4 ms·

A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion. Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games. Can I go ba

by samiv 7mo ago

A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion. Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games. Can I go back to the 80's please?

krapp 7mo ago
>A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion. There are still... dozens of us left!
htdt 7mo ago
Bold of you to assume I'm not making this with passion, I've been yelling at LLMs for a year straight, that's basically the 80s experience with better coffee
- krapp 7mo ago
  The problem is your passion is for the LLM workflow and not the games, and the end result is going to be a powerful way to generate mediocre games.
  - ianbutler 7mo ago
    The majority of all code written is highly mediocre. Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right. The same people who were going to make something good will still make something good, the code imo has very little to do with it. Passion is necessary but insufficient by itself to make good things
    - krapp 7mo ago
      >Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right. Every good and enjoyable game made was handcoded, with art, music, dialogue and design created with intent. I have yet to see a game created with an LLM that's even worth playing, despite countless LLM enthusiasts declaring the death of art , design and programming. A tool that takes a simple prompt and generates a game from it isn't capable of any of that, and the necessary passion is nonexistent. It's an interesting technical demo but it's useless for gamedev unless your only goal is churning out programmatic slop, which is exactly what it will be used for.
      - ianbutler 7mo ago
        Nothing you've written here disproves my point. If you drop the barrier to entry, which this does, of course you see more crap. It won't change the fact someone with taste and skill will make a good game with this tech. People with those qualities will make a good game with whatever tools are available. They're just tools.
        krapp 7mo ago
        If it makes the game in its entirety then it isn't a tool and those qualities don't factor in to the end product.
        ianbutler 7mo ago
        I think game designers who work with a developer would be surprised to learn their skill in game design doesn't factor into the end product even though they don't code the game.
        vdvebjrc 7mo ago
        [dead]
      - stale2002 7mo ago
        > Every good and enjoyable game made was handcoded, with art, music, dialogue and design created with intent. I am not sure about you, but I do not know a single developer who isn't using LLMs with a passion, even if its only just cursor and auto-complete. So, quite the opposite. Instead, literally all games are being made with AI now. I expect the same thing applies to the other professions that you brought up, if not now then soon.
        krapp 7mo ago
        >But I do not know a single developer who isn't using LLMs with a passion, even if its only just cursor and auto-complete A passion for using LLMs, not for making games. If they had a passion for making games they would recognize how limiting LLMs actually are to the creative process. They wouldn't be making Show HN's for what amount to barely coherent tech demos. But it's very clear from having seen many such projects that the actual game doesn't matter to them. > Instead, literally all games are being made with AI now. That's a statement of faith. It's something you want to be true, and believe must be true. And it may prove more accurate as time goes on but it certainly isn't true now.
- dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
  What is the 80s experience? Are you Jobs yelling at Wozniak or something? It's like people with this view are (or will be) the object lesson of a parable or something.
hardaker 7mo ago
This. I've been making a game in Godot with zero AI help. Because I enjoy it. I enjoy solving with weird coding problems you run into. I enjoy leaning as I fixed things. I do it out of love for the process, knowing competition right now from things like this means a flooded market. But I'm ok with that and must be because the other option is to quit.
- ehnto 7mo ago
  It will show in your game, and I think that will also continue to translate into a better chance at success even in such a swamped market. Maybe even because it's such a swamped market, players will value the games made with passion.
tayo42 7mo ago
A prompt like "make it more fun" will never work. What's the line for an authentic enough game?
colechristensen 7mo ago
Why does what other people do affect you? If you want to handcraft something, do it. How popular it is among other people isn't relevant.
- skeeter2020 7mo ago
  This comment screams someone who wasn't around during the rise and fall of Atari 2600 games or Commodore 64 games. More was certainly not better back then either.
  - WillPostForFood 7mo ago
    There are literally 1000x more games being released today* than during the best days of the Atari/C64, and it is great. More has been better. *Atari 1980 (20 games) vs Steam 2025 (20,008 games)
