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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

#41

Post by benbreen »

danjl wrote: post #32
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, anim…

I realize this isn't the same thing as your point about images as part of training data, but just flagging it in case anyone isn't aware: Claude Code lets you copy and paste images into terminal. I've been designing a "universal history simulator" game for use in my history classes lately, and it is really helpful to be able to make a mockup of a ui change I want and then paste it in, rather than trying to explain it verbally. Also good for debugging graphics issues.

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

#42

Post by famouswaffles »

mattmanser wrote: post #20
famouswaffles wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to say this is all LLMs but Steam game releases have exploded. https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

Still seems to be roughly following the pre-AI trajectory though. Which is really easy to argue it's more down to Unity + successors making game dev accessible as it starts in 2015. No huge spike since Claude code got released or anything like that.

>Still seems to be roughly following the pre-AI trajectory though.

Not really. The jump from 2023 to 2024 is bigger than the jump from 2019-2022 in raw numbers and 2020-2022 in %. So the jump of 3 to 4 years happened in a single year.

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

#43

Post by brookst »

zerr wrote: post #38
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.

Some people think the fun part is the requirements and gameplay, and code is the boring part.

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

#44

Post by pjmlp »

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…

And the main reason why actually making a game with interesting gameplay is more relevant than discussing what is the best language to do a game on.

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

#45

Post by adastra22 »

garbagepatch wrote: post #37
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.

In my experience, a massive YES. At least with agenetic models that have an iteration loop, and in languages like Rust where the type system is strong enough to prevent categories of bugs.

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

#46

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#47

Post by furyofantares »

garbagepatch wrote: post #37
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.

From experience: A static type system is MUCH better for agents than dynamic. I've done a few projects both ways - the agent is just much, much better with the static system because it sees compile errors right away, and also has access to better static analysis tools. I don't know how much the types themselves help the LLM, it's better context but more tokens, but the agent seeing errors is just a huge difference.

It's also much easier for you as a developer to digest the code if you need to refactor because you got lazy and accepted some slop.

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

#48

Post by latexr »

danjl wrote: post #9

The LLM started with a three month headstart, both in terms of code, using the previous game as a template, and more importantly, all of the learnings and mistakes you made in the hand-coded pass.

Not only that but it was also their first game, meaning they faced a ton of unknown unknowns which are no longer there. If they were starting to program a card game today without LLMs they would still be able to apply all the knowledge and insights they gained from the previous experience; it would take significantly less than three months.

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

#49

Post by smokel »

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.

Mind sharing what you have tried? Have you considered training a diffusion model on pixel art, and then conditioning it on a 3D model?

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

#50

Post by raincole »

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…

> we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game

We definitely saw an explosion of good indie games by around early half of 2010s. Whether it had anything to do with Unity is another moot point.

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