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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

#201

Post by nikolayasdf123 »

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…

> hold someone’s attention for more than 5 minutes.

more like, more than 5 seconds.

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

#202

Post by pjmlp »

kaiokendev wrote: post #67
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…

> It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. But we did? We've come a long way from the limited XBLA catalog. It didn't happen overnight, but doubtless we wouldn't have the volume of games we have today without Unity, Godot, Gamemaker, Renpy, RPG Maker...

As someone reaching 50 years old, we always had such indies, we used to call them bedroom coders, and distributions came in tapes, floppies in magazine covers, shareware CD-ROM and DVD-ROMs.

Maybe it only got visible to the consoles generation around the time of XBLA arcade, and even that was already predated by PS Yaroze and PS2Linux efforts.

Before Unity, we had SDL, Ogre3D, SFML,... but naturally all of those require more coding skills than engines designed with UI workflows in mind.

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

#203

Post by mzl »

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?

I've heard several talks about how some companies make AI systems that are designed to play as similar to human players as possible. This has been crucial for them in order to play-test levels in order to balance the game.

And note, this is not AI as in asking an LLM what to do, this is more classical machine learning and deep learning.

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

#204

Post by miki123211 »

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…

This makes me feel like games will be the last bastion to fully fall to AI.

In traditional business apps, your goal is to make your app work and look intuitive enough for a human to use. When developing a game, you have a few extra goals, it also has to be fun, rewarding and different enough from other games that came before. It feels like the former group will be much easier to judge by non-humans than the latter.

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

#205

Post by p0w3n3d »

To me the most complicated thing in every project is the business knowledge. It's the tribal knowledge like "do not send null in this endpoint" or what happens when a request A will be send after B was sent to C and the mercury was in conjunction with venus on an odd day of march (answer: everything would explode). And LLM are solving 20% of my work, while the other things are talking to people, inventing new tests etc. I wonder btw. why the LLM bubble created problems on developers' hiring market. Were those companies thinking that LLM will write the code on its own?

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

#207

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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?

Much the same as we do today in games and film both, something saccharine and mediocre built to appeal to a wide majority. Worse, if this process becomes streamlined and widely accessible, you're competing with a hundred other saccharine and mediocre built to a wide majority games. AI generated shovelware, it's like the shovelware of today where anything remotely popular generates dozens of cheap clones, but with AI.

The best games take risks and aren't min/maxed.

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

#208

Post by Cthulhu_ »

SpecialistK wrote: post #181
fluoridation wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

To add, Concord had been in development for eight years at that point, had multiple leadership and direction changes, and then the studio was aquired by Sony because they wanted more big live service games and this game ticked all the boxes and was nearly done. So more money was pumped into it.

And sometimes it works; Apex Legends came out of nowhere and became one of the big live service titles. Fortnite did a battle royale mode out of nowhere and became huge.

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

#209

Post by jamilton »

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.

I've seen people make finetunes for character turnarounds, there's probably one for 2D pixel art in particular, or perhaps combining such a finetune with a pixel art finetune would work.

It looks like retrodiffusion.ai in particular has something close.

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

#210

Post by marqueewinq »

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…

Personally, i don't think the coding part of game development was not a bottleneck.

Just try to implement, for example, a hexagon-based isometric game. There are no off-the-shelf implementations -- you'll need to redo the pan / zoom / click controls yourself, you'll need to implement the pathfinding, map layers, interface state machine etc etc etc

This is still not an easy task -- to build a somehow complicated game. If you're building a platformer -- sure, that's doable. Strategy/4X/RPG? That's different.

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