    - vdvebjrc 7mo ago
      [dead]
- spwa4 7mo ago
  Because you use steam and the play store and ... to get games, and there will be so overwhelmingly much slop you can't find anything. I've switched to emulators, a bluetooth controller and zero android games (and zero ios games on my work phone). But yeah it was/is horribly enshittified already. And what people predicted did happen. The fact that the app store allows updates means existing games get systematically worse. Even the games I used to enjoy, and bought 5 years ago, like collossatron now have ads after every play.
- i_cannot_hack 7mo ago
  It becomes a problem for everone when spaces meant for meaningful work become overrun with an awful stream of endless mediocre slop that someone quickly generated without giving it a second thought. The problem here is not that it is fast and easy. The cardinal sin is that it is fast, easy AND bad.
hoppp 7mo ago
No more code, only markdown files...
beernet 7mo ago
Coding is not dead. No one stops you guys and nobody intends to. I like the knittling analogy that was made by the OpenClaw inventor recently. Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.
- runarberg 7mo ago
  knitting machines don’t generate the design from a prompt, and neither does industrial knitwear production facilities. In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.
  - captainbland 7mo ago
    Not for long, presumably. Apparently the majority of marketable skills will come from a handful of capex heavy, trillion dollar corporations and you will like it.
  - beernet 7mo ago
    > In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming. Equally true for today's AI coding agents
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - runarberg 7mo ago
      Not equally true at all. Far from it. If you have ever seen people use knitting machine you would know the amount of skill required to operate one is far beyond creating a prompt. Same is true of looms, etc. In fact this whole analogy makes no sense, a knitting machine is far closer to a compiler in this analogy then it is to a language model. Many would argue that automatic looms were the first compilers of the industrial age, and I would agree with that argument.
      - 7mo ago
ytoawwhra92 7mo ago
Personally, most of the time I spend prototyping is taken up by wrestling with tools, engines, and assets. Then I discover that my game design just isn't very fun. I've been experimenting with using LLMs to speed up building prototypes because I want to spend a higher percentage of my time adjusting game design and feel rather than solving problems that are irrelevant if the game's not fun to play.
- galleywest200 7mo ago
  If you took the time to throughly learn an engine, would you spend so much time wrestling with it afterwards?
  - ytoawwhra92 7mo ago
    If I was working on this full time the investment of learning an engine thoroughly would be worth it, I imagine. Game dev is a hobby for me, though, and what motivates me is making fun games. If I stumble across a game idea that's really fun and worth releasing to a wider audience there's nothing stopping me from building a better version of the game by hand at that point.
  - 8note 7mo ago
    yes! you wrestle with it because the starting boilerplate is thpically a do-once operation. if you stay working on one project for a few years, you will no longer know how to start the next project, and with modern software, starting a new project in two years from now will be nothing like starting one now
    - ehnto 7mo ago
      I had the same issue where startup cost was a pain to get little prototypes going. I reduce the cost by making re-usable components. Even if I don't intend to reuse something I still make it a component-esque manner. It helps that I mostly want to make certain types of games but I think everyone does. I have drop in CameraController, First Person rig, 2D inventory system, dialogue system etc. All flexible enough to get wired into the one off game manager or whatever it needs to plug into.
SchemaLoad 7mo ago
Curation is probably going to be king over the next years. A game simply existing is no guarantee that any effort has been put in or that even the developer played it. You'll need to find a publisher, journalists, etc to market your game. You'll ask your friends what they are playing instead of scrolling the store page. Trusted platforms will promote games that are actually worth looking at. This problem already exists on modern platforms like Steam but AI is supercharging it.
- goosejuice 7mo ago
  This has always been the case. Just because someone made an album or a game or a movie it doesn't guarantee that it's worth your time even if there was effort. Low effort music can be good too, namely by musicians that are really talented. A really talented game designer may be able to make a very engaging game with little effort beyond the initial design. If you want to test this, find yourself a record store and pick up a few LPs less than a few bucks from bands you've never heard. You might get something really great or it might be terrible.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- ehnto 7mo ago
