On the usage of AI

As a very small indie studio, currently just one person building games out of passion while having to also work a full time job to pay the bills for my family, I use any tools that I can in order to make the best games possible.

In the case of Tachyon Travels, AI has been used in areas such as coding help, marketing materials, text as well as generating the historical reproduction imagery for items, units and sites.

Also, a huge amount of time and energy has gone into using AI to validate the historical data that you're shown for each historical item in the game.

I do not want to get into the moral and political weeds of this topic, just to say that - in the case of this game - I believe the way in which AI was used has contributed to adding much more value to players that I could have done fully on my own.

Being a life-long history nerd, I always wanted to see historical items or weapons being used/held in a historically-relevant context, and the level of capability that the current AI image generation models offer is astoundingly realistic. Is it perfect? Definitely not. But it's much better than anything I could have come up in any other way on my own. If you've already played the game, you'll know what I mean.

Tachyon Travels exists as a game, and can offer such a rich historical experience, only because I was able to use AI tools to bring my ambitious vision to life, which would have been absolutely impossible otherwise.

On another note, you might have noticed that I used the Godot engine to make the game, even though this means that all of the codebase and the assets are easily visible by anyone. I could have easily used another game engine and make it very hard for people to see my code, for example.

This was on purpose, as I would love for other game devs to learn from my approach - if there's any value in what I've done - and also for Modders to have as easy of a time as possible to create amazing new things. I would just kindly ask you to remember that, in order for me to keep improving Tachyon Travels and maybe make other games in the future, it helps a lot if anyone enjoying the game will buy it as well - if within their financial means.

If you cannot afford to buy the game, no worries, I hope you enjoy it none the less and you spread the word about it. That helps me indirectly as well.

Also, a note on modding: creating a game architecture that properly supports modding is very very hard, and without getting too technical I just want to mention that using AI has also helped me to be able to build everything in a data-driven manner, which contributes directly to the amount of creative freedom offered to anyone interested in modding Tachyon Travels.

I hope that my explanations so far give you a view into the why and the how of my usage of AI. If you still feel that it's wrong for anyone to use AI, and indie game devs should not, then I respect your point of view and I'm grateful for your time and attention.

Having said all of the above, I do also believe that we as a society need to have a very serious discussion about the way in which AI has been trained, as well as the effects that its explosive usage has on our society and the environment. And we should also probably put in place necessary limitation and safeguards, especially when it comes to the data that is used for its training.

P.S- As an artist myself, I would absolutely love to be able to collaborate - and pay for - other artists and historians to bring their mastery and magic to the game. I would love to augment and improve the AI content that is there already, and also create new aspects/dimensions that are note even possible today with AI.

If Tachyon Travels ever becomes financially successful enough, it's one of the first things I will do.

Asternom, 18 July 2026