The importance of a cover

It’s easy to forget the importance of a cover picture. After all it is the first thing that catches a potential player’s eye. What makes the player click your game or post in an endless online feed?

Much like music album art, the cover is part of the product. A very important part. Until recently I had not given it much thought and I assumed I would just take a screenshot from actual gameplay. I now realize a cover is worth more effort than that.

How?

I am a coder. Any attempt to produce original cover artwork would just be sad. Had Propspin been a commercial project I would not hesitate to employ freelance artists. Since it is meant to be a fun near-zero-budget project my options are limited.

I decided to let ChatGPT, and the newly released GPT-5 model, have a go. It turned out OK, in my coder opinion. It did, as expected, require a bit of persuasion to make the AI cooperate. But it was manageable. GPT-5 is able to reason about a previous attempt and make improvements much better than some earlier models. Best of all, ChatGPT made multiple variants in different aspect ratios for me.

I slapped on the logo on top of ChatGPTs artwork manually. With a more elaborate AI setup this could have been done without direct human action. I expect AI to be the obvious choice for that kind of operations in a near future.

Keep changing covers

Online wisdom tells us it’s a good idea to change cover picture every now and then. It seems you want a balance between recognition and novelty. All the more convenient to use AI tools. You can prompt for an updated picture in the same style as an existing one. That should give returning players both recognition and the curiosity to retry a, possibly updated, game.