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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

#31

Post by qnleigh »

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??

This is a great analogy. There's a wider Fermi paradox here regarding business productivity. Where's the 10x economic output?

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

#32

Post by danjl »

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…

As a much lower bar, I'd love it if more of the LLMs used for coding were actually multimodal, accepting images of games as part of the context. In general, LLMs are far better at generating web apps than they are at pure 2D or 3D games that use graphical APIs. There's far less training data, and there's no way to test anywhere close to what you can do with testing on a DOM. In an interactive game, with physics, animations and game logic, the AI just falls on its face because of the complexity.

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

#33

Post by virgildotcodes »

fsloth wrote: post #29
virgildotcodes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

” but it only did so by stochastically parroting hallucinated slop” I’m not sure what the argument here is. That you should only use the most primitive tools available? ”LLMs suck” arguments sound exactly like ”IDE:s suck! True engineers writes everything in notepad.exe”. Or ”debuggers suck! Use only printfs!” People have different ways of cognition and different strategies of problem solving and tool use. The fact y…

I was being ironic! I thought the chain of greatest hits in that phrase would give it away, if not the following words.

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

#36

Post by zerr »

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.

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

#37

Post by garbagepatch »

kousthub wrote: post #34

Asking for information - Is Go/wasm doing something here which React/JavaScript cannot?

The front end is still react. But I'd be curious to know if LLM's are less prone to errors generating code for strongly typed languages over others like Javascript.

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

#38

Post by zerr »

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??

Delegating all the fun of making games to LLMs and leaving only the boring part for yourself puts you in the infinite procrastination mode.

Watching LLM generating the code doesn't help with producing the dopamine.

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

#39

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

fsloth wrote: post #26
k__ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they're right and you're not addressing anything

I don’t get these arguments. Just because LLM learned the entire internet does not mean it can’t 10x a developer. Were all standing on shoulders of giants - LLM or no LLM. LLM gives you extra pair of ladders. That are wobbly for sure. But ladders still. Using LLM invalidates nothing and the 10x stories are totally plausible. The plagiarization argument is to me moot - most of us are plagiarizing previous work, weathe…

That wasn't the argument at all.

If I wrote a card game in 3 months, then cloned the repository and used that as a base to implement a different card game, it would be significantly faster with or without LLMs.

The argument is that it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. "I wrote a game in 3 months and then used an LLM in 3 days to fork it and make some changes" is not the same thing as "I spent 3 months doing something that I could do in 3 days with LLMs".

I believe LLM-driven development is powerful (though I hate seeing "10x" everywhere, and have hated it long before LLM coding was big, when it was talking about supposedly superhuman coders), but this is not a good comparison, and the argument is sound.

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