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Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being 'AI free'

198 points by 01-_- 11mo ago

khoury 11mo ago
The "hand made" era of software
- b3lvedere 11mo ago
  We of the hand crafted software guild (HCSG) vow to not use too much tools and automation. Sure, you may use a compiler to magically transform your source code into real executable software or use some Adobe product to transform your ugly concept drawing into something amazing, but we draw the vague limit at outsourcing too much to automation at AI generated or curated content. One can only respect the trade if one works extremely hard, drew blood and shedded tears and sweat from one's very overworked body. AI is just creepy and has no soul. Did the great artists, developers and programmers copy paste a lot of each others work and call it a day? We think not! Here we do not re-invent the wheel or copy someone else's wheel. You will be obligated to design, develop, program and come up with your own wheel, even if you have a copy of the best wheel possible for your program. We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches so the high quality of software is always preserved. Your parents and great-parents will be proud and shed nostalgic tears when using your software. Everything should be as it was and everything should be traditionally awesome. /s
  - beepbooptheory 11mo ago
    > We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches so the high quality of software is always preserved I see the `\s` but this part at least is literally what we need to do!
    - b3lvedere 11mo ago
      You do realize you can copy digital stuff as much as you want? :)
      - beepbooptheory 11mo ago
        Is that fact meant to be hidden or put aside here? I am not sure I see that.
        b3lvedere 11mo ago
        Oh no not that way. Small batches so the high quality of software is quite unneccesary because software can be copied infinite times. Sorry, bad joke.
  - walt_grata 11mo ago
    I'll be more inclined to believe the hype when we start measuring accuracy and predictability like SLOs and holding the companies accountable for bad results.
- ceejayoz 11mo ago
  Artisanal! I remember when artisanal Doritos came out. That felt like the end of that.
- kleiba 11mo ago
  And this when "Handmade Hero" was abandoned over two years ago, after not really getting anywhere over the course of 9 years.
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    Haven't you kept up with the social media status, and the conferences that came out of it?
  - Johanx64 11mo ago
    For what it's worth it spawned a lot of quality software as a side effect. And served as an educational platform for a lot of programmers that felt that there's something wrong with modern day software and python/javascript low quality garbage they did at their day-to-day job, but couldn't quite put their finger on it. Turns out you can both fail, and yet succeed in 10 different ways at the same time.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  - _aavaa_ 11mo ago
    What do you mean by "not really getting anywhere"? The point was to show and document the process, not to ship a commercial game. And the context is that it was 2hrs a week for 9 years, not 9 years of full-time dev.
    - kleiba 11mo ago
      The process was absolutely to ship a commercial game, which Casey re-iterated at the beginning of every single episode. Also, people could spend $15 to "pre-order" the game.
  - kragen 11mo ago
    Huh, I didn't realize he'd abandoned Handmade Hero! I somehow assumed he eventually shipped it.
1gn15 11mo ago
[flagged]
- debo_ 11mo ago
  Most of the focus on this isn't the code. It's the art and music that make up the experience. This is discussed right in the article. > For Kanaris-Sotiriou, the question of adopting the use of gen AI to make games was an easy one to answer. “The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork [...] are unfair,” he says. I personally think using AI assistance for the code is much less intrusive than using AI for the art and music -- the code isn't as directly experienced by the player as the art.
  - mikkupikku 11mo ago
    Much of it comes from people feeling challenged and threatened by the new tech so they construct elaborate philosophies to justify how they feel, but this rapidly crumbles when you look closer. For instance, artists felt threatened by generative AI and came up with a narrative about copyright stuff. But then Adobe comes along with generative AI which doesn't have the copyright issue and how do those same artists respond? With a loud "fuck you" to Adobe, because the root of their objection was never copyright but rather what the new technology would do to their established careers. In this atmosphere, I think it's easy to perceive an implied rejection of and threat to AI generated code, even if the focus is on art assets, because people aren't being entirely direct and forthright about exactly what it is they're upset about, and that makes for a landmine field.
    - stego-tech 11mo ago
      Yeah nah. The core reason they’re pissed is the blatant theft of their work to train these models without compensation or permission (the age old “if it’s on the web it’s free to use” bullshit argument), with “artistic merit” being a distant, but still critical, second. If you can actually write stories or create art, you can see the “seams” in generative content and it gets to be quite nauseating. The fact it was trained on your own output by a trillion-dollar megacorp via theft while you scrape money for rent is the injury to the former’s insult.
sweetheart 11mo ago
https://archive.ph/20251125055632/https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/827650/indie-developers-gen-ai-nexon-arc-raiders https://archive.ph/20251125055632/https://www.theverge.com/e... I'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can become a crutch that hurts rather than helps. I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a remarkable difference between AI being used for the software engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop count as Gen AI? How could it not? In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a somewhat painstaking creative process.
thedangler 11mo ago
I like AI to figure out complex issue or something I would just find on stackoverflow. It's great for doing boiler plate crap that I don't want to do anyways. But when you need it to do something that it hasn't found in a git repo, it struggles.
dejobaan 11mo ago
I've been keeping an eye out on AI disclosures on Steam (https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-of-genai-games-on-steam https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...). While it's unsurprising that devs are using it, what was surprising was the number of games that disclose it. I believe, as of November, it's up to 8% of the while library. The biggest game to disclose AI use right now is Stellaris (with many many millions in sales), though having initially launched many years ago, their GenAI usage is in product updates.
- watwut 11mo ago
  Maybe it is a good strategy. Haters will more likely to steer clear instead of raging in comments and others will be less surprised over ai typical inconsistences and issues.
- nitwit005 11mo ago
  Keep in mind that aggregate statistics about Steam games include things like student projects, and hobby efforts never expected to make money. But that said, I absolutely expected a high rate because I assumed game devs would be forced to use it by management, just as I am.
stego-tech 11mo ago
The “they’re just jelly that we can do better than they with AI” camp really needs to spend more time hanging around artisans in general, instead of flouncing into comment sections and evangelizing the AI-booster groupthink. Artists and creators are, broadly, incredibly pissed that their output was used to train these models without compensation or consent by trillion-dollar megacorps and VC-funded startups. That is, and remains, the core grievance. People who already make a pittance by devoting themselves to the creation of art are now forced out of art entirely because programmers just couldn’t be bothered to - GASP - have an original thought and commission someone else to execute it for them. A distant, but still important, secondary concern is the quality of the slop itself (or lack thereof). Anyone who engages with art sufficiently can see the “seams” in generative content, even in state of the art models: perspectives lack consistency across key frames, anatomy isn’t grounded in reality or bends in ways befitting of a horror movie, geometry and materials that do not “graft” together due to a lack of negative space. These models are garbage because they don’t recognize core artistic concepts, only haphazardly reassemble pieces by prompt. I challenge the AI crowd to actually go to an art faire, or commission a custom piece of your idea. Have something you had to contribute more than a simple prompt, to. Identify styles you like and artists that work within them. Take the chance to make more human connections and bond over shared creativity. The artists will thank you, and you’re likely to enjoy the resultant output far more.
