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What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A sol

What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI. The real grind is in all the invisible layers on top; balancing the loop, tuning difficulty, creating assets that don’t look uncanny, and building enough polish to hold someone’s attention for more than 5 minutes. That’s why we’re not suddenly drowning in brilliant Steam releases post-LLMs. The tech has lowered one wall, but the taller walls remain. It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. LLMs are doing the same thing for code, and image models are starting to do it for art, but neither can tell you if your game is actually fun. The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? That’s when we start moving beyond "AI as productivity hack" into "AI as collaborator in design." We’re not there yet, but this article feels like an early data point along that trajectory.

danjl 1y ago
As a much lower bar, I'd love it if more of the LLMs used for coding were actually multimodal, accepting images of games as part of the context. In general, LLMs are far better at generating web apps than they are at pure 2D or 3D games that use graphical APIs. There's far less training data, and there's no way to test anywhere close to what you can do with testing on a DOM. In an interactive game, with physics, animations and game logic, the AI just falls on its face because of the complexity.
- benbreen 1y ago
  I realize this isn't the same thing as your point about images as part of training data, but just flagging it in case anyone isn't aware: Claude Code lets you copy and paste images into terminal. I've been designing a "universal history simulator" game for use in my history classes lately, and it is really helpful to be able to make a mockup of a ui change I want and then paste it in, rather than trying to explain it verbally. Also good for debugging graphics issues.
zerr 1y ago
My litmus test for generative AI: generate a complete spritesheet for a 2D pixel art action game, e.g. only for the battle tank or main hero movements. No success so far.
- smokel 1y ago
  Mind sharing what you have tried? Have you considered training a diffusion model on pixel art, and then conditioning it on a 3D model?
- davepeck 1y ago
  Ive never once successfully gotten a usable sprite sheet out of ChatGPT. The concept seems foreign to it and no matter how hard I try to steer it it’ll find a way to do something hopeless (inconsistent frame sizes; incoherent animations; no sense of consistent pixel sizes or what distinguishes (say) 8-bit from 16-bit era sprites; it’ll draw graph paper in the background for some reason; etc etc.). If anyone has a set of magic prompts for this, I’d love to learn about it. But my suspicion is that it’s just fundamentally the wrong tool for the job — you probably need a purpose-built model.
  - typpilol 1y ago
    According to all the lazy articles I've read here lately you just need to threaten to beat it up lmao...
  - mac-mc 1y ago
    Like a full sprite sheet, one sprite at a time or a sprite animation loop? Each one would require a different kind of model and model technique to make, so I wouldn't be surprised that ChatGPT has issues with it. A sprite animation loop would be better done by a potentially specialized video-oriented model, for example, and the current image and video models are barely trained on that kind of video data.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - frozenlettuce 1y ago
pjmlp 1y ago
And the main reason why actually making a game with interesting gameplay is more relevant than discussing what is the best language to do a game on.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
raincole 1y ago
> we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game We definitely saw an explosion of good indie games by around early half of 2010s. Whether it had anything to do with Unity is another moot point.
- hollowturtle 1y ago
  even indie games are painstackingly hard to develop, don't make the mistake of associating indie with easy, rather harder i'd say if you go solo or with a few others in a very high risk job
  - lkramer 1y ago
    I don't think the post you replied to says otherwise, but Unity meant there was now a path with professional grade tools without spending a fortune. It definitely did create a new wave of indie games, some of them amazing.
  - raincole 1y ago
    Correct, but it's really hard to comprehend how this is related to what I said.
- nine_k 1y ago
  A bunch of ideas that had been tabled because of the difficulty of implementation were released once the difficulty of making a 3D world was somehow alleviated by Unity. Maybe something else is currently holding back another bunch of good ideas in gaming. Once another threshold gets lowered, we will see another wave of good games enabled by by that, and a return to the average rate of creation again.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  I think change in curation model especially with Steam had lot to do with it. Opening marketplace for more products will allow more of them to be sold.
nahnahno 1y ago
This is not true in my experience. Cranking out code is obviously the bottleneck, unless you have the luxury of working on a very narrow problem. The author describes a multi-modal project that does not afford this luxury.
- girvo 1y ago
  And it’s absolutely true in my experience, coding was never the bottleneck (modulo advanced shader programming which LLMs still aren’t great at despite my best efforts)
- mac-mc 1y ago
  IMO, looking at most budget spend, it's the art & content that is the bottleneck.
- Vetch 1y ago
  Unless you're also writing your own graphics and game engine from scratch, if you're making a truly novel and balanced game, then it should not be possible to crank out code with AI. When working in engines, the bulk of the work is usually in gameplay programming so the fact that its code is so predictable should be concerning (unless the programming is effectively in natural language). Not spending most of your time testing introduced mechanics, re-balancing and iterating should be triggering alarm bells. If you're working on an RPG, narrative design, reactivity and writing will eat up most of your time. In the case you're working as part of team large enough to have dedicated programmers, the majority of the roles will usually be in content creation, design and QA.
lvl155 1y ago
That’s what a lot of people are missing about AI. You can do an exhaustive search which is effectively AGI. You already solved for a “solution” it’s simply a matter of searching for it. We are pretty close.
