• The 2D art is AI-assisted. Meaning AI tools were used but everything was manually edited in Photoshop to make the style and the characters consistent. Animations are done by me, not very well admittedly.
• The Voice acting is AI generated. Voices are based on real voice actors who have licensed their voices to be used in this way.
• The music is made with AI. In the songs that have lyrics, those lyrics are written by me.
• All writing and coding is done by me.

As a avid Sci-Fi fan, I am fascinated by AI. So I was curious if it would allow me to make something I’ve never done before. This is the first game I made that has a story and characters in it. The only reason I tried this is because it was economically feasible to do so with generative AI.

I’m not a 2D artist but I have some art knowledge and decent general Photoshop skills. How far could I get using AI tools? I was curious to find out.

I think the situation is more complex than that, but the situation certainly feels unfair for artists at the moment.
I don’t think AI is going away, so I’m trying my best to use it ethically, but there really isn’t a clear way to do that.
The compromise I’ve come up with is to retain 50% of the income from the game to hire human artists.

Yes, I could have made a game without AI, but not this game. It would have been a game with pixel art, premade licensed music and no voices.

There are:

• 300 full screen digital paintings.
• More than 1000 voice lines spoken by 15 different characters.
• There are 30 unique songs. 6 of them have custom lyrics.

Hiring professional artists and musicians was just not an option for the scope of this game.

I do freelance development for money. I make my own games for me. If money was the primary concern I would not have made a game about philosophy and AI alignment. I don’t expect this game to break even financially.

I wrote the premise for the game on the train home after having a conversation with my mother. In that conversation she explained that as a senior citizen she now feels so useless and feels she can’t keep up with the world anymore. And to be honest you don’t have to be a senior citizen to feel that way in this day and age. I think that feeling is relatable to many of us. So I wrote about it.

So for me the passion in this project was in the storytelling. Not in the artistry involved in making graphics or music, so I made concessions in those areas. Compared to higher budget games, there are a lot of things that are subpar.
The AI art does feel flat and boring at times, the voices are a bit monotone and certainly the animations are not very good.

But I do feel that I’m telling the story I want to tell. And that story is important to me.

I sometimes still get emotional when I hear some of the songs. I’ve never written song lyrics before, it’s an amazing emotional outlet that I’m really grateful for.

So I do feel that I have expressed myself with this game, and as a game developer for 17 years I can tell you, that is a very rare privilege.

I don’t consider myself “Pro AI” at all. I think it’s an invention that is here to stay and I’m simply experimenting and learning.

I think it’s very easy to condemn the harm caused by AI, for example deepfakes. But I can also celebrate the opportunities AI provides at the same time.

AI is empowering people. You can use it to do things you could not do before. Some people use that power to do bad things, some people use it to overcome a disability. I’ve used it to tell a somewhat silly story about robots.