Paolo Villanueva built a game alone for 5 years, and used no generative AI
Memoirium launched Thursday on Steam for 485 pesos. The funding label behind Among Us paid for it, and the one-man Philippine studio made a point of saying no AI art or writing is inside it.
Memoirium went on sale Thursday on Steam for 485 pesos. It is a hard fighting game, the kind where you die often and learn the timing, set inside a collapsing world of dreams. One person in the Philippines made almost all of it. Paolo Villanueva runs a one-man studio called GoldenGratus.
He did not start as a programmer. Villanueva was a freelance writer who began learning to code in 2020, during the pandemic, while looking for a career shift. Five years later the finished game ships with eight dungeons, 31 weapons and 67 spells. Outersloth, the funding label run by InnerSloth, the studio behind Among Us, backed the release.
The line he drew
In the announcement for the game's release date, Villanueva said plainly that no generative AI was used, meaning no software that produces art or writing on command. He called it a passion project. The places in the game come from his own life instead. One area is an enormous version of the house he grew up in. Another is a castle held together by sand and wax, shaped by what he was told being a man required.
All these locations are based on my real-life experiences and how I viewed them, and how they shaped me.
Why it matters
Most Philippine tech news this year has been about AI arriving from somewhere else: data centers, call center jobs, government programs, foreign money. This is the other side of the same week. A Filipino with no studio behind him got funding from an established foreign label, shipped a finished product to a global store, and priced it where Filipinos can actually buy it. That path is open to far more people than a data center is.
The catch to watch
Five years is a long time to work with no salary, and the funding arrived late enough that Villanueva had already built the early version himself. The money let him widen the game from three weapon types to 31, which tells you how thin the first years were. Most solo projects never reach a release date at all. A launch is also not a living, so the game has to keep selling for the five years to pay him back.