I appreciate the apology, and I appreciate you actually trying the game. Let me know what you think! Where can I improve it where its not Ai slop like?
If you’re down, I’d honestly rather talk this out on Discord. It’s easier to have a real conversation there than in comment threads. Message me any time.
As for your question: what’s stopping me from dropping AI sooner is mostly time + bandwidth. I’m doing this 100% solo — there’s no team, no art department, no budget to outsource. It’s just me juggling everything it takes to ship (code, builds, UI, marketing, storefront stuff, bug fixing, support, etc.). Learning to draw to the level I’d need on top of that isn’t a small “just do it” step — it’s basically a whole second career path.
The simplest way I can explain it is: if you’re taking a math test and there’s a calculator sitting there, most people use it. Not because they “can’t” do math, but because it lets them spend effort where it matters more. For me, AI is atool that lets me actually finish projects, learn the parts of game dev I’m focused on, and iterate fast.
On the environment part... I’m not pretending AI is impact-free. It uses real electricity and hardware. But it also runs on the same general data-center + internet infrastructure everything online uses, it’s just more compute-heavy in many cases. data centers used about 1.5% of electricity globally. AI was roughly ~0.3% of global electricity in 2024. Storage systems (where all your pictures get saved, every post you've made on every website, every game you've played online cloud save) account for 5% of electricity consumption. So I get the concern, I just don’t think “don’t use it at all” is the only ethical stance.
Long-term, if the games start making real money, I will commission artists and replace pieces over time. Right now I’m trying to survive the “no budget, still need to ship” stage.
If you want to talk about this more, just hit me up on Discord.
EDIT: source: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-a