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Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

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Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#101

Post by sandworm101 »

dwallin wrote: post #29
bckr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that, while making a game is not hard, making an excellent game is hard. And I think making an excellent game is a lot like reaching product-market fit. It takes fast iteration with user feedback to find the fun, then a ton of polish to make it extraordinary. It has to be so good that, out of those 73,000 games and counting, I’ll spend some of my money and time on it. The way GenAI can help here, I think, is…

Making an excellent game isn't even enough these days, that's just table stakes. With so many games out there it's a market of lemons. You need to have a way of rising above the noise. For AAA, it's having budgets to make games on a bigger scale than everyone else. For mobile games, it's generally about leveraging a large war chest to fuel an advertising-driven margin game. For prestige/indie games you need something…

>> Making an excellent game isn't even enough these days, that's just table stakes. With so many games out there it's a market of lemons. You need to have a way of rising above the noise.

Maybe if your goal is to "win", to be the biggest and most profitable game. But most of the best games become so because they don't try to rise above the noise. Do something very very well and you can abandon all the trappings of the top-tier games. I just paid 20$ for a game about puzzle boxes. It isn't flashy. It is just a fun game about a very niche topic. It will never top any steam charts, nor is it trying to do so. It is just a fun game for people that want to do puzzle boxes. It is still "great" imho because, frankly, I bought it and don't regret paying for it. That alone puts it above 99.99% of games on steam, all those games I would never consider paying a dime for.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#102

Post by fabiopolimeni »

wokwokwok wrote: post #58

I think most people don't actually want to make games. Most people want to take an existing basic game, and tweek it a bit, incrementally, adding new art, ideas and levels, and removing the stuff they don't like. They definitely do not want to write code. They most certainly do not want to debug generated code and I think you've hit the nail on the head with 'generating actual code sucks, is hard and basically doesn'…

I think you are right with most of your observations.

Why do you think that using something like createOrUodateRule could limit the ability to produce complex behaviour?

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#103

Post by stale2002 »

hatenberg wrote: post #60

So ... does every single AI demo put copyright and intellectual property infringement on the box? Just asking? How on earth can an entire ecosystem be so damn tone-deaf and lack self-preservation?

> tone-deaf

Maybe. I'm not sure why that matters though. Better to be hated than not even noticed.

> and lack self-preservation

Arguments like this confuse me. Copyright infringement is everywhere. Not just among companies, but also among individuals.

Any time someone draws fan art of the Mario and posts it on this internet, this is illegal copyright infringement.

But basically nobody ever gets sued for that kind of stuff, unless you get huge and bothersome enough to be noticed.

And if you've gotten to that point, you've already basically won. And you can just fix the issue later, if they actually bother telling you to stop. But it doesn't matter, because you have already found success.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#104

Post by jokethrowaway »

bavell wrote: post #67
dwallin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an excellent game isn't even enough these days, that's just table stakes. With so many games out there it's a market of lemons. You need to have a way of rising above the noise. For AAA, it's having budgets to make games on a bigger scale than everyone else. For mobile games, it's generally about leveraging a large war chest to fuel an advertising-driven margin game. For prestige/indie games you need something…

Just get some popular streamers/channels to do a review/let's play and if they like it you'll get tons of free exposure. I've spent probably hundreds of dollars on indie games in the last year or so from first seeing them on a gaming channel and then pulling it up in steam. Channels like Splattercat are a great resource for indie gamers & studios alike: https://youtube.com/@splattercatgaming

This has been known for more than a decade, you can bet the competition does that too

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#105

Post by jarjoura »

I know this is a small team and experimenting, but in my mind, this engine is already limiting the potential of games it can output.

I don’t know, but Unity is already pretty much point and click game building. I spent a few weeks building a card game with it during lockdown, and without a lot of code, I had an ugly, and basic, but totally playable game.

The hardest part to a game is building something fun yes, but it also has to meet some level of quality bar and work on any platform.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#106

Post by Philpax »

anotheryou wrote: post #96

Any plans for LLM based agents :) ? NPCs will be amazing. AI Dungeon is probably a good example for character setup and story snippets to weave in (so you don't get all generic "helpful assistants") :).

Hi there! I'm the in-house AI engineer at Braindump. We've done some internal research into this and are excited to explore it in future, but we're not currently working on it at present - only so many problems we can tackle at the same time :) Looking forward to playing around with it more down the line!

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#107

Post by stale2002 »

jarjoura wrote: post #98
FredrikNoren wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven't looked into exactly how this will be handled yet, but I believe this would fall under the same laws and restrictions as any other online platform (YouTube, TikTok etc.), it's just that the production tools are different.

Yea you might want to update your blog post with some original and creatively inspired new content. Demoing Star Wars is just asking to be picked apart by people.

> Demoing Star Wars is just asking to be picked apart by people.

I am confused as to why you think think this is a bad thing.

That's likely the best way to go viral and get traction, to have a bunch of people being upset about this tool.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#108

Post by jokethrowaway »

dev1ycan wrote: post #25
jncfhnb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of those games are now visual novels / pornography.

which shows how bad puritan culture is, most people don't care about your puritanism in their room, they want to play a game, see a hot char, and be able to do stuff with them in the game. it's the harsh truth that people seem to get mad at. Especially now with ever increasing rates of ADHD and other stuff, having an old school genre like an RPG have that type of stuff as a "reward" for beating a level or whatever re…

This is like saying people buy baldur's gate because you can undress your characters or make them date

Consumers don't want pornography in their games, they're completely different products: visual novels are closer to a slideshow than a game

People buy good games and they consume pornography, conflating the two doesn't help us analyse the market.

That said, I agree there is probably more money in pornography than in making indie games (which explains the explosion of the genre)

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#109

Post by Philpax »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #88
FredrikNoren wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's hard to give a number on how robust it is, but yes, simply telling GPT that "this doesn't work" or "try again" does work a lot of the time. We're trying to give GPT as much context as possible to help it figure out where things went wrong. Currently that means giving it type errors, execution errors, self-critique and user feedback. But we're working on expanding that; for instance we want to experiment with…

Sounds like a nightmare tbh. Half the fun is the actual coding (aka the journey). I guess if you want to be a prompt engineer that sounds like fun but it sucks all the art of programming out of it.

(I'm the in-house AI engineer at Braindump.)

Yeah, this is definitely something we're considering. The majority of us are programmers and have similar feelings about the joy of programming. The two things I'd say we've discovered along the way are that:

1. People who aren't programmers can build games with this, and that's worthwhile in itself (giving this to a non-programmer and watching them realise an idea they have is delightful!)

2. Working over concepts, not code, allows for much faster iteration and experimentation. I'm a fast programmer, but nothing compares to clicking somewhere, saying "do this", and being able to play around with it within a minute.

We're still navigating the boundary between traditional game making (including programming) and AI-infused game making; I hope we'll find a happy balance that keeps everyone empowered and happy :)

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#110

Post by kibbi »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #87
pjc50 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing. > I'll offer Flappy Bird as an example. Flappy Bird is a bizarre exception: it was a massive viral hit before it was voluntarily withdrawn by the developer feeling guilty over its success. It was then cloned a lot.

The reason why I mentioned Flappy Bird is that it originally wasn't a massive viral hit. It was on the app store for like a year with basically no-one playing it. And then it became a viral hit. So it's a good example of how a good game with no marketing doesn't get picked up (until it gets lucky and eventually does get picked up; you can imagine a timeline where that never happens).

I think that extreme outliers like Flappy Bird (which the developer developed over a couple of days and probably didn't expect any significant return) just muddle these discussions. They're irrelevant if you want to suss out what happens in the usual case.
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