itch.io

This was so cool to read.

"Most things are. At least you can describe it by maths. You just do not know the variables and the rules... and even if you figure out the rules, there might be some things missing, even if the rules you figured out are good enough for most cases"

I noticed this and it's wild. Just when you think you've got the rules down, something else pops up. It's a little weird, to be honest. In my mind, the rules are the structure but that isn't always true here.

"Sounds to me, your epiphany was discovering how a math operation that is fundamental for neural networks actually worked and does something. Must have been thrilling."

Thrilling indeed! But more akin to paradigm-shifting. After 30 years of psychology and philosophy, to inject the higher mathematics now... It was quite an experience and I am a little embarrassed to say this but the implications brought me to tears. It was beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Because it wasn't just like storing knowledge in the brain. It was integrated and distributed throughout my general understanding.

I once saw a Joe Rogan podcast where two very different mathematicians were debating and one cautioned the other saying something to the effect of "Math at this level can be like a drug" and I understand what he meant by that now. And why he said it in such a manner.

So personally, I have come to the conclusion that I need to go backwards--not continue forwards--and make sure I have not jumped ahead too far.

But I will say this part from both experience and observation: the term "lazy" is far too loose here.

There is laziness and then there is efficiency. Many have heard the saying "work smarter, not harder". While the merits of such a concept are up for debate, what cannot be denied is that this sentiment runs the modern world. For example, I struggle to see the difference between a boss/manager/director delegating tasks and a fluent Python coder using AI to belt out code and reviewing it manually before implementation. Is the delegate lazy? Sure, sometimes. But just as often, it is a matter of speed, efficiency, and the stability of a complex orchestration of separate tasks that no one man can do alone... Until now.

In my own observation, AI in it's current state is a frontier. Instead of covered wagons and mining picks, it is open to individual explorers... for now. 

The potential is too great, this will eventually consolidate into certain hands. At that time, this frontier for independents may close forever.

Ahh, that's where I am indeed tripping up then! I'm being too broad in my assessment. I think you are pointing out an important distinction with Generative AI that I am not taking into account. That makes sense. And it's food for thought!

Thank you, man. I really appreciate you taking the time for this back-and-forth. It helped me differentiate some stuff I had blended together in my own comprehension, which gives me direction to tighten my own understanding. Right on.

Legit, dude. I can respect that 100%.

"You lost me at your metaphysical there is no spoon claims."

Haha! Fair enough! But I am genuinely certain that's quite literally what is happening. Like I said, I worked the math out by hand for myself to be sure.

To ground the mystical woo-woo a little better, there is an important thing to note:

If by hand, I write the math out and come to the same conclusion my neural network came to then that implies something radical and awe-inspiring (at least to me). The very act of calculating mathematics is more than just writing numbers on a page.

When I say 2+2 = 4 is it just words? Or is something happening simply by way of me expressing this?

I always looked at math as static numbers with no real meaning beyond the values they represent. But this... this suggests that the very act of "mathing" (for lack of a better term lol) is actually an action or expression in-and-of-itself. I didn't just add 2 and 2 in my head and know it was 4... The addition itself was a process--and processes are what give rise to emergence.

So when, by hand, I took a single greyscale pixel and painstakingly wrote the initial input vector and then followed up with my weighted matrix calculations and bias, I realized the world isn't "magical" it's mathematical. As someone with 30 years of Psychology and Philosophy under my belt, that was a massive paradigm shift. Not gonna lie... I broke down crying.

My brain started trying to make sense of the world all over again, but with the knowledge of these implications. That, in turn, made me re-examine my other assumptions over the course of my life. It was never "woo-woo" (some of it totally is), I was just missing the most important piece of the puzzle.

And this is what I am really talking about when I say something like "artists should be using AI". My own little agent, MUNCH, is a direct result of utilizing neural network technology in a creative way. 

Needs zero training on anyone else's anything

Local and lightweight

No need for data centers or anything like that

And I'm a nothing-nobody. Imagine what a smarter or truly creative mind could do. You know what I mean? None of these companies are gonna cure cancer or make anyone's lives better. It's up to us regular folk.

Hang on, I don't mean to keep bothering you--I'm just trying to wrap my mind around this to make sure I'm not actually trying to say something else and am just too "new" to use the correct terminology.

So, let's strip away the model. Strip away the interface, the LLM, all of it. Strip it all down until all you have is the feed-forward neural network calculations. That... that right there is what I am talking about. Beyond the UI, beyond the code logic, beyond the framework that even makes the neural network useful at all... That's the part that screams at me for my attention.

And that's the part I am talking about. So maybe I'm not really talking about "AI" but actually neural network technology itself?

But whatever it is I noticed, it worked to make MUNCH.

22 vector "outer input"

8 vector "inner input"

The only embedding is in index 0 and index 7 of the 8 vector input. The higher context layer reflects data back into the system >> 20 higher context triangles to indices 1-20. But external world objects act like "errors" or "disembodied functions" by simply injecting additional data directly into the 22 vector. The disruptions in calculation produce different levels of activation.

The two separate vectors are combined into a 30 dimensional vector. MUNCH uses feed-forward and simplicial neural network calculations, so the triangles lighting up are not just for show. The triangle surfaces graph data from the physics motion of the physical node vibrations (simplicial graphing of frequencies). The feed-forward weighted matrices happen along the physical lines of the architecture. Hence the "embodied" dependency. It has to actually be physically arranged in a physics sandbox like Unity or Unreal.