  I agree, in the current ecosystem games are abundant but it's still not easy to find the diamonds in the rough. Trust signals are going to be quite influential going forward, and that will get exploited too. I think we're going to see the return of high effort, high trust games journalism. Not necessarily as the commercial victor, but as a community we will rally around people and outlets we trust.
- kshri24 7mo ago
  The problem is finding the needle in the haystack. When you can cheaply develop AI slop by the millions, good luck finding that one game where a human put blood, sweat and tears to realize their vision/dream. Even if you somehow have access to at-scale distribution, economics will ultimately always triumph everything else and more slop will be pushed because it makes economic sense. It will take at least a full decade for people to realize the slop isn't helping, has made us all collectively mediocre and will seek out people with real specializations. By then I sure hope those who are specializing haven't lost the motivation to do great things and moved on to other fields.
captainbland 7mo ago
We've all seen shovelware, now introducing excavatorware. A single shovelware studio is now empowered to deliver on the order of kilogames per month.
imadierich 7mo ago
[dead]
8note 7mo ago
im not so sure? instead we will see something like flash or game maker, with new art styles driven by what agents make easy, and what children think is fun. games have immediate feedback loops about quality. either theyre fun or theyre not.
- ehnto 7mo ago
  I agree, taste, story and art direction will continue to cohere into successful games. Studios making high volume shallow games never had these, and they probably don't want them just because AI showed up. They are filling a specific demand in the industry.
nanobuilds 7mo ago
AI tools are great but ultimately it's about taste and intent (and fun for games) that will hopefully lead to quality floating to the top.
genewitch 7mo ago
as soon as CD-ROM was a thing, shovelware boomed.
- Ekaros 7mo ago
  I think it was around already with diskettes or even cassettes. When medium gets easy enough to produce the lowest quality stuff gets produced...
  - genewitch 7mo ago
    cassettes are a bit before my time. I am personally unaware of any "shovelware" being distributed via cassette; i have heard that radio stations would broadcast programs you could record and play back (i remember Acorn in this particular story, i think.) And floppies, sure, the 3.5" ones had some shovelware, included in trade magazines and whatnot. Maybe someone has a directory listing of a floppy from this era showing what it was like, i'd be interested; i know about AOL disks, too. But CD-ROM. never before could humans distribute 200 games / software packages so easily. my first computer with a cd-rom had a hard disk 350MB larger than a CD-ROM. 2 shovelware CD-ROMs was more than my PC could handle!
ge96 7mo ago
Maybe can generate roblox games, one gets picked up like the next skibidi, boom rake in the money
XenophileJKO 7mo ago
What is "passion".. for example.. I vibe coded an art display this weekend for myself for a monitor I have on my wall. I am VERY PROUD of it.. it is in GODOT coincedentally. I think it turned out well. Did I spend weeks on it? Did I even learn GODOT?.. No.. but I did spend my weekend late nights figuring out what I wanted and working with an AI to make it. In some ways the kind of complaining I see is like complaining about a chef's meal because the chef didn't mine the ore to make his knife. Look in the specific case of this post... none of the games are "good".. however.. one-shoting games WITH ASSETS.. seems pretty impressive to me.
- dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
  Isn't this just so disingenuous? No disrespect to you, I just see this kind of sophomoric take so much in response to the very normal reaction of the OP. A year ago, it was in vogue to call the OP "ableist" or something. I think the idea that the OP's concern was like the expectation that a chef would "mine the ore" is a bit ridiculous. A better example would be someone having a painting on the wall feeling ownership in it when they asked their artist friend to paint them a picture; at least that is more reasonable. Also, passion means to struggle, since you asked, which I think follow more the idea of learning the craft. This kind of reductionism would deny that craftsmanship exists, as if sculpting David is the same as buy the finished product on the open market. I think we all know this isn't true but there is some kind of forcefield on the Internet that means we have to pretend it is.
  - XenophileJKO 7mo ago
    By that note, no game producer or designer can have passion.
  - guitarlimeo 7mo ago
    Really well said, I hate that every time I say I value craftmanship, skill and effort in art people flock to this reductionism "well did the painter make his own dyes? Did the developer make his own processor to run the game in?" There's levels to it, it's not black and white.

