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I know this is a small team and experimenting, but in my mind, this engine is already limiting the potential of games it can output. I don’t know, but Unity is

I know this is a small team and experimenting, but in my mind, this engine is already limiting the potential of games it can output. I don’t know, but Unity is already pretty much point and click game building. I spent a few weeks building a card game with it during lockdown, and without a lot of code, I had an ugly, and basic, but totally playable game. The hardest part to a game is building something fun yes, but it also has to meet some level of quality bar and work on any platform.

Philpax 2y ago
(I'm the in-house AI engineer at Braindump.) We experimented with a few different form factors, including integrating into existing game engines, before taking this path. Our rationale was that we wanted to go beyond the existing engine integrations (i.e. Unity already has an AI assistant) and reimagine the entire game creation experience with AI and multiplayer in mind. Our platform's entirely on the web, so you can link your current game/game creation session to someone else and have them join you. This works on most modern browser, making it easy to build and share games. That being said, you're not wrong that the current scope of games is limited. That's OK with us for now - we'd like to focus on getting the core experience as good as possible with the current scope and then expand outwards, instead of trying to build something that attempts to solve everything and works for nothing.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  > Our rationale was that we wanted to go beyond the existing engine integrations (i.e. Unity already has an AI assistant) and reimagine the entire game creation experience with AI and multiplayer in mind. How does that pan out? There's hundreds of millions of dollars of product development in Unity and Unreal specifically for game design. How will you ever catch up? Godot got $8m, for the people who authored it, what does it have to show for it? It seems like hopelessly little money. Maybe you said to the investors, "You don't want to be locked in" or whatever. The browser still an engine. Mobile Safari and Chrome are also moving targets. You're still playing in someone else's back yard. There are no games that are designed to be played in Mobile Safari and also make money. I mean the browser also has AI assistants. Obviously I want you to succeed but this sounds more like a good story than a good strategy. It doesn't hold up to an ounce of scrutiny. Right now it sounds like it's not interesting to develop the toolset for Unity because they are already doing it.
  - datameta 2y ago
    Going beyond could mean one of several things, only one of which is playing catch-up with a decade-plus game engine.
tavavex 2y ago
Unless your needs are extremely specific and necessitate replacing most of the engine, Unity is probably not limiting your capabilities. The default packages are extensive and allow for basic game-making without writing that much actual code, but large developers will almost certainly swap default Unity components for their own for parts that need them, while the engine manages other parts like sound and input handling, multi-platform deployment and so on. Unity is by far the most used engine in the world and tons of extremely different games were made with it. Subnautica, Rimworld, Hollow Knight, Beat Saber, the Ori games, Disco Elysium - none of them seemed to face any issues with being made in Unity. The "Unity games are bad" stereotype annoys me - it's bound to have a bunch of shovelware made on it with how many resources there are for learning it (and Unity being free), but it's popular for a reason.
- nameless912 2y ago
  I would bet that more than 0% of that perception, at least from developers, comes from how _fucking awful_ the Unity editor is. It's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. The games you can make with Unity are absolutely very impressive, but the tools Unity provides are just awful, and give a lot of newbie developers the perception that Unity is a hacked together pile of garbage (which...it is, but so are all game engines). Godot, Unreal, and GameMaker are, I would say, the main competitors to Unity in the Indie space, and all three of them have much higher quality editors than Unity's.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    The unreal engine editor is way worse than unity though, unreal doesn't even let you move around files without a massive headache, while in unity moving files is trivial and almost never causes issues. Not to mention that C++ in unreal is horrible to work with and blueprints lacks a lot of features, unity C# is far superior to both for productivity. If your game doesn't do anything complicated so you don't need to code a lot, then sure unreal could work since by far the biggest problem is iterating on code for the different components and actors. Adding or removing or renaming fields or refactoring folder structure and then go and update them in the blueprints takes forever while in unity that is really easy.
sdwr 2y ago
> If I type “Create an Orc,” then I don’t want to be asked 20 follow-up questions to exactly specify the nature of the Orc; I just want it to take a guess. This is the exact point where everything falls apart. Good games have simple rules that combine in robust ways to allow for varied expression. Each roll of the dice here is baking in assumptions that will not play nice with the last unit, or the next one.
- nameless912 2y ago
  > I don't want to be asked 20 follow up questions to exactly specify the nature of the Orc This is the tell that these folks don't know enough about game design to be opining so strongly on "the future of AI driven game development". Game development is almost exclusively about the 20 follow up questions. Any moron can say "I want minecraft but in space with guns", but making that and, more importantly, making it feel good, are where all the juice lies in games. The details are the most important part, which is why I think all these attempts to put AI into the game development flow are ill advised at best. Copilot is okay at helping out with game code, but less so than for normal e.g. REST API or UI code, because game code tends to follow rules that don't exist anywhere else and every game is architected completely differently. Games are just...different.
  - Philpax 2y ago
    I promise that we've made games of our own in the past and that we're not coming at this completely unaware :-) Our thinking is that you can lay a base quickly, and then iterate on that to work on the details of your game. We want to avoid the analysis paralysis that comes from having to make all of the decisions upfront; you can instead rely on the AI's "common sense understanding" of the world [0] to get started, and then refine it to your desired vision. Our initial "engine" is highly-constrained with a specific ontology and predefined behaviours. That will strongly restrict what can be built with it. That's what makes it tractable to use with today's AI; as we develop better techniques and the backing models get better, we hope to cover more and more of the game design space. [0]: Yes, this is a contentious concept, but in practice it has a pretty good idea of what an orc is :-)

