Our Approach to AI

Our ethos

1. We would rather make things by hand. That is the default, and it is where the effort goes.
2. The direction is ours and yours. Which events exist, how systems work, and where the game goes are our calls and yours.
3. We use AI where it genuinely helps us build, predominantly for code reviews, bug fixing, and security.

A person should sign off on everything that reaches the game.

The look of the game

TinyYears has a visible avatar that grows from a newborn to an elder, gains and loses, changes hair, puts on glasses, gets dressed in clothes you bought. That character work is commissioned and drawn by hand, and it is the part of the game we are least willing to compromise on.

Around it sits a much larger body of supporting art: buildings, vehicles, props, icons, the furniture of the world. Some of that is ours, some of it is stock, and some comes from other sources. We keep a record of where every piece of art in the game came from, so we always know which is which.

The art is the game. A life sim depends on whether you look at your character and feel something, and that comes from a person making a hundred small deliberate choices about a shape. That is why the character is where we spend.

The ideas are ours and yours

TinyYears is designed by our team and shaped by our players. Which careers exist, which life events are worth building, which ridiculous way to die is funny enough to keep, how a system should feel: those calls are ours, not a machine’s.

The taste behind this game is human, and so is the judgment about what makes the cut and what gets thrown out.

The best content here comes from players. Someone in our Discord describes a life outcome absurd enough that we build it, and that loop is the point of making a game with a community rather than at one.

Nothing reaches the game without a person reading it and approving it first, and nothing in TinyYears is generating content at you while you play. Your character’s life is written, not improvised by a machine.

Our dev diaries, patch notes, and community posts come from our team.

Code

TinyYears is built in React Native by a small team. We use AI coding assistants for parts of that work, predominantly for code reviews, bug fixing, and security, alongside autocomplete, linters, and the rest of the standard toolset. That is ordinary practice across the software industry now.

A person on our team reads, understands, and is accountable for every line of code that ships.

The principle underneath all of this

AI helps us build the game, in ways we are comfortable with. It is not the game.

The direction is decided by people, and whatever the tools, a person is accountable for everything that ships.

Where we stand

This is the standard we hold ourselves to as the game grows. We have tried to write it the way we would say it out loud, rather than as a promise engineered to be technically survivable. If where we stand changes, this page changes with it.