zahlman 1y ago
> The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? How is AI supposed to simulate a player, and why should it be able to determine what real people would find engaging?
- yonatan8070 1y ago
  Game companies already collect heaps of data about players, which mechanics they interact with, which mechanics they don't, retention, play time, etc. I don't think it's much of a stretch to take this data over multiple games, versions, and genres, and train a model to take in a set of mechanics, stats, or even video and audio to rate the different aspects of a game prototype. I wouldn't even be surprised if I heard this is already being done somewhere.
  - sbarre 1y ago
    Yeah there's no way Microsoft isn't already using all their aggregate metrics (trillions of data points I'm sure) from their first-party studios and making a "What good looks like" training set.. Whether that set is actually useful is a separate issue but someone is trying this over there for sure.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    Ah yes, the huge game companies, definitely outfits I would associate with producing fun games I haven't seen before and not churning out Existing Franchise N+1 every year with barely perceptible differences and higher prices each iteration.
    - yonatan8070 1y ago
      Maybe "fun" isn't the right word, "engaging" or "addicting" is probably what they use internally.
  - uncircle 1y ago
    > Game companies already collect heaps of data about players, which mechanics they interact with, which mechanics they don't, retention, play time, etc. Yes, that's how games like Concord get made. Very successful approach to create art based on data about what's popular and focus groups.
kaiokendev 1y ago
> It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. But we did? We've come a long way from the limited XBLA catalog. It didn't happen overnight, but doubtless we wouldn't have the volume of games we have today without Unity, Godot, Gamemaker, Renpy, RPG Maker...
- sbarre 1y ago
  I think "proportional" is the key word here..
- milesvp 1y ago
  > we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. I'm not sure the 2 of you are disagreeing. We definitely saw an explosion of indie games. In 2010, there were less than 10 indie games released on steam per month. By 2022, there were ~500/mo, and today there's ~750/mo (I expect that the 250/mo jump around 2022 can likely be attributed to LLMs). What's hard to say is if this increase significantly increased the number of good games. Mostly because "good" is highly subjective, but also, I think something else happens. I've been playing games for the better part of 40 years, and what I noticed, is that in that time, the number of must play games each year has largely gone unchanged, despite the industry being orders of magnitude larger than it was 40 years ago. But that is also tricky, because 2 things happen every year, our standards get higher, and our preferences get more refined. https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492 https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492
  - kaiokendev 1y ago
    You also still have the same amount of time you had 40 years ago. There are definitely more games available, and I would argue the proportion of high quality games has also increased massively, but since you're still limited by the number of games you can play in any given year, you'll never feel that increase.
    - Vetch 1y ago
ModernMech 1y ago
LLMs have the same value proposition as no-code or low-code tools, and they also have the same failure cases. With pre-AI no-code tools, they also lowered walls but they didn't remove the barriers. The experience was a lot like we're seeing from the "vibe coders", like this post here: "what's the point of vibecoding if at the end of the day I still have to pay a dev to look at the code anyway... I can't vibe my way through debugging, I can't ship anything that actually matters." [1] That was the experience a lot of people had using no/low code tools, where you could make progress, but as soon as you hit a problem you are done, because overcoming it will require skills the no/low code don't teach or really support. LLMs are only different because the interface is more accessible. But all the same problems are still there. AI is not a panacea. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1mudy12/theystartingtogetit https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1mudy12/th...
hcnews 1y ago
> What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI. This is not true at all. I have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game. While I know a lot of good practices about software development and decade+ of FAANG experience, I don't know the intricacies or even the basics of game development. I recently experienced this for a different usecase. As an experienced backend developer, I wanted to automate some javascript/browser stuff. I tried on my own for 2-3 days and had couple of prototypes but nothing actually worked. I spent 2 hours with an AI and I had a working solution. We even iterated together quickly and solved some runtime issues and the solution is working for me seamlessly now. So, I definitely see value of AI even for coding for experienced developers like myself.
- whoknowsidont 1y ago
  > have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game. You're contradicting yourself. I promise it wouldn't take you months, unless you're just a really bad developer.
  - __loam 1y ago
    Don't be a prick in public man, it looks bad
    - whoknowsidont 1y ago
      I mean it's a simple fact that the baseline for creating a game, roughly using the average developer experience/capability, is not months. Making a _good_ game might take months, it often takes years. And that's the part AI is not going to be able to help you with.
      - 3036e4 1y ago
        Making a good boardgame, with zero need for programming, excluding artwork, is months or years of work. I would expect that much at a minimum for a (good) simple digital game, unless it is just going to sell on graphics and marketing alone (or luck).
ants_everywhere 1y ago
> what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop It can do this. From Atari games to StarCraft this has been a thing since before LLMs. > surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged This it's unclear how to operationalize. Among other things, not all games appeal to all people.
- typpilol 1y ago
