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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

#111

Post by Vetch »

kaiokendev wrote: post #101
milesvp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why would the proportion of high quality games increase? The number yes, but I expect not the proportion. Lowering the entry barrier means more people who have spent less time honing their skills can release something that's lacking in polish, narrative design, fun mechanics and balance. Among new entrants, they should number more than those already able to make a fun game. Not a value judgement, just an observation.

Think of the negative reputation the Unity engine gained among gamers, even though a lot of excellent games and even performant games (DSP) have been made with it.

More competitors does also raise the bar required for novelty, so it is possible that standards are also rising in parallel.

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

#112

Post by famouswaffles »

sarchertech wrote: post #105
famouswaffles wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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

No we're not. Use Wayback machine or whatever and this year is 1k+ ahead at the same date.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240822090931/https://steamdb.i...

>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.

How many games do you imagine can be released per day even with the help of current Sota LLMs ? Nevermind the fact that you have to pay $100 to distribute your game on Steam. You're not making a game you'd pay $100 to distribute in 3 days, LLM help or not.

But fair, exploded is probably overstating it.

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

#113

Post by whoknowsidont »

hcnews wrote: post #106
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 develop…

> have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game.

You're contradicting yourself. I promise it wouldn't take you months, unless you're just a really bad developer.

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

#114

Post by __loam »

zerr wrote: post #36
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…

My litmus test for generative AI: generate a complete spritesheet for a 2D pixel art action game, e.g. only for the battle tank or main hero movements. No success so far.

Unless you're using a model that was built for pixel art, you will never get a usable piece of pixel art out of a model using a diffusion based image generator because it does not understand what a pixel is. You'll always get pixels bleeding into the others, shitty outlines, and nonsensical AA. They simply do not understand the medium.

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

#115

Post by pton_xd »

greesil wrote: post #84
nine_k wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you tweak game mechanics several times every day, keeping the tests useful is a large task. Basics can be tested. Map integrity can be tested. Most "normal UX" is hard to test, and even main functional tests tend to drift. (Source: a short involvement in actual gamedev recently.)

One can still write unit tests. I have been told from a couple different game devs that it's more because of release deadlines, and the cost of a bug is usually pretty small.

There are some game systems that lend themselves to unit testing, like say map generation to ensure that the expected landmarks are placed reasonably, or rooms are connected, or whatever. But most game interactions are just not easily "unit testable" since they happen across frames (eg over time). How would you unit test an enemy that spawns, moves towards the player, and attacks?

I'm sure you could conjure up any number of ways to do that, but they won't be trivial, and maintaining those tests while you iterate will only slow you down. And what's the point? Even if the unit-move-and-attack test passes, it's not going to tell you if it looks good, or if it's fun.

Ultimately you just have to play the game, constantly, to make sure the interactions are fun and working as you expect.

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

#116

Post by chaps »

pton_xd wrote: post #115
greesil wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can still write unit tests. I have been told from a couple different game devs that it's more because of release deadlines, and the cost of a bug is usually pretty small.

There are some game systems that lend themselves to unit testing, like say map generation to ensure that the expected landmarks are placed reasonably, or rooms are connected, or whatever. But most game interactions are just not easily "unit testable" since they happen across frames (eg over time). How would you unit test an enemy that spawns, moves towards the player, and attacks? I'm sure you could conjure up any nu…

> How would you unit test an enemy that spawns, moves towards the player, and attacks?

You use a second enemy that spawns, moves towards the "enemy", and attacks.

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

#117

Post by potatoman22 »

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…

AI doing playtests is an idea I've been thinking about too. The question I can't quite answer is: how do you know the AI play-tester can predict what users find fun? How well does it represent the different kinds of users?

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

#118

Post by cherryteastain »

pton_xd wrote: post #115
greesil wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can still write unit tests. I have been told from a couple different game devs that it's more because of release deadlines, and the cost of a bug is usually pretty small.

There are some game systems that lend themselves to unit testing, like say map generation to ensure that the expected landmarks are placed reasonably, or rooms are connected, or whatever. But most game interactions are just not easily "unit testable" since they happen across frames (eg over time). How would you unit test an enemy that spawns, moves towards the player, and attacks? I'm sure you could conjure up any nu…

> How would you unit test an enemy that spawns, moves towards the player, and attacks?

You can easily write a 'simulation' version of your event loop and dependency inject that. Once time can be simulated, any deterministic interaction can be unit tested.

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

#119

Post by __loam »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #113
hcnews wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 develop…

> have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game. You're contradicting yourself. I promise it wouldn't take you months, unless you're just a really bad developer.

Don't be a prick in public man, it looks bad

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

#120

Post by typpilol »

davepeck wrote: post #99
zerr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My litmus test for generative AI: generate a complete spritesheet for a 2D pixel art action game, e.g. only for the battle tank or main hero movements. No success so far.

Ive never once successfully gotten a usable sprite sheet out of ChatGPT. The concept seems foreign to it and no matter how hard I try to steer it it’ll find a way to do something hopeless (inconsistent frame sizes; incoherent animations; no sense of consistent pixel sizes or what distinguishes (say) 8-bit from 16-bit era sprites; it’ll draw graph paper in the background for some reason; etc etc.). If anyone has a set…

According to all the lazy articles I've read here lately you just need to threaten to beat it up lmao...
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