The Shop Works. The Bosses Got Closer Together. Facebook Is Still Facebook.

The shop is done.

Not “done, apart from the bit where it gives you the wrong thing.” The test purchases work, the correct items arrive, and I've tested it as thoroughly as I can without a live app on Google Play.

There's still that live-store step ahead, but within the testing I can do now, Swordoku's shop is behaving itself.

The no-ads purchase also restores properly after uninstalling and reinstalling, based on the account. The visuals have had another round of tweaks too, and overall, I think I'm happy with the result.

I know. Let's enjoy that before I move a button.

Why wait ten dungeons to meet something horrible?

Next up are the milestone bosses. The big dudes. Stronger than the usual opposition, better equipped to kill you, and carrying special rewards for anyone who survives the introduction.

They even get their own intro banner. A little advance notice that your afternoon is about to become more complicated.

Originally, the idea was to put them at dungeons 10, 20, 30, and so on.

Then I thought about the structure we're planning to ship with: 100 dungeons, each with about five stages and multiple waves per stage. That's a lot of fighting between the particularly unpleasant encounters.

So I changed the spacing. Milestone bosses now start at dungeon five and appear every five dungeons.

There. Much better. For my definition of better, anyway. Yours may depend on how much health you have left.

About forty more mouths to feed

I've also added around 40 monsters to the roster. Now I'm working through their abilities and deciding how they're distributed through the dungeons.

Adding a monster is the exciting part. Making sure it does something appropriate and turns up somewhere sensible is the next collection of jobs.

Once that pass is finished, I can get on with dressing up the dungeons and adding more visual pizazz. The inhabitants are moving in; the decorating can follow.

And then I opened Facebook

Lastly, a rant. Because apparently I wasn't content with the monsters I'd already added to the game.

I'm thoroughly fed up with the reflexive “AI SLOP” shouting every time somebody posts a project that uses AI.

This morning I read an article reporting that a developer had made $200,000 from a Steam game while openly disclosing that its art was AI-generated. I'm not treating one reported sales figure as a survey of every player on Earth. But it certainly doesn't fit the claim that using AI automatically means nobody will want your game.

My view is pretty simple: for plenty of players, the deciding question is whether the game is fun. Not whether its creator followed somebody else's approved production process.

Then I saw an indie developer asking for honest feedback on their game. What did they get? Comment after comment of “AI slop,” “you suck,” “take it down,” and the usual thoughtful contributions to the advancement of game development.

Good lord. Give it a rest.

Review the game. Don't just yell at the tools.

If the art is inconsistent, say where. If the game is broken, explain what's broken. If the gameplay is boring, that's useful feedback too.

But shouting a label at someone and telling them to quit isn't a review. It's just being unpleasant to a person who made something and had the nerve to show it to you.

You're allowed to dislike AI. You're allowed to decide you won't use it, or won't buy games made with it. But that doesn't give you ownership of everybody else's toolbox.

Using a new tool to speed up development, or to help build the game you've always wanted to play, doesn't make the project stop being yours. There are still decisions to make, things to fix, and a game to turn into something worth playing.

And I'd be very interested to know how many of the loudest critics have quietly used AI somewhere in their own workflow. I don't know, so I'm not going to invent a percentage. The certainty with which people police everyone else's process is irritating enough on its own.

I've been making games since the 80s. I've watched tools change. I'm quite happy to keep learning new ones instead of declaring that development reached its final acceptable form at whatever point I happened to get comfortable.

Anyway. Back to distributing monsters and making milestone bosses unpleasant.

At least when those shout at you, it's part of the game.