  It's been YouTube series of AI vs AI starcraft for a long time. AI is insane. It can do like 10,000 actions per second lol https://youtu.be/0p34y7X0VCM?si=GSAjOyRmK6kNmYdx https://youtu.be/0p34y7X0VCM?si=GSAjOyRmK6kNmYdx
potatoman22 1y ago
AI doing playtests is an idea I've been thinking about too. The question I can't quite answer is: how do you know the AI play-tester can predict what users find fun? How well does it represent the different kinds of users?
nine_k 1y ago
> coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck Doesn't look exactly that to me. The author built a server, studied React, built a frontend, made the card game work. Then, with most bits needed for a card game already in place, he asked Claude to alter the existing code to implement a different card game. Understandably, it took much shorter. But it would also take much shorter if a human engineer did the same.
moron4hire 1y ago
Is that the takeaway? When they say, "I cloned the backend for Truco and gave Claude a long prompt explaining the rules of Escoba and asking it to refactor the code to implement it", that doesn't really make it sound like a good heads-up comparison from which we could then say, "the coding part was not the most significant part of the problem". I mean, the entire article is problematic as proof of anything. For starters, they didn't go through a design process for a game at all, they copied existing games. Then there are all these weird technical rabbit holes they went down that really weren't anywhere near "simplest path to MVP". I just don't think there is anything to glean from this article. Like most posts about individual experiences with AI, it's functionally equivalent to, "I had a weird dream last night".
benreesman 1y ago
This holds in other areas as well, and to me at least the conclusion follows from the evidence: there is seemingly a lot of potential in agent coding, a few tasks are just crushed/solved (quick webapp demos, other library stitching in the small) but for real software in the large? It's not there yet in either the way the models are tuned or our collective expertise in using them. And this isn't surprising: git-style revision control hit the scene almost 20 years ago, it was like 5 years until it was totally dialed in anywhere, another 5 before elite companies had it totally figured out, and its been slowely diffusing since, today its pretty figured out. And this is harder to use right than git. I think it would go faster actually if every product release, every OSS tool, every god-damned blog post wasn't hell bent on saying "its done, its solved, old way cooked, new world arrived". We're figuring it out and it takes time. That's OK. If it was done, then we'd be drowning in great software. We're not, we're breaking even, which is impressive for a big new thing 1-2 years in.
- poslathian 1y ago
  This true - and git was not a moving target. AI core tech has certainly slowed down but still moving fast enough to make hard won lessons worthless and investing in learning them questionable.
chrz 1y ago
Depends on the game but absolutely we run thousand iterations of a game, but for balance. Which mechanics keep player engaged you need to get feedback from players
taftster 1y ago
> neither can tell you if your game is actually fun I think this is the core insight. An AI will not be able to experience a game (or anything else for that matter) remotely in the same way that a human can experience it. It might be able to guess, based on human rankings of other similar games. But AI will never be able to actually have fun playing your game. This concept will define the workforce that comes out of this AI boom. Maybe an AI can write a document or code like a human, only based on past samples of similar behavior, but it won't be able to synthesize exactly what it means to be a human. The human element will still need to be traded on. Your value as a human cannot be replaced, you might just have to think differently about that value.
nikolayasdf123 1y ago
> hold someone’s attention for more than 5 minutes. more like, more than 5 seconds.
miki123211 1y ago
This makes me feel like games will be the last bastion to fully fall to AI. In traditional business apps, your goal is to make your app work and look intuitive enough for a human to use. When developing a game, you have a few extra goals, it also has to be fun, rewarding and different enough from other games that came before. It feels like the former group will be much easier to judge by non-humans than the latter.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
> The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? Much the same as we do today in games and film both, something saccharine and mediocre built to appeal to a wide majority. Worse, if this process becomes streamlined and widely accessible, you're competing with a hundred other saccharine and mediocre built to a wide majority games. AI generated shovelware, it's like the shovelware of today where anything remotely popular generates dozens of cheap clones, but with AI. The best games take risks and aren't min/maxed.
marqueewinq 1y ago
Personally, i don't think the coding part of game development was not a bottleneck. Just try to implement, for example, a hexagon-based isometric game. There are no off-the-shelf implementations -- you'll need to redo the pan / zoom / click controls yourself, you'll need to implement the pathfinding, map layers, interface state machine etc etc etc This is still not an easy task -- to build a somehow complicated game. If you're building a platformer -- sure, that's doable. Strategy/4X/RPG? That's different.
- 0points 1y ago
  > Just try to implement, for example, a hexagon-based isometric game. There are no off-the-shelf implementations -- you'll need to redo the pan / zoom / click controls yourself, you'll need to implement the pathfinding, map layers, interface state machine etc etc etc Sure there's off the shelf implementations. Off the top of my head I would suggest starting with evaluating godot 4. They have isometric view, pathfinding, and all of the rest you are mentioning.
  - marqueewinq 1y ago
    Sure they do -- but once you introduce at least one custom component (i.e. hexagon map), it's actually not straightforward, how to integrate it with the rest of the controls. I can't say whether it's me who's stupid, or it's just not very easy to make good UI in game engines. I don't say that's not doable of course -- i'm just saying one would need to invest quite a bit of time to work out how to do this.
WA 1y ago
You are absolutely right! The tic-tac-toe game we‘ve been working on is a total blast and simulated players 1-1000 enjoy it very much! I think we should release it soon.

