AGLST

Development of AGLST  has been suspended indefinitely.

I set this page to 'restricted' initially, but when I realized that I could set the game's status to cancelled, I figured I'd re-enable it for the sake of providing some closure—it was my flagship project, after all. The demo version will no longer be available, and all files on this page have been hidden. Comments have also been disabled; I intend this page to be a silent epitaph, not the site of yet another bitter and vitriolic debate over the ethics of generative AI.

What was AGLST supposed to be?

Despite the "clickbait" title, this was a serious game, not a meme!

Anime Girl Laser Space Tank (AGLST) was to be a genre mashup game that combined mechanics from top-down shooters, anime gacha games, and visual novels to create a unique story-driven experience. Players would've been able to customize their own tank, recruit allies with unique abilities to fight alongside them, and defeat the badguys with a combination of teamwork and gratuitous explosives.

While I never got a chance to do any writing whatsoever for AGLST, I did write all the code by my own hand. I also made the tank sprites and their projectiles from scratch in Pixlr, and most of the rest (eg, UI art) is "grayboxed" with random assets I found in my files. I intended to do the rest of those assets myself in Pixlr, too. That leaves only the character portraits, which is where things get dicey.

This game's character portraits were created with the genetic algorithm Artbreeder in the spring of 2022. Back then, the term 'generative AI' was still technical jargon, and there were still a few halcyon months left before the fascination with the "Weird Dall-E Images" Twitter account would be replaced with the caustic diatribe we see today. While 'generative AI' had yet to cement its place in the lexicon of online discourse back then, let's be clear: Artbreeder and Dall-E are both generative AI tools.

What went into your decision to use AI portraits?

The original game page spoke to this question thusly:

That means each of them is a new, unique character who doesn't exist anywhere else and has no human artist.

It's pretty clear that I wrote that back in 2022. Technically speaking, the portraits are 'unique,' but they're 'new' in the same way a remix of a song from 1976 is 'new.' Additionally, they "[had] no single human artist." Generative AI for images is trained on massive stockpiles of art uploaded to the internet. A few pieces may have been done by monkeys, elephants, etc., but 99.99% are, in fact, from human artists. I hadn't considered any of that, though.

Mostly, I wanted to do AI character portraits because figure drawing is pretty much my ultimate weakness. I put my heart and soul into Sam and Sierra from my then-most-recent project Cross Back, whose sprites I made by myself from scratch, but I felt that they were mediocre enough to add the sort of tackiness that would cause the project as a whole to come off as 'sloppy' or 'amateur.' These days, many people can pick out AI art pretty easily based on its minute flaws, but even those 2022 AI portraits stood head and shoulders above what I could do myself from scratch.

The last critical component was my desire to 'break into' the industry. I figured my best shot would be to use the agility I enjoyed as a solo developer to be among the first person to bring a game with the next big innovation to market. If I could do that, I was confident I could produce a cohesive, polished product with standout writing that would outclass anyone else who had the same idea. From my point of view, AI art would be the great equalizer for indie devs who were held back from creating top-notch products by their poor artistic skills and inability to pay another person a fair and livable wage for help.

Is the backlash against AI art the reason AGLST's development was suspended?

In a word? Yes. My plan had been to be an early adapter of the newest trendy innovation, not the next vitriolic controversy. I was shocked when I saw the negative reactions grow more and more intense, but when I looked into the arguments a little more, I realized that some people had perfectly good reasons for disliking AI art, be it out of concern for ethics or their livelihoods. This plus the knowledge that the general toxicity surrounding the debate over AI art was here to stay sapped my momentum to keep working on AGLST.

The writing was on the wall—for better or worse, AGLST would never be what I wanted it to be. I still don't have portrait drawing skills. I still don't have enough money to care for myself, not to mention pay a worker. And I still do have ADHD, making the prospect of learning anything that must be practiced through intense concentration over a prolonged period of rote repetition beyond unattainable. There was no viable way forward, save to ignore the discourse and keep using AI portraits.

How do you feel about generative AI content nowadays?

Well, I chose to suspend my flagship project rather than plowing forward, so take that as you will. I can't claim to think that all AI art is 'evil,' or even 'bad.' I think the best adjective I could give it as a whole is 'uncomfortable.' I'm not much into philosophy, and I get enough politics in my life already...yet it's abundantly clear to me that releasing a game featuring AI art as a core part of its identity would constitute a philosophical and political statement that I'm not prepared to stand behind. That's what feels uncomfortable.

