ARTerial (the AI-generated art museum) by MEGA Marlon

made by MEGA Marlon for Ludum Dare 48 (JAM)

You’re in charge of curating for tonight’s art show and you only just started working at the gallery. It probably doesn’t help that this place just seems to get deeper and deeper. Well, what are you waiting for? Head on back, and grab some paintings for tonight’s show! Remember… just don’t get lost…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAFM4sTPE2Q

AI Generated Art:

All of the artwork is generated using a neural network. That means each painting you see is completely unique and one of a kind! Find one you like? Hold on tight and don’t lose it!

Objective:

Curate 6 pieces of artwork from an infinite museum. Choose paintings of the right size and synergy. Will tonight’s art show be a success?

Controls:

WASD – Movement

Left Click – Grab/Place

T - Teleport

Q - Quit

Screenshots:

Hardware:

We are working on trying to optimize the game for lower-end hardware. Right now the neural network will slow down the game at some points if your hardware isn't fast enough.

Follow Us

If you're interested in keeping up with more of our work, you can find us on twitter here.

Post-deadline edits and fixes: 4/26/21: bug fix for start room crashing when going too far and player spawning glitch. 5/03/21: source code added. See github link on this page.

Link	https://leefu.itch.io/arterial
Link	https://github.com/levifussell/GenMuseum
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/arterial

Ratings

Overall	829^th	3.563⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Fun	1569^th	2.854⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	140^th	4.022⭐	25🧑‍⚖️
Theme	627^th	3.854⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	832^th	3.74⭐	27🧑‍⚖️
Humor	718^th	2.917⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Mood	970^th	3.458⭐	26🧑‍⚖️
Given		31🗳️	30🗨️

Feedback

ChipperSwitch

27. Apr 2021 · 03:31 UTC

Very interesting concept, and funny voice acting.

For some reason the camera makes it really easy to get lost? Maybe to much wide angle lens warping?

Would like to see an up-sampling on the artworks.

The footsteps are a total life saver.

Khill

27. Apr 2021 · 03:35 UTC

I thought the idea was super interesting. I liked going around and looking at all of the art. I wish that the resolution on the art pieces was a little bit higher or that I could see shapes out of it, but thats probably hard to do in a game using a neural network. Pressing T crashed the game

fosf0

27. Apr 2021 · 04:00 UTC

The concept it's interesting, maybe the gameplay is confusing, but it's good :) good job

Roberto Romao

27. Apr 2021 · 04:13 UTC

Good Idea, :) I got lost a lot but had some good time exploring

Good Job

🎤 MEGA Marlon

27. Apr 2021 · 04:18 UTC

@chipperswitch Thanks for the feedback, we would like to get a larger neural network put in, in the future to help with making the paintings higher quality.

@khill Let me look into teleporting crashing the game. Thanks for letting me know!

Alina Baybulatova

27. Apr 2021 · 09:47 UTC

Soo cool idea and graphic!

Eretol

27. Apr 2021 · 12:40 UTC

Cool painting generation!

Devastus

27. Apr 2021 · 16:28 UTC

That's a very cool idea! Very easy to get lost in the mazes though, I was unable finish my art show as I just wandered around looking :P A shame the artworks are low-res but it's totally understandable.

Very nice, keep it up!

miej

28. Apr 2021 · 06:59 UTC

didnt realize what was up with the footprints until i decided to turn around after diving straight in and seeing how deep i could get. i happen to daylight as an ai practitioner, so it was cool to see some neural net art here. i think a really interesting direction you could take this would be to have the player's path deeper into the art gallery actually be a real navigation of the manifold of the latent coding the VAE, or something similar. could be fascinating to be able to explore the high-dimensional space of neural net internal representations in a game environment

Vivien Fargette

28. Apr 2021 · 08:32 UTC

as said above, really cool work with the artworks!

I had a hard time placing paintings on the wall but other than that, it was quite an enjoyable experience.

Pressing T did not crash the game for me but pressing Q did (not a big deal tho, I pressed it to quit ^^)

Rashcan

28. Apr 2021 · 08:34 UTC

Really cool! Unfortunately hanging paintings is a bit cumbersome, and my second to last painting made contact with two different outlines and the game faded to black, then back, without anything happening. I assume there is an ending? Oh well, I may have to revisit it later.

I especially like the application of theme here, with the impossibly endless museum of paintings in the back. Very easy to get lost in there, in a good way of course.

Levi

28. Apr 2021 · 19:14 UTC

@miej that's a really cool idea. Would also help make the exploration part of it have more meaning by making certain areas have 'clusters' of similar painting types in the latent space. Then you would get interesting effects like seeing the interpolations between different images in the studios as you move through the museum.

