Date Ariane Games

I wasn’t sure it would ever work, because every android version I made after Renpy 7.6 keeps randomly crashing on my phone. Renpy is up to version 8.5 now, so I decided to take my chances.

I dutifully followed the annoyingly long instructions to get it to work. Finally got a build to be created, and uploaded it to my phone.

IT WORKED!

If you own Date Ariane Remastered through itch already, go to https://arianeb.itch.io/date-ariane-remastered you will see a download called “Date Ariane Remastered 2.0 android apk file” The actual name of the file is “hires.dateariane2.android-01-1771829973-release.apk” so don’t freak out if the file name doesn’t match the link name. Download it to your phone, use your file app to find it, and tap on the name. There may be some security settings you have to turn off, but it should work.

I didn’t make any attempt to adjust the fonts to make them bigger. It’s basically the PC version directly ported to Android. The file size is 1.33GB which is the biggest android file ever, so it might not work well on older android devices.

But I was able to play a completed date without any crashes on my Samsung A35 which is not a top of the line phone. Also be aware that Google is still threatening to block all side-loading of AFK files soon, so you might want to download it sooner rather than later.

Two minor bugs: the android keyboard hides the name you’re typing in, and the bottom screen menu is tough to touch. Especially if you use a phone cover like I do. Both are minor and game is very playable,

Note: This is only the itch version.

The Steam version is PC only. This is because of restrictions on Steam related to Mac. There is a separate Mac store for Steam, but it requires games to be “certified” by Apple, which I can’t do, and Steam does nothing with mobile.

The Site store is a little weirder because it’s an independent company running it. I had APK files available at one point there, but helping people get the APK loaded was too much trouble and doesn’t always work.

If you go through itch,io and can’t get the APK to load, at least you have the PC and Mac versions to play.

Date Ariane 2.0 now available everywhere!

arianeb — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 03:06:29 +0000

I’m satisfied with the current state of the game, there may be more updates in the future, and probably a DLC at some point, but the version 2.0 with all the new graphics is ready for public release.

If you already bought the game from any source you can get the updated version immediately. The update is free.

Steam Release $9.99 (Watch for seasonal sales) I updated all the graphics on the games steam page, if you still see the old version, just refresh the page. The Achievement icons haven’t been updated, I’ll get to it this weekend. Also posted the game demo on Steam, so you can try before you buy.

itchio Release $9.00 (does not include steam achievements or library). Yes, I still haven’t been booted from Itch, Price is $1 more than before. Free update is listed there. Besides just Windows and Mac, there is a downloadable apk file there for android. Get it while it’s still possible to load apk files on your phone.

Site Store $8.00 I sent out update emails to everybody who bought it a few days ago, look for it to get the new version (check spam) It’s $1 cheaper because updates are usually not available.

Or if you don’t have it at all, sign up for my Patreon. All $6 members get the updated itch version for free for the sign up during the months of January or February.

New Date Ariane Remastered 2.0 Trailer and Demo

arianeb — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:59:56 +0000

I’m planning the official update in early February 2026, but I have a “green band” trailer and demo available now.

Here’s a link to the trailer: https://youtu.be/Jq5-RpQKvik

And the demo is available at https://arianeb.itch.io/date-ariane-remastered Look for DateAriane2demo files at the bottom of the page.

2025: Where AI Went Wrong

arianeb — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 12:18:20 +0000

Time magazine announced “The Architects of AI” as the person of the year. I had to laugh. Yes, these tech bro fools were one of the most influential in making headlines this past year. And I think they will be influential in most of the headlines next year, too. Just in the wrong direction.

Because as I will demonstrate, AI is not getting better! We have spent billions, maybe even trillions to find this out. Probably the most expensive lesson in history.

There’s a general pattern with new tech. It’s expensive to research, but it gets cheaper. At first it doesn’t do very well, but then it gets better with time. We find uses for the technology, this spurns interest and popularity. Then the uses are so convenient it’s a must have for everyone.

The train, the light bulb, the electric grid, radio, cars, TV, the computer, the internet, the smart-phone, it all follows the same pattern.