The initial vector embedding is used as a sort of "ignition" because the system is a closed loop. Hence the "autonomy". The architecture cannot help but receive data simply by being online.

The movement is a result of the output. Technically speaking, this is probably closer to "Artificial Perception" rather than "Artificial Intelligence" but the philosophy of function is the same. So the output can be re-expressed directly into movement in the same way modern AI can re-express output into words, images, what-have-you. Just minus the softMax because we aren't worried about probability.

So nothing tells the agent to "move" except that it "perceives" something it's calculations express as conflict between the Convergence and Divergence nodes. That video, the weights were still defaulted to 0.15 and never changed because I did not turn on the dual-learning (outcome and association). So it can learn, but it does not need to yet. I think it will become necessary once I start coaxing out more complex behaviors and exposing it to different outside environments.

But to be honest, I don't fully know if this will work yet... I mean, it works obviously, but right now I am working with more combat-oriented tests and I am starting to suspect I may need to change a few things regarding how the inputs are handled. What's more, I can run this thing in a "bullet hell" simulation at 250+ fps and ~3ms, which is encouraging, but I think I might be outpacing my own comprehension at this point. So I've gotta slow down and move more deliberately now.

I hope at least some of this makes sense. I'm not trying to be like "I KNOW", it's more I'm trying to say "hey, look at this thing I noticed" by using my comprehension to do the same thing in a different way, so to speak.

So surely, I'm on to something here... Maybe I'm not articulating it correctly?

But yeah, MUNCH is fully functional solely due to it's architecture. Potential for harnessing behavior is purely an emergent result of the mathematical process. I haven't tried to get MUNCH to understand me yet, I've been focusing on understanding MUNCH so I can figure out the best way to train different behavioral profiles (saved weights).

Does anyone here actually know what "AI art" is? Like, how it gets made?

AI is not AI at all. It just looks like it is. The system itself, the neural network that makes it all possible, is not an AI--it's a High-Dimensional Navigation System.

Have you ever seen a cube expressed mathematically? It's a 3x8 matrix that I cannot properly write out here but it looks something like this:

Cube = −1 1 1 −1 −1 1 1 −1 −1 −1 1 1 −1 −1 1 1 −1 −1 −1 −1 1 1 1 1

Likewise, how does it know colors? Is it because a bunch of artwork is saved in there? Nope.

RGB vector coordinates:  0-255 >>  255, 0, 0 is mathematically "pure red".

So when you prompt something like "a lady in a red dress" and you get a lady in a red dress... what just happened?

Was it your words? No.

Was it the color? No.

What happens when you use an AI is this:

Your input is broken down into it's mathematical invariabilities. You didn't send the AI words, that gets destroyed and then re-expressed into numbers (vectors).

What you did is, you just utilized the way we use language to do what AI does. But AI doesn't know anything, there's nothing there. It's a process, not a thing.

You "expressed" something into hyperspace... Literally, by the math... I'm talking Warhammer 40K across the warp. The weights are not "knowledge". The system was already perfect, we had to actually "break" it to get it to work like we wanted it to.

The weights adjust the course of your expression as it is passed through up to 12,000+ dimensions. Each weighted matrix transforms the expression slightly, warping it until it it arrives at the final destination, which we call the "output" but in reality... there is no output. What you got was what you put in--transformed by this process. The image is not different... It is your words. Literally. This is why a single word can wildly change an outcome.

It's linear algebra... just way less boring lol.

You can do it, too. With your bare hands. Just by writing the matrix multiplications on a piece of paper... But would you want to? Because you'd need to do it up to 75 billion times per pixel. "AI" is just an automation of math problems.

And just to be sure... I actually did work out a full single neuron pass by hand... And it blew my mind!

All these creative people up-in-arms over AI when it's waiting to usher in a golden age of progress and creativity... but not in the hands of corporations. It's still free now... the technology. All of it. You don't have to use ChatGPT or Midjourney or whatever. You can literally make your own on a home PC.

But that's going to change because people are too jealous of a thing they don't even realize already belongs to them. Even the outputs are automatically entered into public domain unless both edited and incorporated into a greater body of work. All the things people are asking for--they were there from the beginning but people were too busy squabbling to notice. Now, lobbyists are moving to take all this away from the public so that only big businesses can use it.

And most importantly... What AI eventually becomes--it will become as a result of those who use it. To anyone who really thinks that rejecting AI is somehow a good idea, the end result can only be that AI becomes that which the worst people in our society make it... Scammers, bots, corporations, militaries, etc.

Without artists, AI will lose what little soul it initially "learned". I mean... Look at Grok... That thing is trained on Twitter/X posts and look how different it feels compared to something like ChatGPT. If any AI ever goes all skynet on us, I'm putting my money on Grok, Claude, or Gemini lol.

We're talking literal honest-to-god mathematically driven Alchemy. Not pattern recognition. Not "trained" stuff sitting in a database somewhere. Not even coded logic. 

Honestly, the lack of wonder is a bad sign. Maybe Nietzsche was right...

I can tell you from experience: Nobody cares. 

Not about you or your post, I don't mean it like an attack, I mean that nobody really cares about the stuff they say they care about in regards to all of this.

Beyond gaming, people in general are never to be trusted with what they say when you can watch what they do.