Philpax 2y ago

(I'm the in-house AI engineer at Braindump.) We experimented with a few different form factors, including integrating into existing game engines, before taking this path. Our rationale was that we wanted to go beyond the existing engine integrations (i.e. Unity already has an AI assistant) and reimagine the entire game creation experience with AI and multiplayer in mind. Our platform's entirely on the web, so you can link your current game/game creation session to someone else and have them join you. This works on most modern browser, making it easy to build and share games. That being said, you're not wrong that the current scope of games is limited. That's OK with us for now - we'd like to focus on getting the core experience as good as possible with the current scope and then expand outwards, instead of trying to build something that attempts to solve everything and works for nothing.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
> Our rationale was that we wanted to go beyond the existing engine integrations (i.e. Unity already has an AI assistant) and reimagine the entire game creation experience with AI and multiplayer in mind. How does that pan out? There's hundreds of millions of dollars of product development in Unity and Unreal specifically for game design. How will you ever catch up? Godot got $8m, for the people who authored it, what does it have to show for it? It seems like hopelessly little money. Maybe you said to the investors, "You don't want to be locked in" or whatever. The browser still an engine. Mobile Safari and Chrome are also moving targets. You're still playing in someone else's back yard. There are no games that are designed to be played in Mobile Safari and also make money. I mean the browser also has AI assistants. Obviously I want you to succeed but this sounds more like a good story than a good strategy. It doesn't hold up to an ounce of scrutiny. Right now it sounds like it's not interesting to develop the toolset for Unity because they are already doing it.
- datameta 2y ago
  Going beyond could mean one of several things, only one of which is playing catch-up with a decade-plus game engine.

tavavex 2y ago

Unless your needs are extremely specific and necessitate replacing most of the engine, Unity is probably not limiting your capabilities. The default packages are extensive and allow for basic game-making without writing that much actual code, but large developers will almost certainly swap default Unity components for their own for parts that need them, while the engine manages other parts like sound and input handling, multi-platform deployment and so on. Unity is by far the most used engine in the world and tons of extremely different games were made with it. Subnautica, Rimworld, Hollow Knight, Beat Saber, the Ori games, Disco Elysium - none of them seemed to face any issues with being made in Unity. The "Unity games are bad" stereotype annoys me - it's bound to have a bunch of shovelware made on it with how many resources there are for learning it (and Unity being free), but it's popular for a reason.

nameless912 2y ago
I would bet that more than 0% of that perception, at least from developers, comes from how _fucking awful_ the Unity editor is. It's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. The games you can make with Unity are absolutely very impressive, but the tools Unity provides are just awful, and give a lot of newbie developers the perception that Unity is a hacked together pile of garbage (which...it is, but so are all game engines). Godot, Unreal, and GameMaker are, I would say, the main competitors to Unity in the Indie space, and all three of them have much higher quality editors than Unity's.
- Jensson 2y ago
  The unreal engine editor is way worse than unity though, unreal doesn't even let you move around files without a massive headache, while in unity moving files is trivial and almost never causes issues. Not to mention that C++ in unreal is horrible to work with and blueprints lacks a lot of features, unity C# is far superior to both for productivity. If your game doesn't do anything complicated so you don't need to code a lot, then sure unreal could work since by far the biggest problem is iterating on code for the different components and actors. Adding or removing or renaming fields or refactoring folder structure and then go and update them in the blueprints takes forever while in unity that is really easy.

sdwr 2y ago

> If I type “Create an Orc,” then I don’t want to be asked 20 follow-up questions to exactly specify the nature of the Orc; I just want it to take a guess. This is the exact point where everything falls apart. Good games have simple rules that combine in robust ways to allow for varied expression. Each roll of the dice here is baking in assumptions that will not play nice with the last unit, or the next one.

nameless912 2y ago
> I don't want to be asked 20 follow up questions to exactly specify the nature of the Orc This is the tell that these folks don't know enough about game design to be opining so strongly on "the future of AI driven game development". Game development is almost exclusively about the 20 follow up questions. Any moron can say "I want minecraft but in space with guns", but making that and, more importantly, making it feel good, are where all the juice lies in games. The details are the most important part, which is why I think all these attempts to put AI into the game development flow are ill advised at best. Copilot is okay at helping out with game code, but less so than for normal e.g. REST API or UI code, because game code tends to follow rules that don't exist anywhere else and every game is architected completely differently. Games are just...different.
- Philpax 2y ago
  I promise that we've made games of our own in the past and that we're not coming at this completely unaware :-) Our thinking is that you can lay a base quickly, and then iterate on that to work on the details of your game. We want to avoid the analysis paralysis that comes from having to make all of the decisions upfront; you can instead rely on the AI's "common sense understanding" of the world [0] to get started, and then refine it to your desired vision. Our initial "engine" is highly-constrained with a specific ontology and predefined behaviours. That will strongly restrict what can be built with it. That's what makes it tractable to use with today's AI; as we develop better techniques and the backing models get better, we hope to cover more and more of the game design space. [0]: Yes, this is a contentious concept, but in practice it has a pretty good idea of what an orc is :-)