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Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

I may just like games too much, but I can't take this seriously in its current form. This feels like one of the old and basic 'build your own game' toolboxes for non-developers, but with AI - not an 'AI game engine'. It shows that even the demos they made for the trailer are all simplistic endless games that remind me of average Flash games with a different coat of paint. When your entire 'game idea' can be expressed in two sentences, it's going to get old fast. There's only so many endless runners, trivia and single screen 'move from point to point' games one can tolerate. I can't see this specific product having any impact on the gaming industry, despite many people here already talking about the industry at large.

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That’s the exact vibe it gave. That also extends to most startups focused on making one shot prompt-to-game tools. It shows a lack of understanding or respect for how the best games are actually made, and a focus on low-depth generic games.

I'm fine with these games being pumped out endlessly, just like flash games were. If we want to have 10,000 versions of flappy bird I guess that's fine -

But we need a way to sort them that's a bit better. Its getting tough to find quality indy games on steam now, and that's the kind of game I like to play, AAA games being too generic and dull for me usually. I feel like somehow this is just going to make it more difficult and expensive to ship a good indy game, which will result in fewer & worse indy games.

This is ultimately the core issue with the games industry right now. We still haven't cracked game discovery at scale. What are the current approaches currently missing?

You are just in the minority/subset of the mobile audience. Walk through a train on a morning commute and look what people are playing. 90% candy crush, subway surfers, temple-run-esque stuff.

Most people want this kind of game

Even then games are so hard to make. Walk through that morning commute and imagine the whole wild ecosystem of games that didn’t make it because they thought ideas were enough and ux and balance and a fun leveling didn’t matter.

Just kidding, here’s some prompts for ya!

- Yars Revenge but in 8k

- Custer’s Revenge but in 8k

- Leather Goddesses of Phobos but you can see everything except it’s only in like 4 bit except if you wind up in the cage with the gorilla and then it’s 8k

- Zork I-III but every room has a sign in it telling me what to do so I feel smart for once.

- M.U.L.E but it stands for “Mules, unlimited empathy” and you just rap with the mules

You're probably right, the slop is not addictive enough because its not completely tuned to your data and your reward system. Will probably just be short-form content then

That’s Betamax thinking son. I need VHS men!

> When your entire 'game idea' can be expressed in two sentences, it's going to get old fast

I think the idea is, that's fine because after it, you get 1000 more.

Mobile game stores now have serious competition! :)

I can't take it seriously at all. Whats the community sell? Make AI slop games? Were game developers wondering "gee, how can I make even LESS money". Not all possible marketplaces or services have to exist.

> average Flash games with a different coat of paint.

Flash games had some soul at least. Im not sure what if was, but after flash died and we got all these fancy web graphics technologies web games felt technically impressive, but sterile and empty.

That was the super compressed and repetitive sound effects.

It helps that none of them are as easy to use as Flash Studio, also while you had the guarantee if the Flash plugin would work, your game did as well, it is a hit-and-miss with browser support for 3D APIs, with device drivers black list.

Here for example for Chrome, chrome://gpu, see the amount of disabled features across your devices.

This information isn't available to games, like in native code, thus it is not possible to work around issues preventing the rendering to work as expected.

Additionally there is no quality debugger available, only a few toy extensions when compared to Flash Stage3D tooling, or what is available for native apis.

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