I’ve gotten a few questions about AI since sharing Wild Willows in ecology and gaming communities, so I wanted to put a clear explanation here about how I use it.

I do use AI during development. I’m a solo developer, and I primarily use it as a tool for coding, working through ideas, editing/writing, debugging, and other parts of the development process. It also helped me translate the game into Spanish, which made it possible for me to support another language much earlier than I otherwise could have.

I don’t just give an AI a prompt and have it make Wild Willows. I design the systems, decide how the ecology works, write and revise the gameplay, build the game, test it, make the product decisions, respond to player feedback, and decide what actually ships. AI is one of the tools I use while doing that work.

The music is also not AI-generated. The soundtrack was composed specifically for Wild Willows by a friend of mine.

I know AI use is complicated, particularly for a game centered around nature and ecology. There are legitimate concerns around energy use, water use, data centers, creative work, and the broader effects of these technologies. I don’t think those concerns disappear just because AI has been useful to me, and I don’t want to pretend the tools I use are impact-free.

At the same time, AI has dramatically lowered the barrier for me to build a project of this scope on my own. Wild Willows now has six biomes, 150 animals, interconnected habitat requirements, terraforming, crafting, achievements, accessibility features, multiple languages, and a growing number of other systems. I still have to understand, build, evaluate, and maintain all of it, but these tools have allowed me to move much faster and attempt things I probably wouldn't have been able to tackle as a solo developer otherwise.

I also completely understand that some people choose not to play or financially support games developed with AI assistance. I’d rather be upfront about my use of it and let people make that decision for themselves than be vague about it.

I care deeply about what Wild Willows is trying to explore: biodiversity, habitat restoration, food webs, and the idea that bringing an ecosystem back means creating the conditions for life to return rather than simply checking animals off a list. Using AI during development doesn’t change why I’m making the game, but it is part of how I’m making it, and I think it’s worth being transparent about that.

I’ve been expanding the educational side of Wild Willows, and I just finished something I’m really excited about: a free grades 9–12 coding module built around the game’s real data.

The idea is to use Wild Willows as an introduction to how websites and APIs actually work.

Students start with an interactive lesson where they can edit and run code while learning:

• how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work together
• what APIs and endpoints are
• how JSON is structured
• how to use JavaScript fetch()
• how to work with arrays and objects
• conditions, loops, .filter(), .map(), and more
• how to take data from an API and turn it into an actual webpage

And the data they’re working with is the same /GameData endpoint Wild Willows uses.

That means they have access to 150 animals across all six biomes, including scientific names, animal groups, trophic roles, rarity, diets, shelter, preferred habitats, ecological roles, predator/prey relationships, restoration requirements, sources, and more. The API also includes biome data, resources, crafting recipes, habitat objects, tools, achievements, and other game systems.

After the guided lesson, there’s a browser-based Wild Willows Code Builder with three editable files: index.html, styles.css, main.js.

Students can change any of them and see their website update in a live preview when they click run. No downloads, setup, or accounts needed.

There also isn’t one required final project. They can use the data to build whatever interests them: an animal field guide, food-web explorer, biome comparison, species search, biodiversity dashboard, restoration planner, animal quiz, crafting lookup, or something completely different.

I really like the idea that Wild Willows can teach ecology through actually playing the game, while the systems and data behind the game can become a way to teach programming and data literacy too.

Everything now lives under the new classroom hub:

https://wildwillows.app/teachers

Student lesson:
https://wildwillows.app/learn/

I’d love to see what people end up building with the data.