Using DALL-E to design a board game, Introduction

Hi everyone!

My name is Wilson and this is the first article in a series about designing a board game using a generative A.I. such as DALL-E2 (shortened to DALL-E from now on), which is one of the tools I used to design The Rings Of Saturn.

This is also the first article to be written on the blog! Because this is a introductory article about the topic, I will cover the basics of generative A.I., introduce The Rings Of Saturn (Figure 1), and speak about how I used DALL-E to bring my board game vision to life.

Generative A.I.

First, what is generative A.I.?

Generative A.I. is the category of software programs that take user input (a picture, a text prompt) and generate content based on the input. The output is depends on the type of program being used. An image generator such as DALL-E, MidJourney, or Stable Diffusion will generate pictures based on a text prompt. ChatGPT or Bard will answer questions and create text outputs based on a text prompt.

How does generative A.I. work?

We will focus specifically on image generators, because in my humble opinion, they are the most fun (Read: really super duper cool!). These A.I.s are trained on large datasets which include a bunch of pictures with corresponding captions or labels that define what they are. Fancy probabilistic math is done and voila you have a picture of what you want (when it goes right). If you want to really get into the weeds, read here.

I emphasize probabilistic because the model is predicting an output image based on your text prompt. This is why you will see multiple pictures outputted for each text prompt, and is why you will get different results if you run the same prompt twice, (Figure 2).

These datasets have billions of pieces of data and each model is trained on different data. The model creators manage the models for fairness, equality, and safety (essentially remove biases from the dataset and stop pictures of a violent or overtly sexual nature). They also all use slightly different math. Because of this, each generator has a slightly different look when you generate pictures without explicit directions (Figure 3).

The Rings Of Saturn

A general synopsis:

The Rings Of Saturn is a race game where players have to get from the outer ring of Saturn to the planet of Saturn by earning resources, managing crew, and avoiding the pitfalls of space. The theme is ironic space, meaning physics don’t exist, aliens do exist, the rings sometimes look like the moon, and the disasters that befall your crew are funny/ironic. In short, you will not be learning anything truthful about space from The Rings Of Saturn.

Each turn consists of:

1. A generating phase: The captain gains resources through investments they make and from the place they land on the board. They can also gain extra resources from dice events and pirating other captains.
2. A trade phase: Captains can trade with the bank and with other captains in some circumstances.
3. A purchase phase: Captains can purchase generators and shields as well as hire extra crew members or pay to sabotage other captains. They can also buy passage to the next ring.
4. A hiring phase: Captains hire crew members for their spaceship.
5. An anomaly phase: Captains draw a card that causes a (typically) adverse event to happen to their spaceship. (Figure 4)

This game was designed by Wilson Holland, Trevor Holzmer, and DALL-E.

Designing Using A.I.

The Rings Of Saturn contains a mixture of user-generated and A.I.-generated content. Specifically, images on the generator, shield, and anomaly cards were designed using DALL-E. There are also some extra images on the game board, the rulebook, and the box that were generated via DALL-E.

No touch up was done on the images generated by the A.I. and the images generated can be determined by the DALL-E rainbow signature (Figure 5).

I dug into the randomness of DALL-E and the design theme is all over the place. See future articles for examples.

There are some pros and cons to using A.I. that I have listed below. Later articles in this series will go into specific details about some of these.

Pros

• Speed: These images take 30 seconds to generate, so even when tweaking a prompt multiple times, it is extremely fast.
• Cost: The DALL-E engine gave me 50 generations plus 25 generations free each month. They also charged 15$ per 150 generations. It is very cost effective, especially for a brand new game publisher.
• Goes With the Space Theme: I affectionately refer to DALL-E as C.A.L. 9001, the A.I. character in The Rings Of Saturn.

Cons

• No Artist: Artists have a specific style and some games really stand out because they took the time and money to pay a proper artist.
• Consistent Theming: Above I mentioned using exact image prompts, unless you have a specifics in mind, the random results can be surprising to say the least. This can be negated and will be covered in a later article.
• Fitting Generated Images With Vision: This can be a difficult task and I ended up taking a different approach. This will be covered in a later article.

An Ask

For those of us employing A.I. as a tool in creative ways, please give credit where credit is due. If an A.I. helped, call it out. Don’t try to pass off the work as solely your own.

Conclusion

Hopefully you learned some new information about generative A.I.

If you have any comments, questions, or concerns. Comment below, I would love to know what you think about using A.I. in board game design and if other people are doing the same!

If you want to keep apprised on the upcoming Kickstarter for The Rings Of Saturn, scheduled to launch May 2nd, 2023 or be updated when other articles are released in this series, click subscribe on the side.