Our Stance on AI

There's something we've been avoiding writing for a while, because the topic is loud and most takes online are bad. But we'd rather you hear it from us than read between the lines of our silence.

Yes - AnkleBreaker Studio uses AI. A lot of it. Deeply.

Not because we're cutting corners. Because it lets a small studio do what wasn't possible before.

The honest version

We are 10 people. We work like a team of 60.

That's not a metaphor. Every person on this team had over a decade of professional engineering experience before AI tools became serious. We knew exactly how long it took to ship a feature, build a graphics pipeline, design a system, iterate on it. Then the tools shifted. Work that used to take three engineers and two months started taking one engineer and a week - with better quality, not worse.

We could pretend that didn't happen. A lot of studios our size do. We've watched developer after developer in this industry quietly use these tools and then publicly distance themselves from the discourse, because the backlash on AI in games has been brutal. Indie studios have been review-bombed for it. Some have been forced to scrub mention of it from their marketing.

We're not going to do that. We'd rather be the studio that tells you the truth on day one than the studio that gets caught later.

This isn't the vibe-coder crowd. We're not the people typing "make me a game" into a prompt box and pushing whatever falls out. We're senior engineers using these tools the way a senior engineer uses any tool - with judgment, with taste, with a decade of scar tissue telling us when something is wrong even when it looks right.

What we actually use it for

Plain version, no buzzwords:

• Tools and tech. Internal pipelines, build infrastructure, engine glue, automation. The connective tissue that nobody sees but that decides whether a small team ships or burns out.
• Code quality. Senior engineers reviewing, refactoring, and pressure-testing each other's work - with AI partners doing one more pass before things merge. Test coverage and defect rate have never been better.
• Graphics and systems R&D. Faster iteration on ideas that would have died on a whiteboard a few years ago because there wasn't time to prototype them.
• Multiplying our craft, not our headcount. The whole point. Each of us ships what five or six of us used to ship. The standard goes up, not down.

What we don't use it for: handing over the direction. Yes, we use AI for parts of art, parts of writing, parts of voice - all the disciplines the discourse gets loudest about. We don't pretend otherwise. The tools amplify the team; they don't replace taste, design judgment, or the call on what's worth building. That part is still us. It always will be.

Why we went quiet on Mithrall

This is the other half of the conversation, and it's connected.

The version of Mithrall on Steam right now is, in theory, shippable. We built most of it before AI tools mattered. We could push the button. A lot of studios in our position would have.

We chose not to.

When agentic AI tools got serious around September of last year, we had a choice: ship a finished game that was fine, or rebuild systems from the bottom up and ship something we'd actually be proud of as players ourselves. Because that's the bias we never let go of - we're gamers first, developers second.

We picked the rebuild. We're still in the rebuild. Mechanics, graphics, systems, polish - everything is being raised.

That's why you haven't heard from us for a year. Not because we vanished. Because we were heads-down doing work that, frankly, would have taken us four more years at our previous pace. The gap between "what we had" and "what's possible now" was too big to ignore.

We don't have the funding to scale the team 10x. We don't need to. We're already doing the work of a team that size - without the burn rate, without the politics, without the diluted vision that comes from a roster that big. That's the bet. So far it's paying off.

Breaking the silence

VinnareGaming on YouTube recently put a spotlight on Mithrall, and we've seen a wave of new faces and familiar ones showing up in our community. Thank you. Genuinely.

We owed you an update. This is part of it.

We're not going to overhype. We've watched too many games get destroyed by premature reveals and roadmap whiplash. What we'll say is this:

• The next phase of work is going beyond great.
• Real announcements are coming over the next few months.
• We're not slowing down.

If you've been waiting on Mithrall, you waited for a reason. The version you'll meet next is the version we'd want to play.

Thank you for following us. We'll keep showing up - honestly, transparently, and with the work to back it up.

• François

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P.S.

To reflect everything we just wrote, we have a new trailer coming. CGI and AI both. Yes, we used AI for parts of it. Yes, we already know that's going to upset some people. We're posting it anyway, because the trailer represents the real vision of what we're building right now, and that's the only standard that matters to us.

This whole article was about being honest with you. The trailer is the next chapter of that.

More soon.