here.
Genesis music is of its own genre. So good
The Yamaha chip (YM2612) really gave it a super grunge sound, perfect for games like Comix Zone. That said, it still felt at home with new age music like Ecco's.
The fact that we had a synthesizer playing live music is still mesmerizing me.
It really, really does.
This song (All Good Times, by MelonadeM) isn't from a game, rather it's one of the demo songs included with Furnace, a chiptune tracker. And it goes so fucking hard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQfSCvvqmXg
Not a single pixel. The code, however...
Not a single pixel. So they will not generate a single pixel, but multiple pixels?
Found the lawyer.
I actually put just a single ai generated pixel in all my games
Now you can't win some awards...
A new Ecco game?? Yess. Love the genesis versions
Ok then, that was always allowed.
It's about saving the planet, I think
Save the planet with ECCO, to kill it everywhere else? It's just marketing (it's working though). Wait for the reviews instead.
Instead of, what?
Listening to marketeers do their thing. Have we not learned our lesson yet. They'll say whatever it is to sell their game.
Let them make it. Let them release it. Find out if it's something you want to buy. Buy it. "It's about saving the planet" why would anyone volunteer to carry water for them?
I mean I didn't buy into hype even when I got the gameboy pocket camera, never have and also never pre-ordered anything. except once, I realise I pre-ordered wow to get it at launch day
"It's about saving the planet" - KeenFlame.
It isn't about saving the planet. They never said it was about saving the planet, they don't think GenAI is destroying the planet (see excerpt) The saving the planet thing came all from you.
It's about marketing, and it's working, here you are saying ecco the dolphin is saving the planet. Unless you were telling me the plot of ecco, and yeah I suppose, but that's a bit out of context. Haven't bought into the hype? What more hype is there than saving the planet.
What's the most over hyped game you know? Where were people saying it was saving the planet? Great graphics, incredible gameplay, get to watch an acorn grow into a tree in real time... But saving the planet?!
I think you just don't get the joke..?
Annunziata has been talking about a new game for decades. I'm sceptical he'll produce a single pixel tout court.
I just want him to bring back SmallBall Baseball man
Ye i just saw a vid on ecco. Wishlisting fs
Ok, that was always allowed!
I somehow read "not a single pixel will not be AI generated" at first. My brain just defaulted to that. I was confused by the replies for a minute straight.
Thank goodness I was worried the French fever dream of ECCO would be ruined
I wonder if the name Ecco has to do with John C. Lilly.
It's the same kind of sadness that I feel knowing that a ton of YouTubers who would rather not show their face now have to just so that people know that they're not a fucking clanker. Especially if they're new at it and don't have a backlog or community to prove that they've been around longer than the AI slop.
Not a single one. In fact it will be nothing less than all of the one's
The zeros will be hand-made, however.
I remember getting irrationally pissed off at the genesis version when i was little lol. Great game though.
Nice
Oh god this is going to be awesome to watch this crash and burn
Edit: Oh god I read it wrong, I thought it said the whole thing was going to be generated by AI
Leaving this as proof of my shame
Why do you want it to fail? I'm so happy that Sega is one of the companies who does games that are not mainstream boring stuff. In fact, this is something I would expect from a small indie team. Shouldn't we celebrate that and support?
Oh god I read it wrong! I thought he said the whole thing was going to be AI ack!
Ah I see, just a misunderstanding. Well then the balance of the force is restored. :D
I did that too at first lmao. With so many bad news about the opposite happening recently the brain just defaults to pessimism.
Watch... They'll make money by virtue signalling "no AI use" and then the second AI inevitably goes mainstream pivot to showing off because they use "the best AI". The trick is to make money no matter which way the wind blows.
LOL, it's not exactly niche right now, my dude.
I guess I'm an outlier, I judge games on if they are fun to play.
"We promise not to put turds in your punch bowl."
"Uh, actually, I prefer to make my own choices. Give me a cup of the Poo-Punch and then I'll decide if its worth drinking."
This actually made me laugh out loud. 😆
Unfortunately you are not, that's what most people do. We should all be including ethics in our purchases.
I do include ethics in my decisions. My ethics simply aren't dictated by copyright juggernauts.
So all the individual artists who had their work scraped are juggernauts?
No. DeviantArt, Universal, Disney, Shutterstock, Instagram and friends are the juggernauts. Artists already gave it all away.
