How this was made
Chromewar is a browser game made by one person with help from software. This page says which parts are written by hand, which are generated, what made them and under what terms. It is kept current with the game.
The story
The story is text, written in advance and edited by hand. It is drafted by the author working with an AI writing assistant, then read, cut and rewritten line by line before it goes in. Nothing in the story is generated while you play. Every scene, choice, reply and notebook line you see exists as a file in the game, and the same words are shown to every player who reaches them.
The rules the writing follows are plain: present tense, no thoughts, no feelings told to you, nothing the narrator could not have seen. Children appear in the story as children who run for gangs, because that is the city it is set in. No violence is shown in detail.
The pictures
Every scene plate, portrait and card is generated from a written description, chosen from several renders and sometimes corrected by hand. No photograph of a real place is used. The models are open weights run on the author's own machine:
- Flex.1-alpha by ostris, released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Most plates and portraits.
- Z-Image-Turbo by Tongyi-MAI, released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Cards, the open-sky plates and the open-sky pictures on this site, including the city picture at the top.
- SDXL-Turbo by Stability AI, under its own community licence, used in the earliest rounds for a handful of early portraits.
Every picture then passes through one colour grade and a little film grain, so renders from different models sit in the same light.
One character's portrait was built from a photograph of a real person who agreed to it in writing. Their name appears nowhere in the game. No other likeness of a living person is used, on purpose or by prompt.
The music
The music is generated, one piece per district, from written descriptions of mood and instruments. It is made with ACE-Step by the ACE-Step team, released under the Apache 2.0 licence, and ACE-Step 1.5, released under the MIT licence. No recorded music by anyone is sampled.
The voices
The narrator and the characters are synthetic voices. They are made with Chatterbox by Resemble AI, released under the MIT licence. The narrator's voice was shaped from short public-domain LibriVox readings, never from a living actor. The other voices were built from voices that are themselves synthetic, made with Kokoro, released under the Apache 2.0 licence, so there is no human in that chain at all. No actor's voice is cloned.
The game
The rules, the numbers and the code are written by hand with the same assistant, and tested by the author. There are no purchases in the game. The game does not use dark patterns on purpose: a clock on the wall tells you when a date passes and what passing it costs, and the darkest choice in a scene is never the best paid one.
Questions
If you think something on this page is wrong, or you recognise a voice or a face that should not be here, it will be looked at first and argued about second. A contact address for that goes on this page at launch.