Why I used AI

One person, a 1993 classic, and the tools that made it possible

I built Known World Empires with AI on purpose. Without it, this remake would not exist.

The original Fantasy Empires was made by a team at Silicon Knights and SSI: designers, programmers, an artist, composers and producers. Rebuilding it with new code, art, music and voices is the same scale of work. So I counted everything the remake contains and priced it at normal market rates. A paid team would cost about $2.3 million, roughly 14 person-years.

I don't have that money, and this game can't earn any. It's a free fan remake of a game I don't own, and one letter from a rights holder could take it down. Nobody funds a team on those terms, and I wouldn't ask artists, composers and actors to work for free on it.

AI let me do the work of that team myself. I designed the game, directed every asset, playtested every build and threw out a lot of work that wasn't good enough. If I ever make an original, commercial game, paying people is how it should work.

M.D. Scur

The numbers

What a paid team would cost

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If we had paid a team: about $2.3 million, about 14 person-years, ranging from $0.7 million to $5.2 million. Where the money would go: programming 56%, design, QA and production 23%, art 17%, audio 4%. Art and audio cost by line item, mid estimate. A 10-person studio would need about 17 months; one person directing AI took weeks. What's in the game: counts of code, sprite sets, portraits, illustrations, 3D structures, music and voice lines. Why not hire a team? It can't earn money, it can be pulled any day, and free labor isn't fair.

Use the arrow keys or swipe.

How the estimate was made

The fine print

What was counted

  • Everything made for the remake as of November 2026: code, sprites, portraits, illustrations, 3D structures, music, voice lines and sound effects.
  • Free and public-domain assets and the data imported from your own copy of the original are left out.
  • Low, middle and high estimates run from offshore freelancers to senior US contractors.

What wasn't

  • Rejected art rounds, redone effects and dropped prototypes. Counting them would push every number up.
  • Lines of code were trimmed by 30%, since a human team might write the same features in less code.
  • The original game's budget was never published, so the comparison is by team roles, not dollars.

Rates come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the GDC 2025 salary survey, and published freelance and studio rate guides for music, voice, sound, 2D and 3D art.

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