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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

#151

Post by famouswaffles »

sarchertech wrote: post #124
famouswaffles wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 explosi…

There must be a huge push end of year. >How many games do you imagine can be released per day even with the help of current Sota LLMs ? Given the number of people who want to make games—if code is the bottleneck, and LLMs can really make you hugely more productive, I’d expect to see an actual explosion. My experience is that neither of those assumptions are true though.

>Given the number of people who want to make games—if code is the bottleneck

Game development is not a zero sum game. There can be multiple bottlenecks or difficult hurdles.

>and LLMs can really make you hugely more productive, I’d expect to see an actual explosion.

Well growth was double the previous year. Maybe you might not call that an explosion, it's still a very noticeable uptick.

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

#152

Post by peterashford »

snovv_crash wrote: post #147
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.)

I've heard the same excuses from ML engineers before introducing tests there, embedded engineers, robotics engineers, systems engineers, everyone has a reason. The real reason? It's because writing tests is a different skill and they don't actually know how to do it.

Oh that's crap. I've been a software engineer for over 30 years. I love tests - I preach testing at my current place of work. I've also worked in games for about a decade. Testing in games is... not useless, but very much less useful than it is in general software engineering.

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

#153

Post by peterashford »

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.

Yeah I tried to get a spritesheet generated. Absolute rubbish.

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

#154

Post by quantumHazer »

This comments shows that most of the users in this thread have not done game development.

We are judging the usefulness of a LLM in a project that is really over represented in training data (a bunch of Intro to Programming courses requires a project like this, and in southern Europe countries we have a lot of similar games like the one in the blog)

In the first year of college I reimplemented Moon Patrol in Python, I had no previous experience basically and it tooks me two/three months of work coding 3 days per week mostly.

Coding a card game is easier than that. LLMs are useful for certain things but this is not a good way to benchmark their usefulness in any type of game development coding.

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

#155

Post by Keyframe »

rsanek wrote: post #139
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

yeah, I'm aware of firefox issues. In next iteration with WebGL it's gone though. So, so far a note that it works best in Chrome/ium.

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

#156

Post by platevoltage »

Halian wrote: post #80

AI slop must be abolished.

Given that the slop factories are being propped up by governments around the world, and and pretty much the reason why the stock market is inflated to the point that it is right now, probably won't happen.

We as a species are going to have to collectively decide it's not acceptable.

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

#157

Post by reactordev »

uncircle wrote: post #134
reactordev wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

10 lines of that are comments, 4 of which are flags that aren’t required, nor is the 2 lines of white space and log lines.

The guy goes through all this trouble with Golang, WASM, tinygo, just to field goal it on the 3 yard line.

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

#158

Post by somat »

AlienRobot wrote: post #70
zahlman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? How is AI supposed to simulate a player, and why should it be able to determine what real people would find engaging?

Game developers will try anything before they actually write automated tests for their games.

As a counter example I found this video essay about fixing a factorio bug fascinating. My main takeaway, I need better introspection hooks. I am not really programmer and I never really thought automated testing of user interactive parts was possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmliviVGX8Q (kovarex - Factorio lets fix video #1)

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

#159

Post by 3036e4 »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #23
schaefer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But image generation and cloning a visual artist’s style is one of AI’s apparent strengths. So it’s interesting to think about what the gaps are between fulfilling a single prompt and completing a project.

AI generated assets look like dogshit

Incidentally so do many cheap games.

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

#160

Post by skocznymroczny »

AlienRobot wrote: post #70
zahlman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? How is AI supposed to simulate a player, and why should it be able to determine what real people would find engaging?

Game developers will try anything before they actually write automated tests for their games.

League of Legends does a lot of automated testing for their gameplay logic https://technology.riotgames.com/news/automated-testing-leag...
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