- catapart 11mo ago
  At this point, I just assume anyone who advocates for the use of AI is actually just an output from some AI. Given that "human-sounding speech" is the thing that AI is most easily able to produce, and how many different AIs are out there, and how beneficial an army of never-softening commenters can be for any specific pet cause you like, I can't think of why it wouldn't be statistically irresponsible to not assume that. I've met enough real humans with completely self-important defenses of it that I know that they exist, so I'm willing to at least give them doubt. But the assumption is that they are AI and they need to prove being human. To assume otherwise is unreasonable.
- NitpickLawyer 11mo ago
  I debated a bit about how to answer this, because I've seen this idea so much after stable diffusion came out. I have a serious answer, and a sarcastic one. I'll go with the serious one. The sarcastic bit was just replacing coders with artists in your text. You can imagine it, I guess :) Why are "artists" special? Why did you feel the need to type these 4 thoughtful (but overdone imo) paragraphs, defending "artisans"? Why are they special, when compared to coders? Why do the artists get to use ever better tools designed to help them, but when the other side gets the same kinds of tools, it's suddenly faux pas? Is it just "AI hate" or is it something else? Can you at least see the double standards that you apply in your post, as I can see it from outside? It used to be that games were coded by passionate people. People who knew how to code. They'd painstakingly find ways of making ascii characters do silly things on a screen that wasn't necessarily designed for what they were doing. Later, they started playing with pixels. But they were still coders. So they coded away until the pixels started doing funny things on the screen. You talk about "art"? Hah. THAT was art. The ability and tech knowledge to make those early systems do those things with pixels is something that we just don't see today. And we don't see it, in large, because coders did what coders do and made it simpler for anyone else to do those funny things with pixels on a screen. At every step of the way coders built software to help other people. They built engines. Then they built harnesses for the designers, animators and so on. Then they built simplified engines. The endless RPG generators, and so on. Then they built "no-code" solutions. Here, friend, you take this piece of code, plug in your art and you have a game! And they were happy to do that, because it was enabling other people to do their thing. With code they wrote. And many of them free of charge! But now, when suddenly coders have a tool that they can use themselves, to empower them with things that they couldn't previously do, now suddenly there's a problem? Why is one artist's output "art", even if the game code is shit, while the opposite isn't? Why can't a coder enjoy creating a game, with help from tools that do something they simply don't care about? They want to do the logic behind the things moving on the screen, and can't / won't spend time creating the art. Why should they be shunned? Why not enjoy the experience for what it is? Is it just AI hate? If so, perhaps you should disclose it. Dunno, this whole take of yours feels mighty high-horsey for my taste.
mjr00 11mo ago
Seems like a misguided fight. Slop is slop because it's slop. Sounds tautological, but AI is orthogonal to the problem. Before AI, there were and are Unity/Unreal "asset store piles" which grab a bunch of (mostly free) assets from the engine's store and slap them into a game. Nothing looks coherent or cohesive. AI has made that a lot more easy and customizable, of course, but the end result is the same: a bunch of disparate elements coming together incohesively, making for a poor player experience. In the end it's about taste. People with poor taste will make bad games, whether they use AI or not. AI has certainly accelerated the rate at which bad games can be made, however. Personally I'd rather play an indie game made by one person who uses GenAI to help build out their coherent, unique, and personal vision, rather than an entirely handmade yet another soulless Roguelite Deckbuilder, 2d pixel art platformer, or extraction shooter.
Mistletoe 11mo ago
I think the next decade will be one that values anything provably authentic and it will keep becoming more and more rare.
Johanx64 11mo ago
[flagged]
- bodge5000 11mo ago
  But normal people also arent pro AI. Thats again a very small, vocal and irrelevant minority. The main audience isn't going to not buy a game because it doesn't use AI
  - Johanx64 11mo ago
    "Normal" people will just buy the game if it's good. So it's irrelevant if it uses AI or not. Ie. it's not a sales pitch and not part of decision making process when making the purchase. There are increasingly more games that use some form of AI generated content, voice lines or otherwise, and nobody could care less, except the people outlined above.
    - bodge5000 11mo ago
      By your own admission its not irrelevant, there are a small group of people who do care about that kind of thing on either side. For an indie dev, that matters. AAA studios can pretty much guarantee at least a few thousand sales, indie devs, especially the less established ones, have far less. For first timers, there'll be none at all. The thing is though, appealing to the pro-AI crowd is much more difficult. They want a game thats a shining example of what AI can be in gaming. The anti-AI crowd doesn't need that, they've got examples of that for decades. A few AI generated voice lines won't do much to appeal to the pro-AI crowd.
      - Johanx64 11mo ago
        Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd" (whatever the fuck that even means) when they use AI tools. If an indie (or even less of an indie) is using AI generation, they are doing so to save costs or work around their very limited budget. Or using it to work around some limitations where voicecasting every line would be infeasible, etc. And losing the small portion of the miniscule-vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are - wasnt part of their audience to begin with), to be able to use AI-gen is not a loss at all. Data on Steam is telling, these tools are becoming increasingly prevalent.
the_real_cher 11mo ago
It just seems weird to me. It's like a carpenter saying they're power tool free. You have an amazing tool to speed up your work why wouldn't you use it?
- HugoTea 11mo ago
  I think of it more like Ikea furniture produced in a factory vs an artisans hand-crafted chair. One of them is made with love and care, the other is an industrial product, one of millions. The difference with video games is the artisan's chair is cheaper than the Ikea product.
- justinmarsan 11mo ago
  The problem with AI isn't really the tool itself, it's the fact that the tool is only able to produce because it has stolen the work of real artists to rip them off, and then take their jobs...
  - the_real_cher 11mo ago
    All science and art comes from people before you. There's a term for that "Built on the shoulders of giants"
- otabdeveloper4 11mo ago
  Generative AI isn't a tool, it's an oracle. You understand the difference? Instead of improving your skills, you just spin the prompt roulette and hope the AI gods gift you with something palatable.
  - xyzal 11mo ago
    This
- oreally 11mo ago
  Because the tool threatens to put the majority of them out of business and jobs. The rest of their arguments, however illogical, all stem from this core of the fear of losing their livelihood.
tete 11mo ago
To be fair I think if there is any kinda okay use of GenAI is being able to get some images and such without needing the money to hire an artist. Maybe that allows for way more niche games. In other words: It's the whole package. If I get something unique, and the dev used some "AI" for translation or to make some avatar image for a character I am happy this game is allowed to exist. If I see a AAA studio putting out the hundredth iteration of the same old game, of some franchise that used to be good and interesting in the 90s and then doesn't even bring actually new art to the table it's a huge disappointment. But here we are. EA cannot even manage to fix their basic bugs (like players running into nets or a new kickoff for less than a second) after a dozen of new expensive releases. Non-indie games have largely been a complete farce for decades now.
- ElCapitanMarkla 11mo ago
  Also AI could also generate some code to enable the artists to make their own unique games. There will be loads of creative types out there who can unlock some neat concepts with AI support
bob1029 11mo ago
I've been working with a partner on a game and we decided that AI assets are acceptable to use for targeted scenarios like localization and accessibility (text-to-text, text-to-speech). The red line is AI cannot be the prime generator of content. For example, the text that is to be localized must be authored by a human. Using ChatGPT to generate scripts from a brief prompt and then feeding that into another AI tool is an example of strictly prohibited use. You can have an actual human redo the translations or voice lines without much frustration (i.e., if we actually make any money). Anything further than that gets a lot more invasive in terms of rework.
