Why I'm building Chunkyard

Who I am

My name's Jason. Like a lot of people, I grew up on Minecraft, Zelda, and Pokémon, and I always wanted to make a game of my own. But making a game means learning to program, draw, compose music, and tell a compelling story. Any one of those takes years. I put my years into the story and programming side building Campfire, which has helped over a million novelists write their stories.

Chunkyard is the tool I wanted as a kid. All you need to do is come up with the story and have a strong vision for how the game should play. Chunkyard is the brush you can use to make your vision real.

Why it isn't AI slop

I know how a lot of people feel about AI, and much of the time I feel the same way. Lots of AI art is bad, and most AI-made games are sloppy demos. I want Chunkyard games to be better than that.

• Your game runs on a real engine. The AI doesn't write your game's code. Chunkyard has its own engine for 2D top-down games, with farming, crafting, combat, caves, day and night, and seasons. Your game is a set of files that describe its creatures, items, maps, and rules, and the engine plays them. When you ask the chat for a change, it edits those files, the same ones you can edit yourself.
• The art is pixel art, made pixel by pixel. Chunkyard doesn't shrink a Midjourney image down to size. It draws each sprite on a pixel grid using a text model and some clever programming, in the palette and style you set for your game, then looks at the result and revises it several times. Animations are smooth and the artwork is clean.
• You decide what goes in. Nothing lands in your game until you approve it. Redraw a sprite with notes, edit it by hand, or throw it out.
• The game is yours. It's a folder on your computer. Export it for Windows, macOS, Linux, or the web, then share it or sell it. Your players don't need Chunkyard, an account, or an internet connection.

AI helps out with the parts you can't do yourself yet. The ideas, the taste, and the calls about what's fun are all yours.

Why it'll help you make good games

At the end of the day, individual lines of code or strokes of a brush don't make a game fun. It's the higher level stuff, the greater vision. Chunkyard makes it easy to focus on that. It also means you can make a game for someone. A dungeon crawler starring your friends, a farming sim for your partner, a creature collector for your kids. And if you make something great, you can put it out for everyone.

Of course, at some point, Chunkyard becomes too restrictive. If you're looking to do everything down to the finest level of detail, stick to Unity or similar.

I'm one person building this, and I want to build it with the people who use it. If you have an idea, or something breaks, email me at [email protected].

Get notified when Chunkyard launches.

— Jason