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How good is it to work on building games, compared to existing agents? I am building my own game?
by swrrt 2mo ago
How good is it to work on building games, compared to existing agents? I am building my own game?
- ubermon 2mo agowe have a detailed launch thread explaining and show case exactly this! https://x.com/NoCommas/status/2086835536598351955 https://x.com/NoCommas/status/2086835536598351955
- 1bpp 2mo agoYou aren't building your own game if you have a chatbot do it for you.
- stronglikedan 2mo agoThat's like saying you aren't building a house if you use a hammer to drive nails instead of your hand. AI is just a tool like any other, and you use it to build things like you would any other tool.
- throw_m239339 2mo ago> That's like saying you aren't building a house if you use a hammer to drive nails instead of your hand. AI is just a tool like any other, and you use it to build things like you would any other tool. A coding agent is more like a carpenter, a mason, an electrician,... rather than a hammer in that case.
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoI'd say it's closer to a Roomba then a hammer -- if you just let a Roomba run around your living room, can you say you vacuumed?
- simlevesque 2mo agoWell, you tell your Roomba "clean the floor" but you don't ask an AI "make a game". You give it very specific instructions.
- finghin 2mo agoSpecific compared to writing procedural code> Barely even by analogy, IMO One could even argue what defines AI instructability is heuristics as opposed to specifics
- schnevets 2mo agoI wouldn't even compare it to a tool. People frequently "build their own house" where they sub out 75% of the skilled labor and act as a General Contractor/glorified gopher. And you won't get purity tests from the layperson: in the end, you're responsible for the build quality so if you tirelessly labor/oversee those teams you're considered capable; if it ends sub-par, then you're a stooge.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ThrowawayR2 2mo agoA far more accurate analogy would be people saying someone didn't write a book if they hired a ghostwriter, which is generally acknowledged to be true. LLMs are much closer to being a ghostwriter than they are to an inert, non-powered hand tool.
- chrisjj 2mo ago> AI is just a tool like any other Really? Last time I checked, other tools can operate without ripping off the works of millions of humans.
- perching_aix 2mo agoSame idea that sends people down needless game engine development / procrastination rabbit holes.
- jatora 2mo agoThis is such a horrible cringe and bad faith take.
- marssaxman 2mo agoA classic tale from the music production world comes to mind: "I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all."
- throwlifeaway 2mo agoDoes prompting an AI music generation service count as making your own songs? I noticed you left that one out of your parable.
- bitpush 2mo agoIf figma draws you a gradient, are you really a designer?
- 1bpp 2mo agoProbably yes; If Figma is deciding for you where the gradient goes, what colors it is, and what its purpose in the design is, then no.
- 8note 2mo agoit kinda is by showing you tools in a certain order and what defaults and so on
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- nkrisc 2mo agoA designer, yes. A painter, no.
- andai 2mo agoEating food doesn't count if you didn't grow it yourself.
- derefr 2mo ago"A game" is a different abstraction layer from "a piece of software", though. A game has designed mechanics, a scenario (level design, etc.), art/music assets, writing, and so on. I would say that if you're making all of those things yourself, but you're having an AI write the software that executes the game, then you're still "building a game" per se. "Developing a game" even. Compare/contrast: people who develop games on top of high-level genre-specific game engines like RPG Maker are still considered to be "building a game." What's the difference between using a pre-made purpose-fit engine like RPG Maker, vs. asking an AI (or, for that matter, a contracted software company) to build you a custom purpose-fit engine?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- swrrt 2mo agoI know now we all are somehow like 'product manager' when using agent/chatbot, and we just need to setup requirements and point out issues. But in game area, I am not so sure models/agent are capable enough, especially involves heavy graphic related development and human interaction things? Since from my personal experience, even codex and claude code not so stable and efficient when dealing visualisation things like figures, videos and even much easier one - web-browser.
- andai 2mo agoThey are a bit weird with game development at the moment. They can one shot entire games, with relatively minor issues. And obviously asking for small code snippets and integrating them yourself has been well supported for five years. But in Agent mode... not so much. I was asking frontier models to make simple changes to my Pong game (you know like the one from 1972) and it constantly failed to make simple changes or would break something else in the process. The main issue is that they can't see what they're doing. Actually one of the agents tried playing the pong game by screenshotting every frame, and it ran for about 20 minutes before I realized what it was doing, and told it to calm down. It takes about 10 seconds to process an image, so it was running the game at 0.1 frames per second... 600x slower than realtime. The technology is not quite there yet. If your game is something turn-based though, with discrete States and well-defined transitions between them, they can help out a lot more with that.
- ricardobeat 2mo agoDepends a lot on what model you use. Claude Sonnet/Opus, Deepseek, Mimo, M3 are smart enough to figure out how to create debug views, add single-frame screenshot and testing harnesses.
- chrisjj 2mo agoSounds like every other plagiarist.
- swrrt 2mo agoSeems visulization is still too expensive and sluggish. I tried to build things like tetris and snake eater with fable5 and got-5.6 sol, 90% of build successful in one shot and remaining needs 1~2 rounds debug. The whole experience is much better than months earlier, where a snake eater takes me 3~4 manually compile/run and input the error message and abnormal manually again and again. But I am curious about building a larger scale game with/without professional engines like Godot. I highly doubt the model/agent is intelligent enough to setup the entire development environment correctly, thus may be struggle to test and debug themselves. Maybe something like GUI-agent a future?
- swrrt 2mo ago