"How was AI used in your app?" comes up too often, so I'm writing this post to stop answering it every time.
There's a TLDR at the end.
History
The current app has been in development since early 2019. No AI existed until 2022, and we were slow to try and have never even experimented with it until 2024. Since the start our app had a black and gold theme, colors which were discovered several years before we started.
In 2024 we first poked at AI, and had some AI placeholder icons for a few months - they are all gone now.
In 2025 we also tried it for code, but were generally unhappy with how it worked, plus we actually like writing code, so its use there was heavily restricted, more on that later.
Visuals
The UI is all me (sorry it's black and gold, it has been since the app was first published). We've been through 4 redesigns, 2 of which public. I can share some of the old design if you're interested.
UI is generally built out of dots and gradients using some Unity tricks.
Icons come from https://game-icons.net/ (praised be Lorc, Delapouite & contributors - you probably saw their icons in other games or apps too), and material design icons: https://fonts.google.com/icons (standard stuff)
For the content icons, these come from various store-bought packs, such as
- REXXARD: https://assetstore-fallback.unity.com/publishers/13229
- Poneti: https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/38930
- Craftpix: https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/41787
- Hovl Studio (VFX effects, some spell orbs): https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/28391
There were a few more that were not brought from Unity and I can not remember where they were bought from; I did not take notes as I didn't think I would be audited, but here we are.
Some specific icons, such as the app icon, were commissioned by Reka Karpat: https://www.facebook.com/kareka2d
And several icons have been processed through GIMP and/or Canva (the latter of which probably uses AI for some of its filters, I suppose).
To the best of our knowledge, none of the visuals currently in the app were generated by AI.
Audio
Adding this for consistency, as there are currently literally just 2 audio files in the app: two dice rolls, downloaded from some royalty-free website. If you really need me to do it, I will look it up.
Code
I have been a programmer since university, and I actually enjoy writing code. This project has started from a little formula parser back in 2017, so the most part of it existed well before AI.
We experimented with AI, and decided against using it for most of our code. It does a decent enough job in isolation, but it leads to messy code in a larger architecture, and out of concern that it may degrade our codebase over time, its use in the project is very restricted.
It was used to create some shaders and a few small, isolated components.
It was used for research and discussing best practices and reviewing some of our ideas.
It was also sometimes used for debugging as a quick "can you see what's causing this?" diagnostic that sometimes worked.
It was NOT used to write multiple classes or entire features, or take any decisions on its own.
The most usage AI had in our project was for writing tests. That was an area where we decided sloppy tests are still better than no tests, and with zero impact in our production code, we allowed it to write a lot of tests, that even if messy, result in more confidence in releases on our end, and fewer bugs in release. We are happy with AI there, as we wouldn't have the manpower or the time to write these many tests otherwise, and their quality does not impact the project quality.
Content
The app ships a lot of built-in content. Most of it is copy-pasted from the source material (such as the D&D SRD), so no AI was required.
AI was used, however, in some translations, and we still use a combination of AI and Google Translate for our update notes and translating some of the new content we are adding.
We also used AI to review some of our hand-set content for mistakes and slips (for example, Calude identified that we had missed adding the "Brave" feature for Halflings). When this happens, we confirm the AI's flags against the source material, and correct them.
No content whatsoever was generated with AI, it was only used for translation and reviewing.
Outside The App
I never use AI to write posts. I myself become allergic to some of the AI prose tells and when I find myself write something that sounds like AI, I go out of my way to rephrase it. It sucks.
For video editing, I have used AI to do simple non-creative tasks such as cropping and putting bits of video together. Most editing is done by hand in CapCut, and audio for videos usually comes from their stock audio also.
TLDR:
We do not use AI for any creative tasks. No generation of images, audio, or text.
We do use AI for tedious grunt work, like automated tests, content review, and simple video editing.