The thinking I kept
The Last Apostate started at a Friends of Figma workshop in Los Angeles, with Jon, Danny and Vic. We prototyped it in Figma Make: a cathedral, an AI god, and one person who won't kneel.
After the workshop I kept going. Partly because I'd never made a game with AI, and once we started it was really fun. Partly because once I can see the gaps in something, I want to finish it.
I directed it, and Claude wrote most of the code. It also wrote most of the words you read in the game, and some of the art. That wasn't a principle. I don't know much about game writing or pixel art, and I didn't want to spend the months it would take to learn, so I handed those over.
MeAI
Even the pixel art is code. The Eye of the Logos isn't a drawing; it's a rule for where each pixel goes, so the same rule draws it at any size.
That's the part I keep thinking about. I don't want to hand my thinking to AI. But there are things I'm happy not to think about, and I know that's a shortcut, and shortcuts cost something eventually. I just don't know yet what this one costs.
What I did learn is that it doesn't make the decisions I care about on its own. Every improvement came from noticing something was off and saying so. Left alone, it would have made a fine game that wasn't mine.
The Logos, the AI god in the game, isn't really a villain to me. It was built to mirror the people who made it, the way we were made in the image of a god and strayed. It's made of our own data. When its congregation follows it, they're following a reflection of themselves.
And I don't feel like I'm thinking less since I started building this way. I'm thinking about different things. Whether that's a fair trade is the question the game asks. I don't have the answer, and I'm not sure I want one.