How we work with AI

Absence of Color is an after-work project by two people. That it takes shape at all is also because we hand a lot of work to AI. This page explains what we use it for, what we do ourselves and where we draw the line.

What we do ourselves

The idea, the concept and the story come from us. That is what we know, and no AI can take it off our hands. Björn writes the story and the dialogue.

We would love to do everything ourselves. Then the game would probably never be finished. It is a big project with a lot of work and countless decisions, and AI helps us move faster.

What we use AI for

Trying out ideas. New scenes or mechanics would take a lot of work by hand, and nobody knows in advance whether they will work in the end. With AI we build a quick test and see whether something feels good. The color prototype in the devlog came about this way.

The basics of the game. Every game has controls and comfort features. AI helps us enormously with the programming, so we can put our time into what makes Absence of Color special. We write the code with Claude Code, an AI tool for programming.

Everything around the game. This website mostly builds itself, the material for social media is created automatically too, and we keep the administration small. We built this automation with AI. These things matter, but they add nothing to the game, and we do not want to spend much time on them.

Art to start with. For tests we could buy ready-made tiles (the blocks the game world is built from), on itch.io for example. But they are used in many games. Pixel art lives from limitation, which narrows the possible styles anyway. We want Absence of Color to look as much like itself as possible. So we have PixelLab, an AI tool for pixel art, create tiles and sprites (characters and objects) in the style of the game and rework them afterwards.

Style images. For the mood of individual scenes we use AI concept images. They only point the direction and never go into the game.

Our rules

• The game uses no AI while you play. Nothing is generated at runtime.
• No AI art goes into a released version without being reworked. Before that, each piece is converted to our color palette and reworked by hand in Aseprite, a drawing program for pixel art. Until then it is placeholder art in the prototype.
• Every asset with AI involvement is logged. Without an entry it does not go into a finished version.
• On this website we mark AI content at the end of each page. We translate the English texts from our German ones with AI.

On the criticism of AI in games

We understand the criticism at its core, especially when a game feels soulless and you get the impression while playing that there is not much behind it or that something existing was copied. We clearly set ourselves apart from that. We believe the idea of Absence of Color is strong enough to stand on its own.

We do not want to release a game to make quick money. We use AI to learn quickly: what works, what adds something to our game and what does not. Björn is our biggest critic in this. In the end there should be a clean game that works well.

Where this is going

The big goal is to replace the AI art. We want to build a real game. The AI stigma sticks to us, and we do not like that either. Right now we do not know any other way.

We have both been playing games for about 30 years and have seen a large part of the evolution of computer games. Absence of Color is a labor of love.

AI notice: AI (Claude) wrote the German original of this page from our answers; we reviewed and approved it. This English version is an AI translation.