Sorry guys, my entry has nothing to do with the theme. This LD, I had the insane idea of creating an AI and putting it in a browser game. And I had an insane weekend, being a total noob to Python, PyTorch, and deep learning.

My entry includes a image-to-image generative AI, is made with the Pytorch library, which enables deep learning using a PC's GPU. It is a 5-layer convolution network trained as an autoencoder (originally as a GAN, but this did not work). The weight data is converted to the ONNX format for loading in the browser. It uses WebGL to accelate execution. The AI feeds back into itself, changing into different shapes. This is also called "dreaming".

The original entry was trained on a set of 1800 8x8 RGBA images. The resulting shapes vagely resemble pixel art, which is the best I could do in the limited time. This AI basically sucks. It adds noise so it keeps changing, but sometimes converges into a static pattern, just reload or copy back to try again.

Click on the animating image to make a copy. The copy will be shown below the animation. Click on a copy to copy it back to the AI. Have fun creating "pixel art"!

POSTCOMPO UPDATE 1: POTION GENERATOR

After a week of hard work, I managed to improve the AI a lot. I found there was a bug in the data exporter, also I cleaned up the dataset and optimized the network. Once it worked well, I fed it a new dataset of similar images (potion sprites), that allows the network to not just recall the data but also generalize from it. At this point, the network converges reliably to valid images, and can be used as an in-game sprite generator. The network has been shrunk from 32Mb to about 350Kb. Check the postcompo demo to see the result!

POSTCOMPO UPDATE 2: ANIMATED CHARACTER GENERATOR

My next step was to go from faithful reproduction to actual creative generation. For this, I created a dataset of 376 8x8 characters taken from freely available sources. Because pixel art is prone to overfitting, I removed oddballs to arrive at 166 humanoid characters, and shrunk the latent size to 3. The result is a quite useful animated game character generator. You can download a sprite sheet with just 2 clicks.