The models look awful. If only there was a place where you could go to download human-created 3d models, either for free or a nominal fee. /s
Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
141–150 of 312 posts
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#142Earlier 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.
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Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#143Earlier 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…
An excellent game is, practically by definition, a game that people would recommend. And the Steam algorithm does a pretty good job of snowballing success. My favorite example here is Kenshi. [1] It started with modest interest and within a few months it was down to literally tens of players. This is normally where somebody driven by profit would just shrug, complain, and go try something new. But they guy clearly believed in his game, kept going, and now a decade later it's an extremely popular game that still has thousands of regular players - verging on overcoming Hogwart's Legacy.
I think a lot of smaller developers are misled by things like game jams. Get a highly enthusiastic group of people in a room and the games they're going to respond well to, and the feedback they're going to give is going to be utterly worthless. What's fun to play in a highly social setting with lots of other hyper enthusiastic people, for 5 minutes at a time, does not translate at all to what people are interested in buying and playing at home.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#144Earlier 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
"Just get some popular streamers/channels to do a review/let's play"
Just is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#145I 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.
> I don't want to be asked 20 follow up questions to exactly specify the nature of the Orc
This is the tell that these folks don't know enough about game design to be opining so strongly on "the future of AI driven game development". Game development is almost exclusively about the 20 follow up questions. Any moron can say "I want minecraft but in space with guns", but making that and, more importantly, making it feel good, are where all the juice lies in games. The details are the most important part, which is why I think all these attempts to put AI into the game development flow are ill advised at best. Copilot is okay at helping out with game code, but less so than for normal e.g. REST API or UI code, because game code tends to follow rules that don't exist anywhere else and every game is architected completely differently. Games are just...different.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#146I 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…
Unless your needs are extremely specific and necessitate replacing most of the engine, Unity is probably not limiting your capabilities. The default packages are extensive and allow for basic game-making without writing that much actual code, but large developers will almost certainly swap default Unity components for their own for parts that need them, while the engine manages other parts like sound and input handli…
I would bet that more than 0% of that perception, at least from developers, comes from how _fucking awful_ the Unity editor is. It's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. The games you can make with Unity are absolutely very impressive, but the tools Unity provides are just awful, and give a lot of newbie developers the perception that Unity is a hacked together pile of garbage (which...it is, but so are all game engines). Godot, Unreal, and GameMaker are, I would say, the main competitors to Unity in the Indie space, and all three of them have much higher quality editors than Unity's.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The usual case of good games which fail commercially because of bad marketing? How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"? The reason I talked about Flappy Bird is that the game's late success proves that its early failure was due to bad marketing. If you only want to talk about games which never succeeded commercially, then I have no way of proving to you that any of those were "good" games.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not just about marketing though. There is this belief, especially among fledgling indies that if they make a game that they think is good, and if they are able to market it well, it will be a success, even a hit. A hit in gamedev is not easier than creating a hit in the music industry really. Even the veteran composers are not able to replicate (or even achieve) creating a hit. Possibility of success depends on…
Hate to break it to you, but the pop star success formula is actually meticulously detailed and very repeatable. The producers and song writers know exactly how to do it. It’s not about challenges in finding success, so much as, at least in music, artists don’t want to follow a formula. They want to create songs and melodies that are personal and meaningful to them and their fans.
There are more people that want to make hit songs than there are hit songs. As long as that's true, it will not be easy.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being passionate doesn’t guarantee a game being a success, though. Look at a game like Knights of the Chalice 2. It's definitely a labor of love, and many people who play it think it has the best DnD combat of any game out there, and maybe some of the best turn-based combat as well. It has mediocre graphics, though, and a high price point, so it’s had extremely slow discoverability. It also has a somewhat niche audie…
People are in their own bubble and believe everything that people say to them on the internet. People lie all the time, plus they don't want to create friction by saying that a specific game is, well, shit. That game is built on already outdated foundations. You need to give something to users that will stimulate them.
> People lie all the time, plus they don't want to create friction by saying that a specific game is, well, shit
The places I frequent say that about games all the time. For instance, though the game I mentioned gets highly praised there, almost everyone trashed the author’s previous RTS game. Some places might give every game universal acclaim, but plenty of places have people who will openly call a game garbage.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#150Hard 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.
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…
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