COLOPL and former Atlus veteran Kazuma Kaneko recently announced that their new roguelike deckbuilder Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter will launch on May 7 on Steam and mobile platforms. In a pre-launch interview with Game*Spark, Kaneko talked about the game’s “AI Kaneko” system – which uses an image generating AI model trained on his own art to generate custom cards based on each player’s decisions.
Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter is a free-to-play game that mixes dungeon exploration and turn-based card battles. Its original concept, character designs and worldbuilding were created by Kaneko, this being his first big project with Colopl after his departure from Atlus.
The AI Kaneko system in Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter uses the player’s activity log – choices made during exploration, battle history, etc. – as prompts for creating personalized cards with unique names, art and effects. According to the developers, it was trained exclusively on art Kaneko made after joining Colopl. But how is this possible, given the huge number of images needed to train a model? Based on their explanation, it seems like they initially trained it on dozens of original illustrations by Kaneko, then generated hundreds of thousands of images based on this training. Then, they filtered out the “good” results (judged by Kaneko to be faithful to his style) for further training, and so on.
However, this process of refining the quality of the AI’s output was not simple, as Kaneko explains, “This method worked fine for humanoid characters, but when it came to depicting fantastical beings that don’t exist in real life, like creatures with two heads, for example – it was much harder.” To help out the process, Kaneko drew and supplied extra reference images to get the AI closer to outputting what was needed. Then, when something even vaguely close came out of it, he would take multiple outputs and manually composite them together to make the envisioned image (to again be used for further training). “Honestly, it’d be faster if I just drew the whole thing myself from start to finish (laughs),” he comments.
Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter launches on May 7 for PC (Steam), iOS and Android. English language support is planned.
