
LONE WOLF: MAKE YOUR OWN VIDEO GAME WITH AI → WATCH VIDEO VERSION →
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A
Welcome everyone. This is Gabriel Custodiet of Watchmen Privacy and Escape the Technocracy. I'm here with Urban, my colleague and we have a great announcement. We have just released a new video course on escapethetechnocracy.com this is called Lone Wolf. Make your own video game with AI So first of all, Urban, people are going to throughout this course learn how to use AI to essentially be able to make their own game as individuals. This is a fantastic, amazing part in human history that we're at. First things first though, give us a little bit of your credentials. Why are you the right person to be teaching a course like this?
B
Yeah, so I've worked in video game development for a long time and I've done both cybersecurity and that's probably why how most people know me. But I've also worked in video games and I've seen everything from custom made games to like larger project with like professional game engine such as Unity or Unreal that some of you might be familiar, especially when you're loading the game, you can see oh, you know, powered by this or that. And I've done From you know, 2D games to 3D games helped in smaller and bigger projects. Like many people, you know, as a child when I discovered my first video game I, I was fascinated and mesmerized by it. But for a long time it required a team of people or some serious knowledge on how to do it. Now you could always do it alone, but you would need to spend a lot of time to learn. And I remember, you know, when I wanted to make my own video game and I asked someone how can I do it? And then it was like okay, you need a big book about how to program. Another big book how to do 3D and then another big book to say how to, to create a 3D program. So I was like okay, that's. And that was like, you know, more than than 15 years ago. Things have changed. And now with AI what we want to show in this course and we have hinted at this during our AI, you know we, we made an entire course about AI and we have already hinted that you can create amazing things with AI and this is what we will show you in, in this course by using hey as an assistant to help you design your own game.
A
Now you've been in on AI since the very beginning. And it dawned at you, I'm sure at one point that wait a second, I can actually use the coding, use the art. And we show in our previous course AI resistance where you have it create a very basic video game right there in basically two minutes. So walk me through when it clicked with you and you suddenly realized that the tools that you were using, especially as they have advanced over the last few years, that you said, wait a second, I can actually do a legitimate full game in a certain sense with this. When did that click? What was that like?
B
Oh, that's a very good question. I think it's when you know someone, when the first version of ChatGPT was released and there was still like a waiting line and you had to be approved and all of this. I remember that one of the thing I tried was hey, let's make this emulate a Linux console, you know. So now instead of chatting to ChatGPT, I would write command to the Linux console. You know, I would say like LS and then it would list the files. And I thought this was pretty funny that you know, what if it's emulating Linux? And then like immediately I realized that it's able to do it and to a certain extent at least. And I was like, okay, this can be used for all sorts of things that is out of the box, you know, like emulating a Linux. And I saw a project that inspired me tremendously, which was it's a fake Internet of what the web could have been from like the early 90s. So you browse blogs and all of this is created on the fly and it all looks like, you know, those old blogs, but all of it is fake and it's basically generate as you move on, right? So in a way it's similar to Minecraft and Draw Fortress that, you know, it renders new thing as you progress and in that case it renders entire page of intranet. So you know, with this experiment plus you know, my own playground with the fake Linux terminal, I was like, I want to make something and I always wanted, wanted to create my own video game. I never, believe it or not, I never did my own video game from scratch. I mean I did once like a pong at, you know, with Oscilloscope in electronic courses. But I, I don't think that really counts as like a proper video game. And I always wanted, and I had for many years now this idea with a, where you like similar to a spaceship game but with train because I think spaceship have been used so many times so you would have to manage a small train instead of spaceship. But I was never able to find other people interested or to find resources to have this being done. But now suddenly I have an assistant that I can ask any question I want. And, you know, if you keep your game simple, which you should as a beginner, and I say this with, you know, I'm a veteran now in video games, so I say this with like more than a decade of experience, but you should keep things simple. And if you keep things simple, really, tools like Gemini, ChatGPT and others will be totally able to answer your questions without much issues.
