Category
The generation pipelines that produce the models, sprites, sound and music, and what they cost to run.
8 posts
An eighty second trailer cut from eighteen generated clips, each one seeded with the game's own splash art so the dwarves stayed the game's dwarves.
Warships, gyrocopters and steam tanks came back from image-to-3D finished. Anything with legs came back needing every joint placed by hand. One question sorts them before you spend a credit.
A model starts every session knowing nothing about the last one, so the documentation is the memory. That changes what belongs in it, and it is rarely a diagram.
Every building is generated twice: as a painted sprite, then as a 3D model built from that sprite. No human drew either one, or wrote the brief behind it.
A dwarf versus goblin match downloads dwarf and goblin art and nothing else. Getting there took atlas packing, a format bake-off and a content hash on every file.
Every axe landing, every worker's grunt and every unit that answers when you click it. All of it written out as prose first, then generated from the sentence.
Every unit and building in this game began as a generated image on a magenta field. What turns one into a sprite is five passes of unglamorous pixel work.
Wood elves fight to a fiddle reel at 145 BPM and dark elves to symphonic metal at 120. Nine factions, 171 tracks, and the difference written down first.
