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Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

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Re: Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

#41

Post by uludag »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #2

Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded games? I suppose perhaps they wouldn't disclose that it was vibe-coded but I'm not aware of a single one.

I've been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit and testing out the demos people have been sharing, as this would be the place where people most enthusiastic about vibe-coding games post and everything I've seen has been immensely underwhelming. The problem with these games fall into the following categories:

- An utter lack of animation. So many games feature mostly static images.

- AI assets make the game's art style feel horribly incohesive. I played a TCG game where there were high fantasy art, chibi 2d art, anime art, seemingly used haphazardly.

- Bad UX. For example, in the same TCG game, all of the cards had very fancy artwork generated, but the game board itself was far away enough that the made the cards look like blobs on the board.

- Buggy mechanics: There was this guy why shared a platformer generated by fable where you move a lamp to create a shadow path. The character had very awkward movement, would constantly get stuck/unstuck, and would be hard to control.

- Broken mechanics: A lot of games featured exploits that just rendered the game boring to play

- Poor balancing

- Lack of ovararching game structure: no story, no meta-progression, no world-map. These AI games tend to be isolated experiences.

I don't see the masses creating quality, sellable games anytime in the near future. There are so many aesthetic qualities to a game that have direct human bottlenecks. AI can even make games significantly worse as you can seemingly implement many bad mechanics without validating them. Good game devs seem to be relentlessly pruning out the things that down work.

Re: Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

#42

Post by alexpotato »

> Why not? I think because it wasn't a good business decision to compete with me.

The owner of Pinboard has a great story about this:

"I ended up buying a competitor. Why? Because his choice of tech stack + server footprint cost more than mine. The consequence of this was that even with each of us charging the same price. I was profitable and he was not.

Do not try to compete against Pinboard"

Re: Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

#43

Post by doctorpangloss »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #29
sarchertech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at steam releases. May 2025: 1727. May 2026: 1875 A year over year increase matching the same trend that has existed since 2017. The same pattern holds for every month this year except March (where there was an increase year over year of about 600 games). If you’ve ever been to a game dev forum, you’ll see that there are at least 10x as many people who want to make a game as there are people who have made a game…

Thing is, Steam already was flooded with shovelware - I suspect a percentage of new relelases includes plenty of AI usage that was previously made in other ways (e.g. using asset libraries)

roblox studio has deep generative AI integration, it has absorbed many users both creators and players during the time period you are measuring. steam grew so little despite digital audiences growing so much.

Re: Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

#44

Post by uludag »

yoz-y wrote: post #4
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #2

Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded games? I suppose perhaps they wouldn't disclose that it was vibe-coded but I'm not aware of a single one.

Turns out making a game, even with full help of the LLM power is still a massive effort most people won’t go through. Even simpler but non-trivial programs require a lot of back and forth. So in the end it will be the same kind of motivated people that will be able to produce something good. We’re nowhere near “Claude, build me GTA6”

Here's an example of this regarding the recent indie hit "Mina the Hollower." They were recently interviewed and asked the question "What is Yacht Club's stance on AI and has AI been used in the production of Mina the Hollower at all?" to which their reply was "We all got caught up in AI fever like the rest of the world, but we didn't find it was very effective for what we're doing. Maybe our work just isn't that generic! We've found some ways it can help... like Google or a thesaurus, but it hasn't affected what's in our game." [1]

It's hard to immagine that even the best AI model would result in anything better than a marginal reduction in release timeline. Like maybe for such projects one could spend $X00,000 worth of tokens for maybe like a %single-digit-percent reduction in time to release. Marginally good, maybe even project saving, but not any larger a paradigm shift than Unity was.

[1] https://www.gamereactor.eu/mina-the-hollower-interview-discu...

Re: Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

#45

Post by notahacker »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #28
sarchertech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at steam releases. May 2025: 1727. May 2026: 1875 A year over year increase matching the same trend that has existed since 2017. The same pattern holds for every month this year except March (where there was an increase year over year of about 600 games). If you’ve ever been to a game dev forum, you’ll see that there are at least 10x as many people who want to make a game as there are people who have made a game…

I wonder if there's also another aspect: Games have to be fun for humans and this involves a lot of trial and error with actual humans in the loop. You can't just spin up a bunch of claude agents to implement a game for you, because implementing a new feature requires that you playtest it with a fairly fine granularity as it's being implemented. You can save some time implementing various subsystems with llms, but at…

Also, game audiences are brutal about games that are flawed, and even more brutal if they think it's shovelware. If you're selling games on Steam, something with "Mostly Negative" reviews isn't serious competition (at least not unless it's part of a long established franchise with a big marketing budget).

And sports management sims are one of the most brutal of the lot. Slop might get you something that superficially looks like a sports sim (a decent third party UI library would get you quite some way in the past), but what fans actually care about is perceived realism, game mechanics, balance/challenge etc (and in real world sims, "how has my team been represented?") and that's a design decision, play testing, parameter tweaking and user engagement exercise, not a feature-adding one.

Re: Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

#46

Post by utopiah »

microgpt wrote: post #35
utopiah wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded games? Fair question... I'd even go as far as broadening the scope : Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded anything? And by popular/successful I don't mean bought Github stars from other GenAI/LLMs related project as it's been a demonstrated practice https://awesomeagents.ai/news/github-fake-stars-investigatio... for that specific domain now.

OpenClaw is popular - or is it? I don't actually know anyone who uses it. Claude Code is popular, and is vibecoded.

Not sure if my last comment was clear but I meant specifically not related to GenAI/LLMs. So no harness, no model tooling, etc. I mean end-user used software. I don't mean that this topic isn't interesting per se, only that (as the article pointed out) it's been "gamed" so much popularity there isn't really meaningful anymore.

Re: Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

#47

Post by sarchertech »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #29
sarchertech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at steam releases. May 2025: 1727. May 2026: 1875 A year over year increase matching the same trend that has existed since 2017. The same pattern holds for every month this year except March (where there was an increase year over year of about 600 games). If you’ve ever been to a game dev forum, you’ll see that there are at least 10x as many people who want to make a game as there are people who have made a game…

Thing is, Steam already was flooded with shovelware - I suspect a percentage of new relelases includes plenty of AI usage that was previously made in other ways (e.g. using asset libraries)

Yeah it was flooded with shovelware. But I’m not talking about people who want to publish asset flips for a quick buck.

I’m talking about all of the people out there who have ever tried to make a game or never got started because it was too hard. In my CS cohort years ago, pretty much everyone there got into programming originally because they wanted to make a game.

Games definitely have the highest ratio of I want to make a game to I have made a game of any type of software. If it was suddenly easy to make “your game”, Steam would explode.

Re: Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

#49

Post by RobRivera »

I have been building my own game and game engine for a while now, and cannot help but see whats really happening with vibe coded game generation: and investment into the content generation pipeline.

I feel a solid game engine paired with a good content pipeline can ship games at such a rapid clup that the gameslop gets lost as the noise it is.

Re: Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

#50

Post by ksaun »

RobRivera wrote: post #49

I have been building my own game and game engine for a while now, and cannot help but see whats really happening with vibe coded game generation: and investment into the content generation pipeline. I feel a solid game engine paired with a good content pipeline can ship games at such a rapid clup that the gameslop gets lost as the noise it is.

If you don't mind disclosing, for what type(s) of games is your game engine intended?

(Also: I agree with your assessment. I'm not working on an engine, but I am working on a game, mostly/initially just for my own edification. It's fun to feel empowered to create again! (My personal circumstances had obstructed me until genAI's recent progress.))

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