Nathaniel Whittemore

One of the things that's coolest about building with Google AI Studio is the ease with which you can integrate Google's AI features and tools.

A game where there was some aspect of image generation and creative on-the-fly responses to scenarios seemed like a really good way to try that out.

And so we dug in.

We articulated the first set of game mechanics, as well as some visual inspiration in Gemini, and then brought that over to Stitch.

Now, what you're looking at here is each of these is a different sequential generation where I was trying to get out an aesthetic that I had in my mind.

These didn't happen all at once.

It was me iterating each time until I ultimately abandoned this particular canvas, feeling like there was too much anchoring bias to where it had started.

And with each iteration, I wasn't feeling like I was able to get it to go do something different enough.

Now, after a bunch of back and forth trying, I decided to try to take it in a fairly different direction, just to see if there was a better way to execute what was in my mind.

What was interesting is that when we landed on this style, it actually modified a little bit of the game mechanics that we had been exploring.

The game that started to emerge

was kind of a turn-by-turn strategy game of survival.

Your goal was to live through 30 of these very volatile years, having to make decisions in a variety of difficult scenarios, using every tool in your toolbox from bribery to deceit to even actions more dramatic to survive and thrive in Renaissance Florence.

From here, there was a bit of interplay between Stitch and Gemini, where I would take something that Stitch had produced, ask Gemini to add some elements, and then ask Stitch to build those elements, or something like them, into the design system.

And in the same way that you saw Google AI Studio being proactive and suggesting next things that it could do, Stitch does that as well.

For example, the Codex page, the Diplomacy page, and the Inventory and Ledger page

all came about after it said, do you want me to design the rest of these pages that we need to get the game ready to go?

Once again, when we were ready, we pressed Export and Build with AI Studio, and it brought everything in.

Now, this was a more complex build, but it still honestly just handled it.

And what we added in Google AI Studio was not only making the thing actually work,