I'm sure there's plenty of people willing to create art for free. ESPECIALLY for an up and coming game that has already gotten lots of traction, as it could upstart their own careers and significantly help them in growing their portfolio + becoming more recognizable.
Try advertising your game on varies social medias like Twitter, Tumblr, and various Discord servers. While AI in general is horrible - *especially* generative art/words - it also significantly limits your audience when advertising your game and even trying to get hired to code for others.
Many, including myself, refuse to support and play anything with even a hint of AI. I really think this game has AMAZING potential and could go very far, but you need to get rid of the AI art immediately.
TL;DR: Creating art for a game provides many opportunities for up and coming artists. Advertise it online and see if anyone would be willing to make art for free. You severely limit your audience by using AI art, as well as your credibility/likeness for future games whether you make them yourself or get hired. Boo generative AI bad and stinky.
I appreciate your feedback. I’m okay with the exposure I already got, so I don’t need to exploit anyone.
Regarding free art: I don’t believe in asking artists to work for free. The game currently has around 100 pictures, and asking someone to invest that much time and skill into a free project, with no payment and no revenue share, doesn’t sit right with me. I think you will agree, since you care about ethics.
If an artist reached out because they were genuinely passionate about the project and wanted to contribute on their own terms, I’d be open to that conversation. But I’m not going to put out a call for free labor.
For now, my focus is on finishing the game itself. If the art becomes a barrier for some players, I understand. But I’m making this because I want to. No one is obligated to play a free indie game.
P.S.: I also need to be real about what this novel is. It’s an extremely niche NSFL project with heavy themes. This isn’t “portfolio builder” material. No one’s getting hired at a studio because they drew incel guro art for a free game. Telling young artists this is a career opportunity feels disingenuous.
Thanks again for taking the time to write.
While I do agree on most of what you said, I don't think AI "in general" is bad, I think AI in the domain of arts and writing is bad in kind of a "whatever the scope" manner while AI in other domains CAN be perfectly fine. As someone working a bit in software development, AI is a great tool, it makes for a good documentation browser since howver you want to put it, an AI is good at treating large agregations of data, it is also quite a good auto-completion tool and is a great translation tool since it takes context in consideration compared to a simple dictionary/translation tool.
Sorry, not that much related to your comment but I feel kinda strongly about AI, its not bas if you know how to use it properly. If your point about AI being horrible was more about the ethics of using human-created content to teach an AI, well, fair, I do agree that's a huge issue that should be adressed in law but that's sadly probably not going to happen...