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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

#151

Post by Capricorn2481 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #115
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For AAA, it's having budgets to make games on a bigger scale than everyone else Does this matter? There are lots of big budget games that don't feel big budget.

Part of the scale is that unlike an indy game, whatever junk EA puts out will end up on every platform and in physical and virtual game stores around the world. Every year when they rerelease the same game.

I don't know what you mean by this. It sounded like OP was talking about scale of content. But it does not take a triple-A budget to be on multiple platforms on physical disk. It takes a relationship with a distributor (through your publisher).

I would even go as far as to say it's easier to distribute indie games to different platforms, for a lot of reasons. Mainly that you have a lot less people to pay and you're likely using an engine that can do a lot of that technical work for you instead of an in house engine.

Source: I worked in game distribution.

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

#152

Post by Philpax »

sdwr wrote: post #138
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.

(I'm the in-house AI engineer at Braindump, but I come from a gamedev background.)

Yes, we agree that doesn't scale. Braindump's designed to let you change those assumptions at any time; the AI works over the state of the entire game (for the most part), so it can change past assumptions to better meet the user's current requirements.

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

#153

Post by somenameforme »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #147
kibbi wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"?

Steam reviews are a great way. Lots of folks, including myself, try or tried to seek out these hidden gems on Steam. And Steam provides some great tools to try to find them. [1] It just turns out that there simply aren't many games at all with genuinely high reviews, but very low player numbers.

There's a whole bunch of great games in the ~200 reviews category with high reviews, but I'd generally consider that successful. The average game gets something like 60:1 sales:reviews, so 200 reviews is around 12,000 copies sold. You're not going to be getting rich off those numbers, but that's more than enough to live an extremely comfortable life in the overwhelming majority of the world.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/0

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

#154

Post by Philpax »

nameless912 wrote: post #145
sdwr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fee…

I promise that we've made games of our own in the past and that we're not coming at this completely unaware :-)

Our thinking is that you can lay a base quickly, and then iterate on that to work on the details of your game. We want to avoid the analysis paralysis that comes from having to make all of the decisions upfront; you can instead rely on the AI's "common sense understanding" of the world [0] to get started, and then refine it to your desired vision.

Our initial "engine" is highly-constrained with a specific ontology and predefined behaviours. That will strongly restrict what can be built with it. That's what makes it tractable to use with today's AI; as we develop better techniques and the backing models get better, we hope to cover more and more of the game design space.

[0]: Yes, this is a contentious concept, but in practice it has a pretty good idea of what an orc is :-)

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

#155

Post by itishappy »

stale2002 wrote: post #128
jsheard wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting people upset is one thing, getting Disney upset is another. They don't mess around with people appropriating their IP.

> getting Disney upset is another. They don't mess around with people appropriating their IP. I am not sure why everyone repeats this line so confidently when it is so clearly wrong. Have you been on the internet? Do you understand how common copyright infringement is? Especially related to Star Wars? Its ubiquitous. Its everywhere. People make fan art of star wars. They write stories. They make fan games. They make…

> They make fan games.

This is the subject at hand. Got any examples?

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

#156

Post by Bjorkbat »

I think a part of the reason why I'm kind of dismissive of AI when it comes to creative endeavors is that I haven't seen it do something that isn't already possible using a "not-intelligent" solution.

For example, AI website builders. It's impressive as a tech demo that you can prompt an AI to make a website for you, but otherwise I don't think this is going to be disruptive to the web design industry since it's already pretty easy to make a website using a drag-and-drop builder like Squarespace or Webflow. Granted, it can get complex when you add certain special features on these platforms, but same goes for an AI-generated website. AI doesn't eliminate the complexity, it just hides it. At best it'll get you maybe 80% of where you want to go and you can get to the remaining 20% by hand. At worst, the complexity is so thoroughly hidden that addressing it isn't an option. It simply does not allow you to manually edit the outputs, or makes it unreasonably difficult to do so.

In that same vein, an AI game maker is pretty impressive as a tech demo, but I feel like it isn't a huge improvement over a code-light game maker. You're not eliminating the complexity of making a game, just hiding it.

Nonetheless, it's a pretty interesting tech demo.

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

#157

Post by somenameforme »

bnralt wrote: post #45
hwbunny wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95 % of games are boring, and unoriginal. Why? Because most of these people, who create these games are entrepreneurs. They only see the possible money from these. These games have no heart whatsoever, why? Because good games need passionate people, not blue collar suits. There are 1 million subscribers at the gamedev reddit. It's ridiculous, and when people ask something, they get total balooney, ridiculous botlike…

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…

That price point is one of the most ridiculous I've seen, and is just lighting money on fire! The game looks great (erm.. so to speak) - clearly extremely heavily influenced by the Gold Box games, but I have no clue at all what the dev was thinking with that price. I am his demographic, and I'm not even considering the game at that price.

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

#158

Post by itishappy »

aredox wrote: post #3

What a neat idea! Next: a strategy game where you give orders in plain text, instead of hundreds of clicks per minutes

Sounds like the premise of Tom Clancy's EndWar from 2008. It was supposed to be an entirely controllable via voice commands. No clue how well that worked out in practice.

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

#159

Post by fzeroracer »

password54321 wrote: post #44
kibwen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is subject to survivorship bias. Balatro is a great game that deserves its success. But it's easy to imagine a universe where it simply never got any traction, anywhere, and died in obscurity. Conversely, this suggests that in our current universe, many games just as great as Balatro have quietly passed without ever getting their 15 minutes of fame. At the end of the day, much of success just hinges on luck. The…

I immediately knew someone would claim "survivorship bias" but at the same I knew that they would fail to come up with a single counterexample.

The Void Rains Upon Her Heart [1], Fear and Hunger [2] are two examples. You'll look at both of these games and think 'wait, they're actually successful, what's the deal?' and not see the whole story, which is why I linked the charts. Both of these games launched to little to no success, with few (highly positive) reviews. What changed is that deep into their lifespan (~3-4 years after release), a popular youtuber did a video on the game, and as a result it suddenly blew up in popularity and carried that momentum forward. You can in fact see the exact point on the charts where that occurred.

There are a lot of games exactly like that, but haven't had the person with the viewerbase to boost them up. Nor will they ever.

[1] https://steamdb.info/app/790060/charts/

[2] https://steamdb.info/app/1002300/charts/

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