How AI was used

Drop Gambit is made by one person, Gamehost, with generative AI tools doing most of the hands-on work. Nobody required us to be this detailed. We think players deserve to know.

Short answer

The code, the graphics and the music were made with AI tools. The game is the human author's. The idea, the rules, the look, the priorities and every decision about what goes in or stays out came from the author, who directed the tools step by step, checked the results, rejected and corrected them, and tested the game on real hardware.

So is Drop Gambit "made by AI"? It is not a game an AI came up with or made on its own. It is a game designed and directed by a person, and built with AI tools. Without the author there would be no game to build; without the tools one person would not have built this much in this time.

The human author

• The game itself: the choice to make a modern game inspired by Bolo Ball (1992) by William Soleau, whose core rules it follows closely, and how Drop Gambit plays, looks and feels.
• Every rule decision. The AI tools are told not to invent rules but to ask. The author decides.
• Product decisions: Steam first, multiplayer between Steam friends, controller support through Steam Input, the browser version kept as a small extra.
• Look, feel and sound: the visual style and the themes, the key layout, accessibility choices such as Reduce motion and no blinking, and the direction for the music.
• Testing: playing the game and testing it on real hardware. The AI tools cannot see or hear the game; the author does.
• Direction and review: choosing what to work on, giving the instructions, reviewing the results and deciding what stays. The code was also cross-checked by having several different AI models review it.

The AI tools

• Code: all of the game's code was written by Claude (Anthropic) through Claude Code, from the author's instructions: the rules engine, the board generator, the computer opponent, drawing, menus, the desktop version, the Steam integration, the build tools and the tests.
• Graphics: every image, in the game, on the store page and on this website, is drawn by program code written by Claude. No image-generation models were used.
• Music: the soundtrack, "Every Drop Is a Gambit" with its lyrics and its variants, was generated with Suno, an AI music generator, from the author's prompt. The first result was close to final and needed little change. The sound effects are synthesised by code written by Claude.
• Reviews: four other AI models (ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok) reviewed the project and suggested improvements. Their claims were checked against the code, and the author decides what is used.

The original music prompt, word for word:

I need "main menu" music for my new game "Drop Gambit", It has retro feel from early 1992, arcade like where two players compete. Chorus should be "Every drop is a gambit.". In game player drops ball/orb down with gravity, goal is to get is as far as possible, or use tactics to get most score. Song should have this competitive feel, but also casual and relaxing at same time, distant electric guitar riffs, with steady bassline, almost as dreamy, but get little more power by end.

What is not AI

• The computer opponent is not generative AI. Easy, Normal and Hard are a classic game-tree search written as ordinary code. No language model, no machine learning.
• Nothing is generated while you play. The game contains no AI model and sends nothing to any AI service. All AI-made content was created during development.

Why we tell this

Many players care about how games are made, and they have a right to know. We could have said less. We would rather say it plainly than have it discovered. The aim was to make a good game that one person could not otherwise have finished. The decisions, the taste and the responsibility for the result are the author's.