The tool I made is powered by Opus. It reverse-engineers games and examines their code, metadata, artwork, 3D models, animations, etc. Based on its results, I believe many games have used AI, not necessarily extensively, but at least for debugging, corrections or other tasks. Some devs appear to have used AI-generated artwork too, including in a background video. I’m annoyed, but I won’t reveal who they are. If you’re asking how the code analysis works: Opus helped build the tool using over 5 million lines of pre-2021 code from local games library and GitHub repositories for Godot, Unity and Unreal Engine. It looks for patterns associated with human-written and AI-generated code. I’m keeping the detection details private to avoid making the tool easier to evade. It estimates whether code might be fully AI-generated, partially AI-assisted or show signs of AI-assisted debugging. The tool also searches developers’ public social media history for corroborating evidence. In some cases, it found older posts where developers acknowledged using AI and saved those references (these same devs been attacking me a few days ago for saying 99% use Ai in coding!). For generated artwork, it analyzes images individually and flags features it considers consistent with AI generation. After the audit, it displays the flagged images and explains its reasoning. The results are in general spot on but require a human review to confirm. Across the 20 games I analyzed, the most common suspected uses were shaders, VFX, partial coding assistance and debugging. The tool flagged 14 as involving AI-assisted debugging; There’s much more to the process than I can fit into one post. I’m still questioning whether publicly identifying these developers would be fair, cause some of them are preparing to launch their games and this will plunge their sales. But it’s frustrating after people came after me for saying AI use in game development is widespread!

One of the biggest challenges I faced while working on The Last Reel’s animations was video model censorship, especially for death scenes. Here’s a workaround I used that might help other devs: I replaced the character with a green bag for the impact animation, then generated the character’s death animation separately, without showing the act that caused it. I combined and synchronized both animations directly in-game using code. Local models like H3 Minimax helped avoid those restrictions, and I used it for some scenes. But in other cases, the animation quality wasn’t good enough for what I needed.