A
Right? So I've listened to this, I've viewed this course. I think this is really cool stuff. Now, one thing people might say urban is okay, making art with making a video game with AI. Can't I just go onto YouTube, check out some of these videos? What's different about our product?
B
Okay, so first, first, first thing first. Our product is not for everyone. This is a serious course for people who want to learn the basics on how to make video games. And we show you how to make a game and we talk about some of the, I would say boring, but essential things that you need to have in a video game. So most tutorial on YouTube, they will focus on how to make, you know, you jump on a video game or how to make a shooter or this and that. But they forget things like, you know, you need to be able to buy and sell items in virtually every video game. That's like one of the core mechanics. Even if it's not a trading game, you must be able to have an inventory, you must be able to, you know, maybe like use certain items and give them to people, etc. Etc. And most of those things, they are just ignored. Like how do you restore a game from, you know, a previous state that, okay, you played now for two hours, you shut down your computer or, you know, lightning strikes, your computer is gone. Now how do you get back to where you were previously? And this doesn't make for a good video on YouTube because it's not really that exciting. And all of those are things that we will show you in this process. So by following, you will not only see how AI was used to like speed, speed up massively the development of this game, but also we are going to discuss about, you know, how to save the game, how to restore it and all those things. Now we keep the exciting stuff right, like the first four hour or I'm sure we're going to go a bit more in details on what we are going to see. So there is definitely exciting stuff, but I want to focus on having the base correct. And this is why we choose a trading game, because once you have this space, you could apply it for any games. And maybe you have realized this, Gabriel, but as you were watching, you could say, hey, this could have been Skyrim, this could have been Doom, this could have been Wolfenstein, this could have been the Sims. You know, this could have been basically any games. Because what we are teaching you is really the basics. We still keep it like fun and exciting, but we make sure that we have a good base. Another thing that we did is since this is the product, right that you pay for this, we are going to show you the entire game and you are going to be able to play the game as we develop. So this is not just a one off as with every other course that were released on Escape the Technocracy. Any update that we do to this project, we provide it to you free of charge and we increase the price as we move along. So you are going to be able to follow the development of this game and to be able to download it and to run it on your own computer so that you have this entire project. If I look at similar things on YouTube often what happen is they won't provide you the source code because you know, they don't want, or they have other plans in mind or there is all sorts of things. You know, maybe you are part of a Patreon that shows you how a commercial studio is doing a video game, but then they will, they won't let you download because they want you to pay for the game at the end or it's like restricted intellectual property. Not in our case. We. And we will even show you how you can download and run the game. We don't keep this as a secret so you can check the entire project, how it works. We also use a game engine and this means that you don't need to be like, it's beginner friendly in the sense that we don't start coding from scratch, but we assume we have a tool to help us make a game because without this things can be very, very complicated very quickly. So this is why we think this is something that is needed. And also if you look at AI, there is a lot of buzz. There is a lot of, pardon my French but bullshit out there that is like, you know, it's like, oh, do AI for this or that. But it's completely unrealistic. They are not trying to create a product, they are trying to sell ads and they are trying to have you click on it. In our case, we don't know we have a product, you paid for it and you have exactly what we made and we are not trying to sell you something additional to it. So we are fully working for you and we think this is the most important that you have. Your tutorials and your course should be made by people who care about you and not who try to sell you sponsorship or things of that nature.
A
I think that's a great point that as I was watching these going along, I'm a real amateur in this stuff. Of course, Urban's the expert and it just struck me that you had been a pro at one point because you were saying, yeah, make sure we do the high resolution for this because we can, you know, that will show little details later on, even if it gets compressed. So you had a lot of experience just from clearly from the trenches of years of grinding and a crunch and all the rest. So that was nice to see. And as you said, we're not just trying to get the quickest thing up possible for a 15 minute YouTube video or something. This is a legitimate step by step process showing you how to make a particular kind of game and then you can use those skills to make another game potentially. I guess one question might be Urban, people who know nothing about coding, nothing about game design. I don't think it's quite for that group of people. What do you think?