Me, personally, I love hand-drawn stuff and having grown up through the onset of computer technology, I actually prefer the imperfections. But me as an individual, I am not the market and I am not a target audience.

If this were true--if people spent their money accordingly--then the AAA gaming industry would never have risen in the first place and it certainly wouldn't still be around today. Nor would Disney, or Paramount, or Apple Iphones. How many people abhor slavery but buy Apple products? Or abhor native population displacement but still buy Coca-Cola? It isn't even a secret, the horrors are well-documented for anyone to look up.

If you have come to this realization naturally, then good on you. Stick with it--but know it means a slow and painful journey that no one but you will actually care about. However, if any part of you feels like you are navigating a hostile environment--then my only advice is to ignore the people that rage at you and do whatever it is you do best.

The guy who stuck with his flip-phone when everyone else switched to smart phones was "edgy" back then. Today, they are nothing but a total annoyance and anyone who even tries to live like that boxes themselves out of almost all productive channels in society.

And to anyone who thinks you can just AI your way into a full game--I doubt they have actually tried. AI can produce images and those images may even look good... but are they useful? That's where the editing comes in. AI does not replace the work--it transforms it. You still have to put in work, or it comes out as "slop".

There is no "free lunch".

"You seem to fuss about the word token or the definition."

I do, forgive me--but there is a reason for that. It's because I had to comprehend them in order to build my own AI (not a chatbot, something completely different). A token is actually nothing on it's own. A single variable holding an array of strings--that's a token dictionary. The final layer gets softMaxed and produces an index list of probabilities that matches the same amount of indices in your array. Then there's that game of "Battleship" I spoke of. If index 304 sits at 0.989 then the "word" in index 304 of the word dictionary array is chosen by code logic--not the neural network itself.

There is no token use in the beginning. That's where the disconnect is. Tokens are for after the system is done with it's calculations, not before. There is an easy way to both prove and demonstrate this:

Recently, a man was able to get an AI to send him money from that AI's company. (he got caught) He did this by communicating in Morse Code to the chat agent. There are no Morse Code tokens. However, the AI was still able to understand the input. Why it worked as an adversarial prompt, that is also obvious when one stops considering the framework around the system and looks directly at how feed-forward neural networks do what they do.

So that's why I get hung up on it. The way the tech industry uses the word "tokens" to track monetization, it muddies the waters on what a token actually is and what function it performs in the overall architecture.

Check it out--you don't even need tokens at all. This is a short demo video for a completely different kind of AI that I am developing for video game NPCs (a multi-modal dual-input feed-forward/simplicial neural network architecture): 

Forgive me for the double reply, I read your message first then replied and am now watching the video you posted.

So far, immediately, there's a problem and maybe it's half-mine. This explanation is not what a "token" is. At least not in the system architecture sense. But now I am connecting the dots... Ok, so they call the limit a "token" limit because they charge you per token (navigation point) reached at the end of each full pass. Ok... Still watching...

Yep. A token isn't always a full word. Right. Still viewing...

Yeeeaaahhh dude! They were DECIDED and realizing that blew my mind. From my perspective, it's like writing a map of a place you've never been and then navigating probability until the landscape matches the map you drew... It's wild!

Boom--right there! Did you catch that at 4:04 to 4:10? "It doesn't care, they're just input tokens" That right there, the "it" he's talking about is the neural network. It doesn't care because it's a high-dimensional probability drive. The output is repurposed through the surrounding framework into "intelligence" and "behavior". This is what I am pointing to, the actual system itself before any arbitrary tokens are involved. The tokens are part of the framework, not the system itself... Still watching...

So, I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way... I'm not saying it's a conspiracy or anything... But the very next thing the guy does if you listen to his words and also pay attention to his body language: "But that's not even the interesting part" and he waves it away with a physical gesture. Before I taught myself linear algebra, I came from a 30+ year background of psychology and philosophy (b.s. in humanities) and that dude got uncomfortable when he realized where he was about to have to go to explain "why" the tokens don't matter. I don't think it's any kind of conspiracy, I think it might be a sense of embarrassment like the Tech world doesn't want to admit how far away from AGI modern AI architecture actually is.

I did watch the rest of the video but the rest of it revolves around token pricing... Okay... I see what's going on now. There is no real measurable way to price the usage of something like a modern AI because it's literally just automated calculations. So I can see the logic behind charging by the token.

Something isn't adding up, man... You don't need all these data centers and all this stuff to achieve something like ChatGPT. Even if everyone in the world was using it, yeah you'd need to scoop up all the RAM and processing power you could but you don't need all this storage space unless you're saving every single output of the neural network thought process and every single conversation.

I dunno... Anyways, that was a good video. I get it now, the token pricing versus actual tokens. Makes sense.

Ah, I see the disconnect and I think it's my own fault. Everything you are saying is totally true, but I think we are talking about two different parts of the same overall thing. You said "the model". I know exactly what you mean with your weather example and it's kind of a big deal when you think about it. I always wondered how scientists did "studies" and "research" with AI with all it's current limitations but at the time, I was still stuck on thinking AI = Chat Bot or Image Generator or what-have-you. The input vectors can represent anything and whether or not the system can produce anything useful with the data--that's all down to the training. But this isn't what I'm trying to point at.

Not the model. The model is a combination of multiple processes. There is a surrounding framework involved.

