Casual Game Art in the AI Era: What Artists and Indie Teams Need to Understand

Kyrylo has worked across casual games, HOPA, match-3, mobile games, concept art, final 2D assets, backgrounds, icons, UI panels, and team guidance. His experience covers both hands-on production and working with other artists.

Casual game art can look simple from the outside, but for artists and indie teams it raises very practical questions: what needs to be drawn before launch, what changes after launch, how much time art production takes, how AI has changed expectations, and how to work with artists without wasting time or budget.

Main Topics:

• Casual Game Art
• AI in Game Art
• 2D Art Production
• Game Art Workflow
• Art Production Planning
• Indie Game Development
• Future of Game Artists

Interview

With Kyrylo Nedorosol, Senior 2D Artist / Concept Artist / Illustrator

Q: 1. How has the world of casual 2D artists changed since AI tools became widely available?

AI is everywhere in casual art now. Basically almost all studios use image generation at some stages of art production wherever it is Gemini, Chat GPT or Leonardo, specialized solutions like Layer.AI or inhouse custom trained Stable Diffusion models. Clients often rely on AI for generating quick reference of what they want to get in the final. 

From the artist perspective – there are two sides. 

First one – generative models at their current stage are trained on scraped art data without any consent which is basically a collective theft of a scale never seen before. From the other side – studio’s deadlines are becoming ridiculous. Every middle and sometimes even junior artist is now expected to be able to produce the art of senior expertise quality. Some studios are pushing AI workflows to automate game art generation entirely, some use it occasionally, some use AI consistently but overpaint it to get that human touch experience. For artists who do not take professional work close to their heart it’s not a big deal. But for those who honed their skills through countless hours of practice and expensive training, forcing them to use AI can look as a depreciation of what they strived to achieve professionally.

As for the practical application of GEN AI – it can complement reference image search (which has become pretty horrible nowadays) but you have to deal with artifacts and nonsense details. 

AI works relatively well when given a good quality base and references for rendering. It can help increase texture resolution, create rough turnarounds of characters or assets, generate previews from blockouts. 

In general – studios are always looking to cut corners so if art production can be automated, they’d likely do so.

The problem with AI assisted workflows is that they are still way too unpredictable. And by nature AI outputs can look too generic, so for the most part you can tell if this art was made by human or AI.

Q: For a typical casual game, what kind of art needs to be created before launch?

Demands for art at the soft launch depend on genre, but in general you need a complete demo of your game with all elements including functioning UI/UX, playable assets, characters, animations, VFX, loading screens, etc etc all in final quality. You need to present what your game looks like to the players as seamlessly as possible.

You have to plan and budget your goals and milestones and keep within your deadlines as much as possible. Otherwise you can spend all your budget on polishing couple of features or assets but still having non-functioning product at launch time. 

Q: What usually changes after launch from an art production point of view?

Launching your game can trigger some asset’s rework or in some cases even general art overhaul. This can not be avoided completely but previous marketing research can significantly lower the chance. 

When your game did well at the start you need to expand the content to keep players engaged. New pack of levels, new characters, skins, new locations, themed and seasonal events, cool new skill trees.  All this can provide your team with months and years of stable work, if your game is enjoyed by players of course.

Q: When a small team plans a casual game, what should they understand about budget and time before hiring a 2D artist?

Planning is always the key. Before expanding your art team you need to sit dowm and calculate the scope of work and estimate the time needed for art production. As we know, nothing ever works as planned, so always reserve some time for revisions.

Casual art relies on how well simple forms flow and interconnect and to get this right you need to put a good amount of effort. You can’t just slap details over design and be good, your art should be instantly readable on a variety of screen sizes, details should be meaningful and match your game style.  Checking your assets against the already finished ones is crucial for style consistency. 

Not a single piece of art is approved without feedback, so dealing with revisions is a natural part of game art production. Getting feedback is always a stress point for artists, so keep it professional, meaningful and friendly. 

And please, don’t complicate feedback loops. Sure you prioritize quality but micromanaging each tiny change of design eats your deadlines. It’s always good to have “master artwork” or style guide for all artists to refer to.

Q: What does the actual process of creating casual game art usually look like?

Every art item starts with a brief. The clearer it is, the faster you get your final_v6_final.psd. 

