Where the art comes from now

On 11 September I read the licence for the Unity Asset Store packs this game is built from, and stopped letting any AI look at them.

This project is made almost entirely by agents, and a lot of what they do is measure art. They section a mesh because its bounding box lied about a corridor. They read a grip off a weapon model, or scan prefabs to decide what may overlap what. The Standard Unity Asset Store EULA has a clause, 2.2.1.1(g), about using assets as inputs to AI. There's a narrow reading and a strict one. I can't confirm the narrow one, and I'd rather lose the convenience than rest the project on my reading of someone else's licence. So I took the strict one.

What the rule is, and isn't

Agents don't read pack content: meshes, textures, material internals, prefab files, or any render of them. That covers free packs too. File names, sizes and GUIDs are metadata and are fine, and so are measurements we had already recorded. When pack art matters, I look at it and describe it myself.

The rule doesn't stop the packs shipping. Shipping them is what the licence is for. And it lifts for any publisher who consents. Nobody has asked one yet, so that route stays open.

The cost is real: every pack is now a region of the project an agent can only ship blind.

Where the readable art comes from

A week later a survey sorted sources into two piles: ones an agent may read, and ones it may not.

• Kenney is CC0, and I already owned the whole library.
• Quaternius switched from CC0 to its own licence in late August. That licence was read at the source, and it has no AI clause. Copies downloaded before the change are still CC0.
• KayKit on itch.io is CC0.

The trap in that survey was one I would have walked into. The same asset can carry different terms depending on where it came from. KayKit's Adventurers are CC0 on itch and under the EULA on the Unity store: same art, same author. The store copy is unreadable and the itch copy isn't. Buying a publisher's packs direct doesn't necessarily help either, because some carry their own AI clause.

So every download gets its licence read at its own page and written into the asset catalogue. That has already mattered. The chest recording I found came from a mirror that credits a CC0 original on Freesound, and the catalogue says to cut from the original if the mirror's terms ever matter. One of the Biting sounds is a slice under a licence that isn't CC0 and isn't confirmed. It's flagged to check before anything ships.

Commissioning Astra

For what no readable source has, I commission. Astra is an agent that models in Blender to a written brief. The contract is a standing delivery standard: real units, matte materials, a README, a validation.json, confirmed and untested things kept under separate headings, and a render from a player's eye at 1.6 m and arm's reach. Every number in a brief cites where it came from, and the briefs ask Astra to correct our measurements, because it has before.

Six commissions landed on the afternoon of 26 September: the whetstone, the training post, the affix tells, the weapon treatments, the gem pickups and the vendor stall. A second batch brought the loot chests, thrown weapons, a raw whetstone and a chisel. Each delivery gets checked on our side before it's used. Files are hashed against Astra's manifest, the validation read, and every node checked against where the delivery says it is. The backpack check found that loading the material by name returned the model file's embedded copy, not the matte one. Four earlier packages had been loading the right material by luck, and a test now guards all of them.

The whetstone is the one that stuck with me. In the headset it was "a very precisely chiseled stone", and "the vein is not too bold. I really liked that detail... really sold it to me." The backpack was the first brief to ask for concepts before a model. Astra sent two and I chose the Field Folio. My verdict on the look was "it's created, so worst case we run into issues and decide to pivot."

Astra also surveyed the kits we already own: 58 kits, 2,435 pieces, 188 contact sheets. That changed two commissions before they were written. The graveyard area already has its landmark, so it needs neither tombstones nor another crypt. And the factory area's machine is on hold until we've tried building one from parts of two kits we own.

The skeleton that reads as a toy

The biggest gap in both games is enemies: an orc and two skeletons. Astra has never delivered an animated creature, and two planning documents independently said not to start there. Research went first instead: Grok surveyed CC0 sources, and on 27 September I downloaded four KayKit and two Quaternius packs, all CC0 by their own licence files. Claude checked the skeletons' rig and then imported one.

Rendered at our enemies' 1.8 m, its hips sit at 0.27 m, 15% of its height, and the head and helmet take the top 52%. From standing height at sword range you look down on a helmet over a stubby body. It reads as a toy, not a threat. I expected that, and the render decided it: not a regular enemy. The assets stay, for an NPC or an easter egg.

Experiment 2

This all bears on the next game too. On 27 September I decided that Experiment 2, the ARPG, will be single-player built on foundations that are ready for multiplayer, targeting PCVR. It forks the same template this one came from, and Experiment 1's systems get made liftable where they stand. As I put it, "the connections might be messy, as long as the system is re-used." The licence question is part of choosing its network stack now. One candidate's own download carries no AI clause, which means an agent can read it.

Still open

Enemies are unsolved for both games, and the first readable fantasy candidate didn't fit. No publisher has been asked for consent. And every one of Astra's deliveries is only as good as the check on our side.