Could you leave the tapping and chatting to the AI? This way, I can let it work on some basic guidelines and let it surprise me with a game every day.
Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
81–90 of 312 posts
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I immediately knew someone would claim "survivorship bias" but at the same I knew that they would fail to come up with a single counterexample.
That's sort of the point of survivorship bias. Name one unsuccessful would-be entrepreneur. It's hard because chances are, anyone that's recognizable was successful in some way. For games, I'll give an example: Aegis Defenders. Great game, no traction.
>Aegis Defenders
7/10 on Steam and Metacritic. Reviewed by major publishers. Over 100 reviews.
Not sure what you mean by "no traction". But I'm sure it did fantastic in some alternate universe because Sean Carroll.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#83Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.
I find it sad that this post is dominating this conversation.
This theme of comment comes up for sooo many types of posts, and it is unfortunate that it usually dominates the conversation. If Facebook or Airbnb-type companies share a new JavaScript lib, the comment sections will be about how Facebook is evil, or an anecdote about someone's horrible Airbnb experience when they cheaped out in Paris.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it sad that this post is dominating this conversation.
This theme of comment comes up for sooo many types of posts, and it is unfortunate that it usually dominates the conversation. If Facebook or Airbnb-type companies share a new JavaScript lib, the comment sections will be about how Facebook is evil, or an anecdote about someone's horrible Airbnb experience when they cheaped out in Paris.
If my startup worked hard on something cool, got it on the front page of HN, and the top thread is: you have no chance.
I mean it's malicious
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#85Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I immediately knew someone would claim "survivorship bias" but at the same I knew that they would fail to come up with a single counterexample.
That's sort of the point of survivorship bias. Name one unsuccessful would-be entrepreneur. It's hard because chances are, anyone that's recognizable was successful in some way. For games, I'll give an example: Aegis Defenders. Great game, no traction.
[deleted]
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you are a beginner composer creating a hit, it is an extreme fluke. You're punching too high. Music is a passion for many people. Same as game dev. I would expect >95% of game devs to be perfectly happy if they can make a living creating indie games. Of course it's nice to make a hit that makes you tens of millions of dollars, but most game devs would be happy to make enough to pay themselves a salary to live on…
>> I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing. > I'll offer Flappy Bird as an example. Flappy Bird is a bizarre exception: it was a massive viral hit before it was voluntarily withdrawn by the developer feeling guilty over its success. It was then cloned a lot.
The reason why I mentioned Flappy Bird is that it originally wasn't a massive viral hit. It was on the app store for like a year with basically no-one playing it. And then it became a viral hit. So it's a good example of how a good game with no marketing doesn't get picked up (until it gets lucky and eventually does get picked up; you can imagine a timeline where that never happens).
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#88How robust is the system to fix bugs? Can you just point at a thing and say "fix this bug"? How does that side of it work?
So it's hard to give a number on how robust it is, but yes, simply telling GPT that "this doesn't work" or "try again" does work a lot of the time. We're trying to give GPT as much context as possible to help it figure out where things went wrong. Currently that means giving it type errors, execution errors, self-critique and user feedback. But we're working on expanding that; for instance we want to experiment with…
Sounds like a nightmare tbh. Half the fun is the actual coding (aka the journey). I guess if you want to be a prompt engineer that sounds like fun but it sucks all the art of programming out of it.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's sort of the point of survivorship bias. Name one unsuccessful would-be entrepreneur. It's hard because chances are, anyone that's recognizable was successful in some way. For games, I'll give an example: Aegis Defenders. Great game, no traction.
>Aegis Defenders 7/10 on Steam and Metacritic. Reviewed by major publishers. Over 100 reviews. Not sure what you mean by "no traction". But I'm sure it did fantastic in some alternate universe because Sean Carroll.
But we're in this universe.
Based on the number of years it took to develop the game, it wouldn't be considered one that achieved "15 minutes of fame". 100 reviews is quite a far cry from your example of Balatro with 33k. I'm not sure where you plan to draw the line on "success", but I think this is a broadly reasonable contrast.
Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far
#90Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.
Itch.io claim to host over 200k free games. AI makes standing out harder; we're not ready for the sludge era of having seven billion people and ten billion games.
Except that’ll just be a fluke.
The next thing isn’t a never-ending list of AI generated games stored somewhere that we’ll have to sift through somehow.
The next big thing will be ephemeral games, created on the fly based on the context and the preferences expressed, both explicitly and implicitly, by the player’s (or players’) past behaviour (and, for multiplayer games, that of their social graph).
That and perhaps, if we manage to preserve it and keep it alive, an industry of hand-crafted games made by people trying to beat the odds.