danjl 1y ago

As a much lower bar, I'd love it if more of the LLMs used for coding were actually multimodal, accepting images of games as part of the context. In general, LLMs are far better at generating web apps than they are at pure 2D or 3D games that use graphical APIs. There's far less training data, and there's no way to test anywhere close to what you can do with testing on a DOM. In an interactive game, with physics, animations and game logic, the AI just falls on its face because of the complexity.

benbreen 1y ago
I realize this isn't the same thing as your point about images as part of training data, but just flagging it in case anyone isn't aware: Claude Code lets you copy and paste images into terminal. I've been designing a "universal history simulator" game for use in my history classes lately, and it is really helpful to be able to make a mockup of a ui change I want and then paste it in, rather than trying to explain it verbally. Also good for debugging graphics issues.

zerr 1y ago

My litmus test for generative AI: generate a complete spritesheet for a 2D pixel art action game, e.g. only for the battle tank or main hero movements. No success so far.

smokel 1y ago
Mind sharing what you have tried? Have you considered training a diffusion model on pixel art, and then conditioning it on a 3D model?
davepeck 1y ago
Ive never once successfully gotten a usable sprite sheet out of ChatGPT. The concept seems foreign to it and no matter how hard I try to steer it it’ll find a way to do something hopeless (inconsistent frame sizes; incoherent animations; no sense of consistent pixel sizes or what distinguishes (say) 8-bit from 16-bit era sprites; it’ll draw graph paper in the background for some reason; etc etc.). If anyone has a set of magic prompts for this, I’d love to learn about it. But my suspicion is that it’s just fundamentally the wrong tool for the job — you probably need a purpose-built model.
- typpilol 1y ago
  According to all the lazy articles I've read here lately you just need to threaten to beat it up lmao...
- mac-mc 1y ago
  Like a full sprite sheet, one sprite at a time or a sprite animation loop? Each one would require a different kind of model and model technique to make, so I wouldn't be surprised that ChatGPT has issues with it. A sprite animation loop would be better done by a potentially specialized video-oriented model, for example, and the current image and video models are barely trained on that kind of video data.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- frozenlettuce 1y ago

pjmlp 1y ago

And the main reason why actually making a game with interesting gameplay is more relevant than discussing what is the best language to do a game on.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

raincole 1y ago

> we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game We definitely saw an explosion of good indie games by around early half of 2010s. Whether it had anything to do with Unity is another moot point.

