Monolith Soft, a developer of the "Alien Sword" series, said that the use of programmatic asset generation technology has greatly simplified the production process of the vast world map of "Alien Sword 3".

In an interview with Japan's CG World magazine, map model designer Yoichi Akizuki, auxiliary engineer Mitsuhiro Hirose and programmer Takashi Shibahara shared how the studio can gradually integrate programmatic generation tools such as Houdini into the development process.

Programmatic asset generation allows developers to first create basic 3D models, textures, and set rules to generate algorithms.The software can then automatically generate a large number of assets that follow the same specifications based on these rules.

For example, developers can first create a 3D model and texture of a tree and set the appearance parameters of the tree. The software can generate multiple trees with different appearances but conform to the setting rules.

Since programmatic asset generation is based on the underlying assets created by the developer themselves for algorithmic processing, this is different from generative AI.Generative AI, which retrieves data from external sources, has been criticized in recent years for the possible misappropriation of copyrighted works by other artists.

"Alien Blade 3" was released in 2022 and has been widely praised for its grand open world.In an interview with CG World, the three mentioned that the introduction of software such as Houdini makes this work more time-saving, and developers can automatically generate secondary small assets, so they have more energy to focus on gameplay or other more important artistic assets.