Celebrating the 20th anniversary of imcGAMES

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of imcGAMES

 

 

Hello, this is imcGAMES. This year, we are celebrating our 20th anniversary.

 

 

First of all, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to our users for supporting us and using our services for so many years. Thanks to you, we have been able to stay in business, develop our technology, and grow on the way. We would like to share with you our hope that we will not rest on the memories of the past and will continue to develop toward a new horizon of entertainment.

 

 

Since the 2010s, the rapid rise of AI technology has brought a huge wave of impact and change to every sector of society. The field of gaming was no exception, and as we saw the impact of AI technology on even the creation that we thought was uniquely human, we realized that this was both a crisis that we had to overcome and an opportunity to take the fun and enjoyment of gaming to the next level.
 

 

The impact that AI technology can have on game development and play is far-reaching, but one of the first things we started paying attention to was something we could see and feel. An AI painting technique called Stable Diffusion has seen dramatic technical growth since its announcement last year, and we've been studying it with the goal of training it on content from Granado Espada and Tree of Savior, two IPs we've been developing and servicing for a long time, and today we're sharing our preliminary results.

 

 

 

 

Last April Fool's Day, we created and released simple digital figures of Granado Espada and Tree of Savior, and while the images were meant to enjoy the April Fool's Day event and the figures don't exist in real life, we were pleasantly surprised by the high quality and vivid depiction of the features of our IPs. Users who saw the image on social media were mostly satisfied with the quality and excited to see it.

 

 

<Figurine illustration based on Tree of Savior>

 

 

Once the Al program has learned the characters and art style of the game, it allows us to try different ways of representing them besides just using a figurine style. One of the things that we found meaningful was creating "fan art".
 

 

One of the most common things you'll find in the community of MMORPGs, where you can customize your character with love, is the so-called "drawing your OC(Original Character)" culture. We believe that the special emotions that make you want to record and show your original character - that spent time together ever since you were a beginner - is a unique value of MMORPGs that you can't get in games where you play with a predetermined character.

 

 

<Like an action figure(Left), Try on a new Hanbok(Right) / Tree of Savior>

 

 

Creating such a drawing of your character would take the time of a skilled artist. However, if you have a well-trained model with AI technology, you can have an "infinite production" of fan art. By using a combination of different application poses, background themes, and drawing styles, you can depict your character in an infinite number of environments.

 

 

<Create multiple art styles for the same character / Granado Espada>

 

 

Cosplaying game characters by real people is one of the ways to leverage IP. However, creating high-quality cosplay outfits can be very time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive. By combining AI photorealistic models with models trained on game IP, you can easily create realistic cosplay photos.

 

 

<Cosplay of a Virtual Human / Granado Espada>

 

 

The original characters, which are designed in the game's distinctive art style, can be recreated in a variety of art styles to give them a new look.

 

 

<Granado Espada in a variety of styles>

 

 

<Anime Style Tree of Savior>

 

 

<Mix live-action, figures, and anime / Granado Espada>

 

<Gender Chance of a same character / Granado Espada>

 

 

But the possibilities don't stop there: what if you could combine characters from Granado Espada and Tree of Savior? We were curious to see what would happen if you could do it in different ratios: 5:5, 2:8, 7:3, 9:1, and so on.

 

 

<Granado of Savior>

 

 

Like the examples above, we are currently working on a plan to maximize the use of these rapidly evolving AI tools. Training high-quality AI models take a lot of time, money, and expertise, but we're making it easy for anyone to reap the benefits of these technologies.

 

 

As a first step, we have planned and started a follow-up event of the April Fool's Day figure event, where users can submit screenshots of their characters and we'll create and send them an AI drawing of this character.

 

 

[‘Turn your character into a figure style image…for real!’ Event Page]

 

 

We hope these images are a small gift to those who love Granado Espada and Tree of Saviors. This event is the start of a series of features we're working on in Granado Espada and Tree of Savior that will allow anyone to train an AI model of their character to create a variety of images with minimal interaction within the game. Who knows, maybe you'll discover your inner artist when you start creating images using AI technology.

 

 

<Illustration style (left) and webtoon style (right) / Tree of Savior>

 

 

Once you've created a beautiful image using AI technology, you could be able to share it with others and see what they've come up with, not just keep it to yourself. MMORPGs are an ideal platform for this kind of activity. We're working on augmenting the current community features to allow users to share and view AI images created by others.

 

 

 

 

In addition to image-generating AI, text-generating AI is also showing great promise and impact. In particular, ChatGPT's near-human conversational and reasoning abilities have surprised everyone, and we expect that these aspects will also enable new experiences in the game world. We're also interested in teaching conversational AI bots to learn in-game settings and interact with them as they would in-game. We're looking to start with something as simple as automatically adding on the quests in the game to make them richer in terms of experience, and then move on to having direct conversations with NPCs in the game. Ultimately, we're hoping to fully train our own language model and create a unified world where the stories of the players and their activities become legendary.

 

 

 

 

Language AI and image AI are fascinating on their own, but when combined, they will open up even greater possibilities. This is an area of active research in academia and the professional industry. At IMC, we are also continuing our research and development with this as our ultimate goal.

 

 

<This was generated by learning a GM's drawing style>.

 

 

How did you see our post? It seems clear that AI technology will have a huge impact on gameplay. We intend to continue our research and development to ensure that AI is not just a dreaded replacement for humans, but something that takes human activity to the next level.

 

 

Twenty years ago in April 2003, imc founded a company based on the idea of Impress, Motivate, and Connect to become a professional MMORPG developer, and we have come a long way since then. With the mindset of starting a second company for the 20th anniversary, we aim to bring the appeal of the MMORPG genre to a new level through AI technology, and we would like to share the fruits of our labor with you. 

 

 

<Kim..?>

 

 

Thank you again for your support over the past 20 years, and we'll be back with more news in the future. Thank you!