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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

#131

Post by anotheryou »

Philpax wrote: post #106
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!

looking forward to everything either way :)!

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

#132

Post by rco8786 »

EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

> Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

The sentiment here is true of all software and always has been. However, it does not mean that making a game/software isn't hard, it means that marketing it and selling it is a different problem space that people underestimate.

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

#133

Post by fwip »

sandworm101 wrote: post #101
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…

>> 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 th…

This thread is rooted in a comment saying that the median revenue for a game on Steam is $800.

There's a large, large gulf between "the biggest and most profitable game" and "I spent months of my life working on this, and made less than a month of rent."

The puzzle box game may be awesome and well-worth your $20. The developer still might rightly have concluded that "damn, this was a huge waste of time. Gotta go back to my Wal-mart job."

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

#136

Post by ugh123 »

viccis wrote: post #134

Wonder how well this will do given that, going by reactions to even fairly anodyne AI usage in games, gamers really really loathe gen AI used to make games and game assets.

I feel like that loathness is largely coming from the game design community, particularly asset and environment artists.

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

#137

Post by user432678 »

ElFitz wrote: post #90
pjc50 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Itch.io claim to host over 200k free games. AI makes standing out harder; we're not ready for the sludge era of having seven billion people and ten billion games.

Except that’ll just be a fluke. The next thing isn’t a never-ending list of AI generated games stored somewhere that we’ll have to sift through somehow. The next big thing will be ephemeral games, created on the fly based on the context and the preferences expressed, both explicitly and implicitly, by the player’s (or players’) past behaviour (and, for multiplayer games, that of their social graph). That and perhaps,…

I wouldn’t be overly optimistic on what an average player can express as a preference. Besides, as a gamer I want to be surprised and entertained, I don’t want to design rules and game mechanics, iterate over balancing the game and finding consistent art style. Unless you meant like really distant future.

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

#138

Post by sdwr »

jarjoura wrote: post #105

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 i…

> If I type “Create an Orc,” then I don’t want to be asked 20 follow-up questions to exactly specify the nature of the Orc; I just want it to take a guess.

This is the exact point where everything falls apart. Good games have simple rules that combine in robust ways to allow for varied expression.

Each roll of the dice here is baking in assumptions that will not play nice with the last unit, or the next one.

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

#139

Post by bloopernova »

Tade0 wrote: post #43
bloopernova wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried to create an LLM based crew on the bridge of a ship or spaceship? Being able to delegate tasks to competent subordinates would be very helpful.

Even a failed attempt at this would be great - imagine your crew frequently misunderstanding your orders and the ensuing chaos.

"Incompetent Bridge Crew" is a game that I'd enjoy playing, that's a great idea!

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

#140

Post by datameta »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #129
Philpax wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the in-house AI engineer at Braindump.) We experimented with a few different form factors, including integrating into existing game engines, before taking this path. Our rationale was that we wanted to go beyond the existing engine integrations (i.e. Unity already has an AI assistant) and reimagine the entire game creation experience with AI and multiplayer in mind. Our platform's entirely on the web, so you can…

> Our rationale was that we wanted to go beyond the existing engine integrations (i.e. Unity already has an AI assistant) and reimagine the entire game creation experience with AI and multiplayer in mind. How does that pan out? There's hundreds of millions of dollars of product development in Unity and Unreal specifically for game design. How will you ever catch up? Godot got $8m, for the people who authored it, what…

Going beyond could mean one of several things, only one of which is playing catch-up with a decade-plus game engine.
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