- dwroberts 11mo ago
  > like localization I think you’re making a big mistake with this one. Assuming it’s being used for anything other than eg placeholder before real translation/localization. Even decent professionally translated games get this stuff wrong sometimes and irritate their audiences, I can’t imagine how badly AI will bungle it
  - dghlsakjg 11mo ago
    I think in this case the choice is between AI localization and no localization at all. If that is the case, I actually think that users will appreciate localization with minor issues over doing things in English. Anecdotally, I have found AI translation to be perfectly acceptable for the languages that I do know, on par with a human translation service, at least. This may be different in a game with e.g. fantasy vocabulary that is made up.
    - 1718627440 11mo ago
      As a non-English native-speaker, I strongly prefer no localization to bad localization.
      - dghlsakjg 11mo ago
        Yes, but you speak English and read the Latin alphabet. You can play the game without shitty localization. Put yourself in the shoes of some kid somewhere in the world who does neither of those things, and just wants to play a video game. If the two options are 1. imperfect translation or 2. no clue what is going on, and no ability to enjoy the game; which do you choose? The fun part about shitty localization in games for ESL speakers is that you don't have to use it.
SunshineTheCat 11mo ago
I can understand people who are upset about AI being used to generate artwork or more "creative" tasks that lean into other people's work, but using this to paint AI as "bad" as a whole is simplistic. There are a million things AI can do that wouldn't fall into this category (repetitive, time-consuming work) that technically wouldn't make the product "AI free." It's about as smart as hearing a phone was used to plan a bank heist, therefore we need "phone free" communication.
- nottorp 11mo ago
  But world building and graphic assets are repetitive, time-consuming work.
  - nasmorn 11mo ago
    The industry tries to use generative tools for assets since forever. Textures, terrain, foliage and eventually even parametric human models. I don’t see transformers much different.
    - dheatov 11mo ago
      The stochastic nature, minimal amount of care required to get something going, and the inefficiency, just to name a few.
    - nottorp 11mo ago
      Oh I do. Because with a tree generation library the trees do look random (they are because the algorithm has a random component). "AI" assets all look the same.
      - Clamchop 11mo ago
        This observation seems innately vulnerable to sampling error and confirmation bias. "Good" generative AI almost by definition is difficult to notice.
geldedus 11mo ago
Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets" of 1950s yawn
geldedus 11mo ago
Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets" of 1950s
andai 11mo ago
Many years ago I was watching a video of some sculpture being done. I was quite unimpressed with the art itself. Then the video zoomed out, and I saw that the guy had spent like 2 years making it out of individual toothpicks. Suddenly I was amazed, right? With AI it's kinda the opposite process, right? You see something, it's impressive, maybe you even like it personally, and then you realize orders of magnitude less effort went into it than it looks like "should" have, based on the result. So we seem to have here the "direct experience" of the art itself, and then a "narrative layer" which obscures that. And we seem to value the latter more highly. A related example is those pages selling "handcrafted" leather bags and they have an life story about Grandma Williams and suddenly the bag is worth a billion times more to the buyer.
- thisisit 11mo ago
  This is the sad reality. Because things can go the other way as well. Something can be amazing but beaten down because - AI. Here's a video which was discussed by VFX artists at Corridor Digital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43h61QAXjpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43h61QAXjpY This is so much creative work. But once people know that genAI and ComfyUI might be involved they might beat it down.
  - somenameforme 11mo ago
    To me, that is kind of the essence of contemporary AI. It's showy but lacks any point or spirit whatsoever. For instance, imagine the morphing was on beat with the music - suddenly it's actually quite neat. As is, it just looks like some fairly low effort prompts. Even the dancing seems relatively low effort and makes minimal effort to play to the scene or music in any way outside of a vague sort of liquidy theme. It just feels very disconnected. Take, for contrast, the original Matrix. The reason the effects in that movie were revolutionary is not because of them just looking neat, but because they fit extremely well into the movie, and were supplemented by other effects that bumped them up to the next level. CG tends to age horrrrrribly (for anybody over 40, watch the original Jurassic Park again...) but the original Matrix lobby scene [1] still actually looks pretty decent, and I think that's because it had spirit. Note how so much love is put into the choreography, even small things like the footsteps being on beat with the background audio at the start of the scene, the military style marching drums when the paramilitary forces enter the scene, and more. It's just great. There's no reason AI can't play a major role in these artistic pipelines, but that's the thing - there's a huge difference between making something showy, and making something that feels like it has spirit, like something that is art. And it's for this reason that I don't think artists are going anywhere. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eCmhBgsyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eCmhBgsyI
andai 11mo ago
I'm surprised nobody's touched the ethical angle of this yet. Like fairtrade... this code was produced without exploiting enslaved human knowledge ;)
rowanG077 11mo ago
I think it's so interesting that people want to know something is created by AI to not consume it. Personally I don't care if something is made by AI or not. If I like it I like it. If not, then I don't. At this point at least I don't like bad usage of AI. But there has been some absolutely bangers of content created by AI. My previous background was AI generated for example.
Bombthecat 11mo ago
I give it a year or two and people will stop caring
haunter 11mo ago
When you copy paste assets in UE that's AI free but is that really "hand made"? I don't know where is the line https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoY062kY1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoY062kY1s
- poutu 11mo ago
  A huge amount of music now is “copy and pasting samples” in FL studio or GarageBand and that is considered 100% human so I would say the line is very clear. The line is at “did it matter that you did this, or would any layperson in your stead have been able to make pretty much exactly the same thing (qualitatively judged)?”
andrewstuart 11mo ago
I wish YouTube videos had an “AI free” label so I can choose.
auxide 11mo ago
A very, very weak sales pitch. I've seen more things start prominently displaying that they're "AI-free" recently, and it has only driven me away as opposed to being more interested because do you just not stand out enough to the point where you have to say that in order for people to care? Or is it because you're stuck-up? I'm not sure anymore.
- xyzal 11mo ago
  Interesting, it has an opposite effect on me. It signals the game is more probably a labor of love instead of a generic asset flip.
- kattagarian 11mo ago
  A very, very weak sales pitch. I've seen more things start prominently displaying that they're "handmade" recently, and it has only driven me away as opposed to being more interested because do you just not stand out enough to the point where you have to say that in order for people to care? Or is it because you're stuck-up? I'm not sure anymore.
faidit 11mo ago
Genuine question (this is more about code than art): Since some indies brag about having no "assistance" whatsoever, is it still AI-free if you ever asked an LLM for help with a tricky programming problem, and incorporated that knowledge into your game's code? What if you just used a search engine and your eyes glanced over an AI-generated answer? Or you unknowingly benefited from an AI-written post or StackOverflow answer? I mean, is it really possible to code without any AI assistance any more? Also what about using third-party assets, that are likely to have a fly in the ointment somewhere (maybe at least a tiny bit of the asset creator's code involved asking Claude for help, or they tangentially benefited from a Google summary). As much as I dislike the taste of AI slop, it seems to me like AI has so thoroughly permeated the internet at this point that a truly AI-free game is impossible unless you are a programming genius and/or independently funded to a point where you can hire domain experts for everything, such that you could make the game fully offline without even going on the internet at all. I actually find it hard to believe that anyone could code a game above a minimal level of complexity without searching problems online and using at least a tiny bit of AI-generated/summarized info, even unintentionally.