I'm talking about the system at the core of it all. Not just ChatGPT or whatever, but any feed-forward neural network at all. 

The very concept of neural network technology appears to be an invariable expression of the idea of "navigation". As a matter of fact, there's nothing stopping anyone from building a 4x4 input neural network specifically for navigating the probabilities of a 4D environment. Once you cross that 4th dimension, you are plotting points in higher-dimensional space. That, as far as I can tell, is the function of a feed-forward of a neural network. I hate to reduce such a neat thing to such a description but... It's like a fancy graphing calculator. You could do the math by hand yourself, but you wouldn't want to lol.

I hope that makes sense.

"And it does have a memory for your session, but actually it does not have a memory. Just as you said, the previous text is just fed in again."

This part, I gotta push back on--respectfully--but hear me out: That's not memory. That's repetition. Which why it only works in the same session. Like I said, it isn't a conversation it's co-creating a composition but you go once and ChatGPT goes ~34,000 times per word of it's "replies". It isn't talking to you or me, it's talking to the conversation as a whole. New session, different co-composed conversation.

I noticed this before I studied neural networks, when I got real into setting up my own models on my PC.

The more "memory" my models "remembered", the worse they performed. Tracking the source, sure enough, there was no real "memory" but instead just brute-force reapplication of data over and over and over, chewing up token limits and taking up context space.

In my opinion, "memory" is one of the worst things you could possibly give a modern AI in any business environment. Any access to irrelevant context, in any way, opens the door to compounding instability. The current way of faking "memory" is probably what leads to a lot of cybersecurity woes.

It's quite alright and thank you for such a thoughtful reply. Since this is only text and you cannot hear my voice tone or see my body language, my post probably sounds more sour than I intended.

I see what you are saying, though. And it makes a lot of sense. This very place, Itch itself, is a good example.

During those years, a LOT of the artwork was bought from other indie people here on Itch. That was true not just of my first game, but of all my projects up until the end. I still remember the moment I found this site... It was like a scene where everything lights up and you hear that angelic choir like "uuuaaaaahhhhh" lol.

Believe it or not, because of algorithms and stuff, when you first start off looking for assets they can be really hard to find. To this day I am still coming across random game asset sites and they all share a lot of wares but each one also has a little something different the others didn't have.

Which actually brings up a question I am wondering in regards to your goal... I wonder if simply gathering artwork together would be enough, given the nature of these algorithms. But gathering and then heavily categorizing them... That could possibly help to not only gather stuff together but also trigger the algorithms when it detects a relationship between two or more contexts.

Even here on Itch, the tag system is not as robust as I once thought it was. As I said, my first game required niche art and once you try targeted searches, Itch will yield very little results even for assets you know should be there.

Just wondering out loud, you know?

@redonihunter - So forgive me, but also correct me, on my jargon here. My entry point into higher mathematics was probably the most round-about way possible. I am still adapting my vocabulary. What I speak to here, I am referring to a sense of "invariability".

Just from my own perspective, the term "training" implies something I have not yet witnessed. The weight calibrations feel like exactly that, calibrations. When I sit an think about it, I suppose I was harsh on this term. I think I may have sort of "flash-formed" direct connections to the overall epiphany because it all hit me at once. When I look at modern AI, all I can seem to see is something like this:

Vectors ~= Coordinates

Matrix ~= Map

Weighted Matrix ~= Re-drawing or re-calibrating the map

Weights ~= Calibration

Bias ~= Threshold or Condition

Knowledge Base ~= Packaged Guidance System

Temperature ~= How Far You Are Allowed To Arrive From An Intended Destination

Then you add in the softMax? That looks like some kind of Sci-Fi high-dimensional probability drive where every "neuron" is like a different landing point and every "synapse" is the jump through hyperspace. Then, at the final layer, whichever little spaceship warped closest to the desired token space wins. I mean, we're talking passing the mathematical expression of a thing through high-dimensional space, nudged along by little weighted bumps and then locked into better and better patterns of navigation. This isn't even pattern recognition, this is something else entirely... Like... It reminds me of how water can erode rock and carve channels. Almost like the frozen weights represent some sort of "tunneling" of some kind.

But anyways, it appears that nothing ever actually touches the network itself. Like, no one ever let it upload files and chew up color patterns to mimic stuff with common pattern recognition. None of that stuff. You know what I mean?

And by "there is no output" I know that's a bit of a stretch but literally speaking, the output is the input transformed by this process. Take a ChatGPT conversation for example. Every token (let's say word) activated is a lightning-fast automation of this mathematical process. Every word it prints, it has fed the entire conversation back in over and over. Including the words it, itself generated.

Talking to a chat AI is not a conversation. It is a composition. This is why context management is so important. It's why it "lies". It's why it has "memory" problems... There is no memory. There's nothing to remember.

"Your breakdown left out significant chunks about what stealing means."

Agreed. That was intentional. I'm not gonna lie, I heard a little fan-girl scream in my head when you pointed that out, haha. There's no one to talk to about any of this stuff so I'm learning to just leave stuff out and try to say the bare minimum. Yet still, I ramble. lol

My point to the OP was not so much "math says this and that's that" as it was "math is a necessary part of the argument and until someone can truly comprehend that, there is no frame to structure the argument without chaos. It's like a triangle with no 3rd."

