Post GDC there was a lot of momentum for Parchment, so much that we actually switched to a game engine we think will be better suited for parchment in the long run. I spent the remaining month of March and half of April porting everything over to PixiJS, and things were looking really great.

We also started investing heavily in agentic workflows that would speed up development of Parchment and get us to our desired finish lines. However, this choice would be our undoing. There’s a legality question of using AI tokens granted to us through my work to create a commercial product, and but more-over it robbed us of the joy of making the game in the first place. When the goal changed to “reach final outcome” instead of “build something together we want to play”, the project was no longer life-giving.

When the currency in which we are paid for our work is joy, AI cannot be the hands the make the product.

What’s next

Cheeselog and I will pivot away from Parchment and build something new. We’ll be making a new game, completely free of AI, bound by a new charter that establishes our values early on and enforces them. Parchment’s may turn into a experiment of how much can an AI build, but will not be sold commercially for a multitude of reasons.

In the meantime, we’re working on a new studio name and new game ideas - and we’ll share them as soon as we have them.

Should AI not be used in games?

It’s not that black and white. The decision requires quite a lot of consideration, and there are different levels of usage. As for us? We want to learn and grow the artisan-hand-crafted way, and that means removing generative AI in most cases and places: In our art and in our code. This is because when we skip what it takes to achieve the output, we don’t learn. We want the joy of learning & building something on our own.

We understand that some tools underneath the hood may have AI components that we cannot control, but we’re not going to fight that. Once we create a full mission & value statement I’ll share it, which will get into the nuances of all this.