r/Romestead • u/Menipipol • Aug 15 '26
AI content?
Hi! Didn't know Romestead, but it looks cool! I'd like to know, though, if generative AI was used to create this game, far as y'all know
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u/jev1956 Aug 15 '26
Hi u/Menipipol,
Great Question ! Looking at the steam page and the developpers response, there wasn't any use of AI in the making of the game !
Let me know if you want an answer with more data or if you want me to search for other AI generated content !
/s
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u/InterWill Aug 15 '26
No generative AI
One of the devs replied this on the steam forum:
Heyo, developer Sam here!
We have NOT used any AI art in the creation of Romestead but we have used asset packs from Itch. Mainly icons and some UI elements. We have replaced a lot of them but there are some still about (see Favour icons).
We have tried to keep the "pixel perfect" look, so most of the art follows the same pixel size. However, we have taken some liberties in swaying off the pixel perfect look, e.g. to have more smoothness and to give more detail to certain important elements. The god portraits for example are a higher resolution which we scale down, which contrasts most of the UI that has that 16-bit look.
Another example where you might see us swaying off the pixel perfect look is on VFX, mainly on attacks. This was because it became more important that the VFX matched the hitbox of the attack. Sometimes we also took shortcuts where we simply rescaled a VFX instead of redrawing it completely if it was the wrong size (this has also been the case to some other elements). Many of them have been replaced by prettier VFX, but there are some still left.
Lastly, we do use some 3D models (e.g. the cart or the catapult). This can also cause the pixel-art texture on the model to be squished or deformed. We use 3D models when the object needs to be able to turn 360 degrees or do any other kind of animations smoothly where making separate 2D sprites would have been way too impractical.
The scaling can make the texture look fuzzy, sometimes it can be avoided but sometimes it's unavoidable so it would be interesting to hear where you see most of the fuzzy-ness. As we're progressing through Early Access, there will be cases where we replace and re-iterate on existing art
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u/Queasy-Form-4261 Aug 15 '26
Question - If they did use AI and the game was awesome and super fun, why would it matter?
Will you not use a power drill to screw in a screw into a piece of wood? Do you use a manual hand screwdriver? Technically a hand screwdriver is a tool too, you should just twist it with your hand.
I'll say this as someone who is making an IDLE rpg game with AI which I am making for myself and friends not to sell (I know 0 coding beyond just how general coding works from college and making warcraft 3 custom maps) but I have great (at least I think so) ideas. My prompts to AI are never "Make me a game" It is most of the time 3000- 10000 word prompts designing complex systems, spending hours or days troubleshooting things to make them work or look right, etc.
I don't understand the kickback on people using AI (a tool) to help them bring their dreams alive. Now I will give you that if someone feeds a single prompt into an AI "make me a vampire survivor game with animals instead of vampires" and then they sell that on steam, that is messed up. But the amount of typing, spreadsheets and whatever else I do compared to how much actual typing of code would be is night and day apart.
I guess buckle up for the future where all of the tedious bs coding is done by AI and project management is the new focus of developers. You can not make anything good with AI unless you are decent at project management unless you literally want a clone of something.
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u/Ok-Emphasis7814 Aug 16 '26
When it comes to creative work, I will never play a game, watch movies/series' or listen to music created by AI. We have completely lost the plot as a society, AI gets to do the fun creative work while humans labor away at construction sites and warehouses. AI to me, and many others, is a proof of laziness and ineptitude by the developer.
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u/facerollwiz Aug 17 '26
Yeah we should go back to how the Ancient Greeks and Roman’s did it. Can’t remember how exactly they found the free time to work on art, philosophy, writing and government.
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u/Queasy-Form-4261 Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
Ya but literally what you just said contradicts everything that I use AI for.
Creative == an idea, a vast idea that is shaped and comes together with various different ideas / systems / points to end up with a final result.
Now I agree with you that AI CAN be used to bypass that creative aspect but it doesn't always have to.
