[wtallis]

Probably. But keeping in mind the mobile focus, a more judicious icon-style art design is important, and I'm not sure how good generative AI is at making stuff that's legible at small sizes. Also, the simplicity of the current art allowing the download to be only 21MB is an accomplishment.

[oefrha]

Unless you’re talking about feature phones or Nokias before 2010, mobile games can have graphics just as stunning as AAA games and an effective canvas size of 720p or up — definitely not constrained to “icon-style art design”.

[wtallis]

I'm not talking about technological restrictions; I'm well aware of the pixel counts and color depth of modern displays. They do not get rid of the design constraints of trying to make a usable interface with very high information density on a small screen.

A game like Unciv can't take the usual mobile UI cop-out of just hiding all the complexity behind a hamburger menu. It needs a large number of individually recognizable UI elements that are all significantly smaller than a thumbprint, because there are several pieces of information that need to be conveyed about each map tile the user can interact with. So a lot of the UI needs to be composed of icons or graphics designed under similar constraints. (And no, the fundamental design constraints and goals of icons are not the same as the file format limitations of early Windows .ICO files.)

Mobile games like Genshin Impact have comparatively little game state information and fewer discrete indicators that needs to be on-screen, so they can go all-out on the scenery and decorative visual effects. Unciv on a phone at its most zoomed-in has about as much physical screen area per map tile as Civ 5 on a laptop at its most zoomed-out; at normal playable zoom levels their respective UIs are working with very different amounts of screen real estate.

[eru]

AI can make pixel art, too.

[wtallis]

Pixel art as used today isn't quite the same thing as old-school icon design. Unciv doesn't need to operate with a restricted color palette and even on mobile has quite a few pixels to work with, but has to make UI elements easily recognizable and distinguishable at small physical sizes. I think the design constraints are probably most similar to early iOS and some early OS X icons, rather than the constraints of Win95 and 2d video game consoles (where all art—icons and otherwise—had very limited color and pixel counts).