But there have been failures, especially recently. Technology that followed the same pattern until it went wrong: Crypto never took off beyond some libertarian unsecured investment not really backed by anything. NFTs turned out to be either fraud or a joke. Blockchain technology has never been fast enough to do more than handle crypto exchanges, and “Virtual Reality” and “Augmented Reality” has been largely a bad investment unless you’re one of those rare gamer hobbyists who still like to hang out in 3D chat rooms.

AI, or as I call it Artificial Impersonation, has so far proved popular enough to be in the “good” tech, but it has yet to cement its permanence as a useful tech. Everyone assumes it will follow the same pattern, and that is getting investors excited, but it has been nearly 3 years since ChatGPT-4 was released, and the technology stagnated. A year ago every AI company created their next generation and there were no improvements over the last generation. OpenAI released GPT-5 and it landed with a thud, they’ve gone back to GPT-4.

Did we reach the theoretical limits of LLM improvements with more data? Did scraping new sections of the internet filled with AI generated slop cause model collapse? Unknown, but something like that occurred for sure.

Since the failures last year, AI has only improved thanks to programming tricks like “reasoning” models, which is running the query multiple times and pick out the best answers. These tricks improve answers, but still make mistakes. They are also much more expensive to run.

You have multiple companies offering LLM services, and the LLMs across the board are not differentiating from one another. Any improvements in the models are largely found in the LLM’s container software.

I wonder if the data models have gotten TOO big. The more data you collect ,the more shit you collect, and it shows in increased “hallucination” frequency.

Some more of AI’s Greatest Mistakes

Which introduces the next place where AI is not improving: It is not getting cheaper

In the US, we have 7 companies developing LLM technology right now, and they are competing to be the BEST!, but users are seeing all the models largely indistinguishable, so it really doesn’t matter which you choose, you’re still going to get a lot of mistakes.

OpenAI is the most popular, but Gemini 3 by Google is the fastest growing, much to the chagrin of Open AI, not because its better than ChatGPT, but because the interface around Gemini 3 is more user friendly. Suddenly, OpenAI is looking at their own Armageddon. They have 800 million users, about 760 million are not paying for it, and it is likely they wont if they were forced to.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to push AI on all their products, causing massive revolts by it’s user base who just want an operating system that runs programs, not one that talks to you.

I know what you are thinking, “AI is very cheap, it’s practically free”, except that is a lie that the AI companies are hiding from you. Every time you query ChatGPT-4 with anything, it’s costing OpenAI money.

Yes, OpenAI is expected to earn $12 billion this year, but its expenses are in the $40 to $50 billion range. It continues to use investor dollars to supplement users, but for how long?

To meet all its goals, OpenAI needs $400 billion next year. It needs more data centers to meet demand.

No AI division is profitable right now, they are using investor funds to pay for it so they can give the illusion it’s cheap or free, betting heavily on the idea that it will be so ubiquitous in the future, that they will make trillions.

There is no evidence to back this up, and investors are finally starting to figure this out. Hence all the talk of a AI Bubble about to burst.

Yet, it has become practically a religious belief in Silicon Valley, and this “theory” is what is driving the data center boom right now.

And so impossibly expensive data centers are being built.

To that end, Kupperman works out rough calculations for the genuine cost of a data center, factoring in the inevitable breakdown of parts over time. Each data center, he says, is essentially made up of three components: the chips, which become obsolete in just a few years; the systems connecting the chips, which need to be replaced every decade or so; and the building itself, which should last for quite a while.

Add it all up, and time is not on the data center’s side. The finance guru estimates that the “AI datacenters to be built in 2025 will suffer $40 billion of annual depreciation, while generating somewhere between $15 and $20 billion of revenue.”

And it’s not just OpenAI. Anthropic, the makers of Claude have seen similar losses to earnings ratio. No one is making money, and the cost of building AI Data centers with thousands of AI processors is getting more expensive.

