Music, Sounds, and Textures: A Game Without an Art Team, at the Kitchen Table

The credits of this game list no graphics studio and no sound studio. Yet every block has a texture, every biome its music, and every energy fence its hum. How that works — and how it feels — is what this post is about.

The tools. We use generative AI as our missing team: block textures are made with image models, sound effects with ElevenLabs, and the music is homemade. On itch.io we write, with a wink, "100% AI-made, driven by a 10-year-old's imagination" — and both halves of that sentence are true.

The truth about the process. From the outside it sounds like pushing a button. In reality it's curation: the first generated texture almost never matches the style of the other hundred, the first sound is almost always too intrusive. The energy fence's hum, for example, went through several rounds until it was the quietest continuous sound in the game — a fence buzzing louder than the waterfall next to it would be unbearable. Taste, consistency, and saying no remain entirely handmade.

The kitchen table test. The best quality control sits at the dinner table. New sounds get played aloud ("too creepy", "sounds like a broken fridge" — both genuine Justus verdicts), new textures get passed around on the laptop. Whatever doesn't convince the family doesn't make it into the game. That sounds unscientific, but it's a surprisingly reliable filter: kids have zero inhibitions about telling you something looks dumb.

The result is a game that simply wouldn't exist without these tools — no family project can commission a hundred textures. But for us, "AI-made" means: the AI delivers material. We make the game.