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Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

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Re: Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

#101

Post by kaiokendev »

milesvp wrote: post #95
kaiokendev wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. But we did? We've come a long way from the limited XBLA catalog. It didn't happen overnight, but doubtless we wouldn't have the volume of games we have today without Unity, Godot, Gamemaker, Renpy, RPG Maker...

> we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. I'm not sure the 2 of you are disagreeing. We definitely saw an explosion of indie games. In 2010, there were less than 10 indie games released on steam per month. By 2022, there were ~500/mo, and today there's ~750/mo (I expect that the 250/mo jump around 2022 can likely be attributed to LLMs). What's hard to say is if this increase significa…

You also still have the same amount of time you had 40 years ago. There are definitely more games available, and I would argue the proportion of high quality games has also increased massively, but since you're still limited by the number of games you can play in any given year, you'll never feel that increase.

Re: Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

#102

Post by mattbuilds »

rustystump wrote: post #92
mattbuilds wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry but the difficult part of making games isn’t the coding, it is making something that is appealing and enjoyable to play. An LLM isn’t going to help with that at all. How is it going to know if something is fun? That’s the real work. Also the idea that a dev who could making a game in 24 hour would create something professional and polished in 3 days is a joke. The answer to “where are all the games” is simp…

This is almost on the money. Making something fun often requires coding, art, sound etc to bring the fun out. So in fact coding is the difficult part, along with all the other stuff needed for something to be fun. Imo tooling like ue blueprints and visual scripting is in the coding bucket.

I’m not saying coding is easy, but when it comes to games it is the easy part. Lots of people can code, very few can make something actually fun. Knowing how to code (or how to use an engine/blueprints/visual scripting) is just the start. It’s like making films. Everyone can record some videos on their phone, but it takes much more than that to make something people want to watch.

Re: Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

#103

Post by jama211 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #76

I like LLMs because it helps abstract code in a way that's more directly compatible with how I think about programs. When I read code, it gets turned into something akin to an AST, where functions and calls are more of an abstract notion of input and result. The LLM vastly simplifies the inverse process. Instead of having to go and find the way to represent an idea in code, or digging through my memory and code archi…

Well said. And I’m sure there were people back in the day that said anyone coding in c instead of assembly didn’t truely understand the machine code and this could one day bite them in the ass.

AI is a tool and it’s clearer than ever to me now that the tool’s best job is abstracting tedious implementation details away from the developer, in much the same way that I never have to bother with manual memory management in my programs written in modern languages the way I once used to with c. We no longer need to deal with segfaults, so why not also no longer having to deal with tracking down documentation or examples to implement simple blocks of code.

Re: Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

#104

Post by jama211 »

deadbabe wrote: post #2

A developer who can build a game by hand in 24 hours could probably build and publish something very polished and professional on Steam within 3 days using LLMs, which leads to some kind of software Fermi paradox: where are all the games??

Creativity is the hard bit yo

Re: Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

#105

Post by sarchertech »

famouswaffles wrote: post #42
mattmanser wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still seems to be roughly following the pre-AI trajectory though. Which is really easy to argue it's more down to Unity + successors making game dev accessible as it starts in 2015. No huge spike since Claude code got released or anything like that.

>Still seems to be roughly following the pre-AI trajectory though. Not really. The jump from 2023 to 2024 is bigger than the jump from 2019-2022 in raw numbers and 2020-2022 in %. So the jump of 3 to 4 years happened in a single year.

But as of August 2025, we are on pace to see fewer games in 2025 than in 2024.

Also the jump in 2024 is only around 10-15% more games than we would have expected from the previous trend. Assuming all of that is directly down to AI, I wouldn’t call that an explosion.

From what I’ve seen, most of the growth was in NSFW shovelware and was just people noticing a business opportunity. This also explains why the number it takes in 2025 isn’t showing similar growth.

Re: Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

#106

Post by hcnews »

starchild3001 wrote: post #30

What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI. The real grind is in all the invisible layers on top; balancing the loop, tuning difficulty, creating assets that don’t look uncanny, and building enough polish to hold someone’s attention…

> What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI.

This is not true at all. I have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game. While I know a lot of good practices about software development and decade+ of FAANG experience, I don't know the intricacies or even the basics of game development.

I recently experienced this for a different usecase. As an experienced backend developer, I wanted to automate some javascript/browser stuff. I tried on my own for 2-3 days and had couple of prototypes but nothing actually worked. I spent 2 hours with an AI and I had a working solution. We even iterated together quickly and solved some runtime issues and the solution is working for me seamlessly now.

So, I definitely see value of AI even for coding for experienced developers like myself.

Re: Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

#108

Post by sarchertech »

MarceColl wrote: post #98
sarchertech wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are all usually quite polished given the timespan The open secret is that they might not start coding or building assets until the start time, but they have spent a lot of time thinking about the ideas before then (even when the "theme" isn't known before hand people tend to make ideas fit theme with tweaks), which just speaks to the "code is not the bottleneck" thesis.

For one datapoint, I've participated in many gamejams and I've never ever spent any time beforehand thinking about ideas.

How many big game jams have you won/placed very highly in though?

Re: Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

#109

Post by ants_everywhere »

starchild3001 wrote: post #30

What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI. The real grind is in all the invisible layers on top; balancing the loop, tuning difficulty, creating assets that don’t look uncanny, and building enough polish to hold someone’s attention…

> what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop

It can do this. From Atari games to StarCraft this has been a thing since before LLMs.

> surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged

This it's unclear how to operationalize. Among other things, not all games appeal to all people.

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