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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

#61

Post by AIPedant »

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.

Yeah, I figured this was clickbait but my jaw still dropped a bit when I saw this:

  I cloned the backend for Truco and gave Claude a long prompt explaining the rules of Escoba and asking it to refactor the code to implement it.
How long would it take the human dev to refactor the code themselves? I think it's plausible that it would be longer than 3 days, but maybe not!

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

#62

Post by lvl155 »

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…

That’s what a lot of people are missing about AI. You can do an exhaustive search which is effectively AGI. You already solved for a “solution” it’s simply a matter of searching for it. We are pretty close.

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

#63

Post by fxtentacle »

cough how about 24 hours?

https://nordicgamejam.com/

I've been participating in these for way longer than our current breed of LLMs or GenAI or engines. Back in the day, your best option was Microsoft's XNA and C#. (Unity had not been invented yet.) Plus most art looked like hand-drawn in paint, because it was. Still, we saw plenty of enjoyable games each year. And some made it to a wider audience, like Baba is You or Braid.

The coding was never the bottleneck. I strongly believe it's the communication among team members.

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

#64

Post by zahlman »

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?

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

#65

Post by zahlman »

fxtentacle wrote: post #63

cough how about 24 hours? https://nordicgamejam.com/ I've been participating in these for way longer than our current breed of LLMs or GenAI or engines. Back in the day, your best option was Microsoft's XNA and C#. (Unity had not been invented yet.) Plus most art looked like hand-drawn in paint, because it was. Still, we saw plenty of enjoyable games each year. And some made it to a wider audience, like Baba is You o…

> I strongly believe it's the communication among team members.

"Communication" within your own head is often also surprisingly difficult.

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

#66

Post by raincole »

hollowturtle wrote: post #52
raincole wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

even indie games are painstackingly hard to develop, don't make the mistake of associating indie with easy, rather harder i'd say if you go solo or with a few others in a very high risk job

Correct, but it's really hard to comprehend how this is related to what I said.

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

#67

Post by kaiokendev »

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...

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

#68

Post by maloga »

hollowturtle wrote: post #58
hollowturtle wrote: post #53

[flagged]

The only reason I can think of is some sort of virtue signaling, like to promote one self. But even then why not spending ~6 months and super polish the game that would make you look like a rockstar? Eventually using ai in the process to learn where it can be useful... otherwise i don't understand

No need to think or guess. You can just bite the bullet and actually read the article. I explained why I built it.

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

#69

Post by yonatan8070 »

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?

Game companies already collect heaps of data about players, which mechanics they interact with, which mechanics they don't, retention, play time, etc.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to take this data over multiple games, versions, and genres, and train a model to take in a set of mechanics, stats, or even video and audio to rate the different aspects of a game prototype.

I wouldn't even be surprised if I heard this is already being done somewhere.

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

#70

Post by AlienRobot »

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?

Game developers will try anything before they actually write automated tests for their games.
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