B
As we said, it's definitely not for everybody. And we are aware of this. It's also an experiment on our side. Now it's sometimes hard for us, you know, because we have experience. I mean, in my case, I have experience on this. So sometimes I'm like, should I use AI for this? Or I know exactly what's the solution, let me do it. And you will see there is a few examples where I try to be mindful and tell you when this is the case. What I will say is if you're curious and you want to scratch that itch to see how a game is made, especially using AI and you want a no bullshit thing and you want to satisfy this curiosity to see like a professional making a game, then yeah, I mean, by any means buy it and we move along with us. But if programming is not your thing and you don't have this. A bit nerdy. Yeah, maybe it's not for you right now. I will say this. After this announcement is finished, there is going to be an example on how this course looks like and you're welcome to just, you know, stick around. If you're listening to a podcast, it's better if you watch it, the video, because it's very visual. You know, at core. I'm also an artist. So I try to make things interesting visually and I try to have striking art. And AI offers you possibilities. You know, one thing I show is how you can reskin the game, make it look completely different from, you know, we went first with like a highly realistic style. And then I know Gabriel, you love comic book, and we decided to switch. Since you're the producer on this project, we decided to switch to completely comic book style. And the reason why is because with AI this was very easy to do. So another category of person that I could see being very interested are the models. You know, if you want to mod your favorite game, you don't really know how to start, or you don't really know how you could use AI I will show some of those principles. And I think this could also be a category of person. So, you know, the, of course, the wannabe programmer that wants to be or like game designer. Then the people with, you know, the modders that wants to modify their favorite games. And we might actually have a section about this. But no promise for now. No promise. And finally, the people who were a bit curious to see the entire process. So, yeah, if you find this boring by any means, don't buy it. We're not forcing anyone. But if it's something that excites you, go ahead and get it, especially while it's cheap. Okay? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. In the quick preview for our tutorial, how to make a video game using AI and the Godot game engine. Now, the course is more than four hours, and as we improve the game, we are going to add more content. So obviously for a preview, we cannot show you everything that we are going to do in the course. We need to be a bit more restrictive. So for this in the next 20 minutes, I'm going to show you how you can use the power power of AI to change the style of a game completely. So originally, when we created the prototype for this game, we went with a realistic look, you know, but as you can see on the screen, we now choose a much more artistic style which is inspired by comic book. However, not everything in the game is yet change. There are still certain sections that are using the old style. And this is what I will show you now. So when we click to play the game here, we have, you know, our slots and we can simply create a new player. So in that case, I'm going to just, you know, call myself with my name and I can put points. Now don't spend too much time on this. This is really now only for cosmetic because none of this is yet implemented, but this lets us create our character and now we have, you know, a character. So we arrive here. Now in a very short story, this game is similar to space trading game with the two major differences. That instead of being in space, you are in a post apocalyptic world with like, you know, in a desert, like a snowy. Some part is snowy, some part is dessert. And instead of spaceship, you have a train. So right now we can go on the market and we can trade with our friend the merchant and we are going to buy coal because we need, we will need a lot of coal to travel. So here I'm going to just buy, buy all the coal that I'm needing. So now if we check at our inventory, we see that we have 54 of coal and of course our total balance, we bought quite a lot of coal, so we have less money. We start the game with 1000. So now we have less money. But finally we are ready to board the train. So if I click here, here now I'm traveling. And as you can see this screen here is completely different from the style that we have and it's a bit messy. We have, you know, here the train that this is an encounter. Now here in the computer this is written what's going on? So right now there is a VIP train. And the problem with VIP train is because there is only one train track between every single cities is they require you to wait for them to pass before you can travel. And this is a problem because as we are doing this, we are burning coal and this could end up costing us a lot of money. Which is why this is actually a bad encounter sort of. So