How AI Convinced Me to Keep Making Games

With Cook or Be Cooked coming up next on Steam, and me having released roughly a dozen games so far (admittedly the majority of them jam games), I had decided to stop doing game development and potentially cancel Parallel Pulse.

What changed my decision was the arrival of new technologies—specifically AI—and my shift toward solo development for the majority of my projects.

Why this change of heart, you might ask, and why is it that AI convinced me to continue down this path? The reasons are several: solo development for indie games is more possible than ever. A single person who’s a generalist can now develop full games by themselves. It’s cost-effective and faster compared to traditional development. And finally, one person can now compete with teams made up of a dozen or more people.

Experimental VN style made with AI in a PC-98 aesthetic. It’s the kind of niche project I’d normally never pursue since it wouldn’t reach the market.

There’s a lot of talk about AAA replacing people with AI, and yes, we’ve seen that to some extent—but the real concern is actually smaller teams or solo devs who can use AI effectively and create high-quality games faster and more efficiently. That could become a real issue for big corporations and big studios. Adapting to rapidly expanding technologies is going to be much more challenging for AA or AAA studios than it is for solo or indie developers. That’s why I think incorporating AI as a solo developer, or as part of a micro team, can have a huge impact right now.

In a way, this reminds me of the early days of the internet, when small businesses or even individuals grew into big businesses because they embraced it early.

This doesn’t mean that every single game I make from now on will use AI. Parallel Pulse will still be developed the traditional way, since that’s how I started it. But for smaller-scope projects—things I want to test, experiments, or quick builds to train new skills—I’ll use AI as much as possible to push myself forward.

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