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Production has kicked into gear on what I have been affectionately calling "Astro Bot and Breaking Gaming's Fourth Wall."¹ I spent the last two mornings working on title ideas and thumbnail concepts as per the advice I talked about in letter 44. Let's get the titles out of the way, that's a much shorter story.

• We Need to Redefine the Fourth Wall
• How Devs Break the Fourth Wall to Talk to You
• Why Devs Break the Fourth Wall
• When Devs Break the Fourth Wall
• Why Fourth Wall Breaks are Unforgettable
• Fourth Wall Breaks are...Broken
• Why do Games Break the Fourth Wall?

I hope it's obvious that I am planning on talking about the Fourth Wall and its implementation in games. I've found wonderful research and have a big fat lists of examples I came up with to use. It excites me.

For the thumbnail, I had/have a very clear idea of a character breaking the glass of a screen. It's simple, direct, and has potential to be intriguing if paired with the right title. Given Astro Bot inspired this whole essay, I wanted to start with him and what I really needed was a transparent glass texture.

Yeah...it wasn't a great start. From the "transparent" images in Google Search to the obscene prices for licensing, I was out of luck from the jump. Then I saw on one of the stock sites that AI-generated options could be filtered out. Well, why don't I just make one that way then?

I went first to Gemini since I pay for Google's tier and was semi-surprised that it flopped hard. It grabbed things from ShutterStock and wouldn't generate an image for me. I asked how to use Google's Imagen and it gave me a fake URL to an image it never generated. Later, it made me a transparent texture—checkerboarding and all.

I pivoted to the free tier of chatGPT and was immediately impressed with the guidance. A much better experience; that is until I ran out of daily generations right when I was getting the sort of texture I wanted. When I asked for variants, it generated them on top of an AI-version of Astro Bot, after making four textures like requested. It's remarkable how literal you must be with these LLMs.

Anyway, this morning I got a couple of textures that seemed satisfactory to me and I melded them together in Pixelmator Pro, threw on some effect, and made solid drafts, I think!

So why go through all this instead of just grabbing something off Google? Peace of mind and some tiny semblance of control. I don't have to worry about violating some license agreement, even if I am never actually pursued. I got to kind of get a version I like; certainly more than the ones off Google Image Search. Am I breaking some sort of moral artist contract by using AI-generation for a broken glass texture? I don't think so.

There was no other feasible, timely option for me. I spent my time mostly waiting for tokens to flip back on so I could make more. If I wasn't interrupted by a limit, I would have had this done yesterday morning when I started. That's empowering, especially in this conceptual phase.

Now I can get to the writing in earnest.

Until next time...