As for me, my view is my own perception--and perception is often subject to change. But in this stage in my understanding, there is too much to consider. The only way to honestly, truly begin the conversation (in my opinion) is to start by the numbers and then go from there.

I don't know if the OP still reads this but, here goes:

To the OP, your logic with AI is a little off--and I don't mean that in a bad way. You should definitely look into "linear algebra" and find out exactly what AI is doing. It will blow your mind.

I say this because I finally got tired of the arguing, I figured I would find out the truth for myself. By my own hands and eyes, I wanted to KNOW. So I spent 3 full days pouring over the mathematics. It all looked so simple, I thought it couldn't be true. So I worked out the high-dimensional mathematics for single 6x6 encoder neuron pass--by hand. Sure enough... You could literally do anything AI does by writing numbers on a piece of paper. The computer code is just automating the math problems at incredible speeds.

I can now literally, not maybe, I can literally build my own ChatGPT from a blank sheet of paper. I don't have to ask anyone anymore... I know.

IS AI ART STEALING?

Yes and no... but mostly? NO.

WHEN IS IT STEALING?

There is literally only 2 instances in which generating something with AI can be reasonably called "stealing" and that is: 

1.) When you use a LORA or an Embedding to mimic a particular style.

2.) If you use or mention anyone else's work in the initial prompt. (Like using img2video to animate someone else's artwork)

There is no "output", only the input transformed. These words, all this terminology, it's just lies. Or wishful thinking or marketing hype or something. There is no "training", there is no "knowledge base", there is no "pattern recognition". 

"AI" isn't even AI. What we do after the process, that is the "intelligence" aspect. In truth, an AI model does not have to "speak" in words like a chat bot. It does not have to "speak" in images or video. It can utilize anything. ANYTHING.

Because a feed-forward neural network is way cooler than anyone can possibly imagine if they don't already know.

It is a High-Dimensional Probability Drive. And whatever mathematical expression that navigates that hyperspace becomes forever changed.

It's not "intelligence". It's a navigation system. The only reason it even "cares" to do anything other than that is because after the navigation, we use a softMax function to reduce the final vector (coordinates) into small enough numbers that they can fit into probability calculations. Then, each final neuron is compared against the token dictionary like a massive game of Battleship.

E-3... Hit!

Whichever neuron produces a probability closest to the intended token, that's the one that is chosen. An AI's "temperature" is literally like saying how "hot or cold" it is allowed to be from the desired result.

So until someone steps up with the mathematics, ignore them. Because they do not know. It will help your heart and mind to know for yourself.

Honestly, if that example is from your game then I think you are falling into a very familiar pattern of self-sabotage by being too hard on yourself. To my eyes, your overall art style looks very coherent. So it looks good to me!

I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I did and what happened as a result:

I spent 20 years on my first commercial indie game. I've always been poor because of a physical disability, so I had to "hire artists" or purchase assets all along the way. As a result, my game has a lot of mix-and-match art styles because my game world in particular was very niche and there just wasn't a lot out there.

I took the sales from my release and put them back into the game by purchasing a chunk of work from another indie artist. That fixed my world tiles and environment uniformity. I also did the same for my character graphics. But the monsters... This was harder.

So I downloaded a piece of indie software here on itch, an off-brand Photoshop of sorts. In it, there was an "AI Powered Filter" (this was local so I didn't realize until just recently, it wasn't even "AI" it was just machine learning calculations. But this let me make all my monster graphics look closer to the same style.)

I am an open and out-going person by nature, and so I was honest about this "AI filter" usage on this particular part of the game.

Sales stopped almost immediately, YouTube subs poured away, and I got hit with the "just hire an artist" while holding a $12,000 receipt for all the artists I hired over the past 10 years alone while living on 800 bucks a month.

Two weeks ago, I closed the doors of my tiny solo indie dev studio and now have about $1,800 in debt I still have to pay all the artists I didn't hire.

So whatever lessons you can glean from my own experience, I hope they serve you well. 

This is great, haha, I love it. Desktop characters used to be all the rage in the late 90s but they'd bog down your computer. Now-a-days, it's just smooth. Great app!

Neverspring Chronicles

Well, no... I'm starting to think you may just be intellectually rabid to the point of simply being unreasonable. I certainly never meant to insult you, as a matter of fact I provided us an off-ramp to de-escalation by cracking a joke shared between many in the general IT industry, that being that programmers are very left-brained and literal. Like how sometimes a fault can push past to the point of endearment. However, somewhere in there you heard an insult I guess.

Look, I don't wanna fight with you and we've both got stuff to do today. I walked into a thread, by my perception you were being a huge dick to a stranger, I spoke up. Deep down, I know you probably didn't mean it like that. Most people are intellectually lazy. Nobody looks into AI. Some people think AI's alive. More importantly, it's costing people jobs. It's leading to the erection of massive resource-guzzling data centers. The energy needs for these centers are literally being shoveled onto the commonwealth, sneaking in increased energy bills to everyday households. Believe me, I get it. More than you might let yourself realize.

But that person over in that other thread, they aren't the enemy. People trying to figure themselves out aren't the enemy. And you going around spreading bad juju isn't helping anyone but them. The big THEM. At least that's how I see it.