by samiv 7mo ago

A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion. Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games. Can I go back to the 80's please?

krapp 7mo ago

>A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion. There are still... dozens of us left!

htdt 7mo ago

Bold of you to assume I'm not making this with passion, I've been yelling at LLMs for a year straight, that's basically the 80s experience with better coffee

krapp 7mo ago
The problem is your passion is for the LLM workflow and not the games, and the end result is going to be a powerful way to generate mediocre games.
- ianbutler 7mo ago
  The majority of all code written is highly mediocre. Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right. The same people who were going to make something good will still make something good, the code imo has very little to do with it. Passion is necessary but insufficient by itself to make good things
  - krapp 7mo ago
    >Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right. Every good and enjoyable game made was handcoded, with art, music, dialogue and design created with intent. I have yet to see a game created with an LLM that's even worth playing, despite countless LLM enthusiasts declaring the death of art , design and programming. A tool that takes a simple prompt and generates a game from it isn't capable of any of that, and the necessary passion is nonexistent. It's an interesting technical demo but it's useless for gamedev unless your only goal is churning out programmatic slop, which is exactly what it will be used for.
    - ianbutler 7mo ago
      Nothing you've written here disproves my point. If you drop the barrier to entry, which this does, of course you see more crap. It won't change the fact someone with taste and skill will make a good game with this tech. People with those qualities will make a good game with whatever tools are available. They're just tools.
      - krapp 7mo ago
        If it makes the game in its entirety then it isn't a tool and those qualities don't factor in to the end product.
        ianbutler 7mo ago
        I think game designers who work with a developer would be surprised to learn their skill in game design doesn't factor into the end product even though they don't code the game.
      - vdvebjrc 7mo ago
        [dead]
    - stale2002 7mo ago
      > Every good and enjoyable game made was handcoded, with art, music, dialogue and design created with intent. I am not sure about you, but I do not know a single developer who isn't using LLMs with a passion, even if its only just cursor and auto-complete. So, quite the opposite. Instead, literally all games are being made with AI now. I expect the same thing applies to the other professions that you brought up, if not now then soon.
      - krapp 7mo ago
        >But I do not know a single developer who isn't using LLMs with a passion, even if its only just cursor and auto-complete A passion for using LLMs, not for making games. If they had a passion for making games they would recognize how limiting LLMs actually are to the creative process. They wouldn't be making Show HN's for what amount to barely coherent tech demos. But it's very clear from having seen many such projects that the actual game doesn't matter to them. > Instead, literally all games are being made with AI now. That's a statement of faith. It's something you want to be true, and believe must be true. And it may prove more accurate as time goes on but it certainly isn't true now.
dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
What is the 80s experience? Are you Jobs yelling at Wozniak or something? It's like people with this view are (or will be) the object lesson of a parable or something.

hardaker 7mo ago

This. I've been making a game in Godot with zero AI help. Because I enjoy it. I enjoy solving with weird coding problems you run into. I enjoy leaning as I fixed things. I do it out of love for the process, knowing competition right now from things like this means a flooded market. But I'm ok with that and must be because the other option is to quit.

ehnto 7mo ago
It will show in your game, and I think that will also continue to translate into a better chance at success even in such a swamped market. Maybe even because it's such a swamped market, players will value the games made with passion.

tayo42 7mo ago

A prompt like "make it more fun" will never work. What's the line for an authentic enough game?

colechristensen 7mo ago

Why does what other people do affect you? If you want to handcraft something, do it. How popular it is among other people isn't relevant.

