Inside Varsity Nights: Creator Arby on Building a Gay Sports Drama With AI

Varsity Nights uses AI to bring its recurring cast and fictional university world to life, but creator Arby is clear that the storytelling remains his own.

The Los Angeles based independent creator writes the series, produces its images and video, and maintains the growing fictional world around Sierra Coast University.

Set in California, the 18+ series follows queer teammates on a Division 1 men's swim team as relationships, attraction and identity develop alongside the pressures of competitive sport. It combines short video, images and written narrative, with new episodes released every other week and a long term ambition to move towards full video episodes.

From a novel to Varsity Nights

The project grew from an unpublished novel Arby had already completed about gay members of a university men's swim team.

AI entered the picture when he began using the technology to visualise some of the characters he had previously only imagined.

“Before Varsity Nights existed, I had already finished a novel about the gay members of a university men's swim team. It is done, not yet published. While I was working on it, I started using AI to build a few of the characters the way I saw them in my head, and I liked what came back more than I expected to. That was the moment. I decided to try building an entire series with an AI cast. Varsity Nights tells a different story than the book does, but it grew out of the same place, and it has been a passion project from the first frame.”

Arby also has a background in artificial intelligence and technology, but the motivation behind Varsity Nights goes beyond experimenting with new tools.

His About page explains that he wanted to tell stories he never saw growing up, particularly stories about gay men in athletics that move beyond stereotypes and clichés.

Representation was therefore part of the series from the outset rather than something added later.

The competitive sporting environment gives Arby a setting in which identity, relationships and expectations around masculinity can exist alongside the pressures already facing the athletes.

“Yes. It was never a feature added on top. These are stories about young men working out who they are inside a world that rewards a very narrow version of masculinity, and a locker room is one of the most honest places to tell that. Some of these characters are out, some are closeted, some are not asking the question yet. I wanted all of those to exist in the same room without anyone being a lesson.”

Building a story around what goes unsaid

That same restraint is central to how the relationships are written. Rather than having the characters constantly explain how they feel, Arby allows hesitation, silence and small changes in behaviour to carry much of the tension.

“Nobody in this series says what they mean. The relationships run on what goes unsaid, what someone stops doing, what they do next. Viewers pick up on all of it, and that is where the tension lives.”

Episodes begin with an outline before Arby works through the images and video scene by scene, with dialogue coming afterwards.

Recurring characters also have fixed appearances, rooms, wardrobes and psychology documents to help maintain continuity as the story grows.

Arby describes the scale of that process as "a serialized visual series with a recurring cast, made by one person, on a real release schedule. That did not exist as an option before.” AI helps make that recurring visual cast possible, but he draws a firm line between what the technology provides and who is actually creating the story.

“AI does not do the storytelling. What it gives me is a cast that shows up every episode looking like themselves, which is what makes serialization possible at all. And the video side is moving fast. Each season the clips get longer and the performances get better, and the goal is full video episodes. The story and the cast are already there. The technology is catching up to them.”

Viewers are following the details

The main Varsity Nights Instagram account has grown to almost 59,000 followers at the time of publication, with the project also maintaining profiles across X, Facebook and YouTube.

For Arby, one of the clearest signs that viewers are investing in the story is how closely some of them remember earlier dialogue and character moments.

“I get messages quoting a line from three episodes ago back to me and asking what a character meant by it. Subscribers hold me to what I have set up. That changes how I write, because I know someone is paying attention to the small stuff.”

New viewers can start with The Summer Between, the first special episode, which is available free at varsitynights.ai before the continuing story moves behind the subscription.

The response suggests Varsity Nights is finding an audience that is not simply scrolling past the visuals, but becoming invested in the characters and the details of the story Arby is building. For an independent project created largely by one person, that level of engagement gives the series a strong foundation as its world continues to grow.

New viewers can start with The Summer Between, the first special episode, which is available free at varsitynights.ai before the continuing story moves behind the subscription. Arby's advice for anyone discovering the series is straightforward:

“Start at the beginning. The people who do are the ones sending me those messages.”

With a growing audience, an expanding cast and plans to push the visual format further, Varsity Nights is developing into much more than an experiment with AI.

At its heart, it remains a character driven gay sports drama with a creator who clearly knows the world he wants to build and an audience increasingly willing to follow him into it.

The Summer Between is available to watch free at varsitynights.ai, with the continuing Varsity Nights story available through subscription. Follow Varsity Nights on Instagram, X and YouTube at @varsitynightsai, and on Facebook at Varsity Nights.

All image credits - Varsity Nights.