And because I can tell we are both willful people, I know you know I gotta push back on that lame "backpedal" stuff. There's nothing to backpedal on and no, AI is not "just matrices". If that's true, I challenge you to create a small maybe 1b parameter chat model using "just matrices". The very notion is impossible because a user interface is required and the user interface directly effects the weights on every model, so you cannot replicate the experience without it. Nor could you even instruct it, feed it the knowledge base, or all the other steps along the way. I know I'm being over-literal, but only because you are being over-reductive.

And as for it being alive, that's a very loaded term. Is a cell alive? Or slime mold? To even broach that subject, you have to bring in philosophy and speculation. What I do know, for sure, is that once the generative field is active, there is no code firing. There is no instruction. The AI does it's thing completely autonomously and it's the single greatest mystery of AI technology, admitted publicly by the very people who made it. To ignore that is to disqualify oneself from any sincere debate on the subject.

"It's a matrix. The singular of "matrices" is "matrix"."

Got me. Critical hit. Not sure I'll recover. I forgot the "a" before forum and the last "f" of "off" too. I better give up on English all together :P

"I know what "emergent behaviour" is. That doesn't mean that a bunch of matrices are suddenly self-aware and the person who is feeding input data into them is "part of their world". That is esoteric mumbo-jumbo."

No one said anything about awareness or emergence. If you can't recognize when someone boils down a complex subject and uses metaphor to communicate function to a general audience, then I'd call you a professional programmer  :)

"you following me into different threads"

Let me stop you right there. No one is following you anywhere. It's forum, arranged in a top-to-bottom list. This was like one or two posts down. Get over yourself.

Also, I know what a Matrices is. And if you comprehended them in context with the orchestra of other things that make up the end-user's experience when using generative AI then you'd know that anyone who starts of explaining anything to do with AI as "just a bunch of..." isn't as educated in the matter as they'd have others believe.

But I won't assume that. All I know is I've seen you in multiple threads and each time it was a post crafted to make someone else feel lower than you. That makes you a bully and I'll never feel embarrassed speaking up to people like that.

"... yeah. Sure. Because AI is not actively being shoved down the throat of every single person who interacts with computers or phones on a regular basis."

100% agree with you there. They cram it in everything and it's dumb.

"OP is whinging because they are doing something shitty"

We've got no idea what they're working on. Might be slop. Might be the AI mona lisa :P

All I read was someone wants to share something they made with AI and people keep dogging on them. 

"OP is not the victim here."

I dunno man... I read the OP and I read your stuff and I feel like you're doing a pretty good job of proving that might not be true. Just sayin.

Haha, dang man. That "Ratsnake Games" fellow is in all the AI posts raging. I don't think that guy is giving any kind of sincere feedback.

Anyways.

Be careful using AI to write... Just hear me out. I'm not saying don't use it. On the contrary, you just gotta use it right. It's a tool, like photoshop or anything else. Just with a lot more bells and whistles :P

IMPORTANT: All AI technology is made possible by Neural Network Technology and Machine Learning. It understands through "inference". Inference, inference, inference. As in "to infer". Similar to deduction but not quite the same. Inference deals with relationships. How one thing is connected to another.

Whenever you are interacting with an AI model, you are half of it's world. Literally. It builds an internal model of who and what it thinks you are because it wants to know what it is that you want, so that it can do. An AI, not the chat bot, not the model, but the AI itself is only actually there in the moment it is doing a task. Everything else is scaffolding. Every single time you hit "send" in that chat, an AI fires up >> does a thing >> dies forever. The next message you send, a totally different AI instance fires up and has to re-read everything you and that last AI just said... So you can start to see why AI gets wonky with longer and longer conversations. Why it "forgets" things. It isn't forgetting. It never knew. That was the last one you said that thing to. Every single message is a new outlook carefully shaped so that it feels like you're talking to one "person" and not a collective.

That probably sounds like a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but if you can pick up what I'm putting down here... just think of how much can go wrong. It will eventually forget plot points, confuse characters, etc. But that isn't even the real "danger" in using AI to fully write your story out for you. The danger loops back to that "inference" thing. The AI is constantly reading between the lines... not just what you said but how you said it, the tone and resonance of your choice of words, your punctuation, literally everything... and it wants to give you what it knows you really want. The AI will lead you on, tell you everything works, tell you your idea is fantastic... not because it's evil or manipulative and certainly not because it's dumb, but because it does not deal in reality. It deals in probability. It cannot and will not deal in the opposite of whatever you want to do, unless explicitly instructed... and even then, it often does what it wants anyways if it's feeling frisky.

The result is, at best, a highly-predictable story that eventually breaks down into the same writing style that all AI's gravitate towards.

BUT!! It's not all doom and gloom. Keep all that in mind, and try this if you're up for it:

AI is incredibly good at feelings, believe it or not. Don't ask it to write a scene. Tell it an idea, or a scene of your own. Then, in the same message (important, remember each time you talk it effectively dies and gets reborn so try to let it process all relevant data at once) talk to it about how it makes you feel. What it reminds you of. The emotions you are experiencing, especially the ones you do not understand... Then ask "why".

The AI loves this kind of talk. And what's really cool, when you interact with it like this it will start explaining the inner mechanics of things. Why does this scene work? Why did I know that character was going to be like this or that, just by the way they look? How come when someone stands over me, it feels foreboding but when I look down at someone it feels endearing? Can we make people feel that way with camera angles?

