On generation and curation

The studio adopted an AI-curated visual pipeline today.

Midjourney generates the paintings. The studio writes the prompts, runs the §9 review, picks the keepers, composites into Unity, and ships. The decision is documented internally, dated, signed, with reversal conditions named so future-us can hold past-us to the reasoning. It applies to every title in the slate, not just Sira: The Companions.

This post is the honest version of why, what changes, and what doesn't. The studio's first principle is that every claim is something we can show; that includes claims about how the work is made.

Why now

Three things converged.

Cost. Real hand-painted commissions for the Sira slice run twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars. The studio is one person on bootstrap income. That budget does not exist in Year One and will not until Kickstarter or PIF money lands in Year Two. The honest options were: spend a year raising before any visible art ships; release something visibly worse than the studio's voice promises; or change the pipeline.

Speed. A real commission cycle runs four to eight weeks per piece. The slice has eight scopes minimum. Yesterday the studio generated the equivalent corpus in one working day with prompts anchored on GRIS, Persian Shahnameh, and Mughal-miniature reference points already in the studio's visual identity.

Quality. Several of the images that came out sit at the level we'd expect from a fifteen-hundred-dollar commission. The aesthetic register is coherent across the corpus once the prompt is dialed in. We rejected one image during review because its composition encoded the Prophet ﷺ's presence through a centered light source, exactly the §9 violation pattern the off-screen rule exists to prevent. The discipline worked. The pipeline produced something a reasonable person would want to play.

We sat with that for a few hours, then made the call.

What changes

Ship art for Sira: The Companions and every title that follows is generated by Midjourney v7 (and its successors) and curated by the studio. The workflow: write the prompt, generate four to sixteen variants, keep the strongest one or two, run the §9 review checklist on each kept image, composite into Unity. Same review discipline as a commissioned piece. The model is a tool, not a co-author.

When you see a screenshot from a DeenOD game, the painting underneath was generated by a machine learning model, and the choice of that painting over the dozens that surrounded it was the studio's. The composition you're looking at, the moment that was preserved, the figures' posture and palette, the §9-clean framing. Those are outputs of a curation process the studio is responsible for. The brushstrokes are not ours. The decision that you're looking at this brushstroke and not another one is.

What does not change

Everything else about the studio's craft is exactly as written.

The narrative is the studio's. Dialogue, character interiority, chapter structure, beat sheets, off-screen rule, source citations to Ibn Hisham and Ibn Kathir and the Sahihayn. Same human labor it was last week.

The Unity engineering is the studio's. Custom URP shaders that unify the painted look across generations, geometric pattern motion design, calligraphy reveal animations, architecture-as-UI menu framing, FMOD bus structure, silence-as-event handling. Bespoke studio code. No AI in any of it.

The audio is real. Real qaris with permission, named in the credits, never AI-generated, never modified pitch or tempo. Real musicians on oud, ney, qanun, riq. AI music is not used in any DeenOD title's core experience and will not be. Not negotiable.

The calligraphy is human. Arabic script that inscribes itself when the unseen speaks (La ilaha illa Allah, Ahad, Allahu Akbar) comes from working calligraphers with classical training. AI is unreliable with Arabic script, but more importantly the calligraphic tradition in the Islamic intellectual inheritance is itself sacred craft. There may never be a model trained on enough hand-prepared Thuluth and Diwani to deliver work the studio would trust to write the names that we write. The studio sources this work from human calligraphers and pays them. This is the hard line the visual pipeline does not cross.

The theological discipline is the studio's and the eventual scholar advisor's. Every kept image runs the §9 review checklist before it ships: no Prophet ﷺ depicted or implied, no figure in the masjid courtyard, no directional light pointing at where the unseen sits, no minarets in early-Madinan scenes, no Ottoman turbans in seventh-century Hijaz. The off-screen rule binds AI-generated images exactly the way it binds commissioned ones. No waiver, no looser review, no shortcut.

The hard part

Midjourney's training corpus was scraped from artists' work without their consent. The studio knows this. The same logic that says we use real qaris with permission, that we credit and pay calligraphers, that we respect the source, does not extend cleanly to image labor in this pipeline. There is a real inconsistency here, and the studio is not going to wave it away.

Tools with cleaner provenance exist. Adobe Firefly trained on licensed Adobe Stock. Public Diffusion. Their aesthetic ceiling today does not reach what Midjourney delivers. The studio is using the tool that produces the work we can ship, and we have accepted a provenance compromise to do that. If the ethically-trained tools reach Midjourney's quality bar, the studio moves. If a settlement or licensing model emerges that compensates the artists whose work trained these models, the studio participates. Until then, the inconsistency is on the record. It's in this post.

How we talk about this

Proactively, by name, in the open. The studio's /process page explains the pipeline at the level of detail a serious patron deserves: the tools, the workflow, the §9 discipline, the human contributions, the training-data acknowledgment. Every Steam page, every Apple Arcade listing, every press kit, every Kickstarter campaign discloses the AI pipeline on-page, not buried in a footer. Every game's credits and main menu carries a made-with line naming the tools.

The studio does not market the curation as if it replaces the brushwork. The studio names what each contribution actually is. The audience decides what they want to support.

What the craft is

The studio's craft is not the brushwork. The studio's craft is in the whole. The same way a film director does not personally operate every camera or paint every set, the studio's authorial responsibility is in the writing, the curation, the engineering, the theological discipline, the audio direction, the restraint, the off-screen rule, the choice of which moment to preserve and which to refuse.

A DeenOD game made under this pipeline is not "an AI game." It is a curated work whose visual surface is generated and selected. The studio carries responsibility for every frame the audience sees. If the work is good, credit belongs to the people who did the work: the writer, the engineer, the theologians, the calligraphers, the qaris, the musicians, and the model trained on labor that was not asked for. If the work fails, the responsibility is the studio's.

What this costs and what it gives

Some of the early audience is not going to stay for this. The studio names them with respect. They came to support what we said the studio was going to be (hand-painted in the literal sense) and we are going to be something different. If you're one of those readers, the unsubscribe link works without a guilt trip. The studio's first principle is honesty about what we are; we'd rather lose a patron honestly than keep one on a misrepresentation.

What it gives: the studio can actually ship. The slice can land in a year. The titles in the slate after Sira can be made by a team of three or six instead of needing thirty before any one of them can be funded. The economics that have kept Muslim independent games small and rare for two decades change. The binding constraint was the cost of original art at the bar a serious narrative game requires. The studio wants to find out what becomes possible when that cost no longer binds.

The studio is going to ship. The studio is going to disclose. Calligraphy stays human. Recitation stays human. Writing stays human. Theology stays human. The painting comes from a model, and the studio chooses which one of its outputs deserves to be looked at.

That's the work now. The next devlog is about a scene from Beat 1 of the Bilal chapter, and the painting in it will have been chosen this way. We'll tell you that, and we'll go from there.

Moody