I thought the SpongeBob parody game they made was also AI-generated, but when I specifically asked them in their Discord, they said it was 100% artist drawn, zero AI used.
However, they do seem to use Photoshop a ton, as you can tell by some of the obviously edited images they have. Maybe that's a source of the "AI-feel"? I doubt it, but they also didn't provide any PSD files despite their $10 tier offering some, so idk.
They very likely are using AI to generate initial images and sprites, then drawing over them and correcting mistakes with typical photo editing software like Photoshop or whatever. There are lots of tells but this poster is the most egregious example. My guess is that because it's a background image and mostly obscured, they didn't catch this one that slipped by. That poster has all of the markings of GenAI, the text is the biggest tell but the rest of it is also pretty obvious...
There are some other weird inconsistencies I noticed (why does Velma only have one big toe, and only has toenails on one foot? for example.) but that poster is definitely the main 'tell' for me. It definitely looks like a mix of GenAI and manual corrections to me. His OC on the left side of the title screen is likely hand drawn, at least...use that as a baseline comparison for the dev's hand-drawn art and you can easily see that he's not doing everything himself. The linework is completely different compared to the rest of the character sprites.
It's so silly to lie about this, because: 1-folks are going to figure it out eventually anyway, and 2-it's a parody porn game about a cartoon from the 1970s, the vast majority of players won't care if you're incorporating AI into your process if you're just up front about it. There are a bunch of top-rated games on this very site that are utilizing AI like this and they're honest about their AI usage.
I guess maybe I'm expecting too much from a dev that jumps from one 0.01 project to a different 0.01 project though, and has a Patreon paywall in the very first version lol
I made it in before the [abandoned] tag at least!