Claude’s big selling point is it’s usefulness to AI code generation. “Coding” was supposed to be a key job of AI, and that isn’t talked about much anymore. The savings from AI writing code – the cost of the AI service – the cost of human debugging of the AI code, more often than not is below zero. Humans may write code slower, but it is less buggy and easier to maintain. Human coders are simply cheaper too.

Who is this AI Person Anyway?

Which bring up the next problem: AI is declining in popularity across the board. The number of people that like AI are declining fast, largely limited to investors who have sunk so much cost into it, they can’t afford to lose.

Part of the problem is that we haven’t found any actual useful uses for AI that can’t already be done by human. The few things it can do, it does faster, but the quality isn’t there. It generates slop.

I first saw creative types vehemently against AI, calling it a “Plagiarism” machine. They were the first.

Now people are finding out data centers are the reason their electricity bills are so high, and why huge water shortages are likely to happen more often.

Gamers are seeing prices in formerly cheap computer products are double, even tripling in price, in the last few months, and it also driven by data centers.

Businesses are finding out they don’t save money on AI if they give their employees the tools. In fact, use of AI in business is going down, not up.

The number of people discovering hate for AI is growing, making once “potential” customers into “never” customers.

People hate the slop destroying the Internet.

People hate the AI tools being jammed into every program they use.

Well that about wraps it up for AI

In the last few years, scientists and academics have found cases for using “machine learning”. About the same time, LLM technology was becoming available. For some reason “Machine learning” and generative LLMs have been grouped together and labeled AI. Neither really are.

The key goal of all of this is AGI, the theoretical point when LLMs become smarter than humans. This is what every investor believes in, and spending billions to acquire.

The theory was that if we build the LLM’s large enough they would soon be more intelligent than people. It was proven wrong about a year ago.

The other theory was that building AGI could change the world in either a better way or a worse way. No it won’t.

The AI industry refuses to define AGI, so they can use it as a marketing tool, or a scare tactic. I’ll define it then:

If an AI company fires all their programmers because they don’t need them anymore, that means they achieved AGI.

It is not likely to happen anytime soon. My wager is that AI companies will go bankrupt before it happens, and will fire all their programmers because they can’t afford them anymore. Anyone who says AGI will get here by 2030 is living in a fantasy world.

LLMs are incapable of reaching AGI. They “guess the next word” based on context from the millions of documents being fed into their models, and yet the AI industry is betting a couple of trillions that it can.

Most cases of success with AI, like protein folding, are not LLMs but “Machine Learning”: software trained on specific topics and using trial and error to improve. Machine Learning has proven more successful than LLMs but there is limited usefulness, and it’s not a big money maker. The limited number of researchers needing this tech has already bought the tech.

So we are left with the fatal flaw of the AI industry: The one new technology that would make a profit (AGI) is not possible with the technology they are using (LLMs).

Stories of AGI being here by 2030 and threatening humanity’s future are fantasies. This will become a widely recognized fact probably in the next year. Much to the embarrassment and wealth of the “Architects of AI”.

The First “AI” Visual Novel shows the flaws in the concept

arianeb — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:52:01 +0000

Being in the Visual Novel development community, quite a few have wondered if it would be possible to integrate AI into a visual novel game. Instead of choices to choose from, an AI engine would be capable answering any question related to the situation, and any question not related as well.

It’s a big concept, and recently an independent game developer studio Anuttacon actually did it. The game is called Whispers from the Star

From what I can tell, this is built with an ethically sourced LLM. It would have to be, a giant LLM filled with random data could go off into dangerous directions.

I’ve watched several “lets play” videos of the game where players were messing with the AI. This was inevitable as “hacking” games is a built in draw for many players. In fact at least half of the videos playing the game are trying to mess with it. The makers have heavily limited the possible responses to avoid such mistakes, but the LLM will still get confused in potentially funny ways.

I have not played the game myself, I don’t even own a microphone. I am mostly curious about how such a game was made and how players react. Is this a game concept that could hit big? Or is it a concept that is too off putting?

From the Steam page, it is getting very positive to mostly positive player reviews, but as of this writing there are less than 1200 reviews. So the people that found the game seem to like it. It’s priced at $10 US, which is fair for a theoretically* short game. (*more on this later)

The “waifu” main character named Stella is likeable and charming, and you can’t help but want to help her survive.