There isn't a scenario where individual artists get a piece of that money. Legislation, if it comes, will protect data aggregators, record companies and Hollywood, with the aim of killing open source.
Google paid 60$ million for Reddit's data and I still haven't received my dollar. Google would also love it if training a model costs so much only they could afford to build a legal one.
So it's okay to steal their work for AI and commercial profit because they posted it on the internet?
I'm saying they stopped owning it the moment they put it on the big websites and signed away their work by clicking the box at the end of the ToS. I don't think it's right, just how it is.
I see two choices:
Scrapping isn't considered theft and we all get easy access to these new tools.
It's considered theft and the new tools end up behind censored subscription models while shutter stock makes a shit load of money.
Paying every artists what they are worth is a logistical nightmare because of the amount of data needed. It simply won't happen and isn't a realistic scenario. It sucks but sticking your head in the sand and giving a soft monopoly to google and openai only helps google and openai.
I understand what you are saying, but it also assumes surrendering to AI. Many of us are planning to avoid, boycott, and fight that slop to our dying breath. AI needs to be unpopular and unprofitable. The technology isn’t going to disappear, but we can make sure it’s not socially acceptable to steal from or replace humans with expensive, inefficient, misanthropic, planet-killing software and hardware. Progress is being made and it’s important to understand that — just like crypto — this is a fight we can win.
I hope your boss won't pay you, because that honestly sounds like a logistical nightmare! They'd need like specialized employees and stuff to pay people! Craaazy!
There's no shortage of games that are fun to play, you can just select for studios that don't rely on the Grand Plagiarism Tool to get you to give them money
It's not all plagiarism, though. For instance, Embark Studios uses AI to create in-game voice lines for characters in their games. They made their own models with actors hired specifically to train them.
They might have used them for fine-tuning, but there is no way that they produced enough samples to train a model from zero.
That's kinda a different case than what everyone is referring to when they're talking about this
However, it's an interesting point: do we know those voice actors are being paid the same as if they did the lines all themselves or is this a studio cheaping out on paying actors to do the job?
There might have been a load of actors who turned the job down before they found someone desperate enough for the money or naive enough to not realise it will likely drive down wages for voice actors if this becomes commonplace.
AI is fascist. anything that uses AI supports fascism.
Same TBF, I don't really care if AI was used as long as it is an enjoyable game and the usage of it doesn't contrast from the game itself.
Being said, most the time when generative AI is used, it comes out sloppy and unenjoyable so if there is the genAI flag on the store page I will definitely give it a more thorough once over.
Procedural or structural AI though I don't even bat an eye on. It's whatever at that point we have used tools like that for years anyway and it's never been a problem.
I think this still matters in a long term.
Good games tend to be made by big teams. That’s why when you hear about some auteur recruiting his own random team for a game, it ends up being a failed venture usually.
AI is often an effort to replace large teams with small ones, churning someone’s half-baked thoughts into code and art. The result is rarely human and inventive; and in a lot of ways, it tends to show in the end product.
I'm mostly thinking of indie devs and how it can let small teams do more. I think some of these tools are a real boon to the industry, it's quickly becoming trivial to included animated cut scenes for example. I think the human and inventive part can still shine with competent devs.
I'm not advocating for shovelware here or games that are 90% AI, but a lot of teams that can't afford certain dedicated positions would probably benefit from using it in some parts of their game.
If it isn't noticable and gives us a better game, I'm more than willing to ignore the copyright companies constant wailing.
This is my take at well, but not just for gaming... AI is changing the landscape for all sorts of things. For example, if you wanted a serious, professional grammar, consistency, and similar checks of your novel you had to pay thousands of dollars for a professional editor to go over it.
Now you can just paste a single chapter at a time into a FREE AI tool and get all that and more.
Yet here we are: Still seeing grammatical mistakes, copy & paste oversights, and similar in brand new books. It costs nothing! Just use the AI FFS.
Checking a book with an AI chat bot uses up as much power/water as like 1/100th of streaming a YouTube Short. It's not a big deal.
The Nebula Awards recently banned books that used AI for grammar checking. My take: "OK, so only books from big publishers are allowed, then?"
Welcome to lemmy, your only allowed response to anything AI related is "AI bad", otherwise the 20 or so people who actually use this platform will downvote your comment.
You aren't an outlier. People judge art in a complex way including final product uniqueness and complexity. AI is just one factor. Hardcore anti AI crowd lives mostly in their own echo chamber.
Work smarter, not harder.
Work smart and hard. :-)