Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

marianogappa.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 236 posts

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

#71

Post by znort_ »

kousthub wrote: post #34

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

in this case, no. it's a client game and performance isn't at all critical, so the state and loop could be trivially handled by a regular js function. if at some point a server architecture was desired, it would be trivial to host that function on node.

my take: as a backend developer he was fixated with the idea of having a server no matter what (if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail), and as go was his main language he just went with that. then he figured out it didn't really have a point, but instead of just translating that simple logic to js he overengineered the whole thing and overcomplicated his design and build process by transpiling to wasm.

there are some bugs, though. i just won a couple of matches at escoba (very nice little game, i hadn't played this for ... decades!) and the game state wasn't properly reset for the next. that's probably the llm ...

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

#72

Post by gmadsen »

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?

because it has millions of examples of that in its training data?

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

#73

Post by maloga »

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??

I think the reason is because you have to pay a non-negligible amount of money per game you publish, and most don't expect to make that back. In my case, making money wasn't my goal, as I explain in the article.

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

#74

Post by zarzavat »

zahlman wrote: post #65
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.

A healthy amount of my work is writing code, trying it out, and deleting it. This is something that the LLMs seem quite far from being able to do.

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

#75

Post by nine_k »

raincole wrote: post #50
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.

A bunch of ideas that had been tabled because of the difficulty of implementation were released once the difficulty of making a 3D world was somehow alleviated by Unity.

Maybe something else is currently holding back another bunch of good ideas in gaming. Once another threshold gets lowered, we will see another wave of good games enabled by by that, and a return to the average rate of creation again.

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

#76

Post by estimator7292 »

I like LLMs because it helps abstract code in a way that's more directly compatible with how I think about programs.

When I read code, it gets turned into something akin to an AST, where functions and calls are more of an abstract notion of input and result.

The LLM vastly simplifies the inverse process. Instead of having to go and find the way to represent an idea in code, or digging through my memory and code archives for an example, I can instead tell the LLM to write the boilerplate to initialize WiFi or whatever. It simplifies code into Lego pieces that I can assemble into a program that's more representative of my internal conception of the problem.

I've been flying through different programming languages with LLMs. When the text and grammar can be abstracted away, I can focus on the program. I was able to do this before LLMs, but with a lot more effort. Like, sure, I don't learn a whole lot about each language as I go, but that's exactly the point. The text and semantics of any one language should be largely irrelevant to the logical flow of the program itself. The text is nothing more than a semi-standardized way of representing logic in a form that can be parsed by machines and (secondarily) by humans.

First we abstracted machine code to assembly. Then low level languages like C, then higher and higher level languages until the machine itself became utterly irrelevant. It only seems natural that we'd further abstract these languages and move closer to the goal of programming instead of coding.

I don't think we've even seen hints of how this will look in the end, but I'm certain that we'll spend less and less time writing and more time programming.

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

#77

Post by Keyframe »

It took me few days on and off to do this with llm: https://www.susmel.com/stacky/

overall I'd say around two working days. I used it as a test ground first for greenfield and then Brownfield development, so nothing serious, but I found myself in a loop of ever growing details I wanted tuned, more and more features (super rotations system, das, this and that).. I'd say it's maybe 10-20% of where I'd take it as a full game, even have a webgl version functional somewhere.. but I had to stop before I started making my ultimate Tetris since I don't want to get sued nor I have (probably) money for a full license to drive it through the end. I heard they charge a pretty penny.. but I am now confident I could drive it home and that's what I took, the experience, to other software development with llm now.

the other day there was an interesting link here on HN about parametric functions. I got an itch then as well, and within an hour or two a playground: https://www.susmel.com/graphy but also, details, details, details. If you know what you wanna see it's quite enjoyable actually.

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

#78

Post by znort_ »

qnleigh wrote: post #31
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?

in the stock market?
Post reply on HN