I am a game developer with more than 40 years of publishing software, a published 3D artist with DAZ3D, and a total fan of AI image generation.

While I have been a supporter of others on Patreon, I never thought much about having my own Patreon page. I have always been firmly dedicated to the model of making a product and selling it for a fair price in a store. The release of Stable Diffusion led to a series of events that changed my mind.

When stable diffusion was released, I was blown away by the possibilities. As a 3D artist I had thousands of ides for generating textures and using it to generate source images I could use as parts of other art. I immediately dropped the cash for two RTX 3090 cards so I could have enough VRAM to work with larger images. I was hooked. As the technology has advanced the possibilities have increased at an exponential rate. As my prompting skills improved, the art I was generating became more and more amazing and less and less about creating content to use in my 3D work. I needed a way to showcase all of the cool images I was creating and so I took inspiration from my past and thought "Solitaire!"

In the 90's my company created several different solitaire products, two were recognized in GameSpot magazine's shareware game of the year awards, one had over 6.5 million downloads, one was banned from government computers for wasting too much of secretaries' time, and my Magnum Opus that featured ten solitaire versions and the ability to change the backgrounds and card deck images was not only successful in that decade, but has a rabid fanbase that has kept it alive ever since with multiple websites dedicated to it that share thousands of fan made decks.

The secret sauce to solitaire has always been more game types and cool card decks to use while playing. AI images are a perfect fit for the cool card decks, and it just so happened that I had created a solitaire engine for the Unity asset store that I had never gotten around to publishing. So just before Christmas of 2022, AI Solitaire was born.

I thought I had a perfect product for release on Steam. Give the base game away for free. Sell additional solitaire rule sets as DLC packs, and AI image generation meant an unlimited supply of card deck DLC. Even better, with all of the excitement and controversy swirling around AI image generation, I had a pretty good shot at getting media coverage for my game. So I worked non-stop and by the beginning of February had the game finished, and four DLC packs ready to go. I submitted everything to Steam and planned on a mid February release.

Plans are great, but reality is often something quite different. After the three days that Steam typically takes to review a game I got a cryptic reply that my game needed further scrutiny and would take a bit longer than necessary to review. It turned out to be three weeks longer, and when the final answer came through it wasn't good news.

It turns out that Steam thought it was a good idea for a product, too. Perhaps too good of an idea... My game had been referred to their legal team and, despite allowing multiple games with AI content, after several weeks they determined not to allow any more games with AI content in them. In fact they told me I had one chance to remove all the AI content and resubmit, and if I tried to resubmit any AI content again, my game and my account would be banned from Steam; effectively killing all my other products, not to mention thousands of dollars worth of games I had bought.

It came as quite a gut punch, but I am not one to give up easily, so steam will get a non-AI version with content I purchased or created in the 90's. How's that for a switch from cutting edge AI imagery to thirty-year-old content from a Corel PhotoCD library?!? But what to do with all the AI goodness of AI Solitaire? Which brought me back to Patreon.

My main purpose in creating this Patreon page is to publish my AI solitaire and have an outlet for all of the creative decks I have made and will continue to make. In the process of creating AI Solitaire and its content, I have learned a lot about AI image generation, written a bunch of different tools to help me create and manage the process and tested hundreds of models and loras, so I intend to make those tools and techniques available here as well.

I am not exactly sure where all this will end up taking me, but I invite you along for the ride. I will always include free content for everyone, and I will try to keep my pricing fair for the paid content. And if you can't afford to be a long-term supporter, I invite you to pay for a month and grab all you want in the month you have the paid membership. I welcome you to my Patreon page and hope you enjoy what you find here.