Prototype : Stick figures or AI ?
Hi everyone, I'm working on a board game prototype and I've tested it once already.
I am planning on hiring a real artist for the final game, but in the mean time, I've drawn some of the game's "scenes/panels" of what I call the game's "scenarios" myself using stick figures because my own art skills are just that bad.
During the playtest, some feedbacks I've received were about how the drawings didn't convey the situations/scenes well, which made it hard for players to appreciate the humor I tried to put into them. The scenes were supposed to be about painting a situation in a DnD game, in which players would use different ridiculous strategies or lose their mind in a situation in which they are facing a mimic in a room and the mimic keeps successfuly disguising itself as different items in the room, creating a feeling a paranoia and panick in the DnD characters' party, leading to situations like attacking everything in the room, flicking coins at each item to see if they react, touching everything in the room in a self destructive way because "they just can't handle the pressure anymore" or even starting a camp in one corner of the room and taking rotations to always keep an eye on the whole room to wear the mimic out until it would have to move eventually because it would become hungry.
Recently, I've tried to generate AI images to replace my stick figures drawings, thinking it might give a better idea of what is actually happening in each panel, and I wonder how people would feel about it. I know AI is commonly not very liked (I personally dislike how it affects artists) but since it's only for a prototype and for testing, I would be interested in knowing if it could be a good tool to use temporarily for testing purposes.
Thanks in advance for your opinions and for sharing your own experiences when designing your games, regarding art and how you find ways to test a game which relies on its art assets in such a way, to make for a better testing experience !