Effective date: August 26, 2026 · Version 1.0.0
The short version. Nestling Studios uses AI tools every day to write code, draft text and plan our games, and a person reads and approves everything before it ships. We do not use generative AI to make art, animation, music, sound or voices, and we don't intend to. Nothing AI-powered runs inside our games, with one small exception we describe below: when you pick a display name, an AI model checks that it isn't obscene or hurtful. Beyond that name, your game data is not fed to AI tools.
We'd rather tell you ourselves than have you work it out from a tell in a sentence. AI is a normal part of how a very small studio builds and runs several games at once, and we think that's nothing to hide, but "we use AI" on its own tells you almost nothing. What matters is where. So this page says exactly where AI does and doesn't touch our work, and we'll change it here first if that ever changes.
Code. Most of the code behind our games, our servers and our build tools is written with AI coding assistants. A person directs the work, reviews it, tests it on real phones and is responsible for it, the same way any developer is responsible for code they ship. This is the single biggest way AI shows up at Nestling Studios, and it's why a tiny team can keep several games moving.
Writing. AI helps draft text: creature names and descriptions, dex entries, tutorial and menu copy, store listings, update notes and announcements. Every line players see has been read, edited where needed and approved by a human before it goes out. If a sentence in one of our games is awkward, that's on us, not the tool.
Planning, research and paperwork. Design documents, checklists, competitive research, store-submission and compliance work. AI drafts, we decide.
Testing and operations. Automated build pipelines, test suites, log analysis and bug triage. Tester feedback gets sorted with AI help; a person reads it and decides what to fix.
No generative-AI art, animation, music, sound effects or voice, in our games or in our marketing. This is a pledge, not a description of where we happen to be today.
Where our art and audio come from instead: it's drawn by hand by us; or it's procedural, meaning our own code draws it from shapes and rules (Socklings works this way, and that's arithmetic, not a trained model); or it comes from asset packs made by human artists, either openly licensed (CC0 or SIL Open Font License) or purchased for use in our games, and we credit them inside each game where the license calls for it. Any voice work will be recorded by real people who are paid for it.
If we ever change this pledge, we'll update this page before we ship anything that relies on the change, and we'll say so in the update notes of the game it affects.
No AI model ships inside any Nestling Studios game. There are no chatbots, no AI companions, and no content generated on the fly while you play. When a game feels random, that's ordinary game code and dice rolls on our servers, not a language model.
The one exception: display names. Our games are for a broad audience and your display name is visible to other players, so when you choose one, our server runs it through OpenAI's Moderation API, a classifier that scores text for things like sexual content, hate and harassment in any language or script. It returns scores, our server decides allow or block, and that's the whole job. We chose it because OpenAI documents that endpoint as free, storing nothing, and not used to train their models, and it's hosted in the United States. The app itself never talks to it; the only thing sent is the name you typed, with no account, device or gameplay information attached, and we don't keep a copy of the exchange on our side. It catches things a word list would miss, and it can occasionally get one wrong in either direction; if a name slips through, you can report it and we'll reset it.
Your data. Apart from that name check, your account and gameplay data live on our servers and are used to run the game, as described in each game's privacy policy. We don't send that data to AI tools and we don't train anything on it. If you write to us, we may use AI to help sort and draft a reply, and a person reads your message and sends every reply.
Where a store or platform asks developers to disclose AI use (for example Steam or itch.io), we answer in line with this page: AI-assisted code and text, no AI-generated art or audio, no AI-generated content at runtime, and one AI-backed display-name check on our server.
If something here is unclear, or you think one of our games doesn't match what this page says, tell us: ai@nestlingstudios.com. We'd like to know.
1.0.0 — August 26, 2026 — First published.