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Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable

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Re: Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable

#42
post #23

I think it’s impressive that an LLM can take you to a local maxima in one-shot. But once you start maintaining it, improving it and fixing bugs, you’ll eventually need to rip it apart and put it back together again while understanding how it all works. This is why I think the better approach isn’t to one-shot but to have the architecture in your head and build it up piece by piece, with the AI accelerating the code w…

I’ve found it very easy to maintain, add features to and fix bugs in software I’ve written entirely with LLMs, and in languages and frameworks with which I’m unfamiliar. You just ask the LLM to explain the code and then work with it to come up with the fix.

How big are those projects.. I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health. Problem solving keeps your brain strong. The laziness in us is inclined to take shortcuts, don't do it. Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer.

Re: Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable

#43

I think it’s impressive that an LLM can take you to a local maxima in one-shot. But once you start maintaining it, improving it and fixing bugs, you’ll eventually need to rip it apart and put it back together again while understanding how it all works. This is why I think the better approach isn’t to one-shot but to have the architecture in your head and build it up piece by piece, with the AI accelerating the code w…

LLMs are good now at looking at existing project and suggesting big refactors for technical debt removal and new better architectures after the project grew organically for a while

[deleted]

Re: Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable

#44
post #5

“ can it build a game idea I've had for years, in a single shot?” Do people do no research or introspection when they’ve had an “idea for years”? There are countless examples of this exact game. I played this on the Gameboy Advance! There’s like 50 of them on the App Store right now. The standard “this almost certainly exists wholesale in the training data” applies, but I’m also interested in how you carry an idea fo…

Same thoughts exactly. I personally started looking into indie game dev and I've just started to realize how naive I was and how hard just game design can be, and that I'll probably never be good at it, and that most of my ideas are pretty garbage (or incomplete at best).

Even with the perfect AI to write, one would need to iterate through many different ideas, play testing constantly, getting people to play test and analyze what they found fun and where they got stuck. And to get the best ideas you'll need to be playing lots of different kinds of games.

Re: Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable

#45
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like prior to GenAI, you’d have had to reckon with the true originality of your idea in some form as you did the research. Creatives having to confront their own unoriginality is such a thing it itself is reflected in countless pieces of media. So it’s interesting to me that the creator here didn’t encounter the tens of physically published versions, or the hundreds of them shipped to digital app stores, or al…

> the creator here didn’t encounter the tens of physically published versions The simplest counterargument: since there are already tens of similar games out there, why didn't the previous authors, supposedly grass-fed genuine checkmark blood-through-their-veins humans didn't notice the other 9-8-7-6-5... games, and still released their own version? Maybe because it was still that they wanted the game out there? Mayb…

My thoughts are less about the merits of creating something that already exists than they are about _knowing_ you are doing that. Which I think my post made very clear :)

Re: Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable

#48
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found it very easy to maintain, add features to and fix bugs in software I’ve written entirely with LLMs, and in languages and frameworks with which I’m unfamiliar. You just ask the LLM to explain the code and then work with it to come up with the fix.

How big are those projects.. I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health. Problem solving keeps your brain strong. The laziness in us is inclined to take shortcuts, don't do it. Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer.

> How big are those projects

Define big I guess. They're non-trivial, mix of internal enterprise tools, a multiplatform app (android/ios/mac/windows/web currently headbutting its way through review), including a billing system for my small telecommunications business.

> I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health

I find the experience of doing it without writing the code to be intellectually pretty similar. I still solve a lot of problems, the LLM couldn't, for example, one shot the event sourcing model I built for synching data between devices. It took quite a few iterations and I had to define a lot of the architecture, but I did it at a level that wasn't "here is a class, here is a module, this module does XYZ", more at the "whitepaper" level or describing how specific bits of the app needed to work in order to solve some problem.

It's also very similar to managing other developers.

> Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer

It's more similar to having staff rather than doing everything yourself. The problem solving just shifts to a different area, and you get more done.

Re: Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable

#49

My Belgian Tervuren and I have a basic herding title and about 4 years of herding experience. The sheep movement is excellent. You could make it even more realistic by having them favor lusher areas and by having one occasionally bolt spastically (hard mode?) A handler mode where you play as a human and shout commands at the dog could be cool too!

[dead]

Re: Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable

#50
post #5

“ can it build a game idea I've had for years, in a single shot?” Do people do no research or introspection when they’ve had an “idea for years”? There are countless examples of this exact game. I played this on the Gameboy Advance! There’s like 50 of them on the App Store right now. The standard “this almost certainly exists wholesale in the training data” applies, but I’m also interested in how you carry an idea fo…

Well, “an idea I’ve had for years” and “something that has never been done before” are not the same thing.
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