Viral Indie Slammed For Gen AI Use Is "Real, In-Engine UE5.4 Work", Says Dev

Over the last few days, a trailer for action-adventure indie title Fallen has gone viral. Inspired by Hyper Light Drifter and Death's Door, except "filtered through a biblical lens," the trailer quickly did the rounds on social media for its blatant use of generative AI, earning the scorn of viewers.

While the game's creators, Superboo Studios, have openly admitted to using generative AI for "QA, 2D animation of painted stills, level prototyping, lore management, and more," founder, director, producer, and writer Brooke Burgess has sought to clarify the situation with us at TheGamer, saying that the "gameplay, environments, cinematics, and combat, is real, in-engine UE5.4 work."

Fallen Is Kind Of An AI Game, But Kind Of Isn't, Implies Developer

"I'm not waving the flag of AI by any stretch," Burgess told GamesIndustry.Biz last week, when detailing the struggles of raising capital to create an indie game in today's market. "I'm not going to sell my soul and be like, 'Yeah, I'll do it by myself, let me prompt this whole game into existence'. No, I want to work with really talented people and make something cool. But if integrating it in a way that doesn't affect creativity, but helps to save a little bit of money and gets the game out there to people, and gives us a chance to make something cool and memorable, and then make something else after that – it's something I have to factor in," he continued.

He told the website that "every publisher" he spoke to asked him how he planned to save money by using the much-maligned tech, and it's something he's had to juggle. However, after the trailer's release, it seems he'd have been better off leaving it out.

Fallen's trailer, uploaded to IGN's YouTube channel, has received widespread backlash and has been described by commenters as being "so AI-generated it's disgusting." It wasn't meant to be like this, though.

What ended up being shared as an 'official trailer' was actually our early dev 'tone pitch'.

"I think most of the confusion boils down to context," Burgess tells me. "What ended up being shared as an 'official trailer' was actually our early dev 'tone pitch', i.e., a work-in-progress UE5 teaser designed for funding discussions. There are [AI-Generated] placeholders in there, specifically some 2D test assets used to explore mood and presentation (for example, how 'lost souls' and fallen angels in the game might react when spoken to and judged, along w/ WIP HUD elements). That material was never intended as final content, nor as a statement on how the shipped game would be made."

Burgess says that everything else in the trailer, including the gameplay, environments, cinematics, and combat, is "real, in-engine UE5.4 work" adding that, "All writing is mine (no LLMs), all audio is bespoke, VO is from my colleague Kasper Michaels, and all creative support + implementation was done in close collaboration with my lead."

While Burgess' words seem sincere, it's hard to look past the blatant AI use not only in the video but also in the game's pitch deck, a presentation designed to help sell the game to publishers. The deck is littered with AI images, and although there is an impetus placed on the studio having a "stable, multirole team," the presentation suggests it will lean heavily into the tech.

In the budget breakdown, Superboo Studios says it will be "Leveraging AI and pre-fab tools to streamline world-building, animation, and localization," and in an earlier slide, it talks about how AI will be used as a "Force Multiplier," whatever that means.

Burgess says the furor over the placeholder generative AI content has meant the game "briefly escaped the context it was meant to live in," something we're likely to see plenty of as AI becomes more prominent in video games. Last year, 11 Bit Studios accidentally left traces of generative AI in its survival hit The Alters, Ubisoft left AI art in Anno 117, and similar placeholder text was spotted in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, causing the game to be stripped of its Indie Game of the Year.