- nottorp 11mo ago
  For writing code, actually you have to use "AI" instead of searches because search has become useless in the last couple years. If you blindly copy paste the results though, I'm sure there are some smart people in north korea writing automated generic exploits by hand for vibe coded web sites...
  - 1718627440 11mo ago
    > search has become useless in the last couple years. google.com has become useless in the last couple years, all other search sites are doing fine or improving.
    - nottorp 11mo ago
      I use DuckDuckGo and it’s still full of useless content mill results.
yinglian 11mo ago
[dead]
liampulles 11mo ago
Most of the gamers I know who are not in the tech space are very against AI, especially if it is being used for stuff that is more on the art side. Anything that displaces "game industry workers" is viewed as a bad thing. I personally don't mind AI use to write code, and while I haven't seen AI art that conveys much in me, I'm open to the idea that it could be used in interesting ways.
- survirtual 11mo ago
  They are against AI code now as well. AI anything is toxic to the general pop, which is why some companies are asking not to be forced to reveal their use of it. The real issue is that people's livelihoods are being automated. This can be fixed with sensible policies and things like universal healthcare and universal basic income. There are some additional policies I'd like involving AI automation gains compensating workers losing their jobs to AI, and laws making all AI open-source due to their nature of being trained on public data. With those policies, it wouldn't hurt so much to lose your job to AI. I would think there would be leas hostility at that point. I must say it is all very confusing to me. If someone likes a game, why does the origin of assets matter? It is the same thing I see with crypto. It is just code and data. People putting value on it doesn't change what it is. Yet now there are all these regulations because enough people assigned enough value so the code suddenly becomes regulated. AI is just code and data. It doesn't make sense how offended people are by it. No one is being for to use AI. Sure, it is changing how our society functions, but this isn't the fault of AI, it is the fault of bad systems. We have bad economic systems, bad political systems, bad leaders across the board, and bad distribution of ownership. AI isn't causing these problems, it is just amplifying them.
alexitorg 11mo ago
I'm looking forward to having LLMs used for character interactions. It will be like that thrilling point in half life where the soldiers start talking about freeman and for the first time you realize that characters are responding to you in normal game play.
- Shorel 11mo ago
  I tested a Sherlock Holmes game where AI was used for character interactions. The actual dialogues were of course awesome, and relevant. I gave them feedback about the controls for moving the character, which were a bit awkward.
- simianparrot 11mo ago
  Emulating real life isn't going to be as exciting as you think it is. That awesome moment in Half Life is scripted to make it immersive like that, but most of the game isn't and that's what makes it special. If all the enemies behaved realistically all the time, the game wouldn't be fun, I can guarantee you that.
fennecfoxy 11mo ago
Idk I kind of want to use transformers/LLMs in a crap game jam sometime. Ever since Skyrim was advertised with the early promise of "If you break this lumber mill it would change the local economy"...which obviously never happened, I've loved the idea of dynamic systems in games. For a truly dynamic system you'd need to build in more than a dev team can manually build - so you need AI for these systems. And where you have dynamic systems, sometimes you'll need dynamic assets. However, the human touch on art is still far better than AI (at the moment, who knows what the future holds). So I think something like how character creators work is the best solution; handmade art but with morph targets etc and where sliders would be, it's an AI creating dynamic NPCs. Aha! Even ChatGPT couldn't find this: https://youtu.be/O0zPYpEGpVI?t=324 https://youtu.be/O0zPYpEGpVI?t=324 "we have a working economy you can sabotage this wood mill if you want" LIES TODD, LIES!
- nickserv 11mo ago
  There's a few different Skyrim mods that use AI. In particular for adding dialogues using the original voices, basically a more advanced version of line splitting that has been done for a long time. There are some where the AI is used to add dynamic content, pretty cool actually. This one in particular is pretty popular: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631 https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631 I've never heard of anyone complaining about use of AI for mods freely given to the community. Paying mods would likely be different.
  - jcurtis 11mo ago
    Mods using AI to clone voice actors' voices without their consent or explicitly against their wishes has certainly been controversial in the Skyrim modding community.
    - nickserv 11mo ago
      I've not seen it, but am curious to dig deeper, can you post some links please?
- 11mo ago
johnwheeler 11mo ago
I’ve determined I hate AI. Luddite reasons, but they’re mine.
qustrolabe 11mo ago
That's "GMO-free" kind of marketing, not a good thing
irishmanlondon 11mo ago
[dead]
dpcan 11mo ago
When it comes to games I absolutely don’t care what they used AI for because the point of games is to be fun. If it’s fun and you used AI, that’s fine with me. The game served its purpose. The line for me is copyright on images. If you use ai to generate images to copy a popular game art style, I think that’s over the line. Create your own art or pay the artist. Code however, I see it as a tool. You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. So to me, AI for coding isn’t any different than hiring a programmer to do the work for you. No problem there. That being said, I do game dev, and using AI to help figure out an algorithm or do the work of creating my inputs code, etc is a big time saver. However, at the moment, it really struggles with anything else because it has no vision and explaining to it how to put code together for a weird game mechanic or level generation reminds me of that game where you explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the 3rd grade, and you tell your teacher to put the peanut butter on the bread and she scoops it out with her hand…
- joecool1029 11mo ago
  > Create your own art or pay the artist. > You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. It’s literally the same. There is no difference, either you acknowledge AI is potentially a useful tool to lower costs of development (especially important for indie devs) or it’s exploitative and puts both artists and programmers out of a job. There’s plenty of things in the art workflow that can be automated same as code, pay an artist to do key frames/storyboarding and use the AI to animate between them? Is this exploitative? EDIT: I’m reminded of this thread from 2019 about a successful game dev that admits their games look like shit due to cheaping out on art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20804998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20804998
constantcrying 11mo ago
I think AI is a wonderful tool for indie devs. Much of the code they work on is low stakes, where AI can be very helpful. AI has made voice actors obsolete and gives even solo devs the ability to have a fully voiced game, which might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars otherwise. I am sure that it can be very helpful for graphical or musical art, but I don't think it is quite there yet.
sublinear 11mo ago
I'm pretty sure nobody cares about this? My main gripe with indie games since forever has been that they're usually boring. They often fall into creative traps that ruin the whole thing. Gameplay is constant grind, minmax, pointless choices, funnels, and "inspired" by some tired old genre. Music and art can be good, but not in the last decade or so anymore. The final nail is if there are political undertones. It's as if every developer out there only listens to their own echo chambers on discord and reddit.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
sandspar 11mo ago
I hate to say this but the indie game developer community is in some local minima where tribal in-group signaling takes precedence over thinking about the consumer. The industry has developed a siege mentality and is entering a "rooting out traitors" phase. The AI thing is only one example of this self-policing; there are many. I really hope that the industry can become more free spirited, less intense and angry. I love the games and the people but the industry is not in a healthy place right now.