Levi

28. Apr 2021 · 19:16 UTC

@rashcan thanks for feedback. Yea, good catch on that bug. The end was sort of a last-minute throw together so when it fades to black you have finished and you should see a new clipboard drop into the room with your score. The only other indication is that the back room will be closed. Glad you enjoyed walking around!

LDJam user 235694

28. Apr 2021 · 21:12 UTC

Its so cool idea, i like this graphic. Nice work

profan

29. Apr 2021 · 12:43 UTC

I quite liked this one, bit of a shame the art wasn't framed more nicely, a bit of lighting in the individual spaces i think would have done a lot to elevate the experience of exploring novel art! (just like in a real gallery, where half of the work is just making sure what you're presenting fits in the space :D)

I managed to get supremely lost (the footsteps helped, but you can only aid a fool so much), and I'm not entirely sure but is the space actually infinite? It certainly felt like it!

Also nice to see someone managed to get picking up objects _almost_ as janky as I did :eyes:

Would also have been interesting to see themed rooms/colour schemes? (at the current time, it's quite hard to tell you've already been somewhere, but in a real gallery it's usually reasonably obvious!)

Anyways now I'm backseat deving here and it's impressive this got done in this timeframe anyways!

Nice work!

SoberCake

29. Apr 2021 · 12:43 UTC

Pretty surreal and cool, and also buggy ahaha

Sand-Gardeners

29. Apr 2021 · 15:03 UTC

Great idea! Does the player have any influence on the generation of the artwork? Or could they have been generated beforehand and stored within the game? Great work anyway, had a blast navigating this deep museum!

Levi

30. Apr 2021 · 05:19 UTC

@profan thanks for the in-depth feedback! Honestly, if we merged our two games, I think there would be something pretty cool there, yours captured the atmosphere we were more trying to go for. The space is infinite as long as all the loaded chunks can fit into memory. We didn't push it too far in testing. Themed rooms with distinguishing parts is a nice idea with items and characters etc. Too many ideas too little time.

Levi

30. Apr 2021 · 05:22 UTC

@sand-gardeners thanks for playing :) Yea right now the artwork is generated when each chunk in the game is generated, so it is the main bottleneck of the game. Preloading could be a good idea to speed some things up! But, we did want the art to be unique every time. The player doesn't have any influence on the art generation though so it takes away from the exploration -- very cool idea to try to incorporate that. Something like @miej's idea would be interesting.

Noble Robot

01. May 2021 · 10:43 UTC

Right off the bat the game sets a good tone, and provides just enough information to both tease and instruct the player without being either too hand-hold-y or obtuse...

...however, once the game begins in earnest I didn't find that the experience got any deeper (excuse the pun). I sorta got the concept before I went out to find paintings, and the fact that almost none of the paintings I brought back fit well in *any* of the frames made the gameplay tedious in a way that wasn't instructive or revealing (or purposefully confounding as in "anti-games" like The Stanley Parable).

Overall, though, the use of theme and the stellar concept and setup, combined with the constraint of the jam, forgives all sins here. Well done! I think this is just one "design eureka" away from being a project that could be developed into a full commercial product, where it can retrieved and be put up on the wall along with the others.

Noteworthy

02. May 2021 · 07:32 UTC

Very cool concept, I love the idea of getting lost in a procedural art gallery.
Had a slight issue with the short, wide picture frame near the corner not highlighting when I had a painting of it's size hung on it, but other than that the game ran and played flawlessly.
The art is very interesting, I don't know what I expected AI generated art to look like.
Great use of the concept!
I got a B+ :)

Levi

04. May 2021 · 03:29 UTC

@noble-robot Thanks for the healthy dose of feedback -- always appreciate when someone takes the time to write something thorough! The game design aspect of this is probably the weakest, so you pointed out the flaws pretty nicely. Something to work on. There's a lot of ideas that we have since come up with thanks to all the comments on here, so we are looking to see what we could do with this concept when not on a time-crunch. Until then, glad you had some fun exploring :)

Levi

04. May 2021 · 03:31 UTC

@noteworthy Happy to hear it's been running flawlessly, our major concern near the end of the jam was getting the generation speed of the museum chunks to not lag the game. If you stand back from the paintings and squint your eyes, you can start to see shapes such as animals, cars, etc. Sometimes the abstractness of the generated images actually works well for a painting. B+ is impressive, that must have taken some work. Glad you enjoyed it (bar the tiny bug)!

Space_man

09. May 2021 · 22:04 UTC

Very cool concept, I love the idea of using a neural network to generate paintings for the game. Its definitely easy to get lost in the maze of rooms, though still tempting to just explore deeper to look for interesting paintings. I did encounter a slight bug at the end where one large painting overlapped the last two spots and counted for both - managed to get a B+ though. If you were to expand the game, I think it would be interesting to have networks that generated paintings of different styles/subjects in different rooms.
Well done!

dean16M

24. Jan 2022 · 09:26 UTC

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