I’ve been watching “Let’s Play”s on You Tube just to see what public reaction would be to this game in the eyes of that community, and it’s largely negative. Having been exposed to that side of the gaming community, I understand that it’s not the games fault for their negativity.

Of these, my favorite is where someone got an AI to play the AI game. The two AI’s got along well, but not much actual plot progress happened.

But then there are the sincere reactions.

The “let’s play” reactions I am most interested are the ones where players are really trying to understand the game and it’s objectives. There has never been a game like this so it should attract a genuinely curious crowd. Some observations:

People are genuinely confused by the game’s interface. No controller needed and limited keyboard and mouse interaction. You talk to the game to play it, and it answers back.
Slightly more confusion comes from the GUI. It is played in two windows one is a video chat that is not designed to be full screen (a fact many players hated because it messes up their streaming method), and a chat window which is designed to look like a phone chat, but being a PC game is obviously not.
Like a standard visual novel, the “game” is a series of logic puzzles you help the main character solve. Obviously, the objective is to ask questions about the environment and find a simple solution, but Stella is not always forthcoming enough with her descriptions. This consistently led to player frustration.
The game’s work around is after so much time with no solution, Stella solves the problem herself. A surprisingly necessary game conceit. Funny that the above video of AI vs AI solved more of the logic puzzles than any human could.
Stella love small talk, always asking personal questions to fill the dead gaming space between puzzles. Gaming streamers hate small talk as it wastes gamers time. Almost every “let’s play” reaction ended in frustration because of this. No sincere player got through the fairly short game in one session, and there are practically no “part 2” let’s play videos.

My impression is solidly mixed. This is a “proof of concept” game, and it hasn’t gone over very well. Some of the reasons are not the game maker’s fault. There is a lot of general negativity toward AI these days and people’s frustration with chatbots shows through.

There is also the newness of the game concept, the fact that you talk to the game instead of choose from menus or simple text interface. Whispers from the Star is at it’s heart a classic adventure game with an added AI interface.

I was a big fan of text adventures back in the day, I played the original ADVENT (aka Colossal Caves Adventure) and had several Infocom games in my Commodore 64 days. These old adventure games is what inspires my visual novels.

This is the gaming tradition that Whispers from the Star is aiming for.

The central complaint back then was the game didn’t understand most player’s instructions unless they were typed just right. Some games like Infocom’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” would make jokes at your expense when you typed wrong. But that was all part of the game. Finding a verb and noun combination that worked was the fun part of the game.

Whispers from the Star has the exact opposite problem. It understands most of the player instructions right or wrong, making it difficult to tell if you are going the right way or not to solve the problem. It would actually be helpful if Stella would say “I don’t understand” more often when the player is going too far off the path.

Also text adventures kind of faded out of existence about 30 years ago, so most gamers today don’t know what they are or how to play them anymore. This is why hand holding the player through is so important.

I think the makers, Anuttacon, are on the right track, but the AI “gimmick” is distracting from the game play. While it’s partially based on an old concept, the AI interface it too innovative and misunderstood. The lack of sales is likely going to kill the concept before a game developer finds the right balance.

How future AI games need to work

I don’t know how the game is set up internally, but it seems to me there’s a missing layer of communication in this game. The game should internally work like a traditional graphic adventure, the drop-down menu kind, and the AI game should work internally like an interface to a menu.

Like the game starts with a crash landing of an escape pod, and the door is jammed. The way a graphic adventure would work is with a list of suggestions to choose from: push really hard, check the door’s edges, find the pod’s manual, check your inventory for tools, etc. The AI interface should focus on the pre-selected menu items, making suggestions to try if the player can’t think of any, explaining why something didn’t work when the player guessed wrong.

By being too open ended the game confuses the player, and too much confusion leads to the high amounts of frustration.

In other words, you can’t rely on the novelty of the interface to make the game playable. The interface should only add a layer sophistication to a traditional game, rather than overtake the game.