198 points by 01-_- 11mo ago

khoury 11mo ago

The "hand made" era of software

b3lvedere 11mo ago
We of the hand crafted software guild (HCSG) vow to not use too much tools and automation. Sure, you may use a compiler to magically transform your source code into real executable software or use some Adobe product to transform your ugly concept drawing into something amazing, but we draw the vague limit at outsourcing too much to automation at AI generated or curated content. One can only respect the trade if one works extremely hard, drew blood and shedded tears and sweat from one's very overworked body. AI is just creepy and has no soul. Did the great artists, developers and programmers copy paste a lot of each others work and call it a day? We think not! Here we do not re-invent the wheel or copy someone else's wheel. You will be obligated to design, develop, program and come up with your own wheel, even if you have a copy of the best wheel possible for your program. We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches so the high quality of software is always preserved. Your parents and great-parents will be proud and shed nostalgic tears when using your software. Everything should be as it was and everything should be traditionally awesome. /s
- beepbooptheory 11mo ago
  > We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches so the high quality of software is always preserved I see the `\s` but this part at least is literally what we need to do!
  - b3lvedere 11mo ago
    You do realize you can copy digital stuff as much as you want? :)
    - beepbooptheory 11mo ago
      Is that fact meant to be hidden or put aside here? I am not sure I see that.
      - b3lvedere 11mo ago
        Oh no not that way. Small batches so the high quality of software is quite unneccesary because software can be copied infinite times. Sorry, bad joke.
- walt_grata 11mo ago
  I'll be more inclined to believe the hype when we start measuring accuracy and predictability like SLOs and holding the companies accountable for bad results.
ceejayoz 11mo ago
Artisanal! I remember when artisanal Doritos came out. That felt like the end of that.
kleiba 11mo ago
And this when "Handmade Hero" was abandoned over two years ago, after not really getting anywhere over the course of 9 years.
- pjmlp 11mo ago
  Haven't you kept up with the social media status, and the conferences that came out of it?
- Johanx64 11mo ago
  For what it's worth it spawned a lot of quality software as a side effect. And served as an educational platform for a lot of programmers that felt that there's something wrong with modern day software and python/javascript low quality garbage they did at their day-to-day job, but couldn't quite put their finger on it. Turns out you can both fail, and yet succeed in 10 different ways at the same time.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- _aavaa_ 11mo ago
  What do you mean by "not really getting anywhere"? The point was to show and document the process, not to ship a commercial game. And the context is that it was 2hrs a week for 9 years, not 9 years of full-time dev.
  - kleiba 11mo ago
    The process was absolutely to ship a commercial game, which Casey re-iterated at the beginning of every single episode. Also, people could spend $15 to "pre-order" the game.
- kragen 11mo ago
  Huh, I didn't realize he'd abandoned Handmade Hero! I somehow assumed he eventually shipped it.

1gn15 11mo ago

[flagged]

debo_ 11mo ago
Most of the focus on this isn't the code. It's the art and music that make up the experience. This is discussed right in the article. > For Kanaris-Sotiriou, the question of adopting the use of gen AI to make games was an easy one to answer. “The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork [...] are unfair,” he says. I personally think using AI assistance for the code is much less intrusive than using AI for the art and music -- the code isn't as directly experienced by the player as the art.
- mikkupikku 11mo ago
  Much of it comes from people feeling challenged and threatened by the new tech so they construct elaborate philosophies to justify how they feel, but this rapidly crumbles when you look closer. For instance, artists felt threatened by generative AI and came up with a narrative about copyright stuff. But then Adobe comes along with generative AI which doesn't have the copyright issue and how do those same artists respond? With a loud "fuck you" to Adobe, because the root of their objection was never copyright but rather what the new technology would do to their established careers. In this atmosphere, I think it's easy to perceive an implied rejection of and threat to AI generated code, even if the focus is on art assets, because people aren't being entirely direct and forthright about exactly what it is they're upset about, and that makes for a landmine field.
  - stego-tech 11mo ago
    Yeah nah. The core reason they’re pissed is the blatant theft of their work to train these models without compensation or permission (the age old “if it’s on the web it’s free to use” bullshit argument), with “artistic merit” being a distant, but still critical, second. If you can actually write stories or create art, you can see the “seams” in generative content and it gets to be quite nauseating. The fact it was trained on your own output by a trillion-dollar megacorp via theft while you scrape money for rent is the injury to the former’s insult.

sweetheart 11mo ago

https://archive.ph/20251125055632/https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/827650/indie-developers-gen-ai-nexon-arc-raiders https://archive.ph/20251125055632/https://www.theverge.com/e... I'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can become a crutch that hurts rather than helps. I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a remarkable difference between AI being used for the software engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop count as Gen AI? How could it not? In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a somewhat painstaking creative process.

thedangler 11mo ago

I like AI to figure out complex issue or something I would just find on stackoverflow. It's great for doing boiler plate crap that I don't want to do anyways. But when you need it to do something that it hasn't found in a git repo, it struggles.

dejobaan 11mo ago

I've been keeping an eye out on AI disclosures on Steam (https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-of-genai-games-on-steam https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...). While it's unsurprising that devs are using it, what was surprising was the number of games that disclose it. I believe, as of November, it's up to 8% of the while library. The biggest game to disclose AI use right now is Stellaris (with many many millions in sales), though having initially launched many years ago, their GenAI usage is in product updates.

watwut 11mo ago
Maybe it is a good strategy. Haters will more likely to steer clear instead of raging in comments and others will be less surprised over ai typical inconsistences and issues.
nitwit005 11mo ago
Keep in mind that aggregate statistics about Steam games include things like student projects, and hobby efforts never expected to make money. But that said, I absolutely expected a high rate because I assumed game devs would be forced to use it by management, just as I am.

stego-tech 11mo ago

The “they’re just jelly that we can do better than they with AI” camp really needs to spend more time hanging around artisans in general, instead of flouncing into comment sections and evangelizing the AI-booster groupthink. Artists and creators are, broadly, incredibly pissed that their output was used to train these models without compensation or consent by trillion-dollar megacorps and VC-funded startups. That is, and remains, the core grievance. People who already make a pittance by devoting themselves to the creation of art are now forced out of art entirely because programmers just couldn’t be bothered to - GASP - have an original thought and commission someone else to execute it for them. A distant, but still important, secondary concern is the quality of the slop itself (or lack thereof). Anyone who engages with art sufficiently can see the “seams” in generative content, even in state of the art models: perspectives lack consistency across key frames, anatomy isn’t grounded in reality or bends in ways befitting of a horror movie, geometry and materials that do not “graft” together due to a lack of negative space. These models are garbage because they don’t recognize core artistic concepts, only haphazardly reassemble pieces by prompt. I challenge the AI crowd to actually go to an art faire, or commission a custom piece of your idea. Have something you had to contribute more than a simple prompt, to. Identify styles you like and artists that work within them. Take the chance to make more human connections and bond over shared creativity. The artists will thank you, and you’re likely to enjoy the resultant output far more.