hollowturtle 1y ago
even indie games are painstackingly hard to develop, don't make the mistake of associating indie with easy, rather harder i'd say if you go solo or with a few others in a very high risk job
- lkramer 1y ago
  I don't think the post you replied to says otherwise, but Unity meant there was now a path with professional grade tools without spending a fortune. It definitely did create a new wave of indie games, some of them amazing.
- raincole 1y ago
  Correct, but it's really hard to comprehend how this is related to what I said.
nine_k 1y ago
A bunch of ideas that had been tabled because of the difficulty of implementation were released once the difficulty of making a 3D world was somehow alleviated by Unity. Maybe something else is currently holding back another bunch of good ideas in gaming. Once another threshold gets lowered, we will see another wave of good games enabled by by that, and a return to the average rate of creation again.
Ekaros 1y ago
I think change in curation model especially with Steam had lot to do with it. Opening marketplace for more products will allow more of them to be sold.

nahnahno 1y ago

This is not true in my experience. Cranking out code is obviously the bottleneck, unless you have the luxury of working on a very narrow problem. The author describes a multi-modal project that does not afford this luxury.

girvo 1y ago
And it’s absolutely true in my experience, coding was never the bottleneck (modulo advanced shader programming which LLMs still aren’t great at despite my best efforts)
mac-mc 1y ago
IMO, looking at most budget spend, it's the art & content that is the bottleneck.
Vetch 1y ago
Unless you're also writing your own graphics and game engine from scratch, if you're making a truly novel and balanced game, then it should not be possible to crank out code with AI. When working in engines, the bulk of the work is usually in gameplay programming so the fact that its code is so predictable should be concerning (unless the programming is effectively in natural language). Not spending most of your time testing introduced mechanics, re-balancing and iterating should be triggering alarm bells. If you're working on an RPG, narrative design, reactivity and writing will eat up most of your time. In the case you're working as part of team large enough to have dedicated programmers, the majority of the roles will usually be in content creation, design and QA.

lvl155 1y ago

That’s what a lot of people are missing about AI. You can do an exhaustive search which is effectively AGI. You already solved for a “solution” it’s simply a matter of searching for it. We are pretty close.

zahlman 1y ago

yonatan8070 1y ago
Game companies already collect heaps of data about players, which mechanics they interact with, which mechanics they don't, retention, play time, etc. I don't think it's much of a stretch to take this data over multiple games, versions, and genres, and train a model to take in a set of mechanics, stats, or even video and audio to rate the different aspects of a game prototype. I wouldn't even be surprised if I heard this is already being done somewhere.
- sbarre 1y ago
  Yeah there's no way Microsoft isn't already using all their aggregate metrics (trillions of data points I'm sure) from their first-party studios and making a "What good looks like" training set.. Whether that set is actually useful is a separate issue but someone is trying this over there for sure.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  Ah yes, the huge game companies, definitely outfits I would associate with producing fun games I haven't seen before and not churning out Existing Franchise N+1 every year with barely perceptible differences and higher prices each iteration.
  - yonatan8070 1y ago
    Maybe "fun" isn't the right word, "engaging" or "addicting" is probably what they use internally.
- uncircle 1y ago
  > Game companies already collect heaps of data about players, which mechanics they interact with, which mechanics they don't, retention, play time, etc. Yes, that's how games like Concord get made. Very successful approach to create art based on data about what's popular and focus groups.

kaiokendev 1y ago

> It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. But we did? We've come a long way from the limited XBLA catalog. It didn't happen overnight, but doubtless we wouldn't have the volume of games we have today without Unity, Godot, Gamemaker, Renpy, RPG Maker...

