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

marianogappa.github.io

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

#131

Post by mac-mc »

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…

Like a full sprite sheet, one sprite at a time or a sprite animation loop?

Each one would require a different kind of model and model technique to make, so I wouldn't be surprised that ChatGPT has issues with it. A sprite animation loop would be better done by a potentially specialized video-oriented model, for example, and the current image and video models are barely trained on that kind of video data.

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

#132

Post by whoknowsidont »

__loam wrote: post #119
whoknowsidont wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I mean it's a simple fact that the baseline for creating a game, roughly using the average developer experience/capability, is not months. Making a _good_ game might take months, it often takes years.

And that's the part AI is not going to be able to help you with.

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

#133

Post by mac-mc »

nahnahno wrote: post #54
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…

This is not true in my experience. Cranking out code is obviously the bottleneck, unless you have the luxury of working on a very narrow problem. The author describes a multi-modal project that does not afford this luxury.

IMO, looking at most budget spend, it's the art & content that is the bottleneck.

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

#134

Post by uncircle »

reactordev wrote: post #127
reactordev wrote: post #96

I was happily reading along loving all the go until the last part. npx http-server No. Just use go. Other than that. Loved the article and I love making games (haven’t shipped one in a while, I should)

https://gist.github.com/paulmach/7271283 It’s literally a one-liner of go to create an http server, http.FileServer that points to a directory. go run http.go You shouldn’t have to use npx when the tool at hand is perfectly capable.

Why write 27 lines of Go (not one line) when you can do

  python -m http.server
And still it is a silly argument because using npx is still less effort than having to write those 27 lines when zero will do. Sure, you dislike Javascript, do whatever you want. No need for pointless pedantry.

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by Vetch »

nahnahno wrote: post #54
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…

This is not true in my experience. Cranking out code is obviously the bottleneck, unless you have the luxury of working on a very narrow problem. The author describes a multi-modal project that does not afford this luxury.

Unless you're also writing your own graphics and game engine from scratch, if you're making a truly novel and balanced game, then it should not be possible to crank out code with AI. When working in engines, the bulk of the work is usually in gameplay programming so the fact that its code is so predictable should be concerning (unless the programming is effectively in natural language). Not spending most of your time testing introduced mechanics, re-balancing and iterating should be triggering alarm bells. If you're working on an RPG, narrative design, reactivity and writing will eat up most of your time.

In the case you're working as part of team large enough to have dedicated programmers, the majority of the roles will usually be in content creation, design and QA.

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

#137

Post by jonny_eh »

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…

Since it led to more games, it led to more bad AND good games.

I don’t think we would’ve seen a Hollow Knight without Unity, built by a team of 2-3 devs.

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

#138

Post by nine_k »

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…

> coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck

Doesn't look exactly that to me. The author built a server, studied React, built a frontend, made the card game work.

Then, with most bits needed for a card game already in place, he asked Claude to alter the existing code to implement a different card game. Understandably, it took much shorter. But it would also take much shorter if a human engineer did the same.

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

#139

Post by rsanek »

Keyframe wrote: post #77

It took me few days on and off to do this with llm: https://www.susmel.com/stacky/ overall I'd say around two working days. I used it as a test ground first for greenfield and then Brownfield development, so nothing serious, but I found myself in a loop of ever growing details I wanted tuned, more and more features (super rotations system, das, this and that).. I'd say it's maybe 10-20% of where I'd take it as a full…

nice tetris reimplementaion! jfyi on firefox + m4 max MBP, this pegs a core at 100% utilization and really spins up the fans

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

#140

Post by moron4hire »

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…

Is that the takeaway? When they say, "I cloned the backend for Truco and gave Claude a long prompt explaining the rules of Escoba and asking it to refactor the code to implement it", that doesn't really make it sound like a good heads-up comparison from which we could then say, "the coding part was not the most significant part of the problem".

I mean, the entire article is problematic as proof of anything. For starters, they didn't go through a design process for a game at all, they copied existing games. Then there are all these weird technical rabbit holes they went down that really weren't anywhere near "simplest path to MVP".

I just don't think there is anything to glean from this article. Like most posts about individual experiences with AI, it's functionally equivalent to, "I had a weird dream last night".

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