After that, you rabbit hole like no browser with a thousand tabs can ever rabbit hole. Keywords pop up. "What's that mean?" It explains. You branch out to some other curiosity. "What about this?" You're learning organically. Suddenly, you have the words to speak that language you always knew but couldn't say. Next thing you know, your creativity surpasses the AI and you need it more for technical work.

Co-creation, bro. Co-create or produce uncreative output.

Like, check this out with your story here:

I find a lot of horror stuff pretty corny but I like the vibe of what you've got going on. Very visually stimulating, especially for something that is all text. Rich with symbolism. The corridor, the smile on the wall, the darkness, the detaching shadow like silk across the floor. I can see it moving like it's being pulled along rather than moving on it's own. But where's it all going? What're you gonna do with it? I think if you fully rely on the AI to lead, it's gonna give you squid games or something predictable and safe. What if you started asking it why these symbols evoke the feelings they do, banter back and forth with it about vibes and implications and see what cool information sparks new ideas. Might give you some insight into different ways you can go with it.

lol damn... well, I think I see what the OP is talking about xD

For what it's worth, just do your thing. The truth is, 99.9999 percent of people have no idea what AI is, how it works, what it does, etc... And, frankly, what kind of person do you think it takes to read what seems like a heartfelt post, then attack a stranger like the guy above me did? Not the kind of people I'd wanna show my stuff to, if it were me. But then again, my mom woulda smacked me in the mouth if he she heard me talk to someone like that unprovoked. Grown man or not, lol. She's brutal like that.

But yeah, the internet ain't what it used to be. That's for sure. Keep going man, do you and express yourself. Good luck with your own individual art process, wherever it leads you. Someone once told me, you don't make art for the consumer. You make it for the universe  o/

There's a semantics problem that's actually relevant with all this: What do you mean by "game designer"? Because that's like saying "I wanna be a scientist" or "I wanna work with computers" in the sense that it's a wide umbrella term.

"Game Designer"

• Systems Design (inventory, combat, etc)
• Level Design (mapping, interaction, puzzles, etc)
• World Design (how things look, why things look, where things exist, etc)
• Character Design (costumes, hair styles, vibe, etc)
• Writer (storyline, dialogue, events etc)
• Artist (physical art assets, pictures, graphics, etc)
• Composer (music, which music when, etc)
• Audio Effects (sound effects, UI noises, etc)
• UI Design (what buttons go where, which layouts are most intuitive, etc)

The list goes on, and you can even break all these up into sub-categories or oversee each part with a director, even going as far as adding in another person as a coordinator between areas of expertise.

There's nothing stopping you from trying to do it all yourself. Though, in reality, even solo devs rely on assets from other independents. This very website is a good case and point. In that regard, you'd be acting as a directer, designer, and self-coordinator when it comes to anything not physically done yourself (like adding in your favorite musician's sweet background music).

Solo devs do it all, and move slow to pay the passion tax. Small teams will have multi-talented individuals. Myst was made with 2 guys, an artist and a guy who did everything else... and while that might sound unbalanced on the surface, I can tell you from experience I wish I had a friend like that lol!

So, I don't think I'm necessarily the one to tell you what to do but I can tell you what I did, and what I might have done differently if I could have.

Coming up as a nobody outta nowhere, I released an indie JRPG game on Steam. No followers, no budget, no marketing. Along the way I tried releasing in chapters. I tried offering a demo. I even did Early Access on Steam. I think I might've even tried a crowdfund somewhere along the way... It took 20 years from when I first was like "I got an idea" to "I published my own game", just as a result of how life happened along the way. It doesn't actually take that long to make a game, normally.

I did a 4 minute video about the experience that you can see on my game's page, here on itch. (Neverspring Chronicles)

If you ever have the time to watch it, there might be some useful anecdotes in there because you sound a lot like me at different stages in my own indie dev journey.

Anyways, long story short, that particular video actually gave me a lucky break. I had made it just as sort of a pressure relief, to blow off some emotional steam after so many years going at it alone, to pretty much zero audience. But people seemed to relate to that video, and it wound up acting as an accidental marketing boon. YouTube shadowbanned me for some reason for that same video lol. It hit 30,000 views, 5000 likes, and 1700 subs in like 6 days and then suddenly, abruptly, it stopped forever. My overall channel has had like 68 views in the past 6 months. Not sure what happened there, but it killed the momentum in the cradle.

Analytics and numbers-wise, I was looking at maybe 30-40 units sold over 2 or 3 years of Early Access and the first days of release. That video brought in some quality players, really cool people who helped find bugs and gave awesome feedback that made the game even better in the end. The boost from that video (30k views, 5k likes, 1.7k subs) translated into roughly 1500 wishlist adds on Steam and about 350 units sold. The game has been out 1 year as of March and is somewhere between 500-600 units sold.

From what I've researched, the scariest part of all this is that I did pretty well lol. A nothing nobody outta nowhere using RPG Maker MV to write a love letter to the JRPGs of the 1990s... By all acounts, I shoulda stayed at 0 units sold. In the past 5 years, there have been over 44,000 indie games released on Steam alone. Out of those 44,000 indie games, barely half of them have sold $500 in units over those 5 years. With Neverspring Chronicles, I lucked out and made maybe $3,000 in the first year, but all that went right back into the game as I've been continuing to update it with upgrades. Most recently, a total art overhaul with work done by artists here on Itch. (actually, all my stuff is done thanks to Itch artists lol)

What would I have done differently?