in, in that scenario I'm, I'm going to try to attack it, but my adversary shield are too strong. I cannot do anything about it and I'm required to wait more days. And we can see that we are still burning coal. Instead of 54, now we have 52. So in that case I don't have much of a choice to just ignore. And here we see the day remaining. Now the reason why I'm showing you all of this is to see what we are going to change. Because right now, as I said, this is the old style which is rather realistic. And we are going to very quickly in the next 10 to 20 minute. Okay, so finally their caravan fades into the horizon while the parade passed with all the pump and none of the hurry. So finally they went past and now we just continue our travel. And you see that in this encounter we actually lost around 10 tons of coal, not sure yet what will be the unit. But anyway, so I'm going to quit because that's enough. And now we are going to create an image that fits this and we are going to work on this together and I'm going to show you. Okay, so now that you, you have a good idea of what we are going to do and change in that screen, I went on and I already generate four image. So let me just show you. Those are the image. The prompt I used is comic book style of a vintage military computer console inside the train. Orthogonal front view. If you don't know what orthogonal means, it's basically front view. And as it as I put another set of image to render, we're going to look at the one it created. So this one I like. I like the creativity of it. I like this radar. Maybe we could have a radar as well. You know, again, nothing is set in stone. You know, we are still exploring. Now the reason why I choose turn by turn battles for this game is very simple. It's a cost effective way to have battles. If you need to implement an entire enemy system with 3D graphics and you know, ballistics and all of this, it's gonna cost you a lot of time and money and research to end up with something. Well, if you just have a turn by turn and you use text to describe, that's just much simpler. So this is why we went for that style. Now if you think what we need is we need, you know, windows so that we can see what's going on. We could also have it on computer screen. But the windows I like because this would show you the outside, you know, which enemy we have. And then we need some kind of, you know, console. Oops, that's not another. That's the wrong image. So this one I like, this one I like. But what I don't like is that there are two windows that there is this weird separation. However, we could easily remove that in post production. This one is also cool because here there is this big computer in front and there is this large windows that could also be used for all sorts of things. This is very cool. But I won't use it because it's too complicated. Right. The image is pretty badass. But you know, this looks like it's inside the. Inside the carriage. And this would require me to kind of do some weird perspective things. So I will not use it. This is also one that looks super cool. I like. It's very creative and it really looks like one of those old, you know, like, like a Battle screen. So that, that's, that's cool. This is very similar to the one I had and I might just use this one because it's simpler and I have already, I have already everything and yeah, so I will try another thing with the military computer console with a large screen, large screen and buttons on the side. And the reason why I want to try this is simple is because if you remember, we have buttons on the side. But again, you know, anything can be, you know, anything can change, anything can be different and we can always improve things and, and change them so we don't have to. Now this one looks very realistic. That's clearly not the style, so I'm going to just ignore it. This one is cool, but I don't know about the Windows yet. This is cool, but we don't have the windows. However, we could go for a fully electronic one. But I think Windows would improve a lot. So let me choose one. I think I will go with this one or this one. Yeah, I think I will use this one. And the reason is simple is the windows is very big. This means we can see a lot of outside and we can always quickly change things like this. Let me try quickly another thing. Computer console. Now I did some test here. So let me see in what I created in the past for preparing this tutorial if there is something better. Now here are some, you know, here are some. I also like this a lot because it has a radar and maybe the radar could be a gameplay thing. You know, maybe the radar could be again, play something with gameplay. This one is also pretty cool, you know. So we have to choose one. It's a hard, it's a hard choice. Again, with AI, anything is possible. I think I will go with this one. I think I will go with this one. So I'm going to save this image. I'm going to upscale it creative and potentially this one as well. I'm going to wait offline as this is done, save them and then let's see how it looks in game. So now the two images on midjourney are finished rendering and I've just saved them as PNG Again, never forget to use PNG