We have made a compilation of AI tools and platforms that can help you to create a board game and to face the blank sheet syndrome. Here are some of the ones we found most interesting:
1. Inworld AI
Inworld AI focuses on creating realistic characters with unique personalities, memories and emotional behaviors. Although this tool is specifically focused on character creation, it can be of great help for those developing a board game in which the characters have an important weight and require a lot of detail and realism.
It can be used to create characters with unique personalities, memories, and emotional behaviors. This type of AI tools can make the characters more realistic and memorable for players.
Inworld AI can also aid you in developing characters with different levels of intelligence and cunning. If you are developing a game in which the different characteristics will have an impact on the game mechanics, you could use this tool while planning and creating more fleshed out characters with unique characteristics.
2. Unity
Unity is commonly used to create video games but can also be used to create board games. It has a large number of resources such as the creation of graphics, games of chance or machine learning models that allow you to test your board games.
When it comes to AI Tools Unity has a number of different features that make it helpful a useful one, such as Unity Machine Learning Agents, Unity Sentient, Unity Mars and Unity OVR. However, when it comes to board game design, what will help you the most is AI character creation.
In a similar way to Inworld, Unity can use AI to create characters automatically, which can serve as inspiration when you are stuck. This can be used for games that require characters to have a high degree of intelligence, such as action games or adventure games.
While Unity’s tools aren’t the best for the board game format, playing around with it if you already have experience in game design can help you get inspired.
3. Chat GPT (or Google’s Bard)
AITools such as ChatGPT are large language models that can be used to generate ideas or descriptions of characters, objects and scenarios; to simulate conversations or interactions with players. It is useful to provide creative, context and language elements.
Nowadays there’s rising competition for Chat GPT, such as Grok (X / Twitter) and Gemini. They can help you with code, develop backstories for your characters or even create the rules of your game. However, they are not perfect.
These AI tools are just language models and can be more limited in character and game creations than the other AI’s we’ve presented you. ¿The positive? They are all free to access, which make’s it an extremely accesible way to play around and try to over come a creative block.
4. Tensor Flow
TensorFlow is an open-source software library for machine learning. It can be used to create machine learning models that can be used for a variety of tasks, including image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition.
TensorFlow can also be used for machine learning in board games, as this tool is very useful if you want to train an AI to play and make strategic decisions in real time.
Let’s say you are designing a boardgame that’s meant to be played in a digital platform. In this case TensorFlow could be used to create an AI player that can play the game, so the player can play with a bot instead of a person.
The AI player can be trained on a dataset of human gameplay, and it can then learn to play the game as well as, or even better than, a human player.
AI players that are able to learn and adapt over time. This can make the game more challenging and engaging for human players. The AI character’s, as they learn, should be able to play the game in a variety of different styles. This can make the game more re-playable and unpredictable.
5. Midjourney
Midjourney: creates realistic and detailed images in a short period of time, which can save a lot of time and resources in the creation process for the conceptual or styling part.
You could use it to create the visual resources of your game in a more cost efective way than hiring an artist to work on your project. When starting a project like designing a game, money and funding is going to have an impact on te viability of the game and whether or not you can get it publish.
It’s always better to have an artist working alongside with you, it will make the look of your game more unique as more and more people start using these AI tools, however both options have their pro’s and con’s.
In addition, Tabletop Creator incorporates its own AI for image generation to make it easier and faster for you to develop the prototype.
6. Scenario
Scenario: design any game piece you need from maps, environments, buildings, accessories, weapons, ships, clothes or avatars with the style you choose. You can train this AI by giving it style reference images and you will get all kinds of resources for your game.
You can use it in a similar way to midjourney, only that this tool does focus more on game design than just art work.
Scenario is a Generative AI focused on the gaming industry, and offers game designers more control over more specific aspects such as the characters, maps, backgrounds,… If you want more control when designing your board games this tool will give it to you.
Each of these AI tools has a specific function that can be of great help in developing your board games, as they can allow you to overcome creative blocks to create more interesting and realistic games.
