Our approach to AI
Every game starts with a human writer. The cases, the characters, the clues, the red herrings and the solution are written by people. We don’t use AI to write or plot our games; those ideas come from our authors and the internal team.
We’re a team of fourteen, and we’re growing. We employ people across a host of creative roles: writers, graphic designers, illustrators, 3D artists, animators, translators, proofreaders and playtesters. That said, we do use AI, and here’s where…
Where we use AI
Many of our games are built from evidence: photographs, documents, CCTV stills, recordings and dozens of other assets. A case file might need a photo of a specific person in a specific place in 1987, or a very particular prop in a location that doesn’t exist because we invented it. Stock libraries don’t have those assets, and they could never have been commissioned conventionally; Shooting a single evidence photo might need a location, a period set, props, actors, costumes and lighting etc, which would make our games commercially unviable to produce.
We make our games using a mixture of photography, stock imagery, Photoshop work and 3D rendering. Our artists now also use AI imagery as part of that toolkit, under their direction, to generate or adjust individual elements that we then edit, composite and finish by hand. Where a case needs it, the same applies to short video clips and background audio. So yes: some of the assets in our games contain AI-generated elements. No game is “made by AI.” Every asset is briefed, directed, edited and approved by a creative person, and the finished asset is the product of that work. We also don’t use AI to imitate the style of any specific artist.
We know that for many people the objection isn’t the tool, it’s how the tools were built. Even when the output is entirely new, it exists because most generative models were trained on the work of millions of people without their consent. That’s a fair criticism of AI, and we don’t exempt ourselves from it.
We’ve written this page so you can see exactly where we stand and decide for yourself whether our games are for you.
Why we think this is the right balance
We want to keep making games that are ever more ambitious, at a price that lets people buy them, and we’d like to do that while paying our team properly and continuing to hire more creatives.
Leave a Reply