catapart 11mo ago
At this point, I just assume anyone who advocates for the use of AI is actually just an output from some AI. Given that "human-sounding speech" is the thing that AI is most easily able to produce, and how many different AIs are out there, and how beneficial an army of never-softening commenters can be for any specific pet cause you like, I can't think of why it wouldn't be statistically irresponsible to not assume that. I've met enough real humans with completely self-important defenses of it that I know that they exist, so I'm willing to at least give them doubt. But the assumption is that they are AI and they need to prove being human. To assume otherwise is unreasonable.
NitpickLawyer 11mo ago
I debated a bit about how to answer this, because I've seen this idea so much after stable diffusion came out. I have a serious answer, and a sarcastic one. I'll go with the serious one. The sarcastic bit was just replacing coders with artists in your text. You can imagine it, I guess :) Why are "artists" special? Why did you feel the need to type these 4 thoughtful (but overdone imo) paragraphs, defending "artisans"? Why are they special, when compared to coders? Why do the artists get to use ever better tools designed to help them, but when the other side gets the same kinds of tools, it's suddenly faux pas? Is it just "AI hate" or is it something else? Can you at least see the double standards that you apply in your post, as I can see it from outside? It used to be that games were coded by passionate people. People who knew how to code. They'd painstakingly find ways of making ascii characters do silly things on a screen that wasn't necessarily designed for what they were doing. Later, they started playing with pixels. But they were still coders. So they coded away until the pixels started doing funny things on the screen. You talk about "art"? Hah. THAT was art. The ability and tech knowledge to make those early systems do those things with pixels is something that we just don't see today. And we don't see it, in large, because coders did what coders do and made it simpler for anyone else to do those funny things with pixels on a screen. At every step of the way coders built software to help other people. They built engines. Then they built harnesses for the designers, animators and so on. Then they built simplified engines. The endless RPG generators, and so on. Then they built "no-code" solutions. Here, friend, you take this piece of code, plug in your art and you have a game! And they were happy to do that, because it was enabling other people to do their thing. With code they wrote. And many of them free of charge! But now, when suddenly coders have a tool that they can use themselves, to empower them with things that they couldn't previously do, now suddenly there's a problem? Why is one artist's output "art", even if the game code is shit, while the opposite isn't? Why can't a coder enjoy creating a game, with help from tools that do something they simply don't care about? They want to do the logic behind the things moving on the screen, and can't / won't spend time creating the art. Why should they be shunned? Why not enjoy the experience for what it is? Is it just AI hate? If so, perhaps you should disclose it. Dunno, this whole take of yours feels mighty high-horsey for my taste.

mjr00 11mo ago

Seems like a misguided fight. Slop is slop because it's slop. Sounds tautological, but AI is orthogonal to the problem. Before AI, there were and are Unity/Unreal "asset store piles" which grab a bunch of (mostly free) assets from the engine's store and slap them into a game. Nothing looks coherent or cohesive. AI has made that a lot more easy and customizable, of course, but the end result is the same: a bunch of disparate elements coming together incohesively, making for a poor player experience. In the end it's about taste. People with poor taste will make bad games, whether they use AI or not. AI has certainly accelerated the rate at which bad games can be made, however. Personally I'd rather play an indie game made by one person who uses GenAI to help build out their coherent, unique, and personal vision, rather than an entirely handmade yet another soulless Roguelite Deckbuilder, 2d pixel art platformer, or extraction shooter.

Mistletoe 11mo ago

I think the next decade will be one that values anything provably authentic and it will keep becoming more and more rare.

Johanx64 11mo ago

[flagged]

bodge5000 11mo ago
But normal people also arent pro AI. Thats again a very small, vocal and irrelevant minority. The main audience isn't going to not buy a game because it doesn't use AI
- Johanx64 11mo ago
  "Normal" people will just buy the game if it's good. So it's irrelevant if it uses AI or not. Ie. it's not a sales pitch and not part of decision making process when making the purchase. There are increasingly more games that use some form of AI generated content, voice lines or otherwise, and nobody could care less, except the people outlined above.
  - bodge5000 11mo ago
    By your own admission its not irrelevant, there are a small group of people who do care about that kind of thing on either side. For an indie dev, that matters. AAA studios can pretty much guarantee at least a few thousand sales, indie devs, especially the less established ones, have far less. For first timers, there'll be none at all. The thing is though, appealing to the pro-AI crowd is much more difficult. They want a game thats a shining example of what AI can be in gaming. The anti-AI crowd doesn't need that, they've got examples of that for decades. A few AI generated voice lines won't do much to appeal to the pro-AI crowd.
    - Johanx64 11mo ago
      Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd" (whatever the fuck that even means) when they use AI tools. If an indie (or even less of an indie) is using AI generation, they are doing so to save costs or work around their very limited budget. Or using it to work around some limitations where voicecasting every line would be infeasible, etc. And losing the small portion of the miniscule-vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are - wasnt part of their audience to begin with), to be able to use AI-gen is not a loss at all. Data on Steam is telling, these tools are becoming increasingly prevalent.

the_real_cher 11mo ago

It just seems weird to me. It's like a carpenter saying they're power tool free. You have an amazing tool to speed up your work why wouldn't you use it?

HugoTea 11mo ago
I think of it more like Ikea furniture produced in a factory vs an artisans hand-crafted chair. One of them is made with love and care, the other is an industrial product, one of millions. The difference with video games is the artisan's chair is cheaper than the Ikea product.
justinmarsan 11mo ago
The problem with AI isn't really the tool itself, it's the fact that the tool is only able to produce because it has stolen the work of real artists to rip them off, and then take their jobs...
- the_real_cher 11mo ago
  All science and art comes from people before you. There's a term for that "Built on the shoulders of giants"
otabdeveloper4 11mo ago
Generative AI isn't a tool, it's an oracle. You understand the difference? Instead of improving your skills, you just spin the prompt roulette and hope the AI gods gift you with something palatable.
- xyzal 11mo ago
  This
oreally 11mo ago
Because the tool threatens to put the majority of them out of business and jobs. The rest of their arguments, however illogical, all stem from this core of the fear of losing their livelihood.

tete 11mo ago

To be fair I think if there is any kinda okay use of GenAI is being able to get some images and such without needing the money to hire an artist. Maybe that allows for way more niche games. In other words: It's the whole package. If I get something unique, and the dev used some "AI" for translation or to make some avatar image for a character I am happy this game is allowed to exist. If I see a AAA studio putting out the hundredth iteration of the same old game, of some franchise that used to be good and interesting in the 90s and then doesn't even bring actually new art to the table it's a huge disappointment. But here we are. EA cannot even manage to fix their basic bugs (like players running into nets or a new kickoff for less than a second) after a dozen of new expensive releases. Non-indie games have largely been a complete farce for decades now.

