It's becoming second-nature for people to interrogate whether a new game or even fan project is being made with AI, and when your game involves AI as its subject matter, it perhaps runs more risk of people, rightly or wrongly, jumping to conclusions.
It's partly why the indie devs behind Limerence, a branching narrative thriller about an AI partner decided to explicitly declare on their Steam page that no gen AI has been used in the game's development, including a big bright badge reminiscent of Nintendo's Seal of Quality.
"We found that through Polygon Treehouse, indie dev friends of ours, and they had started this campaign of putting that badge on," Salix Games CEO Jessica Saunders tells me. "We didn't have it originally, and then we were having people messaging me going, 'I just heard about your game, but this has generative AI, so I can't support it.' And I'm like, 'No, it doesn't.' So, we're having to make a big deal out of that."
Yet while AI is being primarily pushed by tech companies, including Epic, which already plans to incorporate Gemini and Claude into Unreal Engine 6, one can see the appeal to create things faster when there are less resources.
Salix Games in particular has felt the pinch of budgets, following its 2019 debut, Dance of Death: Du Lac & Fey, an adventure game with Arthurian characters in Victorian London, which hadn't been financially successful, while the industry post-COVID with layoffs and closures still a daily occurrence, means funding for larger projects has been next-to-non-existent.
But rather than opting for AI shortcuts, Saunders has taken a different approach when considering how to better adapt and survive the current turbulence: "It's like, what could we do for the minimum budget that maximises the skill sets that we have?"
Part of this involved partnering with another studio called Game in a Frame, run by Vincent Joyau, a former colleague of Saunders when she worked at Splash Damage. "He'd been building up his own set of tools for his game, so I asked if I could use them, and he goes, 'I'll do one better, I will use my tools with you and we'll work together to create this new game because we both need to start thinking smaller production-wise if we're going to survive in this industry.'"
Joyau's custom tools created in Unity hasn't just been important for handling Limerence's heavy branching dialogue but also for modelling the game's sole onscreen character, Kai, a 3D AI avatar, who also exists within a fake AI app that's been created with its own fully customisable character creator, outfits, and hairstyles.
This AI partner is only part of the bigger picture of Limerence, which explores how digital dependency can impact our real-world relationships, as the game explores how 30-something woman Claire's life and real-world relationships are impacted by her new-found obsession with a seemingly perfect partner.
This is all presented by the player essentially interacting with Claire's phone, with Saunders citing inspiration from indie games that have played with the premise of snooping on someone's phone, notably A Normal Lost Phone, which then naturally includes other apps that can be accessed, from social media posts, photos, or streamed music.
"It's interesting because these found phone games also use real actors, building up their own photo galleries, but our team lacked production experience, so we've had to pull in a lot of favours from a lot of people," Saunders explains. "We basically said, "Can we have access to your Tik Tok, your Instagram, your small business, and let us use your material, either as a donation or a small fee."
To her surprise, many people were happy to help. They include a friend who loves taking photos of lots of food from restaurants, and a couple of friends who are essentially 'playing' the lead couple in the game, with photos spanning years that show a consistent relationship history that the narrative is able to create a fictional life around.
"We expanded on that too," Saunders says. "We ended up hiring a couple of models through an agency and held a low-budget fake wedding shoot in London which was great fun just to get some of those extra background photos. Honestly, things like Adobe Stock and Unsplash have been great for filling in blanks. That's really allowed us to create a very voyeuristic experience of looking into a real person's phone and just opening up a gallery and seeing things you shouldn't really see."
With stretched resources, mostly going into recording the voice performances, with only Kai's lines being recorded in a sound booth so that the exceptionally clean audio adds to his artificiliaty, it would have been easy for the peripheral aspects of the game to be created with AI, be it arty social media posts or songs playing off a fake streaming app. But Limerence's approach to world-building shows you can make something more lived-in and authentic that also respects and credits artists - you just have to ask.
"The thing is I'm not actually very anti-AI, I think AI as a data tool is marvelous, and it can be very helpful for certain industries," Saunders concludes. "But when it comes to things like making video games, film, TV, and art, I don't see its purpose at the moment because it's just stealing."
Limerence is releasing on PC on 29 October, while Gen's Story, a free demo separate to the final game, is available now on Steam.
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