How This Was Made
A person designed this island, its five regions, its prices and its pace, and an AI did most of the typing. Not one picture in it was drawn by an AI.
By Adrian Bezalel. Last updated 17 October 2026.
Who did what
| Part | Made by |
|---|---|
| Design | Adrian, by hand: the loop of gather, make and sell, every price, every pace, tuned a number at a time in the game's own editor. |
| Code and menus | AI, to Adrian's direction, sent back until it played right, and checked by tests that walk the island in a real browser. |
| Pictures | Free 3D models by the people listed below, rendered into sprites. The ground, sky, water and people are shapes the game draws for itself. |
| Sound | Oscillators and noise, synthesised as you play. There is no audio file in the game. |
| Words | Written with AI to Adrian's brief, then cut and corrected by him. |
Directed, not delegated
Directed. The creator gives an outline, and the draft is done with AI, based on guidelines from the author's own work and style. Everything the AI gives is reviewed and approved by the creator, edited and regenerated to fit the outline and vision.
Take the AI away and the game is still standing there, waiting for somebody to type it: a floating town with five regions round it, a walk out to the sheepfold and an armful of fleece carried back to the spinning shed, a first helper who costs one trip to market, and a house on the street for every hire. That is design, and all of it came before the first line of code. The choice was never this game or a hand-coded one. It was this game or none.
The AI that wrote the code learned from a great deal of public code and writing, and people disagree in good faith about whether that is fair. This page will not settle it. It tells you what was used, so you can decide before you spend an evening on the island rather than after.
Everything it is built from
| Used | For |
|---|---|
| Kenney's 3D kits | Every building, tree, rock, tool, good, boat and pier, kitbashed from the Nature, Holiday, Fantasy Town, Pirate, Survival, Food, Graveyard, Tower Defense, Mini Dungeon and Minigolf kits and the Weapon Pack, taken from this mirror. CC0. |
| Low Poly Sheep | The flock on the Plains, by The_Cyborg_Lord. CC BY 4.0. |
| Gold, by Poly by Google | The Mountains' ore and ingots, recoloured to iron. CC BY 3.0. |
| game-icons.net | The action buttons, by Lorc, Delapouite and the site's other artists, under the same CC BY 3.0. |
| Tabler Icons | The job marks on the hiring squares, and the shovel. MIT. |
| Atkinson Hyperlegible | The typeface, made by the Braille Institute for readers with low vision. SIL Open Font License. |
| Poppy 70s Continental | The lettering of the game’s name and its card titles. A face Adrian supplied. |
| Clouds | Cropped from a cloud pack Adrian supplied. |
| Claude Code | The AI that wrote the code. |
| three.js | Renders the 3D models into the sprite sheet, offline. |
| Playwright | Drives the browser tests. |
| Cloudflare Workers | Serves the site as plain files. Nothing runs on a request. |
Which model makes which building is in the full credits.