Creating hundreds of unique characters for a rugby game is a massive undertaking for any game dev team. Distinctive Games found a solution using AI-generated faces that changed their entire approach to character design.
Why creating diverse game characters is game dev hell
Rugby is massive worldwide, with women’s rugby exploding (2.7 million players globally). When Distinctive Games decided to add female characters to Rugby Nations for the first time, they doubled their workload overnight. Their “Sports Games for Everyone” motto meant they couldn’t compromise on diversity either.
Traditional character design? Prohibitively expensive. Hand-crafting every rugby player would’ve destroyed their budget. Face-scanning hundreds of people wasn’t feasible. Mobile memory constraints made everything exponentially harder. Classic game development nightmare.
How AI-generated faces became the solution
Generated Photos solved their core problem. This AI character design platform creates photorealistic faces without requiring traditional photography workflows.
Their process:
- Select faces during virtual casting sessions based on diversity requirements
- Import AI generated faces into Reallusion Character Creator
- Generate 3D models with standard post-processing
- Integrate into existing game pipeline
“We could quickly and inexpensively create as many player faces as we needed,” they explained.
The approach addressed their main challenge: efficient 3D character design within realistic budgets.
3D character design workarounds that don’t break mobile
Here’s where it gets impressive. They created ~100 unique heads + 25 hairstyles + 10 hair colors + facial hair options. That’s thousands of combinations, but mobile devices would crash trying to store all that data.
Their solution? Custom technology that fits any hairstyle to any head in real-time. No pre-baked assets consume memory. Just intelligent algorithms handling the heavy lifting, including rugby headguards and facial hair integration.
This isn’t just clever—it’s essential. Mobile game dev means working within brutal memory constraints, and they absolutely nailed the execution.
Reallusion integration workflow
The Reallusion Character Creator pipeline proved clutch.
Import AI generated faces → get detailed 3D models → minor Photoshop cleanup → Unity integration.
The initial output quality is “amazing,” according to the team.
This workflow shows how modern game devs can leverage AI tools without losing quality. No more choosing between budget constraints and character diversity.
Female character design beyond basic stereotypes
Adding female rugby player representation was huge for the franchise. AI generated faces delivered the ethnic and age diversity needed for authentic female character design—way beyond basic stereotypes.
The tech enabled them to represent women’s rugby properly, which matters when your sport is genuinely global and inclusive.
Why this actually matters for game dev
Smaller studios can now pull off character diversity that rivals AAA productions, while Distinctive Games proves you can solve authentic representation vs budget reality without making excuses.
The math that actually works:
- Cost Reality. Skip expensive photography setups
- Scale Factor. Create hundreds of characters without going broke
- Representation. Actually diverse faces instead of the same 5 archetypes
- Technical Win. Solves mobile memory problems
Their approach shows how video game development can adopt AI character design tools, plus established solutions like Reallusion Character Creator, without everything falling apart. They focused on fixing real problems instead of chasing trends.
“We would have loved to include more, and we’ll be adding more over time,” they said.
Classic dev reality—ship what works, iterate forever.
AI-generated faces tech keeps improving, and character creation workflows will probably get better as tools evolve. Studios are still figuring out authentic representation within actual constraints, but Rugby Nations proves these tools can fix specific game development problems.
Generated Photos plus Reallusion Character Creator worked for their needs. It’s one solid option for how to make your own character in modern game development. AI tools are just part of the toolkit now—useful when they actually solve problems instead of just looking impressive in demos.
About the author
Alexander Dallow. UX writer who transforms confusing interfaces into conversations users actually want to have. He’s an AI enthusiast, owns more drumsticks than pens, and firmly believes that user flows and workout routines have more in common than people realize.
