Not on the list: Turned away at the door for using AI
It shouldn't have come as a surprise. There's corners of the internet where AI-assisted work isn't welcome; it's important to respect their wishes.
Hello hello, it's been a while. After feeling smug about building a perfectly serviceable website with AI assistance, I decided to tackle another grand project.
Partnering with Claude, I made a video game for the PICO-8 Fantasy Console called BIG LIZARD. And let me tell ya, it was an absolute joy to design, play-test and chisel away at this thing. I'll be writing more about the development process soon.
But when it was time to ship the game to the PICO-8 community forum for their collective appraisal, a new development scuppered my plans.
An update to their Terms of Use on 22 June 2026 bans the submission of cartridges whose code was written by AI. And yes, the code for BIG LIZARD was definitely written by AI.
I found myself in a bit of a pickle.
Describing the game, briefly
In BIG LIZARD, you play a fire-breathing creature who's lost, alone, and hungry. You stumble across a valley filled with sheep, guarded by a trio of dozy shepherds. It's time for a BAA-B-Q!
Except for one little snag: these sheep belong to someone else...
This is a classic test of skill based on the arcade games of yesteryear. The sheep wander in random directions across the lanes above you. Shoot as many as you can for a score multiplier, dodge the farmhands as they try to stop you, and beat your own high score before an angry rival turns up to stomp on your head.
That's BIG LIZARD in summary. Hand-drawn sprites with a rudimentary soundtrack, and mechanics of play carefully tuned over many late nights and weekends. I loved every minute.
Hand-drawn sprites in PICO-8. Not bad for an amateur!
Who wrote what?
The full disclosure is that I didn't write the code which underpins the game. I couldn't have. PICO-8 utilises a programming language called Lua, of which I have no prior familiarity.
But I did design BIG LIZARD. The art, the concept, and every gameplay decision were mine alone.
The Lua underneath, the game logic, the sound effects and the music, was written by an AI working to a specification I set. And we went back and forth over every decision before committing anything to code.
From my perspective it was a fascinating process: choosing what stays in, what ideas are put aside, working within the rigid constraints of the platform.
It was also woefully inefficient. The game went through roughly 150 different prototype builds before I judged it was ready to ship. Another story for another time.
But for the purposes of this post, the only statement that matters: the code is AI-authored, yes, but the creative steer came from a human.
What changed
On 22 June Lexaloffle updated its Terms of Use with a new section on generative AI.
Content containing the output of AI models trained on the work of "uncredited authors" may no longer be posted to the BBS.
The wording is specific about what it covers. Not just labels, graphics and audio, but cartridge source code and the text of forum posts as well.
So the source code of my game fits exactly into the category the new clause is singling out.
There is a grandfather carve-out, but it only covers small portions of genAI output, disclosed, in carts posted before the change.
BIG LIZARD is fully AI-coded. FAIL.
And even if it had been submitted before the rule change, the AI component is far more extensive than its terms would permit. Another FAIL.
Fair enough
The annoying thing is that the rule is right. It bans the output of AI models which have been trained on other people's work without their consent.
Those people are more or less who the new rule is for. Hobby pixel artists, chiptune makers, folk posting their carts for no reason other than to share the joy of creativity and education. There's a clash between the fundamental rights of creators to control their own labour and the legal concept of fair use, and the folks maintaining PICO-8 are entitled to take a stand.
I'm being transparent about it. My personal predicament is that I don't know how to write Lua. So I reached for AI because otherwise the game would never have progressed further than a sketch in a notebook.
The moderators at PICO-8 can rightly say that misses the point. What they object to is the use of the tool itself. I don't have much of a defence.
I'm especially proud of the "game over" screen, sandwiching a little diorama between the words.
The part that stings
I will fully abide by the new rules of the PICO-8 community (and will blog about it, too) but there's a sting in the tail.
Not being able to submit BIG LIZARD to the cart library means not having access to SPLORE, the cart browser built into PICO-8 itself.
SPLORE is an important discovery channel that ships with the machine, the place a player scrolls through carts without ever opening a web browser.
Nothing off-platform is going to be as effective as that. And it wasn't just about reach, either. I wanted the game to exist inside the ecosystem that inspired it.
The reroute
BIG LIZARD is now being hosted on itch.io instead. This is where a huge number of indie games are distributed and shared in any case (and it has a strong track record on social justice, too). It's just not the place where I planned on setting out my wares.
itch.io doesn't ban AI content, but it does ask you to disclose it. Tick the field, flag the code as AI-assisted, done. The sprites, the map, the sound and the music are all hand-authored and carry no disclosure burden. Only the Lua does, and I'm in no position to be coy about its origins.
The web build plays in the browser. Native builds are tagged for Windows, Linux and macOS, with the Raspberry Pi zip and the raw p8.png left as plain downloads for the people who know what to do with them.
The disproportion is the funny part. A serious rule with a serious purpose, and the first thing it snags in my corner of the world is a game about a fire-breathing lizard torching sheep for points. I understand why the rule exists. I’m just not sure where that leaves work like this.
BIG LIZARD is available now at woollybully.itch.io/biglizard. Please do take it for a spin and leave a comment, I'd love to hear your feedback.
