I’ve been making a story RPG called Bloom, on my own, with a lot of help from AI tools. The free demo (about 20 minutes, in the browser, no install) is here: https://thevelvetarcade.com/play

What it is: you play a warden sent to bring in Tamsin Vale, a healer the Cathedral fears. Over ten chapters you make written choices and fight turn-based card battles, walk a map, and build a home that fills with the mages you free. The video is a minute of the demo.

How AI is used, since this is the right place to say it in detail:

Mine: the world, story, characters and canon, and every decision about how it looks and plays.

AI writing assistants: scenes and dialogue are drafted to my outline and canon notes, then revised and approved by me.

AI coding assistants: the engine is written under my direction.

AI image and video generation: characters, backdrops, cards and clips, from my prompts and reference sheets. I choose and approve every look.

AI voices and music: voices are text-to-speech with original voices designed from written descriptions, not clones of anyone. Music and sound effects are also made with AI tools.

No AI runs while you play.

I’d like to hear what you think of the demo, and how other people here keep a story consistent across a game this size.

(Velvet Arcade, one developer)

More comments- I used Claude as my main coding agent but those of you out there doing HEAVY coding I've found that keeping the project master run by Claude while using DeepSeek for API coding calls can save you money. DeepSeek is 1/2 off on off‑peak hours too. If anyone knows a cheaper alternative to that, that is good with code let me know. I've been running a heavy Claude sub Max 20x and I run out of tokens even doing periodic handoffs to save tokens. I'm using it probably inefficiently as well, but DeepSeek I've found has its uses if saving tokens is important. Just my personal experience, no promotion of either coding agent I'm just trying to save tokens and I would have integrated DeepSeek earlier on if I had known how cheap it was for token cost.

Out of this game I'm converting the framework into its own engine. I've found all of the regular visual novel engines to be lacking and I'm building a ground‑up engine to use AI as an integrated helper. Not sure how well that will go but I want to share that project here soon.

For context, my game is a little more RPG than visual novel BUT I made a visual novel game before this one much less expansive and it took around 20× more labor than using coding agents and you have to do all of the tedious things that as a creative person you don't really want to get bogged down in.

The demo doesn't include it, but I built a system around the open‑source Qwen AI engine where you can actually chat with characters AND it included an image generation system where you could call for an image of the scene. This is a deep hole because there are games out there that use AI generation to make stories adaptable as you go on, but they are severely lacking because they don't have an overall story and rails to keep things cohesive. Mine has that. It was a really cool experiment that shows some promise. The downside being you need a decent video card to run the Qwen engine and if you wanted to run the image‑gen system you simply can't do them without having another networked computer with a GPU. (unless maybe you have a 6500 Blackwell which I certainly don't.) I could do it with my main system and a network laptop with a decent GPU. Not practical for anyone to actually do in terms of selling the game but the possibility is there and fascinating. One could rent a video card on a part and run the game this way, but that would cost money to do and wouldn't be worth it for my game. I ran the larger Qwen AI open‑source engine on a pod and the image gen locally and found it to be fun but the card was a 6500 Blackwell that rents for around $2.50 per hour. Not practical but fun nonetheless. Very excited about this new frontier of creative game making that seems to have something new and groundbreaking happening every month.

Thanks, enjoy the journey!