Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

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I really hope that highly polished and great games will still be loved and supported by players. We've seen problems with shovelware before, but the gems usually managed to get enough attention to be successful.

Children especially are extremely tolerant of complete garbage (I have similar concerns with animation) but I think targeting older audiences, respecting players by avoiding typical player-hostile bullshit (ads, in-game purchases, time gates, etc.) and really putting in the effort to make something special will still attract players.

It's going to be very rough for anyone trying to make simple arcade/flash/mobile style games. People will probably be able to vibe-code those games themselves well enough, but games with a well crafted story, amazing art and music, and satisfying gameplay will still offer unique experiences that you won't be able to just prompt your way into creating.

AI has the potential to give gamers something to play with for a while, but eventually people will get tired of poorly made AI reiterations of games they've already played and they'll want something new and actually creative. AI games aren't going to kill that demand for the same reasons AI won't be the end of books or movies. Making something that's really good takes talent and creativity and AI isn't capable of that. Most people generally aren't either. Even talented and creative people aren't interchangeable. If A Song of Ice and Fire is never finished I can ask AI to write the ending for me, but it's not going to be satisfying. Nothing stops me from writing the end for myself right now, and I can even make anything I want happen, customize the story and text for my exact preferences but it still wouldn't stop me from wanting to read whatever GRRM finally manages to release.

> Making something that's really good takes talent and creativity and AI isn't capable of that

I agree. You need to constantly inject taste and creativity via a lot of testing, feedback, and iteration.

With current technology, this still takes months to years of effort, depending on the scope of the project.

I feel that when you say AI game, it sounds like slop produced near autonomously in a single weekend.

There are other ways to fully use AI for software implementation and asset generation, but still apply standards.

One can spend a full day refining a single gameplay element to tune it into something enjoyable, or to explore and select assets that look great. This can happen with just prompting and testing.

Many skip the effort, and it currently of course results in a bad, barely working product.

> I feel that when you say AI game, it sounds like slop produced near autonomously in a single weekend.

That's most of the project I've seen people post about at least. Either actual clones of simple games, or just dreams of saying to AI "Make me red dead redemption but with pirates!" and expecting something playable.

If you spend enough time with AI you likely could come up with a great game. It'd probably take longer to explain to AI what you want, correct what it gave you, explain how you want to teak it, then correct that, etc. than it would just to code it yourself (for those who can code) and as the project grows there's a risk of it becoming unmanageable unless you have AI hyper-compartmentalize everything to fit each function within the limit of what it can keep track of, but that's going to have impacts on performance and maintainability too.

It may not be the most efficient way to do it, but as long as you put in enough time and effort on design, are willing to spend the time forcing the AI to get it right, and don't settle for less than what you envision, it could work.

In my opinion it's an order of magnitude faster with AI.

That things come out perfectly working without need for QA and refinement cycles when writing the code manually seems very unlikely, and the case where coding it yourself is faster than explaining the task to the AI does practically not exist.

> as the project grows there's a risk of it becoming unmanageable

I suspect that what you said there is not based on actual experience but rather something you imagine. In my personal experience AI has shown no issues working efficiently on projects with even 500k LOC.

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