A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion.
Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games.
Can I go back to the 80's please?
A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion.
Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games.
Can I go back to the 80's please?
Personally, most of the time I spend prototyping is taken up by wrestling with tools, engines, and assets. Then I discover that my game design just isn't very fun. I've been experimenting with using LLMs to speed up building prototypes because I want to spend a higher percentage of my time adjusting game design and feel rather than solving problems that are irrelevant if the game's not fun to play.
If you took the time to throughly learn an engine, would you spend so much time wrestling with it afterwards?
If I was working on this full time the investment of learning an engine thoroughly would be worth it, I imagine. Game dev is a hobby for me, though, and what motivates me is making fun games. If I stumble across a game idea that's really fun and worth releasing to a wider audience there's nothing stopping me from building a better version of the game by hand at that point.
Don't listen to these people. Work on your "vision".. figure out what gameplay is "fun".. let the LLMs smooth out the resistance.
Things will change rapidly in the nest 12-36 months and people with vision will outlast "craftsman" 100 to 1.
yes! you wrestle with it because the starting boilerplate is thpically a do-once operation. if you stay working on one project for a few years, you will no longer know how to start the next project, and with modern software, starting a new project in two years from now will be nothing like starting one now
I had the same issue where startup cost was a pain to get little prototypes going. I reduce the cost by making re-usable components. Even if I don't intend to reuse something I still make it a component-esque manner.
It helps that I mostly want to make certain types of games but I think everyone does. I have drop in CameraController, First Person rig, 2D inventory system, dialogue system etc. All flexible enough to get wired into the one off game manager or whatever it needs to plug into.
Curation is probably going to be king over the next years. A game simply existing is no guarantee that any effort has been put in or that even the developer played it.
You'll need to find a publisher, journalists, etc to market your game. You'll ask your friends what they are playing instead of scrolling the store page. Trusted platforms will promote games that are actually worth looking at. This problem already exists on modern platforms like Steam but AI is supercharging it.
This has always been the case. Just because someone made an album or a game or a movie it doesn't guarantee that it's worth your time even if there was effort. Low effort music can be good too, namely by musicians that are really talented. A really talented game designer may be able to make a very engaging game with little effort beyond the initial design.
If you want to test this, find yourself a record store and pick up a few LPs less than a few bucks from bands you've never heard. You might get something really great or it might be terrible.
I agree, in the current ecosystem games are abundant but it's still not easy to find the diamonds in the rough.
Trust signals are going to be quite influential going forward, and that will get exploited too. I think we're going to see the return of high effort, high trust games journalism. Not necessarily as the commercial victor, but as a community we will rally around people and outlets we trust.
The problem is finding the needle in the haystack. When you can cheaply develop AI slop by the millions, good luck finding that one game where a human put blood, sweat and tears to realize their vision/dream. Even if you somehow have access to at-scale distribution, economics will ultimately always triumph everything else and more slop will be pushed because it makes economic sense.
It will take at least a full decade for people to realize the slop isn't helping, has made us all collectively mediocre and will seek out people with real specializations. By then I sure hope those who are specializing haven't lost the motivation to do great things and moved on to other fields.
This. I've been making a game in Godot with zero AI help. Because I enjoy it. I enjoy solving with weird coding problems you run into. I enjoy leaning as I fixed things. I do it out of love for the process, knowing competition right now from things like this means a flooded market. But I'm ok with that and must be because the other option is to quit.
It will show in your game, and I think that will also continue to translate into a better chance at success even in such a swamped market. Maybe even because it's such a swamped market, players will value the games made with passion.
We've all seen shovelware, now introducing excavatorware. A single shovelware studio is now empowered to deliver on the order of kilogames per month.
AI tools are great but ultimately it's about taste and intent (and fun for games) that will hopefully lead to quality floating to the top.
im not so sure?
instead we will see something like flash or game maker, with new art styles driven by what agents make easy, and what children think is fun.
games have immediate feedback loops about quality. either theyre fun or theyre not.
I agree, taste, story and art direction will continue to cohere into successful games. Studios making high volume shallow games never had these, and they probably don't want them just because AI showed up. They are filling a specific demand in the industry.
Coding is not dead. No one stops you guys and nobody intends to.
I like the knittling analogy that was made by the OpenClaw inventor recently. Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.
I heard him say that too. And he's probably right. But it's more like every knitter now has access to an automated loom.
Oddly I feel AI is getting me off the endless learn new tech churn. I was looking at a few odd ball programming books on my shelf, graphics programming from scratch and retro game dev (c64 edition and nes editions) and thinking I might now have time to work through these instead of learning technology x.
https://www.retrogamedev.com/
https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/
And I'll be manually coding as I want to learn!
> off the endless learn new tech churn.
you make a good point. I lost interest around "MCP" in all this; now we're up to people not understanding map reduce and manually garbage collecting for the AI.
I have the Minix book, somewhere...
> Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.