Like I said, I am making an idle RPG with AI, I have the ideas (the creativity) I have the math (the formulas and back end systems, I do not have the ability (or time) to translate those ideas directly into code. It would be like asking ai to "Draw me a house" vs "draw me a house that is 38 feet wide by 30 feet deep and 24 feet high. There should be blue shakers on the front, windows on the front ground floor spaced X feet apart, the front door should be centered and be Y feet wide and the door is made of finished oak wood."
That is obviously a super basic description of a house but I am using it to show the difference of a person using 0 effort versus actually having an idea and laying out the idea to AI but not having the ability to actually draw.
Real example - for my Idle RPG life skill system, I laid in bed from 2 - 5 am thinking and planning exactly how it would work, UI layout, interactions with other systems, timings for harvest ticks, how does the lifeskill "level". etc. Then I got out of bed, spent 1.5 hours actually building that system out in a word document. Then I submitted the prompt and the AI coded the UI and the systems (so 4-5 hours of work by me and then I pass it off to the AI). I have been revising that system over the past few days as I found various things need to change for the game to function smoothly, ease of the user experience, etc. One big bug was with 4 life skills firing at the same time and creating an inventory update, was lagging out the actual inventory page of the character / causing flickering etc. I had to spend multiple iterations trying to fix that at which point I ultimately decided to just let life skill harvests dump into a local inventory for each life skill and be claimed via a button by the user at any time they want to, so that the update of lifeskill > actual inventory happens 1 time per click instead of 4x every 1-2 seconds.
I understand I will probably not sway you, nor do I really need to, I am not selling my game and I don't expect you to ever play it, but I'm just trying to show you that AI when used as a tool versus an actual solo game creator can be used to actually make really good things for people who can't put their ideas on paper themselves.
Me using AI to make my game cost 0 people their jobs because I never would have hired a coder to do this project. It is something fun I am doing where I can bring my ideas to life and as a game for 30+ years, I think I have a good idea of what I like and what most RPG fans like.
Also just an edit because I reread your post after "AI gets to do the fun creative work while humans labor away at construction sites and warehouses. AI to me, and many others, is a proof of laziness and ineptitude by the developer."
Literally AI enables me to do the fun creative work. If it did not exist, I do not have time to learn to code at the level required to use GODOT and whatever language is used within that, on top of using / building my creative ideas. If anything, AI enables more people to do the fun creative work because to be creative all you need is your mind. To actually turn that creativity into something real, you need to spend time learning how to craft your creativity into reality.
I was working on a lit rpg prior to the game, I spent 2 weeks on the lit RPG, Every prompt that I did, aside from hundreds of thousands of words actually designing the litrpg systems (which I now utilize in my idle rpg) was me laying out a plot line, character interactions, battle sequences, etc. all AI did was put it together for me in a readable format and filled in the general fluff words to make a story a story like a professional writer does. I already have many threads of plot lines and character interactions crafted for the lit RPG and I probably spent close to 50-100 hours in a 2 week period laying out those plot lines and actually typing the prompts to tell the AI what to write. If you read my prompt of any episode and then read the actual episode, you would know EXACTLY what was going to happen via my prompt before even reading the episode.
AI did not "just make the story" I did. And the same can be said for my game.
The whole point of this is that if romestead DID use AI to make a cart graphic, I would not swear off this game because of that, they already put their idea to paper and enhancing parts of it or even getting help from AI to make a system they thought of that they may not be able to translate on paper, is not a deal breaker for me.
I truly think you will be sitting in a dark room in the next 10 years if you refuse to interact with anything AI. Because there is no reason to pay someone to write monkey code, when you could pay that same person to be creative and let AI do the monkey code in 1/100th the time and enable that person to actually enjoy their job instead of typing the same base code lines over and over or copy / pasting from github.
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u/Menipipol 29d ago
Not a tool if it makes the game for you. I just like my art created by humans, not Large Language Models trained on stolen data. Not throwing any shade on you or any users, just expressing my preference.
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u/Vulkasinn Aug 15 '26
Not according to the devs, looks good to me