Generative AI in Game Design: Enhancing Creativity or Constraining Innovation?

Generative AI tools are increasingly being integrated into game design and development workflows, offering new possibilities for creativity, efficiency, and innovation. This paper explores the evolving role of these tools from the perspective of game designers and developers, focusing on the benefits and challenges they present in fostering creativity. Through a mixed-method study, we conducted an online survey (<i>n</i> = 42) with game design professionals, followed by in-depth online interviews (<i>n</i> = 9), to investigate how generative AI influences the creative process, decision-making, and artistic vision. Our findings reveal that while generative AI accelerates ideation, enhances prototyping, and automates repetitive tasks, it also raises concerns about originality, creative dependency, and undermine of human-authored content. Future work will aim to address these challenges by investigating strategies to balance leveraging AI's capabilities with preserving the integrity of human creativity. This includes developing collaborative human-AI workflows that maintain human oversight, designing systems that support rather than replace creative decision-making, and establishing ethical guidelines to ensure transparency, accountability, and authorship in AI-assisted content creation. By doing so, we aim to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of generative AI's role in creative practices and its implications for the game design and development lifecycle.