How this is made

The short version

I don't draw the pixels. I don't write most of the code that draws them. I don't compose the music.

What I do is decide what these worlds are, and decide when they're wrong.

They're wrong most of the time.

The art

There's no pixel editor here. No tablet, no stylus, no canvas. Every pixel in every world is placed by code — a line that says put a block of that colour, two wide, one tall, at that coordinate. A few hundred of those stacked up, and a figure appears. Every world in every pack, built that way.

I don't write most of that code. I describe what I want, a machine writes the function, and then I look at what came back and start again.

Here's what that actually looks like. Wisp — the hooded character these worlds hang off — has a cold rim of light down one edge of his cloak. The first version came back as a single unbroken line, top to bottom, and it looked like a neon strip stuck to a man. Light doesn't do that. Light catches cloth where the cloth turns — the crown of a hood, the top of a shoulder, where the hem kicks out. So it got broken into three pieces, in those three places, and then it read as a person standing in the moonlight rather than a person standing next to a light bulb.

That took a lot of goes. That's the job.

For the character design I also used an image generator — hood shapes, how much face to show, where the light sat in his hands. Dozens of versions, most of them wrong. I never generate the pixel art itself, and that's deliberate: what I want out of a generator is a full-resolution reference to build from, the way you'd work from a photograph. The building is the part that's mine.

The music

The soundtracks are made with an AI music tool called easymusic.ai, from my own musical prompts and my own lyrics.

I'd like to tell you I sat down with a guitar. I can't, so I won't. What's mine is the brief: every world gets a loop that has to survive being heard four hundred times, which is a strange thing to ask of a piece of music and takes a lot of attempts to get right. But the notes aren't mine.

The code

The apps and the worlds are built with AI coding assistance throughout. Which design works, what's fun, what's broken, what ships and what gets binned — that's all me.

I finished four worlds this year that nobody will ever play. They looked fine. They didn't feel right, and I couldn't tell you why for months. So they're in a folder instead of on the Store, and I rebuilt the engine instead. That decision cost me four products in a year where I'm counting sales in single figures.

That's the part of this you're actually buying.

What I won't do

• No generated art in anything I sell you as art. No AI images in the packs, on the store pages, in the capsules, in the thumbnails, or in the trailers. The reference stage stays a reference stage.
• No asset packs. Nothing in these worlds was bought in from anywhere.
• No pretending. If any of this changes, this page changes with it, and it'll say so before you have to ask.

Why I'm telling you

Because I had it wrong, quietly, in a couple of places. I'd written "no AI" on a post template and in my own notes, and it wasn't true of the music, and then I nearly wrote "every pixel by hand", which isn't true either.

Half-true is worse than either honest answer. So here's the honest one, and it's smaller than I'd like it to be.

I'm not going to argue that what I do is the same as drawing. It isn't. What I'd say is that fourteen finished things exist that didn't exist before, four more were binned for not being good enough, and somebody made every one of those calls. That somebody was me, and it took ten months.

If you'd rather buy from someone who draws, I understand that completely, and I'd point you at a few people who do.

If you've got a question this doesn't answer, I'm easy to reach.

— Sam