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Excommunicated devs making games with AI

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Re: Excommunicated devs making games with AI

#61

Post by peteforde »

ausbah wrote: post #59
peteforde wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229458 You should consider that there is a rather large gulf between low-effort crap and using agentic LLMs to make more sophisticated games faster before you downvote me. It's just not black and white, and to treat it as such devalues the conversation.

ofc there’s a spectrum in LLM usage, but the usage scenario of LLMs as a “supervised force multiplier” (paraphrasing your linked comment) isn’t how most near anyone uses them. I can’t imagine gamedev is any different. what a vast majority of LLM usage appears to me is as a unsupervised slop multiplier. any social media platform, including hacker news is rife with a deluge of unpolished LLM generated turds that creato…

> the usage scenario of LLMs as a “supervised force multiplier” (paraphrasing your linked comment) isn’t how most near anyone uses them. I can’t imagine gamedev is any different.

That's just it: you don't know this. You're speculating from within your confirmation bias bubble. Everything you're saying is completely anecdotal.

Re: Excommunicated devs making games with AI

#62

Post by peteforde »

raincole wrote: post #50
peteforde wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. Let me try and change your mind. Let's say that you have been building your passion project; it could be a game, it could be a synth, it could be a mobile app. You were a year into development already when LLMs blew up, and you very quickly realized that you could leverage them to move much, much faster. This allowed you to tackle a long list of features that realistically would have never left t…

Steam has an AI disclaimer now and many games with the disclaimer still sell well. So yeah it's totally victim mentality. The evidence is just right on Steam, but instead of actually looking at the largest market in the gaming world some AI bros chose to fight an imaginary enemy in their minds. https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/games-with-ai-disclosures-h...

Here's a social experiment for you to try: create or switch to a different profile, put on your debate club hat and post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions. Speak eloquently and be polite. Say things that are defensibly reasonable if you were arguing the opposite position.

Then watch the silent downvoting begin. Perhaps y'all aren't aware that this is happening, or the degree to which it doesn't matter how coherent or fair your point may be.

If you speak out in favour of considered, responsible use of agentic LLM usage, there's a mob of socketpuppets that are eager to punish you because you're not on their team.

Re: Excommunicated devs making games with AI

#63

Post by bilekas »

peteforde wrote: post #60
bilekas wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and each of those updates ends up deluged with people complaining specifically about the AI use I would genuinely like to see this thread, because if the comments are legitimate and backed up by examples, ie : "This is XSS vulnerable" etc.. then even with the prefix of "AI Slop" I'm fine with.. I think it's fair people don't get too comfortable with just trusting vibe coded agents, when in my own experience, the bu…

It would elevate the conversation significantly if people didn't use "vibe coding" and AI use interchangeably. I don't use Reddit, but you don't have to look for a specific thread. It often feels like there's a mob of people just waiting for fresh meat to wander into their camp. Literally any thread referencing AI on this site is full of people who appear to have nothing but venom and contempt for people who use thes…

I'll try to only use the term AI as VibeCoding is more a derivative. There definitely are some people who are just doomers about AI entirely and I think it's always the case with any new technology. That said, you can't deny there is just an unholy amount of useless applications for the AI tooling that are really not providing anything useful other than generating 'slop'.

Using AI tools for protein folding or medical breakthroughs for example will impact the world in a positive way. People will champion that. Using them to automate your creativity hasn't been in demand by anyone except shareholders or people looking to milk a quick ad revenue for little to no effort. So of course, there's a negative sentiment.

Re: Excommunicated devs making games with AI

#64

Post by krapp »

peteforde wrote: post #44
tezza wrote: post #33

My latest game BossBattle[1] (html5, have a play) uses AI for graphics, some strobe effects, a C64 loading screen shader. I have decided to lean in to it and I will document all the places I use AI in the game on my blog[2]. Not everything works, notably 3D assets[3] and sound effects. There is a lot of human content… i paid for a lot out of my own pocket and have limited budget. It started in 2021 before chatgpt. LL…

I commend you for being willing to share. The "able to make the X" thing is something haters love to ignore. Best of luck with your beta!

Making the game that OP made, a basic Simon-type color matching game, isn't that difficult. None of the vibe-coded games I've seen posted to HN would be difficult to make in any engine. If that or any other such game had been written by a human being and posted here it would be getting a similar reaction because none of them are any good on their own merits.

But because they're AI, and only because they're AI, people gas these things up regardless of quality, almost in spite of it. That's why people are mad. Not because they're "haters" but because people are flooding HN and the rest of the web with slop and insisting on being treated like masters of their craft.

And again, if a human had written this game in its entirety and posted it here, it would get flagged as spam, because it is first and foremost a bad game. Even as a "beta." And OP can't improve on it much because they're limited by whatever the AI happens to generate. Even just giving them encouragement is pointless.

"Games are impossible without AI" is a paltry excuse. My nephew, who isn't even in high school, is learning coding in school and is making games in Roblox. It's never been easier. If it's true that making a game in AI takes actual skill and work, as people claim, then making it in an engine is not at all beyond anyone's grasp.

If y'all want to shut up the "haters," make something with AI that's actually good, a game with a coherent visual look, well designed gameplay, an interesting concept, that's at least as good as a tutorial project for any existing game engine.

Re: Excommunicated devs making games with AI

#66

Post by [deleted] »

voidfunc wrote: post #24
makerofthings wrote: post #18

Having AI generate a game for you no more makes you a game dev than ordering a happy meal makes you a chef.

Oh please, just stop being silly. Being a game dev means you're building games which means you're thinking about the mechanics of the game and what makes something fun to play. The programming is not "game dev" and offloading it to an AI agent doesn't make someone any less of a game dev.

[deleted]

Re: Excommunicated devs making games with AI

#68

Post by raincole »

peteforde wrote: post #62
raincole wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam has an AI disclaimer now and many games with the disclaimer still sell well. So yeah it's totally victim mentality. The evidence is just right on Steam, but instead of actually looking at the largest market in the gaming world some AI bros chose to fight an imaginary enemy in their minds. https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/games-with-ai-disclosures-h...

Here's a social experiment for you to try: create or switch to a different profile, put on your debate club hat and post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions. Speak eloquently and be polite. Say things that are defensibly reasonable if you were arguing the opposite position. Then watch the silent downvoting begin. Perhaps y'all aren't aware that this is happening, or the degree to whic…

> post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions

> Then watch the silent downvoting begin

I express my pro-AI positions on HN all the time.

Also, top 3 comments in this very thread are all pro-AI right now. That's how deeply your victim mentality rooted. You chose to ignore all the positive parts and cling to the downvotes. That's a choice you made and I won't bother to convince you otherwise anymore.

Re: Excommunicated devs making games with AI

#69

Post by mcteamster »

yuppiepuppie wrote: post #17

If you want to see what the HN game dev community is building, I’ve been curating the list here ( https://hnarcade.com ) for the past months. The output is quite impressive. And having spoken to a number of the developers, it does seem like AI has had a massive impact on delivering their ideas.

Awesome, I've submitted a game I made last year (https://blankwhite.cards) which was itself a remake of a game I made in 2019.

In my experience it took 5 years to find the time and motivation to build a v2.0 by hand. AI has since accelerated the production process to help me ship features that would otherwise have taken me another few years to even consider doing.

Re: Excommunicated devs making games with AI

#70

Post by andai »

makerofthings wrote: post #18

Having AI generate a game for you no more makes you a game dev than ordering a happy meal makes you a chef.

What if you get someone else to program it? By this logic, Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, Binding of Isaac, Mew-Genics) isn't a game developer, because he doesn't code.
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