There’s a reason why truly innovative games don’t prosper. Players prefer familiarity.

Early Preview of Date Ariane Remastered 2.0 (aka Date Ariane 2)

arianeb — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 05:19:21 +0000

This whole past year, I have been making new Daz Studio versions of all the pictures in Date Ariane Remastered, just like last year when I did all the pictures for Ariane in Paradise. I haven’t posted anything about the update because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. Release as a new game?, release as a free update?, Release as DLC?

The recent rule changes on Steam forced me to make a decision about Date Ariane 2, or Date Ariane Remastered 2.0 either is accurate, and it will be released as a free update. That means people that have the game already will get the new graphics update automatically on itch.io or Steam.

I’ve been posting my progress regularly all year on my Patreon page. For only $1, you can see a large sample of pictures I’ve made for the update, and for $6 you can download a preview alpha version that is Date Ariane Remastered with new pics replacing old pics, so the game switches back and forth between the two versions. I release new pics weekly and new alpha updates monthly.

The update should be finished in early 2026.

I didn’t announce it until now because I was afraid it would hurt sales of Date Ariane Remastered, especially if I released Date Ariane 2 as a new game. Now that I decided to release it as an update instead, people can still get Date Ariane Remastered knowing that the full update will be released for free if you already own the game.

So what’s the plan to make Money?

Part of this project was to add new stuff to the game. Steam changed the rules how adult games can work on Steam moving forward. They banned “early release” for adult games, which was a popular way to release, even though I never did, and “new content” that changes the game will have to get approved, and sold as DLC.

Also I hope the graphics update alone will improve new sales.

So that’s my game plan. After the graphic update of the current game which updates all the pictures, any new scenarios I add after will be released as a DLC, which will be sold separately. I’ve already made a list of several new things I want to add, but I don’t want to share the list just yet because nothing is certain until it’s written and coded.

In the coming months, I’ll release more preview pics, a new trailer, and a new demo (as soon as I make them).

The urge to stop supporting Microsoft and Google

arianeb — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 03:15:41 +0000

Let’s face it. The Internet has become shit.

Between AI slop, robots posting and robots responding to boost engagement, and the BIG AI companies building huge data centers that are raising utility bills on unsuspecting people, this is becoming evil incarnate.

I can’t stop them but I can’t support them, either. Here’s what I am doing:

Replacing Microsoft

I’ve been a subscriber to office 365 for a few years, but the price is going up to add AI Copilot to MS Office. Microsoft cancelled my subscription assuming I would renew at the new higher price, but I was prepared for this eventuality.

The truth is the Office part of MS 365 is one I rarely ever use. Mostly I use it to check grammar and spelling of my visual novels.

I’ve replaced it with LibreOffice which has all the same functionality of MS Office, but none of the cost, because it’s open source. It uses ODS an open source format for word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations, but it can covert these to the standard DOC and XLS formats used natively by MS Office.

The programs in Office 365 I used most often was OneNote and OneDrive, these both run over the internet and without a Office365 subscription I will lose both.

OneNote is a note taking app which I use a lot, but there are many note taking apps. Two good ones are Joplin and Obsidian are both popular, free, and can port the contents of OneNote to their own format which is standard markup language.

I find Joplin the easier to use for notes, searching, and downloading important web pages. Obsidian has a cleaner interface and can handle flowchart type notes. Both have sketchpads when words aren’t good enough and you need to draw a note. I’ve also tried Notion and Milanote, but their functionality is crippled without a paid account. Joplin makes money with Joplin Cloud subscription that saves your notes on multiple devices, but works with other clouds including a private server.

Joplin works with OneDrive cloud which I used to have, but I suspect Microsoft will kill my access soon. So I signed up for pCloud, which looked pretty expensive at $100 for 500gb, that’s about twice what others charge, per year. But this is the price for LIFETIME. Over time that’s one hell of a deal. Pay for two years, never pay again.

