40 Questions Game Developers Should Ask Before Trusting AI
When you paste Copilot code into your engine or feed a design brief to ChatGPT, you are outsourcing a decision that shapes your game. Asking the right questions before you accept that output protects both your understanding of your own systems and your game's ability to feel like yours.
These are suggestions. Use the ones that fit your situation.
1Can you trace why Copilot chose this algorithm over three other valid approaches, or are you accepting it because it compiles?
2If this AI-generated function breaks in six months, do you have enough understanding of it to fix it yourself, or will you need to ask the AI again?
3Does this code follow your studio's existing patterns, or does it solve the problem in a way that only the AI understands?
4Have you checked whether ChatGPT's explanation of its own code is accurate, or are you trusting the explanation without reading the implementation?
5Is this generated code faster because it is genuinely more efficient, or faster because you did not have to think through the trade-offs?
6What happens to your codebase if your team leaves and new developers inherit functions they cannot reason about?
7Does this solution scale to the scope your game will reach, or is it optimised for a small example that Copilot saw in training data?
8Could you write or rewrite this function if you needed to, or has the AI become the only person who understands how it works?
9Are you using AI code generation because it is the right tool for this task, or because it is faster than thinking through the architecture yourself?
10If you removed all AI-generated code from your project right now, how many systems would become unmaintainable?
Asset Creation and Visual Identity
11When you generate assets with Midjourney or DALL-E, are you making specific artistic choices in the prompt, or are you settling for the first acceptable output?
12Does your game look like your game, or does it look like the average output of whatever model everyone else is using?
13Can you describe the visual principles that define your game's aesthetic, or would that description equally apply to three other AI-generated indie games?
14Are you using AI generation because your artist left the team, or because it is genuinely faster than human creation at the quality your game needs?
15If you put your AI-generated assets next to hand-crafted ones from your earlier projects, is the difference noticeable to a player?
16How many iterations did you do with the AI tool before accepting an asset, and were you chasing perfection or just moving forward?
17Do your generated assets tell a story about who made your game, or do they tell a story about which AI tool you chose?
18When you generated these assets, did you make intentional constraints in your prompts, or did you let the model decide what freedom to take?
19Could you reproduce the exact look of your generated assets if you needed to change them, or would you have to regenerate and hope for something similar?
20Are your environments instantly recognisable as part of your game, or could they appear in someone else's project without anyone noticing?
NPC Behaviour and Game Design
21When Inworld AI generates NPC dialogue, does it match how your characters speak in the story you wrote, or does it sound like a generic version of that character?
22Are your NPCs behaving in ways that create memorable moments players will talk about, or behaving in safe, predictable ways that satisfy the design brief?
23If you removed the AI-assisted behaviour from a key NPC, would the player experience change, or would the game play almost identically?
24Did you decide that an NPC should act a certain way because it served your story, or because ChatGPT suggested it and you agreed?
25Can you explain the decision logic of your AI-assisted NPC to a designer who has never seen it, or does it only make sense inside the black box?
26Are your level design decisions coming from your understanding of pacing and player challenge, or from an AI tool optimising for 'engagement metrics'?
27Does your game have moments that contradict the rules because you chose to break them for emotional effect, or does the AI prevent rule-breaking?
28When you used AI to assist with quest design, did it create quests that could only happen in your game, or quests that feel interchangeable with other games?
29If an AI tool suggested your game's final boss encounter, what would your game lose if you designed it yourself instead?
30Are your design decisions now optimised for what AI can help you execute, rather than optimised for what your game needs?
Creative Direction and Studio Identity
31Does your studio have a recognisable style that persists across projects, or has that style become blurred as you share AI tools with other studios?
32When you look at your game's design decisions, how many of them came from your intentional creative direction and how many came from AI suggestions?
33Could a player recognise your game as your game by looking at screenshots alone, or could those screenshots come from any competent studio using the same tools?
34Are you making creative bets on unusual ideas that might fail, or playing it safe with AI-assisted decisions that will probably work?
35If you pitched your game concept five years ago before AI tools existed, would you still make the same creative choices, or has AI access changed what you think is possible?
36Who on your team owns each major creative decision in the game, and could they justify why that decision was right if you removed the AI recommendation?
37Are your art direction, design philosophy, and narrative voice distinct from other games made in 2024, or just competently executed?
38When you brief your team on a project, do you describe the creative vision in your own words, or do you mostly describe how the AI tools will help execute it?
39What aspect of your game could you not make without AI assistance, and is that because the idea was genuinely impossible or because you have outsourced the skill?
40If AI tools disappeared tomorrow and you had to remake your current game without them, how much of the creative direction would you have to rewrite because you forgot how to make those decisions?
How to use these questions
Keep a private log of every major AI suggestion you accepted and rejected. Six months later, review which decisions made your game better and which made it indistinguishable from others. You will see patterns in what the AI is good at hiding from you.
Before you accept AI-generated code, spend thirty minutes rewriting it yourself and compare your version to the AI version. You will learn what you are losing when you skip this step.
Assign one person on your team to be the 'translator' for each AI tool. They own the prompts, they understand the outputs, and they explain to the rest of the team what the AI actually did. This prevents the black box from spreading through your codebase and design.
Once a sprint, review one piece of AI-generated content in your game and ask: Could a player tell this was made by AI? If the answer is yes, you have a consistency problem. If you cannot answer the question, you have a comprehension problem.
Write down the creative decisions that made your previous games memorable. Check whether you are still making those kinds of decisions, or whether AI assistance has nudged you toward safer, more generic choices. If you notice the drift, course-correct deliberately.