ElCapitanMarkla 11mo ago
Also AI could also generate some code to enable the artists to make their own unique games. There will be loads of creative types out there who can unlock some neat concepts with AI support

bob1029 11mo ago

I've been working with a partner on a game and we decided that AI assets are acceptable to use for targeted scenarios like localization and accessibility (text-to-text, text-to-speech). The red line is AI cannot be the prime generator of content. For example, the text that is to be localized must be authored by a human. Using ChatGPT to generate scripts from a brief prompt and then feeding that into another AI tool is an example of strictly prohibited use. You can have an actual human redo the translations or voice lines without much frustration (i.e., if we actually make any money). Anything further than that gets a lot more invasive in terms of rework.

dwroberts 11mo ago
> like localization I think you’re making a big mistake with this one. Assuming it’s being used for anything other than eg placeholder before real translation/localization. Even decent professionally translated games get this stuff wrong sometimes and irritate their audiences, I can’t imagine how badly AI will bungle it
- dghlsakjg 11mo ago
  I think in this case the choice is between AI localization and no localization at all. If that is the case, I actually think that users will appreciate localization with minor issues over doing things in English. Anecdotally, I have found AI translation to be perfectly acceptable for the languages that I do know, on par with a human translation service, at least. This may be different in a game with e.g. fantasy vocabulary that is made up.
  - 1718627440 11mo ago
    As a non-English native-speaker, I strongly prefer no localization to bad localization.
    - dghlsakjg 11mo ago
      Yes, but you speak English and read the Latin alphabet. You can play the game without shitty localization. Put yourself in the shoes of some kid somewhere in the world who does neither of those things, and just wants to play a video game. If the two options are 1. imperfect translation or 2. no clue what is going on, and no ability to enjoy the game; which do you choose? The fun part about shitty localization in games for ESL speakers is that you don't have to use it.

SunshineTheCat 11mo ago

I can understand people who are upset about AI being used to generate artwork or more "creative" tasks that lean into other people's work, but using this to paint AI as "bad" as a whole is simplistic. There are a million things AI can do that wouldn't fall into this category (repetitive, time-consuming work) that technically wouldn't make the product "AI free." It's about as smart as hearing a phone was used to plan a bank heist, therefore we need "phone free" communication.

nottorp 11mo ago
But world building and graphic assets are repetitive, time-consuming work.
- nasmorn 11mo ago
  The industry tries to use generative tools for assets since forever. Textures, terrain, foliage and eventually even parametric human models. I don’t see transformers much different.
  - dheatov 11mo ago
    The stochastic nature, minimal amount of care required to get something going, and the inefficiency, just to name a few.
  - nottorp 11mo ago
    Oh I do. Because with a tree generation library the trees do look random (they are because the algorithm has a random component). "AI" assets all look the same.
    - Clamchop 11mo ago
      This observation seems innately vulnerable to sampling error and confirmation bias. "Good" generative AI almost by definition is difficult to notice.

geldedus 11mo ago

Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets" of 1950s yawn

geldedus 11mo ago

Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets" of 1950s

andai 11mo ago

Many years ago I was watching a video of some sculpture being done. I was quite unimpressed with the art itself. Then the video zoomed out, and I saw that the guy had spent like 2 years making it out of individual toothpicks. Suddenly I was amazed, right? With AI it's kinda the opposite process, right? You see something, it's impressive, maybe you even like it personally, and then you realize orders of magnitude less effort went into it than it looks like "should" have, based on the result. So we seem to have here the "direct experience" of the art itself, and then a "narrative layer" which obscures that. And we seem to value the latter more highly. A related example is those pages selling "handcrafted" leather bags and they have an life story about Grandma Williams and suddenly the bag is worth a billion times more to the buyer.

thisisit 11mo ago
This is the sad reality. Because things can go the other way as well. Something can be amazing but beaten down because - AI. Here's a video which was discussed by VFX artists at Corridor Digital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43h61QAXjpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43h61QAXjpY This is so much creative work. But once people know that genAI and ComfyUI might be involved they might beat it down.
- somenameforme 11mo ago
  To me, that is kind of the essence of contemporary AI. It's showy but lacks any point or spirit whatsoever. For instance, imagine the morphing was on beat with the music - suddenly it's actually quite neat. As is, it just looks like some fairly low effort prompts. Even the dancing seems relatively low effort and makes minimal effort to play to the scene or music in any way outside of a vague sort of liquidy theme. It just feels very disconnected. Take, for contrast, the original Matrix. The reason the effects in that movie were revolutionary is not because of them just looking neat, but because they fit extremely well into the movie, and were supplemented by other effects that bumped them up to the next level. CG tends to age horrrrrribly (for anybody over 40, watch the original Jurassic Park again...) but the original Matrix lobby scene [1] still actually looks pretty decent, and I think that's because it had spirit. Note how so much love is put into the choreography, even small things like the footsteps being on beat with the background audio at the start of the scene, the military style marching drums when the paramilitary forces enter the scene, and more. It's just great. There's no reason AI can't play a major role in these artistic pipelines, but that's the thing - there's a huge difference between making something showy, and making something that feels like it has spirit, like something that is art. And it's for this reason that I don't think artists are going anywhere. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eCmhBgsyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eCmhBgsyI

andai 11mo ago

I'm surprised nobody's touched the ethical angle of this yet. Like fairtrade... this code was produced without exploiting enslaved human knowledge ;)

rowanG077 11mo ago

I think it's so interesting that people want to know something is created by AI to not consume it. Personally I don't care if something is made by AI or not. If I like it I like it. If not, then I don't. At this point at least I don't like bad usage of AI. But there has been some absolutely bangers of content created by AI. My previous background was AI generated for example.

Bombthecat 11mo ago

I give it a year or two and people will stop caring

haunter 11mo ago

When you copy paste assets in UE that's AI free but is that really "hand made"? I don't know where is the line https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoY062kY1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoY062kY1s

poutu 11mo ago
A huge amount of music now is “copy and pasting samples” in FL studio or GarageBand and that is considered 100% human so I would say the line is very clear. The line is at “did it matter that you did this, or would any layperson in your stead have been able to make pretty much exactly the same thing (qualitatively judged)?”

andrewstuart 11mo ago

I wish YouTube videos had an “AI free” label so I can choose.

auxide 11mo ago

A very, very weak sales pitch. I've seen more things start prominently displaying that they're "AI-free" recently, and it has only driven me away as opposed to being more interested because do you just not stand out enough to the point where you have to say that in order for people to care? Or is it because you're stuck-up? I'm not sure anymore.

xyzal 11mo ago
Interesting, it has an opposite effect on me. It signals the game is more probably a labor of love instead of a generic asset flip.
kattagarian 11mo ago
A very, very weak sales pitch. I've seen more things start prominently displaying that they're "handmade" recently, and it has only driven me away as opposed to being more interested because do you just not stand out enough to the point where you have to say that in order for people to care? Or is it because you're stuck-up? I'm not sure anymore.

faidit 11mo ago

Genuine question (this is more about code than art): Since some indies brag about having no "assistance" whatsoever, is it still AI-free if you ever asked an LLM for help with a tricky programming problem, and incorporated that knowledge into your game's code? What if you just used a search engine and your eyes glanced over an AI-generated answer? Or you unknowingly benefited from an AI-written post or StackOverflow answer? I mean, is it really possible to code without any AI assistance any more? Also what about using third-party assets, that are likely to have a fly in the ointment somewhere (maybe at least a tiny bit of the asset creator's code involved asking Claude for help, or they tangentially benefited from a Google summary). As much as I dislike the taste of AI slop, it seems to me like AI has so thoroughly permeated the internet at this point that a truly AI-free game is impossible unless you are a programming genius and/or independently funded to a point where you can hire domain experts for everything, such that you could make the game fully offline without even going on the internet at all. I actually find it hard to believe that anyone could code a game above a minimal level of complexity without searching problems online and using at least a tiny bit of AI-generated/summarized info, even unintentionally.

