Thanks for the great feedback! Just to clarify on a few points: I didn't use AI for the art, and the game is currently flat (2D). I'm leveraging well-established procedural generation tech to build a massive world, which I plan to gradually fill with hand-authored content.
I am leaning heavily on AI for the repetitive, tedious stuff like generating loot tables and boilerplate code but even with that help, you still need to be a decent developer to stitch it all together and make it actually work.
On the technical side: the entire visual library comes from a single 250KB sprite sheet. The full world weighs in at over 2GB, but thanks to streaming, your PC will never hold more than about 20MB of it at any given time. The client itself is tiny all the heavy logic runs in the database, using just 66 tables and 125 reducers. This setup is efficient enough to run on a free-tier VPS with 100+ concurrent clients indefinitely.
My goal from the start was to make an MMO, and I know the ins and outs of what that entails. Since I'm no artist or animator, the 1-bit sprite aesthetic is the perfect creative constraint—it allows me to pack a ridiculous amount of content and design complexity into the game without being gated by my artistic limitations.