skeeter2020 7mo ago
This comment screams someone who wasn't around during the rise and fall of Atari 2600 games or Commodore 64 games. More was certainly not better back then either.
- WillPostForFood 7mo ago
  There are literally 1000x more games being released today* than during the best days of the Atari/C64, and it is great. More has been better. *Atari 1980 (20 games) vs Steam 2025 (20,008 games)
  - vdvebjrc 7mo ago
    [dead]
spwa4 7mo ago
Because you use steam and the play store and ... to get games, and there will be so overwhelmingly much slop you can't find anything. I've switched to emulators, a bluetooth controller and zero android games (and zero ios games on my work phone). But yeah it was/is horribly enshittified already. And what people predicted did happen. The fact that the app store allows updates means existing games get systematically worse. Even the games I used to enjoy, and bought 5 years ago, like collossatron now have ads after every play.
i_cannot_hack 7mo ago
It becomes a problem for everone when spaces meant for meaningful work become overrun with an awful stream of endless mediocre slop that someone quickly generated without giving it a second thought. The problem here is not that it is fast and easy. The cardinal sin is that it is fast, easy AND bad.

hoppp 7mo ago

No more code, only markdown files...

beernet 7mo ago

Coding is not dead. No one stops you guys and nobody intends to. I like the knittling analogy that was made by the OpenClaw inventor recently. Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.

runarberg 7mo ago
knitting machines don’t generate the design from a prompt, and neither does industrial knitwear production facilities. In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.
- captainbland 7mo ago
  Not for long, presumably. Apparently the majority of marketable skills will come from a handful of capex heavy, trillion dollar corporations and you will like it.
- beernet 7mo ago
  > In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming. Equally true for today's AI coding agents
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - runarberg 7mo ago
    Not equally true at all. Far from it. If you have ever seen people use knitting machine you would know the amount of skill required to operate one is far beyond creating a prompt. Same is true of looms, etc. In fact this whole analogy makes no sense, a knitting machine is far closer to a compiler in this analogy then it is to a language model. Many would argue that automatic looms were the first compilers of the industrial age, and I would agree with that argument.
    - 7mo ago

ytoawwhra92 7mo ago

Personally, most of the time I spend prototyping is taken up by wrestling with tools, engines, and assets. Then I discover that my game design just isn't very fun. I've been experimenting with using LLMs to speed up building prototypes because I want to spend a higher percentage of my time adjusting game design and feel rather than solving problems that are irrelevant if the game's not fun to play.

galleywest200 7mo ago
If you took the time to throughly learn an engine, would you spend so much time wrestling with it afterwards?
- ytoawwhra92 7mo ago
  If I was working on this full time the investment of learning an engine thoroughly would be worth it, I imagine. Game dev is a hobby for me, though, and what motivates me is making fun games. If I stumble across a game idea that's really fun and worth releasing to a wider audience there's nothing stopping me from building a better version of the game by hand at that point.
- 8note 7mo ago
  yes! you wrestle with it because the starting boilerplate is thpically a do-once operation. if you stay working on one project for a few years, you will no longer know how to start the next project, and with modern software, starting a new project in two years from now will be nothing like starting one now
  - ehnto 7mo ago
    I had the same issue where startup cost was a pain to get little prototypes going. I reduce the cost by making re-usable components. Even if I don't intend to reuse something I still make it a component-esque manner. It helps that I mostly want to make certain types of games but I think everyone does. I have drop in CameraController, First Person rig, 2D inventory system, dialogue system etc. All flexible enough to get wired into the one off game manager or whatever it needs to plug into.

SchemaLoad 7mo ago

Curation is probably going to be king over the next years. A game simply existing is no guarantee that any effort has been put in or that even the developer played it. You'll need to find a publisher, journalists, etc to market your game. You'll ask your friends what they are playing instead of scrolling the store page. Trusted platforms will promote games that are actually worth looking at. This problem already exists on modern platforms like Steam but AI is supercharging it.

