No one can afford to make Myst games anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#151

Post by threatofrain » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 8:46 PM UTC

tyromaniac wrote: post #106

threatofrain wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degree to which you can discern is the degree to which you can meaningfully ask for human vs AI.

Art consists of decisions made by the artist that are interpretable by the audience. Automatically generated imagery lacks this, but still presents a fascimille of it. The intention and thoughtfulness of the artist is encoded within their creation, and when there is no artist this is lost.

And the degree which this is discerned... sometimes wins art contests. Let the people speak, and if they should want the soul inside one work over another, let it be so.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#152

Post by uxhacker » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #98

uxhacker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team. What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

Myst is a fun game, but the game play is little more than the original Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT). Instead of typing in commands, you clicked on things on the screen. I.e. the game play code was pretty simple.

I think out of the original team there where only 1 and half developers.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#153

Post by uxhacker » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #83

uxhacker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team. What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

For the most part, those teams are art teams. At my last studio, we had more artists than programmers, designers and producers combined. Games are still being made by small teams and succeeding - “sir we have an orc problem” was a 4 month project with a 2 person studio that sold a million copies. The problem is once you push into the slightly higher tier of games, the 1-15M budget, the expectations of everyone (playe…

But the original game was very playable and fun. There are plenty of modern games that only have a tiny bit more game play.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#154

Post by 3eb7988a1663 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

mh- wrote: post #149

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only think of bemused as "confused". Maybe incredulous at a stretch?

I was iffy on it as well, so looked it up before suggesting it. M-W has it as the 3rd definition, for example. It's hit or miss whether that usage is in a given dictionary, it seems. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bemused

Sure enough. Oxford only gives a bewildered definition. Although, their ambiguous examples could fit an amused/confused definition.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#155

Post by drdaeman » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #127

drdaeman wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on the substance, but hate the way things ended up colloquially called. AI art is human art. It is based on human intent and choices (and in non-trivial cases it’s a lot of effort to get the machine to produce something that resembles a artist’s mental image), and the rest is mathematically sourced from human art. I strongly suspect the only difference is in level of decision making, where details that aren’t e…

Humans detect mode collapse. If there was one artist making art in the style of AI (by hand), he'd be no more annoying than say Reg Mombassa, Guy Delisle or Tony DiTerlizzi or anyone else drawing in an idiosyncratic, easy to recognize way.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I think this would be true if "AI" art would have a limited set of distinct styles - and it surely does not. I agree - there are a few distinct neuroslop styles from major models, and those trigger aversion. But that's not the full picture.

There's an insane amount of fine-tunes out there (be it base models or LoRAs), that drastically vary in styles they produce. "AI" art can look very different, and I still think the only common property to it is sloppiness, lack of intentional attention to the fine details.