Dev Blog #8: What AI Assisted Means for StormTome

The previous blog posts have made it fairly clear that AI has been involved in building StormTome. As a step toward fuller disclosure, I plan to add an “AI Assisted” label in a few places around the project.

But what am I actually disclosing? Those two words can cover very different ways of making a game.

What Does a Label Mean?

I have never hidden my use of AI in my projects. I consider it a force multiplier, especially when I work with it cooperatively. It helps me attempt things that would otherwise be lenghty to build alone.

Still, putting an AI logo on the game feels intimidating. I understand some of the frustration behind the term “AI slop.” I share the frustration to find something that looks promising and discover that very little care went into it.

That said, I have been working on and off on StormTome for over a year. There have been experiments, rewrites, audits, and plenty of discarded work. I hope players judge what I have built and not how I built it.

At the same time, I can appreciate the need for project to disclose the use of AI.

How Much Assistance?

Worldbuilding Draven was an iterative process. I would bring an idea and use an LLM to help would write it out. That idea would then be edited it before repeating the cycle. The agents contributed ideas as well as prose, but the final material went through me. I decided what belonged in Draven and what needed to change.

Much of the interface followed a similar process. Sometimes I supplied a prototype or a layout for the model to work from. Other times, we developed an approach together and revised it once I could see it in the game.

The artwork is generated. I do not have the artistic skill to produce images myself at this level and scope. A tremendous amount of work went into creating a style guide and getting the tools to follow it. Countless images were regenerated to correct details or make them fit the rest of the game. That selection and direction are part of my work, but I did not draw the images.

The code was written by both me and LLMs. My role has included writing code, reviewing pull requests, refactoring, and spending considerable time auditing what was produced. I often compare the process to supervising a junior developer: useful work can come out of it, but it needs guidance and review. I remain responsible for deciding whether the result is ready to use. My multi-agent workflow gives a closer look at how I coordinate that work.

These are substantial contributions. “Assisted” should not make them sound smaller than they are. It describes a project whose direction and decisions remain mine, with AI contributing to the production work.

More Human Involvement

If StormTome becomes a commercial success, artwork would be the first place I would invest. I would be thrilled to work with artists on developping a visual identity unique to the game.

I can still imagine AI tools being part of that workflow. I believe AI can have a contribution to the artistic process, but I won't claim to have the answer. The value of an artist goes far beyond producing an image: a character's expression, their pose, and their consistency across different scenes all need judgment.

For now, generated artwork makes this scale of project possible for me.

Finding the Right Label

Looking for a disclosure logo also meant thinking about the wording. “AI Generated” captures how the artwork was produced, but leaves much of the game's design process unexplained. “AI Assisted” describes the overall workflow more closely, provided I explain the extent of that assistance.

There are formal efforts around disclosure. The European Commission has published a code of practice and icons for AI-generated content, tied to specific transparency obligations under the AI Act. That does not make “AI Assisted” a universal legal category for games.

For StormTome, the label is a starting point, with this article giving the details: AI has contributed writing, generated artwork, and written code. I have directed, edited, reviewed, and brought that work together. The decisions about what goes into the game, and the responsibility for the result, remain mine.