sbarre 1y ago
I think "proportional" is the key word here..
milesvp 1y ago
> we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. I'm not sure the 2 of you are disagreeing. We definitely saw an explosion of indie games. In 2010, there were less than 10 indie games released on steam per month. By 2022, there were ~500/mo, and today there's ~750/mo (I expect that the 250/mo jump around 2022 can likely be attributed to LLMs). What's hard to say is if this increase significantly increased the number of good games. Mostly because "good" is highly subjective, but also, I think something else happens. I've been playing games for the better part of 40 years, and what I noticed, is that in that time, the number of must play games each year has largely gone unchanged, despite the industry being orders of magnitude larger than it was 40 years ago. But that is also tricky, because 2 things happen every year, our standards get higher, and our preferences get more refined. https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492 https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492
- kaiokendev 1y ago
  You also still have the same amount of time you had 40 years ago. There are definitely more games available, and I would argue the proportion of high quality games has also increased massively, but since you're still limited by the number of games you can play in any given year, you'll never feel that increase.
  - Vetch 1y ago

ModernMech 1y ago

LLMs have the same value proposition as no-code or low-code tools, and they also have the same failure cases. With pre-AI no-code tools, they also lowered walls but they didn't remove the barriers. The experience was a lot like we're seeing from the "vibe coders", like this post here: "what's the point of vibecoding if at the end of the day I still have to pay a dev to look at the code anyway... I can't vibe my way through debugging, I can't ship anything that actually matters." [1] That was the experience a lot of people had using no/low code tools, where you could make progress, but as soon as you hit a problem you are done, because overcoming it will require skills the no/low code don't teach or really support. LLMs are only different because the interface is more accessible. But all the same problems are still there. AI is not a panacea. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1mudy12/theystartingtogetit https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1mudy12/th...

hcnews 1y ago

> What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI. This is not true at all. I have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game. While I know a lot of good practices about software development and decade+ of FAANG experience, I don't know the intricacies or even the basics of game development. I recently experienced this for a different usecase. As an experienced backend developer, I wanted to automate some javascript/browser stuff. I tried on my own for 2-3 days and had couple of prototypes but nothing actually worked. I spent 2 hours with an AI and I had a working solution. We even iterated together quickly and solved some runtime issues and the solution is working for me seamlessly now. So, I definitely see value of AI even for coding for experienced developers like myself.

whoknowsidont 1y ago
> have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game. You're contradicting yourself. I promise it wouldn't take you months, unless you're just a really bad developer.
- __loam 1y ago
  Don't be a prick in public man, it looks bad
  - whoknowsidont 1y ago
    I mean it's a simple fact that the baseline for creating a game, roughly using the average developer experience/capability, is not months. Making a _good_ game might take months, it often takes years. And that's the part AI is not going to be able to help you with.
    - 3036e4 1y ago
      Making a good boardgame, with zero need for programming, excluding artwork, is months or years of work. I would expect that much at a minimum for a (good) simple digital game, unless it is just going to sell on graphics and marketing alone (or luck).

ants_everywhere 1y ago

> what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop It can do this. From Atari games to StarCraft this has been a thing since before LLMs. > surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged This it's unclear how to operationalize. Among other things, not all games appeal to all people.

typpilol 1y ago
It's been YouTube series of AI vs AI starcraft for a long time. AI is insane. It can do like 10,000 actions per second lol https://youtu.be/0p34y7X0VCM?si=GSAjOyRmK6kNmYdx https://youtu.be/0p34y7X0VCM?si=GSAjOyRmK6kNmYdx

potatoman22 1y ago

AI doing playtests is an idea I've been thinking about too. The question I can't quite answer is: how do you know the AI play-tester can predict what users find fun? How well does it represent the different kinds of users?

nine_k 1y ago

> coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck Doesn't look exactly that to me. The author built a server, studied React, built a frontend, made the card game work. Then, with most bits needed for a card game already in place, he asked Claude to alter the existing code to implement a different card game. Understandably, it took much shorter. But it would also take much shorter if a human engineer did the same.

