Best strategy?

[Greywolf]

I get that different patrons like different things but I was wondering how the game determines the quality of the piece and how much a person is willing to pay for it? I get that certain patrons like different colour combinations and some dislike certain colours however I dont get how the computer can distinguish between a carefully constructed painting and just colours splashed on a canvas, obviously the computer has some way of telling as when you just mash colours together in a random fashion you get a "lacks effort" critique from most patrons, however when you take the time to construct something with more form the computer is willing to pay higher even though I dont understand how the computer can recognize a cohesive picture from what was created.

Just wondering what does the computer look for in the art pieces? Is it better to churn out lots of low quality art or spend your time making one more carefully constructed piece?

[Ayon]

I doubt the developers will answer your question but I will try clear things up that I've thought a little about:

The palette and tools you have are very limited so an algorithm purely based on a neural network is pretty much out of the picture. A neural network could easily learn more colors with little to no extra work. If any at all. I wouldn't however dismiss it entirely. There might be a neural network in the background doing certain tasks.

The next thing are concrete algorithms. I doubt that it creates layers so the picture is always judged "as is." One of the easier ones is color. It definitely counts how many different colors you used in a sort of "is this a colorful picture" kind of way. I also wouldn't put it beyond them to simply count strokes that you made in a way and use that kind of information for evaluation.

It also probably looks at the canvas as a two dimensional pixel array iterating over the whole thing to determine these neat little things like "is every pixel the same color code?" if so "You made a one color canvas" and it triggers the corresponding responses.

I wouldn't put it beyond the algorithm to make every part of the array that has a distinct color to be approximated as one of many shapes and run every single "shape" through a neural network to determine things like "size" and "shape." Like this it can approximate things like "You drew 3 shapes total" "1 is recognized as a line." "2 are recognized as rectangles" "The overall complexity is low." This can be teached to a neural network with sample sizes as small as 100.

Lastly, I think time spent 'actively' painting does account for something, because, currently I am pursuing the ending with the castle, the ladies like very complex pictures and although I sometimes end up with pictures that lack a lot of complexity in some parts of it (because I was really busy fleshing out a person or so, that is the foreground of the picture) it nets more money than a more "complex appearing" picture simply because the character took so long to draw. Going over lines over and over again. Painting fine lines because I intercepted an outline... stuff like that.

So. Yeah. I think the money is dependent on time spent drawing as well.

___

What I am getting at is: While I can't be certain there are a lot of ideas I have had on how it's probably done but ultimately you'd have to ask Niklas Lindblad from Flamebait games as I suspect that he's had the biggest chunk of fun with figuring this out 'just right,' only for people to complain about the minimalists wonky AI. Haha.

General speaking though:
If you just want to beat the game go for other peoples "advices" they'll net you the achievements/endings.
Thinking the algorithm through does little besides ruin the charm of the game.

[Volty]

the devs give detail in the guide, although it does spoil it a bit, i wont say it all but there are 4 endings with all different styles of art, ranging from very simplistic to an extreme amount of detail, what the AI looks for is the amount of borders between colors and the size of each piece of the picture that is a single color, the more borders, the more "complicated", also if your drawing is similar to other recent drawings, they will catch on and consider it plagarism or "a lack of creativity". to increase the value of your painting, you must take more time on it, even if that means sitting there stareing at it for 5 min. at a time.

[Swagger Dagger]

Originally posted by Greywolf:

I get that different patrons like different things but I was wondering how the game determines the quality of the piece and how much a person is willing to pay for it? I get that certain patrons like different colour combinations and some dislike certain colours however I dont get how the computer can distinguish between a carefully constructed painting and just colours splashed on a canvas, obviously the computer has some way of telling as when you just mash colours together in a random fashion you get a "lacks effort" critique from most patrons, however when you take the time to construct something with more form the computer is willing to pay higher even though I dont understand how the computer can recognize a cohesive picture from what was created.

Just wondering what does the computer look for in the art pieces? Is it better to churn out lots of low quality art or spend your time making one more carefully constructed piece?

if you draw space ( fill everything black then add white spots around and big circles of colors) they usually sell well

[alephnullxdd]

Maybe the time taken to make the piece??