Roadmap →
AI, authorship, and authority
TREADBOUND requires external AI during play, but the AI is not the authority over the Chronicle. This page separates that runtime dependency from the tools used to help create the project and from the human decisions that define it.
Disclosure reviewedDuring play
Players speak naturally to a connected AI Tread Master. The bundled Chronicle Engine controls what context the AI receives, validates proposed actions, applies the rules, commits accepted changes, and keeps each Chronicle's persistent state.
External service
The current Founder Alpha requires a player-provided Gemini API key obtained through Google AI Studio. Google provides the AI service separately; its availability, quotas, pricing, and terms apply.
Separate cost
TREADBOUND does not include, prepay, or set AI usage charges. Provider availability, limits, terms, and fees remain between the player and that provider.
Authority boundary
The AI cannot write directly to authoritative persistence. The local engine validates every proposed operation and returns a receipt for each committed turn.
Data and credentials
To produce a turn, the application sends the supported provider the player input and bounded TREADBOUND context needed for that operation. The provider processes that material under its own terms and privacy practices. Another Chronicle's private state and unrestricted filesystem access are outside the integration contract.
In today's Founder Alpha, a Gemini key typed into the installer is stored in Windows Credential Manager under your Windows sign-in, the only place TREADBOUND stores it. If you leave that field blank, you can enter a key inside the application for one session only; it is held in memory and written nowhere. Credentials must not be written into Chronicle files, exported saves, logs, screenshots, or ordinary configuration files.
How the project is made
Raymond Mills created TREADBOUND and remains its director and standing Authority of Record. He directs the setting, game design, software, and editorial review and is accountable for what the project presents as TREADBOUND.
TREADBOUND did not begin with Raymond asking an AI to invent a game. He created its premise, world, Wanderers, Chronicles, Volumes, Lineages, Practices, terminology, rules, and governing design principles. AI is how he made TREADBOUND happen. It is not how he came up with TREADBOUND.
Development has included collaboration with Anthropic's Claude and Claude Code; OpenAI's ChatGPT, Codex, and ChatGPT Cowork; and Google's Gemini, under the creator's direction and review.
The cinematic artwork used around the Library was generated with OpenAI's image generation (in ChatGPT or Codex) on August 31, 2026, then selected and accepted against a TREADBOUND-specific art direction and prompt set. It is separate from the approved illustrations carried by the manuals.
The Library publishes the working manual text and its corresponding approved artwork. A public, asset-level technique and credits register is not yet complete; that register remains a pre-commercial-release disclosure obligation.
Report a rights or credit concern →The Home, World, Engine, and How Play Begins pages translate the product and manuals for first-time visitors. They are orientation and marketing copy, not new setting canon or replacements for the books.
