AI is a huge issue today in game development in order to be transparent about how I built this game the first half of this post is going to be all about AI. First as a both a artist, and a programmer, I get both why people are in camps and have pitchforks about this topic. I am not trying to debate about the larger issues around AI. I see AI in the context of a solo-developer who has never had the time or the means to draw together resources to build a complete and high quality game. I feel like AI is a tool, the term can mean a lot of different things to different people and thats cool. The way I see it is that AI allows me to enact the original vision I had when I started building games 10 years ago.
This game is not vibe coded, its a design that i started almost 10 years ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DaysOfValorDev/comments/6w12nz/country_decision_ai_engine/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DaysOfValorDev/comments/6w12ac/the_first_draft_of_the_game_design_diagram/
The game looks remarkable the same, lol given the time, the current iteration of this game vs the 9 year old design.
What has changed over this time is the tools and my ability to use them, also my taste and design aesthetic i hope has gotten better.
As you can see the bones for the game were always there, I just lacked the technical ability at the time to do it with the quality that i can today. Its taken me 10 years to learn many skills to build software including games. Becasue I choose to leverage AI to build the parts that I couldn’t do before, or don’t want too doesn’t make poison the game it just means you gotten better with your craft. Game making is like any craft it takes time,knowing how to use the right tools, and skill.Luck and the desire to always keep learning also are important too.
How does this game us AI?
The game uses a quantized verison of a LLM shrank down it whats called a small-langage model, these are small enough to run in your own local hardware. In my games case I am using SLM (Phi/Qwen3/DeepSeek) which is around 6GB and can run on most machines.
here more information about SLM
https://shuaiguo.medium.com/small-language-models-why-shrinking-parameters-is-the-next-big-thing-16d48645d725
There are a few areas where this runs inside the game, at the end of the mission summary the SLM will take all the stuff that happened during a battle and build a summary report, this is skip able and doesn’t send any information off of your machine.
The other place is to support news content, and character biographies.
15 Editors total, they cover the entire game.
The editors make the games system and the game systems make the game.
The world/province editor lets me update
The editors lets you update the games progress, instead of having to play through tons of stuff you can just skip to critical events have taken places to make sure characters use the correct information.
Tile Editor lets you edit and build out missions, the cool thing about this is building these tools first make in game editor even easier
Narration Editor lets me create dialog, build mission triggers, and craft the storyline. This make it easier for me to build the story outside of the game. There is no AI here, I have to build and craft these missions and
The 2D battle editor lets me customize the look and feel of every battle scene. I can update VFX and look and feel building this up. AI is used to create placeholders for me to replace with custom assets that I am building.
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