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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

#251

Post by johnnyanmac »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #108
dev1ycan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which shows how bad puritan culture is, most people don't care about your puritanism in their room, they want to play a game, see a hot char, and be able to do stuff with them in the game. it's the harsh truth that people seem to get mad at. Especially now with ever increasing rates of ADHD and other stuff, having an old school genre like an RPG have that type of stuff as a "reward" for beating a level or whatever re…

This is like saying people buy baldur's gate because you can undress your characters or make them date Consumers don't want pornography in their games, they're completely different products: visual novels are closer to a slideshow than a game People buy good games and they consume pornography, conflating the two doesn't help us analyse the market. That said, I agree there is probably more money in pornography than in…

>Consumers don't want pornography in their games,

I kinda do. I just want them to be more than a fade to black implication or awkward not even colliding meshes with low res genetalia.

It's a landmine, so no AAA dev is doing any of that, and it's really high tech to do convincingly so few indies can pull it off. That's why 2d works like VN's tend to be the best compromise. a gif loop or a few still frames and a seductive voice can be just enough to sell the scene.

> they're completely different products: visual novels are closer to a slideshow than a game

most western ones. They're "expensive" to westerners, but if you ever buy a decent Japanese VN you can understand the appeal. full voice acting, multiple different scenes and poses, an actual attempt at a narrative (we can argue all day if it's good, but so many western ones have shifted to "haha quirky meta" as a substitute for substance), good music, etc. Some even have some surprisingly addicting gameplay, which makes you question why it's categorized as a "visual novel". But that's marketing for you.

I don't blame you for your opinion, but I assure you it can be done right.

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

#252

Post by antifa »

viccis wrote: post #134

Wonder how well this will do given that, going by reactions to even fairly anodyne AI usage in games, gamers really really loathe gen AI used to make games and game assets.

I can't think of any high effort, non-cash-grabs, non-asset-flips that were dragged through the mud for using AI.

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

#253

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

because you'd also counter with "well that's an exception", or find some other reason it "deserved to fail" while propping up a game jam level game as "deserving to succeed". Yeah, conversation about game metrics without proper metrics and unaligned definitions of "success" is a bit of a fool's errand on social meida.

No disrespect to Balarto, but you just know that if it sold 1k copies, people on Reddit would tear it apart with the usual armchair criticism.

> this looks like a free mobile game > why are you selling a game about gambling? don't use poker cards > use a real engine like Unity/Unreal > rougelites AND card games are oversaturated, pick a better genre

Seen the same things over and over again for years. There's a huge "rule of cool" effect and popularity bias influencing such opinions that suddenly shift when a game is "a success".

>God exists. I can't show you God. But believe me God definitely exists.

I wouldn't call Gabe newell "God", but I guess others would.

But sure, you're free to message him, and he can definitely defy all ethics to show you the sales figures for every game on steam just so you can see how little the average indie game earns. I believe all of that is real. Not feasible, but not outside the realms of reality.

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

#254

Post by johnnyanmac »

kibbi wrote: post #92
kyleamazza wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sort of the point of survivorship bias. Name one unsuccessful would-be entrepreneur. It's hard because chances are, anyone that's recognizable was successful in some way. For games, I'll give an example: Aegis Defenders. Great game, no traction.

Then it seems that "survivorship bias" is some kind of unfalsifiable and self-fulfilling belief. Secondly, these sorts of discussions usually don't define any concrete amount of success that a game is supposed to achieve. What is "no traction" supposed to mean? Aegis Defenders has 1,656 reviews at the moment. There's the assumption floating about that you can roughly multiply this by 50 to get the number of owners, w…

>Then it seems that "survivorship bias" is some kind of unfalsifiable and self-fulfilling belief.

It's very falsifiable. Just not by us, as we have no acccess to the sales data, nor enough public sales points to make a proper statistical analysis. The best ones out there are either based on estimations (especially reviews to sales ratios) or non-public data you pay the NPD or someone similar thousands to access (and obviously you're not allowed to share that data). So someone truly curious can pay a lot of money to get an answer.

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

#255

Post by johnnyanmac »

djeastm wrote: post #113
EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

Maybe it's not about marketing the game, but marketing the application that allows you to make your own games. To be able to make a bunch of games easily that just you and your friends can enjoy without having to code seems like a good use case.

When in a gold rush, sell shovels.

You're right, devs aren't as picky with tools as gamers are with games. As long as it works and is proven to save time, it'll sell. But the downside is that you're audience is much less.

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

#256

Post by johnnyanmac »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #63
EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

I find it sad that this post is dominating this conversation.

Don't want to be rude, but most people here probably aren't game devs. So bikeshedding taking over is inevitable.

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

#257

Post by johnnyanmac »

tavavex wrote: post #119
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…

Unless your needs are extremely specific and necessitate replacing most of the engine, Unity is probably not limiting your capabilities. The default packages are extensive and allow for basic game-making without writing that much actual code, but large developers will almost certainly swap default Unity components for their own for parts that need them, while the engine manages other parts like sound and input handli…

>none of them seemed to face any issues with being made in Unity.

I'm sure they did. But I wager there is no such thing as "smooth development". Every engine has its quirks, every team has its odd dynamics and clashes.

engines are there to make development smoother, not smooth.

>it's bound to have a bunch of shovelware made on it with how many resources there are for learning it (and Unity being free), but it's popular for a reason.

To be fair, that one is more on Unity. You had to pay to remove the splashscreen, so that meant low effort titles would have "MADE WITH UNITY" front and center, where higher budget titles could remove the logo. It was great for awareness, but it completely reversed the perception of the engine quality as a result.

(disclaimer: I used to work at unity)

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

#258

Post by antifa »

MCLAU155 wrote: post #16

we are in need of a good 2D strategy game such as Advance Wars or Fire Emblem that can be played with infinite variations

I got a buddy who is making an AW2-like and was exploring procedurally generated gameplay modes (including co-op), not sure if they'll use this new AI thing or not.

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

#259

Post by antifa »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #172
report-to-trees wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, yeah I guess that makes sense. I always thought those strategy games were missing a competitive community and better PvP experience but I could also see how more replayability would make them more popular.

I think it's hard to make those PvP modes compelling to most people, being turn-based with longer turns is rough (card games get away with it because turns are typically pretty short). It's hard to think of popular turn-based video games where it's popular for multiplayer and the turns are long.

Do you consider the civilization series popular? It seems people put up with that.

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

#260

Post by johnnyanmac »

Philpax wrote: post #154
nameless912 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, a…

>Our thinking is that you can lay a base quickly, and then iterate on that to work on the details of your game

I'm not an AI engineer, but my understanding with current AI advances is that it is very good at "laying a base" and very bad at "iterate on that". Many models are essentially throw out 90% of the previous iteration and grabbing something else for the next prompt.

I am a dev, and usually it isn't as hard to "lay a base", from a technical perspective. There's plenty of mock assets to work with, and then later on we can use a early design mesh to fine tune. I don't necessarily need an "orc" to work out the posing and animations for a game unless I'm doing facial animations.

But hey, there's 2000 dev pipelines for every 1000 studios, so this isn't to discredit you. Just hoping to give another perspective on how some approach game dev.

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