AI & Procedural Generation Policy

Why we use it

Valenfeld is a solo indie project chasing a scope that normally takes a studio of dozens: a massive, hand-lorekept world you can wander for years without hitting an edge. That scope is not achievable by one person typing every tree, every ruin, and every line of dialogue by hand on a shoestring budget and an ambitious timeline. So we lean on AI-enabled workflows and, more importantly, cutting-edge procedural algorithms to scale content production and world scale to match the ambition — not to replace it.

What always stays human

Every piece of content in the game — every place, character, creature, item, quest, and line of lore — is built and overseen by a human creator and judge, grounded in our own ideas, our own lore, and our own systems design. AI does not decide what Valenfeld is. It never originates the world's canon, its themes, or its design intent on its own; it accelerates producing what we've already decided the world should be, and everything it touches is reviewed before it ships.

Not AI slop — procedural generation is the point

We're not interested in dumping raw model output into the game and calling it done. Our actual goal is an experimental, large-scale world built on cutting-edge procedural algorithms — terrain, dungeons, towns, ecosystems, even history — designed to be massively replayable for years, not a one-and-done AI slideshow. AI-assisted tooling is one part of the production pipeline that gets us there faster on a small budget; the procedural systems and the authored lore they run on are the actual craft, and that's where our attention to detail goes.

Our bet

We believe that if we focus relentlessly on delivering the best game possible — with a genuinely obsessive eye for detail on everything we ship — we can produce something great on a low budget and a small team of one. That is the bar we hold ourselves to, not "shipped fast" or "shipped cheap."

On art, specifically

We support artists. Today, AI is used mainly to speed up code and systems work, and for the handful of visual assets that are genuinely hard to hand-model at our size — it is not a replacement for an art department we don't yet have. We aim to hand-craft as many of the game's visuals as we can afford, and that share grows with our studio size and our success, not the other way around.

As we grow

This is how we build today, as a solo project with an ambitious scope and timeline. If and when Valenfeld earns a bigger budget for this game or for future releases, we intend to keep leading art direction with humans, not handing it to AI — hiring art, lore, and gameplay experts to build alongside these same tools, never replaced by them. We want to keep making tailor-made games for people like this, ideally forever; we don't want AI taking the job of making games away from the people who make them. It stays a tool we reach for only when it's genuinely necessary — never the point of what we do.

— Metatransformer Studios