u/Extra-Band7919

I've been working on a game that I want to publish on Steam for free eventually and have absolutely been loving it. I've just been conflicted about my use of AI while using it. (I haven't used AI for any assets or textures just code. I will not be using AI for anything other than code. Ever.)

For Context; I'm in the 10th grade of my country's school system and have been trying to work on my game weekly. I've used AI for code a lot at this point, and it's mainly to help me understand and solve problems due to my inexperience. When i use AI to solve these problems i pretty much completely understand the code it's used to help me. However I don't replace it with my own code later though and just leave it there and it's started to bug me A LOT. I want to make a game worthy of being posted on steam for free, but I don't know if people will like my game at all if AI is used to make it. My plan is to release this game for free (I want to release it for free because of my inexperience) once finished and set up some kind of donation page, so that people that want to see a better made sequel can support me. I plan on using 100% of the donated money to hire a musical artist and a 3d animator, I might even hire extra help coding. I know that this whole plan is wishful thinking but I want to follow through anyway. I love the idea of my game being published on steam and I love watching it grow. I just feel uneasy at the thought of it flopping because of AI or whenever I use AI when working on it.

I know Steam doesn't require you to state if code is AI generated (I think), but I don't want to withhold information. What I also don't want though, is for people to see my game as slop and for it to fail.

I don't know what to do. I could just stay silent about AI and feel like an asshole, I could start over and lose hours and hours of work, I could be honest of AI and take the risk or I could replace the AI parts of my code.

Please help me and give me suggestions on what to do!
Thanks for reading.