Yes, Spell Death was made with AI. On purpose, out loud. Why? This is a game about a city that stopped reading. The demons here don't eat anyone. They need us. They keep the presses running, they copy everything and read nothing, and they are always hungry for more text. Sound familiar? I paid one to help me make this.
Not made with AI:
- The taste, the design, the systems and the balance. 10+ years of making mobile games and 30 years of collecting cards, building decks and theorycrafting.
- The dictionary: a human-made list of about 196,000 words. (Even TRAGI. I still don't get TRAGI.)
- Your words. Nothing is generated while you play. No suggestions, no autocomplete. There never will be.
Made with AI:
- Illustrations: image models, then picked, retouched and composed by hand.
- Music: an AI music tool, directed by my taste for oriental and arabesque music and my obsession with the art deco and noir era.
- Sound effects: most are synthesised from code, just math and stubbornness. A few come from the same AI music tool.
- Code and some text: much of it drafted with an AI assistant, then edited, broken and fixed again by me.
So I'm not standing outside the city pointing at it. I live here. A game about the trap, made from inside the trap. Art or hypocrisy, your call. (I've made mine.)
The line, for me and for the game: a tool is fine, a proxy is not. The machine can draw a street. It doesn't get to do your reading, your thinking or your spelling.
Still hate it? Fair. Spell something mean at it. It's a word game.
Spell Death
Announcement Trailer