because this way you don't have compression artifacts and you can also have transparency, which in that case as we are going to see is important. So here I have a node called a sprite called Battlestation and I can hide display it. So this is basically this entire frame and I'm going to just add, you know, the one. Now you see, it's a really Big image. But again, that's not an issue. We can rescale it better to have bigger image than, you know, higher resolution and we can see how it looks. And I'm going to place it where our current battle station is so that we can have some comparison. Right. So of course the buttons are not correct anymore. This is also not correct. Now the reason why I'm doing this is because I want to see which one I prefer, you know, and I think sometime it's better to just have this. So let me rescale it like the previous one. Yeah, I think this is just better to see in the game itself. And this is definitely one of the advantage of having a game engine. Now here is how it looks. Right, so this is the original, this is one, this is the other one. I like this one. My main concern with this one is that the battle computer takes a lot of space and I'm not so sure if we are going to be able to see what is outside, you know. So the best way I feel is to open the windows and see which, which one is the best out of those two. So let's do this. I've loaded the two images in gimp. Now we need to add an alpha layer. Right. And now I'm going to be very, very rough and I'm going to simply go ahead and create large opening for the windows. Now you want to spend more time. Of course, I'm doing this very, very roughly and quickly. You definitely want to spend a bit more time than what I'm doing. But for the purpose of this tutorial, this is more than enough. So here you see how I'm using the round radius to get rounded corners on my windows. So this way, you know, we have. Okay, and then we still have a rounded corner here and then another rounded corner here. Okay. And for prototyping you don't have to be super precise because we don't know yet if it's going to fit. Now the reason why I'm going around those things is because if you think about it, those are leverage that are in front right now. In the future we could potentially use those lever, you know, to like turn turrets, trigger cannons, doing all sorts of interesting gameplay stuff. But for now I just want to be very quick and let me go with this and let's be right and this is more than enough. And again, you will notice you don't need to be perfect. And what you will realize is often you might see the issues, but you're public and the players won't see it. I remember sometimes I spend like hours and hours trying to fix things. Then we would run them on players to test it and basically no one saw any difference. So you know, don't hesitate to sometimes do like some quick job. Again, the rule we had in my studio was the human eye can basically notice around seven different objects per second. So if you in your image you have more than that, then usually they won't notice all the mistakes and things because the brain is just overloaded by things. Okay, so here we have. I will do the same thing on this one. And then we are going to export them and, and to have. So here, remember we have this problem and I will show you how I fix it. Again, very simple. Simply duplicate and continue those line and there, there is it. Right. So no need. Now we could have went into the AI and you know, but sometimes when it's as simple as that, I don't bother. Again, if I choose to use this image, I will go back and make sure that all of those lines are correct. But for now I want to make sure that it's as well there was a problem. Never mind. Add an alpha channel. And now we're good. So let's go again. Rounded corner, probably bigger around that corner. Those are quite big. And we go and we make the openings of the windows. So there we have it. Now here I need to go and I think I will go like this. This one is a bit simpler than the other one. Corners are a bit around it. And again nobody will really notice that. Trust me. Don't be perfectionist yet. You know when you're two weeks, what one of my boss used to tell me is when the game, you know, when we are two week and the game is finished and we are two weeks before the deadline and everything is finished, then you have time to think about those things. So okay, here we have our two images. I will save them, load them again in Godot and we will see how it looks. I saved all the images and now when we are back in Godot, we see that, you know, it automatically imported the image. Now we have this very cool and weird effect in which we have the first windows that looks into the other control room and finally looks where the original images. