Anna Kolodiyska on AI in art: from experiments to a functional pipeline in mobile game development

Anna Kolodiyska, Art Director at AB Games, spoke at Games Gathering 2025 on the important topic of using AI in the development of art for mobile games. She shared how AB Games went from experimenting with AI tools to integrating it into the company’s workflow.

Emphasizing that although AI will never be able to replace humans in game art creation, Anna said that it can become a useful tool for optimizing certain processes.

AB Games approached the issue of using AI consciously, considering the needs of both individual specialists and the company as a whole. In 2022, our company began researching existing AI services and observed the evolution of the results of generations. We analyzed these results and experimented with different directions and types of graphical AI.

Internally, we conducted surveys that allowed us to analyze the opinions and needs of our art teams. The collected data allowed us to start selecting useful solutions that would be relevant to our tasks.

Perfection as a requirement with which we approach the creation of everything related to Hidden City is accompanied by our desire to devote as much time as possible to ideas and creative processes. However, there are also routine tasks for which it has become possible to significantly reduce the time required.

Adapting the potential of AI to the specific needs of art departments, AB Games has implemented its own tools for specific functionality requests using its own servers. First, for one department, and then scaling to others.

AB Games was able to reduce the time for the implementation of regular content by 30-50% due to the faster execution of routine tasks. Anna also demonstrated how the AI tool we developed can be used to generate references, objects from sketches, generations by posing, etc. AB Games was able to almost completely abandon studio photography and the purchase of stock images.

Today, AB Games is introducing the use of the developed tools to all departments and is looking for appropriate solutions in other areas, such as animation and development.

Anna emphasized that AI will one day become a common tool like Photoshop or Blender. It doesn’t create anything on its own, but is just a tool that can be adapted to your needs.