nottorp 11mo ago
For writing code, actually you have to use "AI" instead of searches because search has become useless in the last couple years. If you blindly copy paste the results though, I'm sure there are some smart people in north korea writing automated generic exploits by hand for vibe coded web sites...
- 1718627440 11mo ago
  > search has become useless in the last couple years. google.com has become useless in the last couple years, all other search sites are doing fine or improving.
  - nottorp 11mo ago
    I use DuckDuckGo and it’s still full of useless content mill results.

yinglian 11mo ago

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liampulles 11mo ago

Most of the gamers I know who are not in the tech space are very against AI, especially if it is being used for stuff that is more on the art side. Anything that displaces "game industry workers" is viewed as a bad thing. I personally don't mind AI use to write code, and while I haven't seen AI art that conveys much in me, I'm open to the idea that it could be used in interesting ways.

survirtual 11mo ago
They are against AI code now as well. AI anything is toxic to the general pop, which is why some companies are asking not to be forced to reveal their use of it. The real issue is that people's livelihoods are being automated. This can be fixed with sensible policies and things like universal healthcare and universal basic income. There are some additional policies I'd like involving AI automation gains compensating workers losing their jobs to AI, and laws making all AI open-source due to their nature of being trained on public data. With those policies, it wouldn't hurt so much to lose your job to AI. I would think there would be leas hostility at that point. I must say it is all very confusing to me. If someone likes a game, why does the origin of assets matter? It is the same thing I see with crypto. It is just code and data. People putting value on it doesn't change what it is. Yet now there are all these regulations because enough people assigned enough value so the code suddenly becomes regulated. AI is just code and data. It doesn't make sense how offended people are by it. No one is being for to use AI. Sure, it is changing how our society functions, but this isn't the fault of AI, it is the fault of bad systems. We have bad economic systems, bad political systems, bad leaders across the board, and bad distribution of ownership. AI isn't causing these problems, it is just amplifying them.

alexitorg 11mo ago

I'm looking forward to having LLMs used for character interactions. It will be like that thrilling point in half life where the soldiers start talking about freeman and for the first time you realize that characters are responding to you in normal game play.

Shorel 11mo ago
I tested a Sherlock Holmes game where AI was used for character interactions. The actual dialogues were of course awesome, and relevant. I gave them feedback about the controls for moving the character, which were a bit awkward.
simianparrot 11mo ago
Emulating real life isn't going to be as exciting as you think it is. That awesome moment in Half Life is scripted to make it immersive like that, but most of the game isn't and that's what makes it special. If all the enemies behaved realistically all the time, the game wouldn't be fun, I can guarantee you that.

fennecfoxy 11mo ago

Idk I kind of want to use transformers/LLMs in a crap game jam sometime. Ever since Skyrim was advertised with the early promise of "If you break this lumber mill it would change the local economy"...which obviously never happened, I've loved the idea of dynamic systems in games. For a truly dynamic system you'd need to build in more than a dev team can manually build - so you need AI for these systems. And where you have dynamic systems, sometimes you'll need dynamic assets. However, the human touch on art is still far better than AI (at the moment, who knows what the future holds). So I think something like how character creators work is the best solution; handmade art but with morph targets etc and where sliders would be, it's an AI creating dynamic NPCs. Aha! Even ChatGPT couldn't find this: https://youtu.be/O0zPYpEGpVI?t=324 https://youtu.be/O0zPYpEGpVI?t=324 "we have a working economy you can sabotage this wood mill if you want" LIES TODD, LIES!

nickserv 11mo ago
There's a few different Skyrim mods that use AI. In particular for adding dialogues using the original voices, basically a more advanced version of line splitting that has been done for a long time. There are some where the AI is used to add dynamic content, pretty cool actually. This one in particular is pretty popular: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631 https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631 I've never heard of anyone complaining about use of AI for mods freely given to the community. Paying mods would likely be different.
- jcurtis 11mo ago
  Mods using AI to clone voice actors' voices without their consent or explicitly against their wishes has certainly been controversial in the Skyrim modding community.
  - nickserv 11mo ago
    I've not seen it, but am curious to dig deeper, can you post some links please?
11mo ago

johnwheeler 11mo ago

I’ve determined I hate AI. Luddite reasons, but they’re mine.

qustrolabe 11mo ago

That's "GMO-free" kind of marketing, not a good thing

irishmanlondon 11mo ago

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dpcan 11mo ago

When it comes to games I absolutely don’t care what they used AI for because the point of games is to be fun. If it’s fun and you used AI, that’s fine with me. The game served its purpose. The line for me is copyright on images. If you use ai to generate images to copy a popular game art style, I think that’s over the line. Create your own art or pay the artist. Code however, I see it as a tool. You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. So to me, AI for coding isn’t any different than hiring a programmer to do the work for you. No problem there. That being said, I do game dev, and using AI to help figure out an algorithm or do the work of creating my inputs code, etc is a big time saver. However, at the moment, it really struggles with anything else because it has no vision and explaining to it how to put code together for a weird game mechanic or level generation reminds me of that game where you explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the 3rd grade, and you tell your teacher to put the peanut butter on the bread and she scoops it out with her hand…

joecool1029 11mo ago
> Create your own art or pay the artist. > You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. It’s literally the same. There is no difference, either you acknowledge AI is potentially a useful tool to lower costs of development (especially important for indie devs) or it’s exploitative and puts both artists and programmers out of a job. There’s plenty of things in the art workflow that can be automated same as code, pay an artist to do key frames/storyboarding and use the AI to animate between them? Is this exploitative? EDIT: I’m reminded of this thread from 2019 about a successful game dev that admits their games look like shit due to cheaping out on art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20804998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20804998

constantcrying 11mo ago

I think AI is a wonderful tool for indie devs. Much of the code they work on is low stakes, where AI can be very helpful. AI has made voice actors obsolete and gives even solo devs the ability to have a fully voiced game, which might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars otherwise. I am sure that it can be very helpful for graphical or musical art, but I don't think it is quite there yet.

sublinear 11mo ago

I'm pretty sure nobody cares about this? My main gripe with indie games since forever has been that they're usually boring. They often fall into creative traps that ruin the whole thing. Gameplay is constant grind, minmax, pointless choices, funnels, and "inspired" by some tired old genre. Music and art can be good, but not in the last decade or so anymore. The final nail is if there are political undertones. It's as if every developer out there only listens to their own echo chambers on discord and reddit.

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sandspar 11mo ago

I hate to say this but the indie game developer community is in some local minima where tribal in-group signaling takes precedence over thinking about the consumer. The industry has developed a siege mentality and is entering a "rooting out traitors" phase. The AI thing is only one example of this self-policing; there are many. I really hope that the industry can become more free spirited, less intense and angry. I love the games and the people but the industry is not in a healthy place right now.