Faena is made with beautiful minds, and one of them is artificial

Our team is made up of language teachers, developers, and artists working hard to bring you guys a playable demo that showcases the language learning, Andean world of Faena! Perhaps working harder than any of us to best communicate quickly, effectively, and creatively this world in our heads is Midjourney. Midjourney is an artificial intelligence that creates images based on text description that you input.

It works like this. You write whatever you want to see, with as little or as much detail as you want, and the bot gives you 4 options to choose from. From there you can tell it to go ahead and try again, upscale (do in more detail) or make variations of any of the four images originally given. From there you can keep upscaling or making variations. With practice, we are now able to be pretty efficient with Midjourney in getting it to product what we want.

So how has our team been playing with this amazing bot?

In one word, we make pre-concept art with it for asset creation. This allows us to communicate and play with ideas visually out in the open instead of having it all to ourselves in our heads. Then, by the time we get to making our own concept art for Faena, we’re able to communicate with other team members exactly what we had in mind. Plus we get to really play around with ideas.

If you’ve been following along our instagram (@faenagames) you may have seen the voting between different midjourney pre-concept pachas, small creatures that are very important in the game world (can’t say more than that right now!). The cuyepacha (based on guinea pigs; ‘cuyes’ in Spanish) final 4 options were all competitive! Bottom right won thought :). We did these for some pachas that all fit well into the Faena world, but that we just truly couldn’t decide which one should pass onto the concept art stage.

So this is essentially what we’ve been doing for the pachas, to take one example. In the Midjourney discord, we write in a sentence of things we want the bot to spit out: “very cute, very fluffy, small, magical andean guinea pig, turquoise and teal colors, vibrant colors, high level of detail”. After many iterations we learned that these were the keywords that got us these adorable pachas.

Right now we are designing the pueblo of Colibrío, the main town zone, and we need lotssssssss of pre-concept art for so many different assets.

We want the town to be largely constructed through guadua, a species of bamboo found in Colombia. So we were playing with phrases like “bamboo lamp inspired by mushrooms, mystical, earth colors”. And with some human guidance, Midjourney eventually produced this dope lamp! We’ll make a Notion page just for Faena lamps and we’ll use Midjourney pre-concept art and some found images and drawings to ensure we have a host of visual references that will go into the finalized concept art.

Midjourney has been just an absolutely crucial and fun aspect of designing the Faena world! It’s in its Beta version right now but anyone can pay a small monthly subscription fee to play around with this wonderful artificial intelligence.

Stay tuned to our instagram account. We should be doing more Midjourney pre-concept art voting episodes soooooon enough!