So far so good, but what about email? Outlook used to be good for email, but the accounts no longer work on Thunderbird or any other 3rd party client. I prepared for this a long time ago. I bought a custom domain in the early 2000’s and set up domain forwarding to whatever free email address I could find online. Well with the breaking of outlook.com emails, I switch to proton mail, and just changed the forwarding to that new email address. Because proton mail has end to end encryption, I had to pay for a proton bridge service so I can decrypt on my PC and have my mail appear on Thunderbird, like I wanted.

I’ve now replaced the need for Microsoft 365. I still have windows 11, and probably will until Daz Studio supports Linux.

Replacing Google

This is a tougher request because Google is all over the place, but it is possible to replace parts of Google.

First and foremost is the problem of replacing of Google Search, which is covered with ads these days and getting thicker, and now it has switched to AI searching with even more ads. Worse Google tracks everything you do on their site, so they can sell that data to advertisers. Google’s peak was around 2007, and it has been getting worse and worse.

Two routes to go here. If you want a free alternative duck duck go which does not store any information about you, and it’s search results come from a combination of it own web searches and Bing. Still you’re going to get ads. For fewer ads, try Qwant which is similar in style to Duck Duck Go in that it is privacy based and some of the results come from Bing. The negative is that it does not refresh the results as fast, so if you are searching for a news report it may not give results for a day or two.

Or you can pay $5 a month to go ad free with https://kagi.com/ Not only is it private, in that nothing you search for is tracked, but because you are paying for it, you can customize the results. Don’t like results from twitter? Block it, and it won’t search there. I de-emphasize sites that hide behind a firewall, preferring news from sites I subscribe, or sites that don’t firewall stories.

After enshittifying their search, Google is now working on their Android OS. Reports are you won’t be able to “sideload” apps into Android anymore. This is bad for several reasons. Sideloading is needed to test apps before distributing. My games are only available on Android via sideloading, that will likely end soon.

I think my next phone is going to be a GrapheneOS or a linux phone. These OS’s can’t be searched by authorities as easy as Android and iOS can. Might be something worth considering in the future.

And then there’s YouTube. A necessary evil unfortunately. You can use Nebula or one of the other alternatives.

But only on YouTube can you watch PewdiePie explain to you how he got rid of Google. See also r/degoogle for more helpful suggestions.

How to handle META

Lets face it, Meta (aka Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) has been replaceable for a long time. Use TikTok instead. The problem is that TikTok is just as bad, as any of the Meta stuff, or YouTube for that matter.

I like Bluesky. The biggest difference is between Bluesky and the other stuff is that it is not driven by the algorithm. It has one and it sucks too, but with a couple of clicks you can turn it off. See Bluesky post 1 for how to get started, and post 2 to make your own algorithm.

Reddit is social media without algorithms, with everybody upvoting and downvoting to see what gets to the top. I also like it because I can pick what topics I want to see.

Here’s the thing. Every social media algorithm can be bypassed. The problem is that social media hides the ability to do so. But once you learn how, it makes these sites so much better.

Take Facebook. Now Facebook used to be where you follow friends and family, and it was good for that. Then they started shoveling paid shit, and algorithm shit, and suggested stranger shit, and videos from TikTik shit. Some of us are still on Facebook because of friends and family, so here’s how you control it.

First rule of fixing Facebook: DO NOT USE THEIR SHITTY APP!! It’s basically spyware. Not only does it monitor what you do on Facebook, it monitors what you do on other apps. To stop it, open up your browser (yes phones have browsers), and go to facebook dot com, click on the left (or hamburger menu) where it says “feeds” then click on “friends”. You still may get some random ads (because this is Meta after all), but mostly you’ll see ONLY your friends posts. Then after looking at that get off facebook. Same rules apply to Instagram. (And Threads too, but why are you on Threads at all?)

Go to Bluesky. It’s “friends” feed is called “Following” and can be found on top.

YouTube also has a way to bypass the algorithm. It’s called “Subscriptions” and it shows all the latest videos from channels you subscribe to. This is usually my first stop on YouTube.

The Best solution is get off social media as much as possible.

Read a book, watch a movie, go for a walk, listen to music, play a game. Create something just for yourself to enjoy.