Don't Roll a One

TLDR: I’m making Super Bandit into a video game.

Preamble

After college I thought I wanted to make video games. For a while I led the volunteer team that made Wasteland Half-Life, then left after a while once I’d realized that I didn’t want to make video games. That experience instilled a profound tolerance and appreciation for the hard work and thankless effort that goes into game development, however.

I decided TTRPG design was way easier to get into, more satisfying to share with friends, and overall a better fit for my hobby time.

Disillusionment

I do love spaceships, though, and have been enjoying the recent spate of space games. Thing is, while there’s a handful of very good games that come very close to my “perfect space game”, none of them have scratched that final itch.

• House of the Dying Sun was perfect but I couldn’t play it with my friends. See also Chorus, Everspace 2, etc…
• Star Wars Squadrons was lousy with EA’s… EA-ness. And there’s a minor quibble about not being able to mix and match bots onto human teams (also looking at you, Ready or Not).
• No Man’s Sky has the breadth but its space combat is as shallow as its other subsystems. No shade – I love this game – but for a focused “I want to swoosh swoosh pew pew” game, it doesn’t cut it.
• I’m not hardcore enough for In the Black, and I can’t talk my friends into Hunternet Starfighter.
• Hahahaha EVE Online

Roughly two and a half decades after putting down the Half-Life modding tools, I installed Unity.

Betrayal

I don’t like writing this part but it needs to be said. Mad Jay wrote a more thoughtful post about AI than this will ever be. I struggle with the robots as I think most of us do, but like Jay writes:

I use ChatGPT and Claude for actual work tasks. Remember, I’m a software guy by trade. Show me a software or hardware tech worker who refuses to use AI tools, and I’ll show you an unemployed person. It’s not even about that person; the paymasters are calling this dance, I’ve witnessed it.

I can think it’s insidious and I can still use AI to accomplish my goals. Shoot me full of arrows in the woods and call me Boromir.

I have a line, and it might not be your line, but in the spirit of Jay’s post this is full disclosure for where I’m using AI on this Super Bandit project, as well as where I will not knowingly allow it.

• I use agents to generate code and review my own code.
• AI is now implicitly part of any troubleshooting or searches for specific techniques. Put in simpler terms, there’s AI involved anytime anyone searches for results like “How to XXXX in Unity”.

The areas where I’m trying to wall off from AI influence are basically everything else:

• I’m 3D modelling everything myself in Blender and importing into Unity. I’m not using any Unity store items or asset packs.
• I’m doing foley and sound design myself or through CC0 assets (vetting those as best I can for human-made ones).
• I’m generating music myself. I have Reaper, an old Roland TD-6, and a MIDI->USB cable.
• I’m cajoling friends for voiceover work. The one placeholder voice you might hear below is specifically the pre-AI Microsoft Zira text-to-speech voice from https://ttsreader.com/legacy/.
• I still remain dedicated to keeping AI out of my TTRPG work.

The fact is, I simply never would have attempted game development without AI. I have learned things on this journey, that’s undeniable. I’ve expanded skills I already had and combined several interests in the service of making this game. That’s why “insidious” is the best word I can think of to describe it.

Progress

…And that’s enough soul-searching maudlin bullshit. Time for some explosions.