Dev Blog #7: Let's Talk About AI
Hey everyone,
If you spend any time on the MMORPG subreddit or anywhere else this genre gets discussed, you know the drill. An indie dev shows up, and within a few comments someone asks about AI. Fair enough. There's a flood of genuinely low-effort AI stuff in games right now and people are right to be suspicious. So rather than wait to get asked, here's exactly where Eternal Realms Online stands.
The Art: None of It Is AI
Let me be as clear as possible on this one, because it's the part people care about most.
There is no AI-generated art in the game. Not the characters, not the gear, not the enemies, not the icons, not the textures. Nothing.
The art in ERO comes from exactly two places:
- Professional asset packs, made by human artists. For terrain, materials, and environment pieces, we buy high quality packs instead of sculpting every rock ourselves. Terrain and landscape materials come from Brushify. Towns and structures are built from 3DKitbash packs. Our in-game icons come from a hand-drawn icon pack. I talked about this approach in the small team post: nobody ever quit an MMO because the devs didn't personally carve the boulders. Buying good bricks from real artists lets us spend our time where the game is actually different.
- Our artists. All character art, gear, enemies, anything with a face or a silhouette you'll come to recognize, is made by hand by the character artist on our team. And the world itself is the same story: the map is being hand built by our map designer. The asset packs are raw material, but a real person places every town, forest, and road in Valedorn.
That's the whole policy. It's not changing.
The Code: AI Assists, I Build
Now the other half, and I'm going to be honest with you here instead of pretending it's 2019.
Like most modern developers, I use AI to assist me while I build this game. It's one of the reasons a solo developer can move at the speed this project moves at, and I'm not going to hide that or act embarrassed about it. It's a tool, the same way an engine is a tool, and refusing to use it would just mean shipping the same game slower.
But I want to be specific about what "assist" means, because there's a canyon between a tool in an experienced developer's hands and what people rightly call vibecoded slop. This is not a project where I type a wish into a chat box and ship whatever falls out. It's also not something that's been cooking for a few weeks. I've been building this game for almost nine months now, around a full time job, one finished system at a time. I've been a software developer for 15 years, and I've been messing with game development for 10 of those.
Let me be blunt about how hands-on I actually am, because "assist" gets misread as "AI does it all" and that's just not true. I write and fix plenty of the code myself. I read every line that goes into this game, and I still review all of it by hand: to make sure it's actually built to spec, that it meets the quality bar I'm holding this game to, and that when AI did assist me it actually did the right thing rather than something that merely looks right. There are plenty of times something's wrong and I'm the one in the file debugging it, because AI would simply waste too much time trying to figure some of this stuff out. And honestly, you'll never get quality results with AI on a game like this without being heavily intertwined in the development process yourself. If you sat me down and pointed at any file in this codebase, I could tell you what it does, how it fits with everything around it, and why it was built the way it was. There is no part of this game I don't understand. Every system, the combat, the economy, the server architecture, is designed by me, reviewed by me, tested by me, and understood by me down to the bone.
And a huge amount of this game happens in the Unreal Editor itself, where AI mostly can't follow. Setting up animation blueprints, wiring up materials and effects, placing and tuning the world, building the actual feel of the thing by hand in the editor and playing it over and over until it's right, that's all me, hour after hour. There's a whole category of work here that no tool does for you, and it's most of what separates a real game from a tech demo.
Honestly, I'm a somewhat stubborn developer on this subject. I don't believe AI could build something like this on its own yet, at least not at the quality we're going for. An MMO is thousands of interlocking decisions about how systems feed each other, and getting that right takes experience with how these things fail. The 15 years matter. The tool speeds up some of the typing, but it's the experience that knows what to build, what to throw away, and what "done right" actually looks like, and it's still my hands on the wheel the whole way.
Why I'm Telling You This
Same reason I posted the full money breakdown before anyone could spend a dollar: trust is the entire product in this genre, and you earn it by answering the uncomfortable questions before they're asked.
So that's the policy. Human art, from our artist and from artists whose packs we buy. Code built by a developer who's been doing this for a long time, using modern tools the way working developers actually use them. If any of that ever changes, you'll read it here first.
More soon.
- Anxiety