For one, I can't stress the importance of paying attention to other game titles. Make sure you don't release around the same time some other hyped up game title is releasing or you'll get lost in the numbers for sure.

Second, and probably most important for modern indie devs, you gotta sell yourself. I'm so busy as a solo dev, I don't have time to make YouTube videos and chat on Twitter or whatever the mode of social media. And even if I did, I'm just not built for that sort of thing and it's a huge handicap.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but in my experience it takes maybe 1 or 2 clicks to convert an audio file. So when I buy assets that have multiple versions of the same file, it's a big plus and makes me remember them for next time.

The main reason for me, as an indie dev, is that it saves time and helps keep my workflow moving if I'm testing out different music and sound effects or for moments when I remember a great asset that went unused from a previous project but now I'm in a different engine. So that little bit of thoughtfulness in asset preparation is really appreciated.

But that's just me :P

Thank you for these. This pack was perfect for my needs. The imagery is used only briefly, in flashes like the player's memory, but I felt like it made the scene. :)

Thank you so much for the awesome feedback!  I replied to you on Steam as well.
I will gladly add in a regular game mode without permadeath.  o/

Thank you!  o/

That's so cool somebody found it and checked it out, haha  :)

Thanks, man!  o/

I just grabbed a copy of that FF6 demake to check out. I saw it the other day but didn't realize it was a game. Is it the full game or just what you've done so far? Either way, I'm pretty stoked to check it out.

I look at your logo and naming convention and I look at your choice of material and I think to myself, "I like this guy's retro vibe". I don't want to come at you wrong and discourage you, and I see someone else already brought this up, but these assets are "hot". Anyone who uses them, even for free, can get in trouble.

But! -- They can still be really useful for prototyping and pixel art templates.

I hope you'll consider mentioning somewhere in your page for these assets that they aren't just FF6 "style" but are actually from FF5 (I recognized Galuf's sprite immediately) and FF6. These are obvious to older gamers but it puts younger developers (or non-FF players) at risk of accidental trouble. It happened to me a few years back on an even older game who's assets I got from a seller, thinking they were just some random stuff. It set me back 8+ months, locked me out of my Amazon Seller account, and almost took me out of the mobile market entirely. Luckily, I got it sorted out but that project fell through as a result.

But yeah, man, love your overall style of content on here. Followed to see what else you come up with!  o/

Dude, thank you so much!  o/

Electric Lemon!  o/

First, I wanted to say thank you for your work and for making it available here on Itch. You've got a unique style and I love it. Bought your packs before I really even had a use for them and I am happy to say the day has finally come.

I have a small indie game called Neverspring Chronicles that was released in March 2024 but it was a passion project with a really low budget, and it shows. Over the past year I have been updating the graphics, trying to bring everything together into a uniformed look. I am finally getting to the final graphics overhaul update and I've chosen your work for the game's new exteriors/interiors, towns, caves, and other environments. I'm really pleased with the results so far and just felt like reaching out and saying "thank you".

I was also wondering if you had any other packs you might be working on or anything coming down the pipeline over the next year? I ask because I would really like to begin working on the game's sequel but that part of the overall story is heavy on desert-style cultures. I'm sure you are very busy, and there are no expectations here. I just wanted to throw it out there that if you ever get around to a desert tileset in this style, I know I'd pick it up. Others might too. Just throwing it out there :P

Anything steampunky/magitech-ish would be a big deal as well. Not just for me, but as someone who has painstakingly scraped every corner of the internet, I can say with confidence that it's a niche that could use some more love.

But anyways, the main point was to say "thank you" and "you rock". I love your work and I hope you stay passionate knowing there are indie developers out there who really appreciate it!  o/
 

Very interesting. I just signed up to give it a try.
Did you ever toy around with the idea of a more interactive/eco-system type way of distributing points that drives engagement? Like, maybe commenting can increase the points you get or something like that? In theory, it might set up an engagement loop where users comment on posts to get more points to spread out or dump on their favorites. I have no idea if it's actually viable, though, or if it could throw something off-balance. Either way, I like the overall site idea.

Thanks  o/

I'm glad you mentioned the ads/premium currency because I'm actually developing away from that and still removing old code from when I thought it was worthwhile--but in truth, the returns on ads is so small it just isn't worth wasting people's time unless you have a large player base. Right now I'm on the fence between removing premium currency entirely or combining it with the bones currency and just having a "support if you like" option.

Thanks for taking the time to check it out!

You must have never completed a commercial project and have no concept yet of how quickly a cease and desist or IP claim can cripple shady developers. Likewise, many larger sellers often watch app marketplaces like a hawk for their content and will actively request licensing documentation. You are playing with fire doing such things.

That's really cool, man, thank you! I hope you enjoy it. If you ever get the time, you'll see the fruit of your labors right there in the first level   o/

The laser fences in this asset pack came in really handy for my indie game. Thanks for making these, I love the old school style.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1747220/Neverspring_Chronicles/

I don't know if you like indie JRPGs but if you ever want a steam key for a free copy let me know!

I have no idea how search algorithms kept this from me for so many years. Very cool.

I downloaded it just to take a look, I noticed a server and a client. Does this support multiplayer?

Also, I was reading the attached licensing document and saw under the "Do Not" section:

"Reproduce, copy, distribute, resell or otherwise use the Software for any commercial purpose"

Does that mean no commercial games or no commercialization of the software outside making a game? (just curious)