A lot of brilliant design work goes into the production of online slots, as designers spend a lot of time getting the details of a machine just right. Everything from the colour scheme to the typeface, to the design of in-game characters and symbols has to be considered.
Some of the most impressive design work on slots goes into the animations. From exciting introductory scenes to the representation of spinning reels and visually engaging bonus games, modern slots have a tremendous amount of animation design. But how might AI or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) influence the role of animators in online casino game development? Could these technologies change the way animators work or shift their place in the creative process?
Artificial Intelligence
AI has already worked its way into almost all industries, including online casinos. If you visit any of the top gambling platforms listed on the https://legalcasino.uk/ website which reviews legal casinos and ranks them, you’ll find AI bots in the support chat handling simple user queries. On top of that, casinos use AI to produce personalised experiences and boost security.
Because of the abundance of artificial intelligence, it has raised some questions that go beyond its simple functionality for producing better web searches and creating pictures out of text prompts. People have expressed various concerns about how AI might affect different professions, and this has become an even greater talking point in AGI, which will hypothetically mimic human learning capabilities and approaches.
Slot Machine Animators
Human creativity is a wonderful thing, and that is what drives innovative designs on slot machines. This human touch is something that may not go away. The initial creative vision could still come from animators, and they would still be pivotal in ensuring that the vision is defined, refined and output exactly as they wanted.
There could be other elements like curating the AI content, casting a human eye over the finalised animations, and assessing how the animations make someone feel while playing the slot.
What Could Artificial Intelligence Do?
That’s not to say AI and AGI don’t and won’t have a bigger role to play in the future. AI is already employed to do repetitive frame generation tasks and in creating the motion of non-player characters that pop up in celebratory animations and bonus games.
It can also work procedurally, working from the concept of, say, one particular gem design and using that as a guideline to develop more. The integration of extra assets like particle effects on different symbols is much more efficient when automated.
That leaves AI in the position of being a tool rather than a platform for directly replacing animators. Working with the feedback that AI produces through analysis can help developers get to the end goal of high-quality, efficient designs.
Can AI Design?
The big question, perhaps, is whether it can design and take over all aspects of game animations? This is where the concept of Artificial General Intelligence comes in because it would have a far better ability to understand what the slot’s narrative is all about.
Because it would hypothetically process information like a human, AGI would have the ability to get into the emotions of how a player may feel using it, by processing what a player does in response to animations. This contextual aspect would be the big game changer, because that feedback could lead to the artificial intelligence making design tweaks to animations intuitively.
Sticking to the Theme
Slot themes typically have a story attached to them, even if it's a very simple one. The popular slot Gonzo’s Quest, for example, is about a conquistador on a treasure hunt, and the in-game animations of the character entering temples are an integral part of telling that story.
AGI could tap into the mood of the game based on what bets a player is making, and in real-time, show relevant animation sequences instead of just generic ones. That would require a greater volume of animations created per slot, and AI would handle such an extra workload more efficiently than human designers.
It could potentially adapt to learn and create animation styles while handling more complex, realistic physics of characters. The upshot is that AGI could become specialised in emotional design choices and creation.
Will It Threaten Jobs?
At some level, artificial intelligence may threaten game designer jobs, which is a common thing with automation, of course. But there still feels like there would be a need for human animators, even if that’s in a much different capacity than the role now. Large parts of the animation process still need to be directed and prompted to get the right execution, and there is nothing that beats human oversight on content for quality control.