How is that a good thing? Sounds insanely dystopian to me. Especially considering all the other jobs that will be affected too.
It sucks to fear for your job because programmers decided to automate your job away, doesn't it?
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-new-hampshire-campaign-co...
yeah, it does suck, all the way to nvidia's bank account
those are extremists. for them it must be left or right. two cannot coexist.
meanwhile in reality many jobs still exist that could be automated..Why? because people dont let others automate their joy of life away.
its how it always goes.
people will be programming professionally, and such programs will be used by businesses.
The OpenClaw inventor? Ok, sure. I think this is sort of cute. The idea that it is just great that all knowledge work would just be a "hobby" when that logically a world in which there would be no leisure would be quite amusing if it is wasn't so depressing.
knitting machines don’t generate the design from a prompt, and neither does industrial knitwear production facilities. In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.
> In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.
Equally true for today's AI coding agents
Not equally true at all. Far from it. If you have ever seen people use knitting machine you would know the amount of skill required to operate one is far beyond creating a prompt. Same is true of looms, etc.
In fact this whole analogy makes no sense, a knitting machine is far closer to a compiler in this analogy then it is to a language model. Many would argue that automatic looms were the first compilers of the industrial age, and I would agree with that argument.
I was never talking about a knitting machine in the first place. Rather, I was referring to the old lady sitting on her sofa, knitting a sock she could also buy for a dollar, but decides to do it herself for the love of the game and nostalgia: a hobby.
The "art" of programming is going exactly that route, maybe with a little fewer ladies and more men.
I didn’t hear the exact analogy so I made some assumption. But I fail to see any insightful analogy which could make such predictions, unless the analogy is operating on top of some flawed assumptions about industrial knitware production.
An old lady could equally sit in front of her desktop PC write some HTML, and upload a blog page with her amazing knitting projects, or she could get pintrest. This was true before LLMs, and it is still true today.
Another potential flaw is the assumption that professional knitwear design does not exist. It does. Plenty of people work in industrial scale knitwear products. We have people designing new products, making patterns and recipes, we have manual labor in the production, operating machines or even knitting by hand. Case in point, travel anywhere and go to a local market popular with tourists, and you will see plenty of mass produced knitted products, most of them took great skill to design and produce. Nothing compatible to prompting an LLM to do this for you.
Not for long, presumably. Apparently the majority of marketable skills will come from a handful of capex heavy, trillion dollar corporations and you will like it.
Maybe can generate roblox games, one gets picked up like the next skibidi, boom rake in the money
>A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion.
There are still... dozens of us left!
Bold of you to assume I'm not making this with passion, I've been yelling at LLMs for a year straight, that's basically the 80s experience with better coffee
The problem is your passion is for the LLM workflow and not the games, and the end result is going to be a powerful way to generate mediocre games.
The majority of all code written is highly mediocre. Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right.
The same people who were going to make something good will still make something good, the code imo has very little to do with it.
Passion is necessary but insufficient by itself to make good things
>Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right.
Every good and enjoyable game made was handcoded, with art, music, dialogue and design created with intent. I have yet to see a game created with an LLM that's even worth playing, despite countless LLM enthusiasts declaring the death of art , design and programming.
A tool that takes a simple prompt and generates a game from it isn't capable of any of that, and the necessary passion is nonexistent. It's an interesting technical demo but it's useless for gamedev unless your only goal is churning out programmatic slop, which is exactly what it will be used for.
> Every good and enjoyable game made was handcoded, with art, music, dialogue and design created with intent.
I am not sure about you, but I do not know a single developer who isn't using LLMs with a passion, even if its only just cursor and auto-complete.
So, quite the opposite. Instead, literally all games are being made with AI now. I expect the same thing applies to the other professions that you brought up, if not now then soon.
>But I do not know a single developer who isn't using LLMs with a passion, even if its only just cursor and auto-complete
A passion for using LLMs, not for making games. If they had a passion for making games they would recognize how limiting LLMs actually are to the creative process. They wouldn't be making Show HN's for what amount to barely coherent tech demos. But it's very clear from having seen many such projects that the actual game doesn't matter to them.
> Instead, literally all games are being made with AI now.
That's a statement of faith. It's something you want to be true, and believe must be true. And it may prove more accurate as time goes on but it certainly isn't true now.
Patently the idea that it is a passion for using LLMs is crank, what does that even mean? People don't have passion for screwdrivers. I've developed for 20 years now. I wrote my first line of code when I was 10. My passion is for realizing my ideas in general. I liked making the fire ball move. Code was a convenient means to do that, there are increasingly more convenient means now.
The latest stack overflow survey puts AI dev usage at 84% of their respondents, increasingly your position is the faith based one.
Nothing you've written here disproves my point. If you drop the barrier to entry, which this does, of course you see more crap. It won't change the fact someone with taste and skill will make a good game with this tech. People with those qualities will make a good game with whatever tools are available. They're just tools.
If it makes the game in its entirety then it isn't a tool and those qualities don't factor in to the end product.
