Tool AI help! (Price and other things)

[Mark17]

So recently I decided that I want to create my own visual novel (I already have the first part of the story and the characters ready). The problem is that I’d like to know whether AIs are paid or if I can get them for free. Could someone give me some guidance on this?
Also, what are the best AIs for creating a game? Tutorials would be great too, so I can start developing the game.

 

[secret_agent]

For AI gen art -- What type of system specs (including video card) do you currently have? You can download local AI tools and models for free, but your system specs will matter. If you have a decent system (> 8GB video RAM), then you can download tools like comfyui or automatic1111 and then download models (refer to civitai for best central repo of models). There's thousands of online tutorials for setup and configuration, so just use google to find a tutorial and follow it.

For AI gen coding -- you can use free tools like chatgpt or gemini or whatever to get help with coding. Just note that they are very, very often wrong and can easily get stuck in error loops (they say do A, then you have bug, then they say do B to fix A's bug, then you get another bug, then to fix that bug, they tell you to do A again and you're stuck in a loop and they aren't smart enough to figure out the root cause). It can be helpful for minor code and sometimes do okay, but you need to understand what you're doing because it can't make a complete working game for you.

For AI gen story/writing -- you can also use free tools like chatgpt or gemini or whatever (same as with coding). Just note it won't get into naughty bits, but it can be very useful for story boarding, outlining, plot tracking, story threads, brainstorming, etc. There's other paid AI models that can get into naughty bits, but I don't think there's any free ones. The actual dialogue and text can feel very generic if you copy/paste it directly into your game, so it still requires a human touch to make it read well, but it's a very useful tool for the backend (outlining, tracking, brainstorming, etc.).

 

[Mark17]

For AI gen art -- What type of system specs (including video card) do you currently have? You can download local AI tools and models for free, but your system specs will matter. If you have a decent system (> 8GB video RAM), then you can download tools like comfyui or automatic1111 and then download models (refer to civitai for best central repo of models). There's thousands of online tutorials for setup and configuration, so just use google to find a tutorial and follow it.

For AI gen coding -- you can use free tools like chatgpt or gemini or whatever to get help with coding. Just note that they are very, very often wrong and can easily get stuck in error loops (they say do A, then you have bug, then they say do B to fix A's bug, then you get another bug, then to fix that bug, they tell you to do A again and you're stuck in a loop and they aren't smart enough to figure out the root cause). It can be helpful for minor code and sometimes do okay, but you need to understand what you're doing because it can't make a complete working game for you.

For AI gen story/writing -- you can also use free tools like chatgpt or gemini or whatever (same as with coding). Just note it won't get into naughty bits, but it can be very useful for story boarding, outlining, plot tracking, story threads, brainstorming, etc. There's other paid AI models that can get into naughty bits, but I don't think there's any free ones. The actual dialogue and text can feel very generic if you copy/paste it directly into your game, so it still requires a human touch to make it read well, but it's a very useful tool for the backend (outlining, tracking, brainstorming, etc.).

Ok about the coding and story, I understand. But what about the AI for images did you have one for that? Shadows Of Ambition DEV recommend PINOKIO.

 

[secret_agent]

Ok about the coding and story, I understand. But what about the AI for images did you have one for that? Shadows Of Ambition DEV recommend PINOKIO.

Recommend tools or models?

If you are running local, I use comfyui and automatic1111. I like comfyui for movies and automatic1111 for images, but you can do both in comfyui (and maybe both in automatic1111 with right extensions). I don't use online tools, so I'm not familiar with those. If you're just doing images, I'd recommend automatic1111 (it's easy to setup and has lots of extensions). If you also want to do animations, then maybe I'd say start with automatic1111 to learn how things work and move to comfyui later.

These 2 tools (comfyui and automatic1111) are the most popular tools, have the most support and extensions (addons), and have the most tutorials. I feel automatic1111 is way easier to learn and setup than comfyui, but comfyui allows you to do a lot more complex tasks (you won't need this to start). I also feel comfyui breaks a lot more than automatic1111 (I use the tool to do auto updates with comfyui and sometimes it just breaks everything). For automatic1111, i just download a fresh version into new directory and run it separate to make sure it works before upgrading (just delete old dir etc) and rarely have problems.

For models, you need to find something that matches your art style and intent. Civitai.com has thousands of models and Loras (fine tuned models that lay on top of base models) to choose from. You can use automatic1111 to make embeddings (its like what we started with before we had Loras) or other tools like kohya_ss to make your own Loras once you get a bunch of images of a particular character, so you can be more consistent with the generated images.

If you run multiple tools, you can use the same models in both by just editing each tool's config/settings to point to a shared model directory, so you don't need to download/copy the same models more than once.

 

[NTR.S Emperor]

I will soon be releasing a free web tool that does not require coding, designed for creators who want to focus on story creation! If you're interested.

This is not a response to the creative AI, but if it can help you...