As a firm believer in "the death of the author," I care more about what sorts of interpretation I'm opening my work up to than the innate meaning I conceived for it. This severely limits my ability to employ elements that are currently fraught with political and philosophical associations in my creative process, unless those associations would contribute to or enhance what a work is already offering. In the case of AI, its current associations would likely contradict the themes I'd intended for AGLST.

Before I drew this conclusion, I asked my friend sadie ng for her thoughts,  and I don't think I could explain it any better than she did:

so, aglst was gonna be about combinations and genetics, yeah? but you also said possibilities and freedom were key themes. dunno if art that can only iterate on what's already been done plays nice with [those themes].

All I can say with certainty regarding AI art is that it's clearly not a good fit for AGLST, a game concept that had originally been designed around it. That made the decision to suspend its development a pretty easy one, and it's also left me with a murky opinion of AI art as a whole.

I intend to neither bash nor praise indie devs for using AI art. It really can open up options for solo devs who are economically marginalized and unable to afford professional art, but I also think it'd be sad to see a world in which no human artists were able to make a living doing what they loved. I do see that as a real risk—there's no way to ensure that those who can afford to hire an artist do so instead of using AI art to "cut costs." Were AI art ever to become sophisticated enough to rival AAA quality, I'm not naive enough to believe that the millionaire studio owners will keep their art teams on principle.

Do you think you'll use generative AI content in another game project going forward?

No. Above all else, games should be fun to play, and ideally, fun to develop, too. Just as the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house, you can't make a fun game out of components that aren't fun. When I first discovered Artbreeder and AI art, I had so much fun. It gave me energy and enthusiasm to develop. That's no longer the case, and it hasn't been for some time.

As a writer,  I've also thought about generative AI for storytelling. Honestly, it doesn't much bother me; I firmly believe that I could write a better story than an AI algorithm trained on everything I've ever written, and that sense of professional pride is enough to prevent me from feeling upset about the existence of AI stories. Not everyone feels that way, though. I was reminded of that this past autumn.

I returned to UW-Whitewater (virtually) to participate in a panel of professional writing alumni. Near the end, the moderator made note of the fact that she was about to ask the most pressing question on the audience members' (current students') minds. When she followed that up by asking if AI was going to replace their jobs, I almost burst out laughing—until I saw the visceral fear behind those students' eyes. My blood ran cold.

I hastened to compose myself, then provided them with a nuanced explanation of how generative AI works, laced with any reassurances I could think of. I sincerely believed everything I told them; I think the world will always need people with their skills. But that evening, I came to believe something else, too:

Whether it's for art or writing, commercialized generative AI won't ever be fun.

After the panel ended, I waved goodbye and turned off my camera. Then, I opened up my old AGLST file and started deleting my Artbreeder assets.

So this truly is the end of the road for AGLST, then?

For the foreseeable future, yes. There's always a chance that sadie or I will strike it big with something like ESCAPE: Ultimate, Look Closer's pending update, or even a manuscript for some creative nonfiction piece or novel. We've agreed that if that happens for either of us, we'll fund an indie startup and spend our professional careers telling all the stories we never could before.

In that idealized world, where I could hire professional artists to bring the characters to life? With Hoyoverse still ruling the scene in gacha games and Gen Alpha coming of age on social media, I think there will definitely be a market for a story about anime girls flying tanks with laser guns through space.

Try thinking about it as an allegory for growing up on the internet—there's absurdity, an art style that older Americans would still consider niche, and the sort of psuedo-isolation that comes with being sealed alone in a capsule drifting through the vastness of space, surrounded by other people who are also alone and drifting yet perpetually out of reach~

—

Legacy Content

These instructions detail the key bindings and core gameplay loop applicable to the erstwhile demo from spring of 2022. I see no reason to delete them, so they'll remain here for posterity. There's always a chance that someone who still has the old download from all those years ago will come back to this page in search of them.

Key bindings: Move Left/Right: A/D or Left Arrow/Right Arrow Shoot: Space Bar Basic Ability: E Ultimate Ability: Q Switch Characters: F1, F2, F3, F4, & F5. These correspond to the number of the character they switch to.

Core gameplay loop:

1). Test your luck by rolling against chance to unlock new characters, each of whom commands her own laser-shooting "space tank."

2). Visit numerous sectors across the galaxy, each with its own lore, conflicts, and narrative.

3). Build a team of characters suited to the sector's unique challenges and fight the badguys.

4). Make decisions in the heat of battle that will affect the story and the fate of those around you!

5). Depending on your choices, new characters might become available to roll for (to add to your team).