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

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

#181

Post by SpecialistK »

fluoridation wrote: post #178
SpecialistK wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was a sarcastic example - in other words, all the data and metrics and trend-chasing in the world is not a replacement for human vision, creativity, and risk-taking.

Was Concord made the way it was because of data? I got the impression that the designers were chasing misguided trends with the art direction, and on top of that the game part was just mediocre.

I can't say for sure (never played it or followed it much, because it's not my type of game) but the impression I had is that it was a cookie-cutter attempt to be just another live service online shooter in the vein of Valorant, Overwatch, Apex Legends, etc etc. And people saw no need to play this new one when those games already exist.

Compare that to Helldivers 2 (online-only live service game, same platforms and publisher) which had a lot of personality (the heavy Starship Troopers movie vibe) and some unique gameplay elements like the strategems.

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

#182

Post by hackable_sand »

TechSquidTV wrote: post #10
deadbabe wrote: post #2

A developer who can build a game by hand in 24 hours could probably build and publish something very polished and professional on Steam within 3 days using LLMs, which leads to some kind of software Fermi paradox: where are all the games??

I've been "able" to make likely decent games for a number of years now. Code and 3D I could potentially have covered. That's no longer what scares me. Having a good and semi unique idea, is a rare. If I had a great game mechanic idea, the rest would be trivial. Say you do get a good game loop together that you feel will be successful. You will also now need to loop in art teams for artistic direction, music, characte…

I highly recommend making a game and then reviewing your comment.

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

#183

Post by eru »

zahlman wrote: post #64
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…

> 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?

> How is AI supposed to simulate a player, and why should it be able to determine what real people would find engaging?

Games have goals, and players are prone to 'optimising the fun out of games', by doing some save strategy over and over again to reach that goal, even if it's not fun. Think eg grinding in an RPG, instead of facing tough battles with strategy and wits and the risk of failure.

Even if AIs are terrible at determining what's engaging, you can probably at least use them to relatively quickly find ways that you accidentally opened that let players get in the way of their own fun.

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

#184

Post by spicyusername » 

    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.
Definitely still incredible by 2019 standards. Absolutely no doubt.

But by LLM standards, feeding it the entire working codebase of a simple, similar, game you wrote by hand as context is basically doing all the work yourself still.

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

#185

Post by eru »

greesil wrote: post #84
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.)

One can still write unit tests. I have been told from a couple different game devs that it's more because of release deadlines, and the cost of a bug is usually pretty small.

> and the cost of a bug is usually pretty small.

Like letting speed runners skip half your game. :)

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

#186

Post by hcnews »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #113
hcnews wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is not true at all. I have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game. While I know a lot of good practices about software develop…

> 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.

What is the contradiction? I am guessing it will take me a non-significant effort to learn game mechanics and code them etc.

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

#187

Post by hcnews »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #132
__loam wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you are a games developer and are overlooking the fact that people have to first learn the basic apis/models/etc. of graphical systems, engines, etc. before using them. Not sure how you are saying that it wouldn't take a few weeks to code even a simple production game like chess or more complicated but still simple Jump king etc.

Just think of the speciality in which you aren't an expert, javascript/storage/networking ...

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

#188

Post by sarchertech »

deadbabe wrote: post #170
sarchertech wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many big game jams have you won/placed very highly in though?

Game jams typically require games to adhere to a theme that is only known the day of, and the best entries will make a game specifically around that, not just adapt some pre-existing idea to it.

The themes are so open ended it’s very easy to adapt most game ideas. Games that win tend to be the most fun to play not necessarily the ones that fit the theme the best.

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

#189

Post by Mars008 »

sheepolog wrote: post #17
deadbabe wrote: post #2

A developer who can build a game by hand in 24 hours could probably build and publish something very polished and professional on Steam within 3 days using LLMs, which leads to some kind of software Fermi paradox: where are all the games??

As a Steam-based game developer, I am starting to use AI more and more in new projects for asset generation (images and text) as well as some help with code. Here are some of my ideas for why we haven't yet seen a huge increase in steam game releases due to AI: 1: Even with AI, it's a lot of work to make a full game. When most people think "I have a cool game idea", they're usually imagining something polished and no…

> 5: There is still considerable prejudice against using AI to make game assets. I think some people (myself included) are hesitant to release a game with lots of AI generated assets at the current moment, for fear of public backlash. Eventually that will calm down and it will become more socially acceptable to use AI to generate game assets.

This is mostly from artists themselves. Most people are ok with even fully generated content if it's fun and interesting. Anyway, solo developer cannot afford even single artist, musician, writer.

That's where LLM helps. I recently tried GPT5 for story telling. Gave it a single image (in a bar, women, man, and a gun) and asked for a short story. Then asked for the next part 6 times. Every time at the end for illustration. The result was consistent and readable. Images generated had even similar faces. Remember, that was a problem with earlier models. I'm sure this will be used fill Amazon's bookshelves.

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

#190

Post by marcus_holmes »

Vetch wrote: post #111
kaiokendev wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also still have the same amount of time you had 40 years ago. There are definitely more games available, and I would argue the proportion of high quality games has also increased massively, but since you're still limited by the number of games you can play in any given year, you'll never feel that increase.

Why would the proportion of high quality games increase? The number yes, but I expect not the proportion. Lowering the entry barrier means more people who have spent less time honing their skills can release something that's lacking in polish, narrative design, fun mechanics and balance. Among new entrants, they should number more than those already able to make a fun game. Not a value judgement, just an observation.…

We had shovelware games 25+ years ago (and probably 40 years ago, though I suspect the lack of microcomputers limited that). There were bargain-bin selections (literally bins full of CDs) that cost a few bucks and were utterly shite. I suspect the target audience was tech-unaware relatives who would be "little Johnny likes video games, I'll get him one of these...". Most of them were bad takes on popular games of the time.

Unity + Steam just makes this process a bit easier and more streamlined. I think the new thing is that as well as the dickwads who are trying to rip people off, there are well-intentioned newbie or indie developers releasing their unpolished attempts. These folks couldn't publish their work in the old days, because making CDs costs money, while now they can.

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