About Ashline

I have some broad plans for this game. I intend to make a fun and enjoyable game where the main gameplay loop revolves around the player driving their train, looting rail yards and buildings they encounter, and defending and upgrading their defenses on the train.

The primary goal is to circumnavigate the globe, but I plan to implement opportunities to tackle side content that a player would not normally travel to in a point A to point B playthrough. I'm not a particularly great creative writer so any story content will be mostly environmental and not an overarching segment of the game.

Depending on how popular this game ends up being, I'll consider making a release on Steam with 3d graphics and some new content. That being said, a 3d game is a lot of work and I'd have to hire 3d modelers or learn blender to make a cohesive visual style.

This game is developed using Tweego in VSCode. I bounce ideas off the wall in my private discord server and deliberate about the best way to implement logic of certain gameplay decisions. The initial concept for this game was to have the player circumnavigate the globe. I deliberated about what would use the least browser resources to implement the global map for the player and came up with a concept of using a tricolor map in RGB. The R layer would act as the heat, the G layer would act as the heightmap, and the B layer would act as humidity. The plan was for it to procedurally generate cities on this map and then generate tracks between them. Initially, it'd download a copy of the earth with the game, but the player could instead randomly generate a new planet or even import their own custom map. After thinking on it, I came to the conclusion that at a resolution of 5km*5km tiles, there would be enough content in the game already that an infinite procedural generation is not necessary and distracts from the intention of the game. I'm sure it'd be easy to mod in if someone wanted to, though.

This game uses AI in the following ways: Generation of code, generation of .svg art. I do not, and will never utilise diffusion technology due to ethical concerns over training and a general distaste for how diffusion functions and how it looks. I do not use AI generated story or text in this project because I enjoy writing things myself, and do not believe that I can prompt an AI to write things in a way I'd find acceptable.

I am willingly disclosing that I am using AI in this project because I believe people are allowed to disagree with how AI is used and choose to not play games that use AI. That being said, AI assistance in coding is an industry standard. I chose .svg art for the reason that it's arguably an extension of code compared to technology like diffusion. .svg is a simple format that defines polygons of a certain color at certain coordinates on the screen programmatically.

I view LLM training on code very different than Diffusion training on art. Programmers have a long history of making code publically available with rich documentation for other developers to utilise. Even before AI, developers would very often use the code of other individuals or draw inspiration from their approach. AI assisted coding is a natural extension of that. In my view, vibe coding is a tool that empowers individuals who have creative visions and who understand the logic of why code is done the way it is to make projects that would have taken a long time to formally learn a programming language to implement it. I do actually have a computer science background and am familiar with java, but I'm not particularly knowledgeable about javascript.

Diffusion, on the other hand, very explicitly steals art in a community that is very explicit about credit and fair use. It as well, functions completely differently than how artists actually draw, generating a full result from nothing, and it can't make minor edits the way you can with code. The results are ugly, and even if they weren't, I still believe it'd be more valuable to have made an effort to train models to draw from scratch instead of generating the final result. Diffusion is, in my view, a completely useless technology, and should never have even been bothered being researched.

I know many people may have concerns about the quality of a game that utilises AI generation. You may wonder, does this developer cut corners? Why have they not hired humans? At the end of the day, I'm developing for fun, not for money. I will never compromise the quality of my game to make a quick buck, but I'm also not going to invest significant amounts of money into a project if I'm not going to make a return on investment. If I do not make my game enjoyable to myself, I see no reason why anyone else should invest their time in my game.

If you understand and are willing to give my game a chance, I thank you dearly, and I hope you have as much fun playing as I did making it.