moron4hire 1y ago

Is that the takeaway? When they say, "I cloned the backend for Truco and gave Claude a long prompt explaining the rules of Escoba and asking it to refactor the code to implement it", that doesn't really make it sound like a good heads-up comparison from which we could then say, "the coding part was not the most significant part of the problem". I mean, the entire article is problematic as proof of anything. For starters, they didn't go through a design process for a game at all, they copied existing games. Then there are all these weird technical rabbit holes they went down that really weren't anywhere near "simplest path to MVP". I just don't think there is anything to glean from this article. Like most posts about individual experiences with AI, it's functionally equivalent to, "I had a weird dream last night".

benreesman 1y ago

This holds in other areas as well, and to me at least the conclusion follows from the evidence: there is seemingly a lot of potential in agent coding, a few tasks are just crushed/solved (quick webapp demos, other library stitching in the small) but for real software in the large? It's not there yet in either the way the models are tuned or our collective expertise in using them. And this isn't surprising: git-style revision control hit the scene almost 20 years ago, it was like 5 years until it was totally dialed in anywhere, another 5 before elite companies had it totally figured out, and its been slowely diffusing since, today its pretty figured out. And this is harder to use right than git. I think it would go faster actually if every product release, every OSS tool, every god-damned blog post wasn't hell bent on saying "its done, its solved, old way cooked, new world arrived". We're figuring it out and it takes time. That's OK. If it was done, then we'd be drowning in great software. We're not, we're breaking even, which is impressive for a big new thing 1-2 years in.

poslathian 1y ago
This true - and git was not a moving target. AI core tech has certainly slowed down but still moving fast enough to make hard won lessons worthless and investing in learning them questionable.

chrz 1y ago

Depends on the game but absolutely we run thousand iterations of a game, but for balance. Which mechanics keep player engaged you need to get feedback from players

taftster 1y ago

> neither can tell you if your game is actually fun I think this is the core insight. An AI will not be able to experience a game (or anything else for that matter) remotely in the same way that a human can experience it. It might be able to guess, based on human rankings of other similar games. But AI will never be able to actually have fun playing your game. This concept will define the workforce that comes out of this AI boom. Maybe an AI can write a document or code like a human, only based on past samples of similar behavior, but it won't be able to synthesize exactly what it means to be a human. The human element will still need to be traded on. Your value as a human cannot be replaced, you might just have to think differently about that value.

nikolayasdf123 1y ago

> hold someone’s attention for more than 5 minutes. more like, more than 5 seconds.

miki123211 1y ago

This makes me feel like games will be the last bastion to fully fall to AI. In traditional business apps, your goal is to make your app work and look intuitive enough for a human to use. When developing a game, you have a few extra goals, it also has to be fun, rewarding and different enough from other games that came before. It feels like the former group will be much easier to judge by non-humans than the latter.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago

> The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? Much the same as we do today in games and film both, something saccharine and mediocre built to appeal to a wide majority. Worse, if this process becomes streamlined and widely accessible, you're competing with a hundred other saccharine and mediocre built to a wide majority games. AI generated shovelware, it's like the shovelware of today where anything remotely popular generates dozens of cheap clones, but with AI. The best games take risks and aren't min/maxed.

marqueewinq 1y ago

Personally, i don't think the coding part of game development was not a bottleneck. Just try to implement, for example, a hexagon-based isometric game. There are no off-the-shelf implementations -- you'll need to redo the pan / zoom / click controls yourself, you'll need to implement the pathfinding, map layers, interface state machine etc etc etc This is still not an easy task -- to build a somehow complicated game. If you're building a platformer -- sure, that's doable. Strategy/4X/RPG? That's different.

0points 1y ago
> Just try to implement, for example, a hexagon-based isometric game. There are no off-the-shelf implementations -- you'll need to redo the pan / zoom / click controls yourself, you'll need to implement the pathfinding, map layers, interface state machine etc etc etc Sure there's off the shelf implementations. Off the top of my head I would suggest starting with evaluating godot 4. They have isometric view, pathfinding, and all of the rest you are mentioning.
- marqueewinq 1y ago
  Sure they do -- but once you introduce at least one custom component (i.e. hexagon map), it's actually not straightforward, how to integrate it with the rest of the controls. I can't say whether it's me who's stupid, or it's just not very easy to make good UI in game engines. I don't say that's not doable of course -- i'm just saying one would need to invest quite a bit of time to work out how to do this.

WA 1y ago

You are absolutely right! The tic-tac-toe game we‘ve been working on is a total blast and simulated players 1-1000 enjoy it very much! I think we should release it soon.