Research in Generative Art presented at the EvoStar conference

Two members of staff attended the EvoStar conference which took place in Trieste, Italy during April 23-25 2025. EvoStar actually acts as an umbrella term for four conferences focused on computational intelligence and artifical evolution: EuroGP (European Conference on Genetic Programming), EvoApplications (European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary and bio-inspired Computation), EvoCOP (European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation), EvoMUSART (International Conference on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design). Roberto Gallotta presented the paper "The Importance of Context in Image Generation: A Case Study for Video Game Sprites" co-authored with Antonios Liapis and Georgios N. Yannakakis at the EvoMUSART conference. The paper introduces the notion of context as a prompting method in order to guide visual asset generation for games that matches the environment the asset is in. For example, a "Mischievous Imp" can have a very different visual identity if it is in a “Submerged Arena” than if it is in a “Hieroglyphic Hallway” (see below image).

In this paper, context was envisioned in many different ways: as text input of the room's description, as visual information about the room background (colors, cropped image, AI-generated caption), or combinations of the above. The paper evaluated 25 different enemies in 25 different rooms, getting statistical results from 50,000 generated game sprites. Finally, human users were also shown a subset of these generated sprites and assessed whether the enemy matched its surroundings and whether they liked the generated sprite. The best way of describing the context will be leveraged in LLMAKER, a chat-only tool facilitating iterative game content co-design. LLMAKER serves as a bridge between human designers and a content generation system, utilising LLMs to translate designer requests into instructions for a content generation system.

The EvoStar conference offered another opportunity for scientific dissemination and network-building. The Institute of Digital Games has been consistently active in this conference, with Prof. Antonios Liapis (who also attended the 2025 event) having served as General Chair for EvoMUSART in 2018 and 2019.