Its been a long time since I’ve written one of these. For anyone not up to date on the reasoning behind the devlogs stopping I’ll explain that briefly although I’ve gone over it in threads and previous devlogs.
In short, since the game was being remade in a new engine I eventually ran out of things to talk about that weren’t just repeats of what I’d said already. I apologize if that seemed off-putting to anyone. It wasn’t my intention to just go dark while working, but I made a determination that it was better to spend my limited time working on the game rather than writing redundant devlogs.
Anyway. Here I am. This is going to be a somewhat short devlog but I’m hoping it’s the start of something. I wanted to explain because it’s something that still bothers me. Perhaps I should preface and alleviate any worries, the game is still continuing. I still have every intention of seeing it done.
The reason I’m writing this is to discuss AI, which is probably something most people are sick of so I’ll keep it brief. First and foremost, I want to be clear, no asset, sound, piece of music, sprite, etc will be created with AI for this game. I have people I pay for that, and I prefer to keep it that way. In general, I’m really not a fan of AI taking on creative endeavors. In my mind that’s for passionate people to do.
That said, I’ve avoided AI for the past few years because I believed the process of programming was something that people should also do. Honestly, I still think that. However, I have to live in the real world. These tools are available and they massively alter the speed with which code is written and the quality of it. While I’d prefer it if that weren’t the case I can’t deny it.
With this in mind I am going to use AI to assist in the programming for the game. I feel I should be clear here as well for people who don’t code. This is not vibe coding. The AI is not making any decisions on its own. I am heavily dictating what I want. It makes the 0s and 1s work, then I review because it will run wild if I don’t. The term AI slop is thrown around quite a bit and I agree, there are a lot of people with no understanding of what they are doing throwing things out into the void and it shows.
I wanted to be up front or as up front as I can because I feel that as customers you deserve to have some insight into how the game is made. Some people hear that AI is used in a project and I think it completely turns them off of it. Steam actually forces you to put a message on your store page if you use AI in your game. However, this only applies if AI is used to generate assets. If it just assists with code you don’t have to mention it. This is a little misleading in my opinion and as someone with strong opinions on AI I wanted to make the information available.
I think that is the end of my speech, but I do want to mention something more directly about the game and progress updates.
At the moment, I’m working with the AI to run through what I have already built and clean it up. This does mean some time will be spent on refactoring what already exists. This will take some time, probably only a few weeks (if that) because of how fast things move with these applications. After that I am expecting to see a massive increase in productivity. Its hard to quantify but as a general rule of thumb things that would have taken me days to weeks to accomplish on my own can be done by AI in far less time.
What this hopefully means is a much faster timeline. There are still things that I have to do manually like designing areas, writing, etc, so not everything will be faster but a huge chunk of the work will be expedited.
To myself and those around me I have often referred to this as the ‘never-ending project’. In the past few days, I’ve had more confidence than I have ever had that this project will in fact be finished. I also expect that with these tools it will be better than I could have hoped. Which is one of, if not the most important part. As a programmer (if I can still call myself that) my job is to make the game work as flawlessly as possible with the goal being a completely smooth player experience. Using AI is basically just a means to make a non-buggy and well performing game.
Now, a final note. Maybe this devlog won’t be short, seems like a habit with me. I again don’t want to over promise. I’ve been contemplating a way to report progress that isn’t as intensive as writing these devlogs and laboriously explaining things.
A thought I’ve had is perhaps showing is better than telling. Game Maker (the engine I’m using) has a feature that allows you to upload your game to a site they host so that people can play it. If I were to do this the first iterations would quite literally be testing environments not a real game. While there wouldn’t be much to do it would serve as a piece of proof that progress is happening. As I understand it most people just want to know that something is being worked on. The devlogs were at least me showing up once a month to say ‘hey I’m still here’. This would be a more concrete way to demonstrate progress and you would no longer have to take my word for it.
I’d be curious to hear anyone’s thoughts on any of this as its sort of a lot. Regardless, I’ll keep moving forward, hopefully with much more expediency. Thank you all for sticking with me, I hope to be delivering something of substance soon.
One last note, I asked the AI to give me a quick summary of what we have done so far since I started using it. Now. All of this was already written by me, we are basically running through existing code and cleaning up systems. So this is a little misleading but I hope it shows how fast things can potentially move and why I chose this sort of change in the first place. For reference I’ve been at this with AI for about 10 hours.
Menus & Getting Started
New splash screen and title screen, with working New Game / Load Game / Exit
Character creation screen — pick your look and name your character
Smooth fade transitions when moving between screens
Moving Around
Reworked player movement to feel smoother and more consistent — fixed glitches with diagonal movement and with getting stuck facing the wrong way when bumping into walls
Fixed and improved how the camera follows the player and how the game scales to different window sizes
Improved how you move between different areas of the world
Inventory & Items
Cleaned up the entire item database and fixed several bugs where wrong or broken items could show up
New main inventory screen — opening/closing it, picking up items, placing them down, and stacking/swapping items into full slots all work correctly now
Rebuilt the hotbar (the quick-select item bar at the bottom of the screen)
Time, Seasons & Atmosphere
Fixed a bug where seasons could silently skip ahead
Rebuilt the on-screen clock — shows time, day, season, gold, and stamina/health
Fixed a lighting bug where colors could go wrong during sunrise/sunset (plants briefly turning red instead of green, for example)
Behind the Scenes
A large amount of general cleanup and bug-fixing across these systems, making the game more stable and easier to keep improving going forward