AI Textures and AI Sounds in the Asset Pipeline

Blocks Beyond The Stars has no graphic artist and no sound designer. Still, every new block gets its own texture and every new feature its sound. Our tool for that: generative AI — with a clear workflow around it.

Textures. New block tiles are created with OpenAI image models. The prompt describes material, style, and the game's voxel aesthetic; the result is brought down to tile size and sorted into our block atlas — one big texture in which every block type has its fixed tile. Consistency is what matters: a single pretty texture is easy, a hundred textures that look like one game together are the real work. That's why our prompts are more style regulations than wishes.

Sounds. Effects come from ElevenLabs. Here too, the art is in the fine-tuning: the hum of our energy fence, for example, is deliberately mixed as the quietest continuous sound in the game — a fence that hums louder than the waterfall next to it would be unbearable after five minutes. No AI makes decisions like that for you.

The workflow. Both run through small scripts in our tools folder: prompt in, asset out, into the game, look at it or listen to it in context, refine. We usually need several attempts — the first version is rarely the one that makes it into the game.

The honest framing: AI doesn't replace a team we would otherwise have — it enables things that simply wouldn't exist otherwise. A family project would otherwise get neither a hundred textures nor its own sound set. The direction, the taste, and the quality control remain handmade.