There are two main stages of art production – prototyping and finalization. Prototyping includes reference search, concept art, color iterations and may include 3D blockouts. Finalization may follow 2D or 3D path of getting the final image or animation.

References included with the brief are for the most part the bare minimum, so artists usually pick their additional structural and stylistic references. 

Concept art can be line drawing, b/w collage or a color draft, it’s the personal choice, unless there are defined pipeline stages. Concepting is the foundation to all of the next steps in art production so all revisions are likely to happen at this stage before investing more resources into render. The problem here can be that if you approve your designs with a client, they often can not tell if the final art would be good from the sketch, so in some cases the “sketch” you present to client is a nearly finished illustration. 

Casual game art tends to use high saturation base colors with colored shadows to avoid dark and muddy look. Everything under 50% saturation is likely to be avoided. 

The colors of your item must be always put in context  – a wooden pirate’s chest should be clearly readable against the ship’s wooden deck, green fruit must be instantly recognized on the green game field, etc. In order to get this, artists often switch back and forth from color to black-and-white previews to check if the values are correct. Color gradients are  used often to paint the item into the environment. 

If your pipeline includes 3D as a final stage make sure that concepts are suitable for 3D production – they must be logical and include projections in right perspective (or isometry),  item’s base colors and texture references. 

If your art would be animated, you have an additional task of preparing the required set of layers that need to overlap without artifacts. For example, to prepare a character’s eyes for animation you need to have upper and lower eyelids, eye balls, irises and highlights on separate layers. 

Feedback can happen at every stage of art production so don’t take it personally, this is just what needs to be done. 

Having clear vision in the brief, good amount of reference and distinctive feedback can help reduce unnecessary time spent on a task.

Q: What should an artist learn before trying to work in casual game production?

Don’t scatter, set yourself a clear goal and pick what are you going to chase – 2D, 3D, UX/UI, tech art, animation or maybe you’d like all of them and become a generalist. Master one skill  at a time and as you progress, you can expand your skillset in the related fields.

Ideally, before you start to apply you’d need at least 2-3 industry quality works in your portfolio, showing not only polished finals, but your designing process from start to finish. Don’t be afraid to show sketches, that’s how you can prove that you’re able to make creative decisions and push the task up to the final result.

Show your work to your GF, your homie, your mom, basically anybody who’s not an artist and can give you honest feedback. Focus on your artistic skills, learning industry tools and self-discipline.

Don’t worry about the pipeline routine that much, each studio lead has their own preferences so knowing basics of file handling is helpful for the start, you can get into details once you start working.

Q: What should an indie developer prepare before contacting a 2D artist for a casual game?

I don’t have much experience with indie studios but can speak from 2D Artist’s perspective. The clearer the brief is -the better. Ideally to have art/style guide if your game has a specific creative language to follow. If you rely more on references then you need to select them thoroughly and as close to your desired vision as possible. 

You can group the references by style, mood and desired technical level. As for deadlines and estimations – there’s always a compromise between what artists want and the client is able to budget. There’s only one rule – you can choose only two of the three constraints: Fast, Cheap, Good at one time. 

Q: Looking ahead, where do you think casual game art is going over the next five years?

The casual gaming industry is still growing and changing. Games are becoming bigger and more complex, some genres cease, others are getting popular again. Game production was always a risky venture, nowadays it’s becoming even more uncertain in the current situation that is leading to general lack of fresh air in the industry. We see mass layoffs and restructuring popping up while job hunting has never been tougher. 

But the need for artists is not disappearing. I can see the trend that smaller studios are more willing to hire generalist artists who are able to do all design, UI and animation work for the project, as well as senior positions are still in demand. I don’t think that AI is going to replace game artists any time soon, which is proven by some tech companies re-hiring  people because AI is getting more expensive and its work value is still questionable. 

My opinion on being a game artist in AI era  – don’t look for shortcuts, AI can only approximate what’s being fed to it, and it doesn’t have understanding of what it is producing. So we need to learn to be better creators based on our own experience and knowledge.

I guess the future is not all doom and gloom, and while AI  will settle in mass art production, indie studios would get better chances to cater to more niche auditory valuing unique styles and approaches produced entirely by humans for humans.