goosejuice 7mo ago
This has always been the case. Just because someone made an album or a game or a movie it doesn't guarantee that it's worth your time even if there was effort. Low effort music can be good too, namely by musicians that are really talented. A really talented game designer may be able to make a very engaging game with little effort beyond the initial design. If you want to test this, find yourself a record store and pick up a few LPs less than a few bucks from bands you've never heard. You might get something really great or it might be terrible.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
ehnto 7mo ago
I agree, in the current ecosystem games are abundant but it's still not easy to find the diamonds in the rough. Trust signals are going to be quite influential going forward, and that will get exploited too. I think we're going to see the return of high effort, high trust games journalism. Not necessarily as the commercial victor, but as a community we will rally around people and outlets we trust.
kshri24 7mo ago
The problem is finding the needle in the haystack. When you can cheaply develop AI slop by the millions, good luck finding that one game where a human put blood, sweat and tears to realize their vision/dream. Even if you somehow have access to at-scale distribution, economics will ultimately always triumph everything else and more slop will be pushed because it makes economic sense. It will take at least a full decade for people to realize the slop isn't helping, has made us all collectively mediocre and will seek out people with real specializations. By then I sure hope those who are specializing haven't lost the motivation to do great things and moved on to other fields.

captainbland 7mo ago

We've all seen shovelware, now introducing excavatorware. A single shovelware studio is now empowered to deliver on the order of kilogames per month.

imadierich 7mo ago

[dead]

8note 7mo ago

im not so sure? instead we will see something like flash or game maker, with new art styles driven by what agents make easy, and what children think is fun. games have immediate feedback loops about quality. either theyre fun or theyre not.

ehnto 7mo ago
I agree, taste, story and art direction will continue to cohere into successful games. Studios making high volume shallow games never had these, and they probably don't want them just because AI showed up. They are filling a specific demand in the industry.

nanobuilds 7mo ago

AI tools are great but ultimately it's about taste and intent (and fun for games) that will hopefully lead to quality floating to the top.

genewitch 7mo ago

as soon as CD-ROM was a thing, shovelware boomed.

Ekaros 7mo ago
I think it was around already with diskettes or even cassettes. When medium gets easy enough to produce the lowest quality stuff gets produced...
- genewitch 7mo ago
  cassettes are a bit before my time. I am personally unaware of any "shovelware" being distributed via cassette; i have heard that radio stations would broadcast programs you could record and play back (i remember Acorn in this particular story, i think.) And floppies, sure, the 3.5" ones had some shovelware, included in trade magazines and whatnot. Maybe someone has a directory listing of a floppy from this era showing what it was like, i'd be interested; i know about AOL disks, too. But CD-ROM. never before could humans distribute 200 games / software packages so easily. my first computer with a cd-rom had a hard disk 350MB larger than a CD-ROM. 2 shovelware CD-ROMs was more than my PC could handle!

ge96 7mo ago

Maybe can generate roblox games, one gets picked up like the next skibidi, boom rake in the money

XenophileJKO 7mo ago

What is "passion".. for example.. I vibe coded an art display this weekend for myself for a monitor I have on my wall. I am VERY PROUD of it.. it is in GODOT coincedentally. I think it turned out well. Did I spend weeks on it? Did I even learn GODOT?.. No.. but I did spend my weekend late nights figuring out what I wanted and working with an AI to make it. In some ways the kind of complaining I see is like complaining about a chef's meal because the chef didn't mine the ore to make his knife. Look in the specific case of this post... none of the games are "good".. however.. one-shoting games WITH ASSETS.. seems pretty impressive to me.

dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
Isn't this just so disingenuous? No disrespect to you, I just see this kind of sophomoric take so much in response to the very normal reaction of the OP. A year ago, it was in vogue to call the OP "ableist" or something. I think the idea that the OP's concern was like the expectation that a chef would "mine the ore" is a bit ridiculous. A better example would be someone having a painting on the wall feeling ownership in it when they asked their artist friend to paint them a picture; at least that is more reasonable. Also, passion means to struggle, since you asked, which I think follow more the idea of learning the craft. This kind of reductionism would deny that craftsmanship exists, as if sculpting David is the same as buy the finished product on the open market. I think we all know this isn't true but there is some kind of forcefield on the Internet that means we have to pretend it is.
- XenophileJKO 7mo ago
  By that note, no game producer or designer can have passion.
- guitarlimeo 7mo ago
  Really well said, I hate that every time I say I value craftmanship, skill and effort in art people flock to this reductionism "well did the painter make his own dyes? Did the developer make his own processor to run the game in?" There's levels to it, it's not black and white.