A website is born

Ylem’s Ink website started with a Claude Annual Pro subscription and a one year domain name and web hosting.

Three apps are currently up and running under my name. I have been a hobbyist game developer. All three are monetized, but only 2 with ads. When Ylem’s Ink was founded, the collective revenue of the 3 apps was about 9 cents advertising earned (with a minimum $100 required earnings before payout).

I write code and develop games. I love creating music. I detest the chore of marketing and putting in the long hours of “business” to do things right. Sales is work. Therefore; I have been happy to just create, and occasionally release, art on the web.

The coding was experiential learning. The experience of creating my own games in first Flash, then Unity and deploying them was invaluable towards my career. So much goes into developing a game. Project management was an unexpected skill I fine tuned as I worked on releasing those games, and project management is invaluable to anyone innovating.

When ChatGPT was released, at work we quickly picked up projects that involved AI. Although I found the tech fascinating, my news feed fed me a constant stream of negative AI stories. I was skeptical, unnerved. I rooted against it. Until.

I came to the conclusion that I could only remain relevant to the working world for about four years without embracing AI as a tool. I have more than 4 years until retirement. Just like how I learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ActionScript, etc… I needed a home project to really learn and understand the capabilities of AI.

Around the time of the initial dust up between the pentagon and Anthropic, I purchased a Claude Pro subscription to conduct an experiment in three phases: Update my Unity game that had fallen many versions behind, convert my old Flash Assets and ActionScript 3 code into Unity and create an entirely new game using AI.

Stack And Bomb, the Unity game, was saved from being removed from both app stores. Table Shuffleboard, the Flash game previously titled ShuffleGolf, was rereleased. I was two thirds of the way through the experiment when I decided to pause. Set up a website.

I have utilized Claude, a lot. Future blog posts will provide many more details. For now I will say that after 6 months of utilizing Claude I have decided to continue with the experiment and create a new game utilizing AI.

AI disclaimer: My blog is meant to be my own voice, my own writing, but I reserve the right to utilize AI even here. Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. Probably…

I will be utilizing summaries from AI as notes on my experience. Everything other than the blog will unapologetically have varying degrees of AI usage. Given the opportunity to do all of this with humans and 2019 technology I would strongly consider it, but I do not plan on raising any capital.

But first, the next few posts will be about my experience in the first two phases of the experiment.