Dust & Diamonds

Dust & Diamonds is a 100% solo project.

The idea for this game came to me a few days after my son was born — my first child. I was celebrating with my cousin and bet him I could build something like Motherload in two weeks. As you've probably guessed, I lost that bet spectacularly. I'm writing this almost a year later, and my son turns one in a few days.

I have a degree in computer game engineering, but I live in a small town with no game studios — so I drive a pallet jack around a warehouse by day and build this game after hours. I can't afford to hire an artist or a composer. To bring this world to life at all, I turned to generative AI tools. I'm not going to hide that.

How does the game use AI?

Graphics (2D): A significant portion of the visual assets — character portraits, environment elements, buildings — was generated using AI, then manually retouched, edited, and assembled by me in the engine into a cohesive style with a parallax system.

Music and sound: The musical tracks in the game were generated by AI. Fittingly, this ties directly into the game's lore — the "Relics of the Old World" (our 21st century) collected by the goblins are canonically works created by AI before the great cataclysm, carrying the lost wisdom of humanity.

What's mine in this game is the design: how the economy works, how water behaves in a flooded shaft, when a ceiling collapses, what the old man says across the counter. I came up with each of these systems, wrote them out, tested them, and reworked them a dozen times until they behaved the way I wanted.

I'm just a regular guy who had an idea for a game about digging in the dirt and was stubborn enough to see it through. Thank you for your understanding and support.