AI Use Disclosure
One pair of hands and plenty of help
The Long Watch is made by one person. Much of it is built with AI — and I’d rather tell you plainly than let you guess.
You’ll see “we” across this site. The plainer truth is it’s one person and AI doing a lot of the work. I don’t hide that in the game, the words, or the art — so here it is, set down plainly.
The game
The Long Watch is a wide, complicated world for one person to tend, so I build it with AI — it does a lot of the building and works through the hard parts with me. The design is mine, though: what the world is, how it should feel, what stays and what goes. The decisions are mine and so is the responsibility for them. AI helps me make the game; it doesn’t decide what the game is.
What you’ll actually play isn’t run by AI. The world turns on plain simulation and rules I wrote — weather, soil, the food webs that tie it together — and the creatures act on drives you can read and follow: hunger, warmth, the pull to carry a lineage on. You can usually tell why something happened. Nothing in there is a black box watching back.
The art
This website is its own thing, made the same honest way. The concept art is AI-generated — every image — and labelled “concept art · pre-alpha” wherever it appears. It’s the look I’m working toward and the picture I draw from while the game’s own art is still being made — not a screenshot and not the finished thing.
The words
The Field Notes start in my real development logs — the long, messy record of what I built, broke, and learned. AI reads through all of it, works out what’s worth telling, and writes the first draft. Then I go over every one by hand before it goes up. The work it describes is real, and the voice is mine to answer for.
This page and the code under the site are written much the same way — most of it by AI, with me deciding what belongs, reading it over, and choosing what ships. It works fast. The care and the last word are mine.
None of this is a secret to keep. If how I lean on these tools changes, I’ll update this page first — same as the privacy policy and just as plainly. The watch is kept by one person, with a great deal of help, in the open.
Questions? Write to hello@thelongwatch.world.