I think game designers who work with a developer would be surprised to learn their skill in game design doesn't factor into the end product even though they don't code the game.
What is the 80s experience? Are you Jobs yelling at Wozniak or something? It's like people with this view are (or will be) the object lesson of a parable or something.
What is "passion".. for example.. I vibe coded an art display this weekend for myself for a monitor I have on my wall. I am VERY PROUD of it.. it is in GODOT coincedentally. I think it turned out well. Did I spend weeks on it? Did I even learn GODOT?.. No.. but I did spend my weekend late nights figuring out what I wanted and working with an AI to make it.
In some ways the kind of complaining I see is like complaining about a chef's meal because the chef didn't mine the ore to make his knife.
Look in the specific case of this post... none of the games are "good".. however.. one-shoting games WITH ASSETS.. seems pretty impressive to me.
Isn't this just so disingenuous? No disrespect to you, I just see this kind of sophomoric take so much in response to the very normal reaction of the OP. A year ago, it was in vogue to call the OP "ableist" or something. I think the idea that the OP's concern was like the expectation that a chef would "mine the ore" is a bit ridiculous. A better example would be someone having a painting on the wall feeling ownership in it when they asked their artist friend to paint them a picture; at least that is more reasonable. Also, passion means to struggle, since you asked, which I think follow more the idea of learning the craft. This kind of reductionism would deny that craftsmanship exists, as if sculpting David is the same as buy the finished product on the open market. I think we all know this isn't true but there is some kind of forcefield on the Internet that means we have to pretend it is.
By that note, no game producer or designer can have passion.
Really well said, I hate that every time I say I value craftmanship, skill and effort in art people flock to this reductionism "well did the painter make his own dyes? Did the developer make his own processor to run the game in?"
There's levels to it, it's not black and white.
No more code, only markdown files...
as soon as CD-ROM was a thing, shovelware boomed.
I think it was around already with diskettes or even cassettes. When medium gets easy enough to produce the lowest quality stuff gets produced...
cassettes are a bit before my time. I am personally unaware of any "shovelware" being distributed via cassette; i have heard that radio stations would broadcast programs you could record and play back (i remember Acorn in this particular story, i think.)
And floppies, sure, the 3.5" ones had some shovelware, included in trade magazines and whatnot. Maybe someone has a directory listing of a floppy from this era showing what it was like, i'd be interested; i know about AOL disks, too.
But CD-ROM. never before could humans distribute 200 games / software packages so easily. my first computer with a cd-rom had a hard disk 350MB larger than a CD-ROM. 2 shovelware CD-ROMs was more than my PC could handle!
A prompt like "make it more fun" will never work. What's the line for an authentic enough game?
[dead]
Why does what other people do affect you?
If you want to handcraft something, do it. How popular it is among other people isn't relevant.
This comment screams someone who wasn't around during the rise and fall of Atari 2600 games or Commodore 64 games. More was certainly not better back then either.
There are literally 1000x more games being released today* than during the best days of the Atari/C64, and it is great. More has been better.
*Atari 1980 (20 games) vs Steam 2025 (20,008 games)
It becomes a problem for everone when spaces meant for meaningful work become overrun with an awful stream of endless mediocre slop that someone quickly generated without giving it a second thought. The problem here is not that it is fast and easy. The cardinal sin is that it is fast, easy AND bad.
Huge gatekeeping energy right here.
Do you think people complaining about online marketplaces being overrun with unscrupulous drop-shippers are "gatekeeping e-commerce" as well?
No I do not because that's not a reasonable comparison?
Then you haven't understood the complaint.
I understood it just fine. You object to creations and creativity that do not pass your subjective quality bar and/or aren't produced in a way that is satisfactory to the people already behind the gate.
It's the literal definition of gatekeeping.
The problem you describe (quantity over so-called quality) is a discovery and curation problem.
Yet you blame the tools of creation and lament the lack of restriction or controls on production instead.
Yes these tools make it easier to produce, and yes that means that you have more low-quality work out there. I'm not pretending like that doesn't introduce new challenges.
But the answer isn't to gate-keep the tools or the process of creation or to stop or shame people from being creative with these new tools by universally calling their work "slop" or "bad".
So you completely agree with the factual description of the problem I supplied when asked to describe the problem, your only real complaint is that I used the phrase "more awful slop" instead of your preferred euphemism "more low-quality work". Having a frank discussion about the problems caused by new technology is not gatekeeping, and I don't think we should sugarcoat it out of fear of hurting people's feelings.
Because you use steam and the play store and ... to get games, and there will be so overwhelmingly much slop you can't find anything.
I've switched to emulators, a bluetooth controller and zero android games (and zero ios games on my work phone). But yeah it was/is horribly enshittified already. And what people predicted did happen.
The fact that the app store allows updates means existing games get systematically worse. Even the games I used to enjoy, and bought 5 years ago, like collossatron now have ads after every play.