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn this off. And then in here we have this scene and if I look and I will just remove this. We have this scene and now in the original image, this was a very small, you know, this was through the screen. So what I will do is I will make this much, much bigger. So let's look here. Okay. Okay. And now I need to check and I will make this big. Okay. Okay. This is much, much bigger. Okay, very good. And the reason why I want this bigger is so that we can see it with the other windows. Okay. And let me increase the size of this image also much bigger. Again, I know it's not perfect, but that's not the goal. We want to see quickly how this looks. I forgot to save. So let's quickly save this. Let's go back in the traveling and. Yeah, so we have to see. So now we could maybe change a bit like this. All right, so we see a bit what's going on now if we go, this is how it looks. This was okay before. And now we can choose which one we prefer. Okay. Okay. And then this one or this one. I have to say I prefer this one. So this is the one I will choose. And that's the end of it. Now I will do a few more modifications. I think what we could easily do is, you know, if we put, you know, we can change its place. And what I realize is, you know, we could have quite some interesting things going on because I want more space so that we see the train. Now I think this is cool. Especially what we could have is that you can toggle in and off this. Right. So maybe there is an option then to make this panel different. But for now I think it's going to work. And we could check how this looks as we play the game. So let's try it out now. Okay, so play the game. Reload the previous board train. And there we have it. Very, very good. So there is two small issues. There is here the counter that is a bit off. And those button also now looks like they're on the windows. So let's fix that really quickly. Okay, so here are our buttons and I'm going to simply move them here and place them in the new. In our new control system. And you know, in a way, I have to tell you, I really, really like that we have this thing here. This is like. This is a good, good excuse for gameplay. This is very good excuse. So I'm going to lock again this so that, you see, we cannot move. I'm also going to lock this one so we cannot move. You also notice that there was glass. So I've added, you know, some glass to the. To the image so that this way it looks like there is glass. And. Okay, another thing, we have the inventory for now this can go Here, I don't know, this is more a debug. This is going to be changed later on. The last thing that happened is there is here the counters of day. That is a bit off. Apologize. My phone was not on silent. So. So we have this entire counting. So what I will do is I will select all of those and I will place them up here. Okay, so let's play again and let's see. Okay, we start again the game Border Train. And okay, we have here the day remaining now for a prototype. This is okay, but there are two things that are a problem. Number one is this train is not correct. We need to have another, you know, another like comic book style train. And then in here those buttons look weird. And the reason why they look weird is because we have this behind the scene thing that doesn't look like they are like fitting. Now if you remember in the original image, this one we had here an entire section that was empty. Now when Midjourney generated this image, there were some electronic stuff, but then we just removed them. And this is what I will do here so that this fits same here on top. I won't show you the one here on top just because there is not much time. But of course if you buy the course, you will see the entire process including how to redo this and you will be able to get all the image that we used for this. We are back in GIMP where we have our image. And since this is the one we choose, I'm going to fix it. Now here is, you know, a tiny thing and we are going to focus on this which. Which was probably one of the most weird aspect in that image. Now really the simpler thing is to just go ahead, select all of this and then just delete it like this, right? Because it's comic book style. So you know, everything is with plain colors and lines. So this is much easier to to do and use. So this is what I will do. I will just delete everything like this and then go in with my color picker and simply fill this up again. And there we have it. And I will still have here we still have some places that are a bit weird, but that works and that's gonna do the job. And again, don't have too much perfection. Now in some advice that I would give you is maybe like paint here some screws and some stuff here. I've left some screws, but this we can do later. Now same thing here on top. Now this is a bit more complex, but I think I will just for now do this and remove some of this weird equipment that we have here and see if we can fit our game counter. Now if we had more time, maybe we try to move this whole thing on here so that this is the counter. But for now I just want something that works and that doesn't look too weird. Okay, so there we have it. So I'm going to save this, import it in game. So now we are back in game and we see there is just here we need to make it a bit higher. So I'm gonna adjust this like this and I think this looks much, much better than what we had. And now our buttons are also very good. Now one last thing that I might do is those could actually be a bit smaller because now our computer is a bit smaller. And anyway the text on them is not that big anymore. So that could work as well. And if we go and we select all of them we can see. Okay, they are all aligned. Very good. And finally I'm going to go here and I'm going to change this image. So for now we have this image that is pretty cool from the welcome screen. It has all the proper stuff that we want and we just need to flip it. So let me see. Can I flip it by using this? No, I can't. Yeah. Okay, here. Perfect. So let's have this, let's save. Okay, now it's too big again. Those are things you would need. Okay, so this is almost good. I think it's going to be easier to change like this. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Now let's try and let's see. Okay, so let's play the game. Let's start sport the train. Okay, so here we have, you know, we have our entire new style. It's way. Okay, so now we can just, you know, ignore and do our stuff and we have everything. There is one thing I just think we could improve is right now this windows is a bit small and I feel like it would work better, you know, if we don't need to see this bottom. Really what we might do is maybe we would have an animation. You know, when we go on the battle screen we have something like we click and then this opens and enables us to do battles. Or there is a way to open and close the windows so that we can see the train, we can see the enemy that we are facing and then we can do the battle here in the sender. We could also have some kind of radar or something that shows how many enemies or if there are missiles. Like this image. There are really a lot of things that we could add. And you see now the button, they look integrated in this image. Another thing that we could also do is right now, if you see we have a color filter and we can use this to improve and change. Change. Let me see. So we can. By increasing this, we can change the tint if we want. So I. Yeah, I mean, we have to see maybe something like this or if this is better. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe like this, like it was before. So, yeah, hopefully this has given you a good introduction to this course. And as a conclusion, you know, in 30 minutes we have changed completely the style of this image. And we could have went in any direction, you know, which we went from like artistic concept art, semi realistic to completely comic book style. And all of this was done very, very quickly. So hopefully this shows you the power of AI and of course, the more time you spend on details, the better it gets. But with this, we have a really, really good starting point. That was very easy. Imagine if you had to paint all of this by hand. That would have taken hours and hours and hours. And we have this ready by, you know, in. In a few minutes. So that's a tremendous improvement in efficiency. So, yeah, check out the course and yeah, hopefully you will have a lot of fun creating your own game.
Host: Gabriel Custodiet
Guest: Urban
Date: April 18, 2025
This episode introduces "Lone Wolf," a newly released video course on making your own video game with AI, now available on EscapeTheTechnocracy.com. Host Gabriel Custodiet and guest Urban dive deep into the evolving landscape of solo game development, focusing on how AI can empower individuals to create fully realized video games—even without a large team. They explore practical AI techniques, the philosophical shift in accessibility, and how their approach differs from superficial online tutorials.
Urban’s Experience:
Evolution of Accessibility:
When Did It Click for Urban?
AI Tools Mentioned:
Depth & Completeness:
Transparent, Community-Centric Model:
Not for Absolute Beginners:
Ideal Audiences:
Urban’s Advice:
Premise:
Design Philosophy:
Switching from Realistic to Comic Book Style:
Art Integration Process:
Speed and Flexibility:
Endless Possibilities:
| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|---------------------------------------------------| | 00:39 | Urban's credentials and history | | 03:03 | Early AI experiments and “the click” moment | | 06:11 | What makes their course different from others | | 08:50 | Transparency: full access to code & constant updates| | 11:45 | Is it for complete beginners? Urban's honest answer| | 12:40 | Hands-on demo: changing the game’s art with AI | | ~22:30 | Guiding philosophy: focus on player perception | | 34:06 | Efficiency & power of AI in development |
The episode is conversational and pragmatic, marked by Urban’s deep expertise and Gabriel’s curiosity as a non-expert. Urban provides candid, no-nonsense guidance, balancing technical how-tos with encouragement and warnings for those considering the solo development path in the AI age.
Lone Wolf is positioned as a deep-dive, “no bullshit” course designed for those who are genuinely curious and willing to engage hands-on with AI-assisted game development. The hosts stress the value of process, iteration, and a willingness to learn from real professionals—without the noise and hidden motives of most online tutorials. The episode features actionable advice, live walkthroughs, and a motivational vision for anyone looking to create their own video game in a new era of individual empowerment.