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Comment by j45 | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that captivates many people who play games is imagining building their own.

It's understood that there's a massive new flood of games from new game creators that are using a higher level abstraction like AI to build games.

At a smaller level, it can sound like the differences between folks that used to build games using assembler only or a higher level programming language, which built to the point until there were higher and higher level tools.

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There’s two kinds of people making games (fully) with AI:

- I have a passion for making games but not the skill, and this lets me achieve my dream

- I can crank out games in an hour, and as long as I get 100 purchases over its lifetime I’m making money

You're forgetting one (I think people do this deliberately because they dislike AI, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt): those who are passionate about games and skillful, and can ship higher _quality_ at the same pace as before.

That’s why I caveated it with fully using AI. If they’re using AI as a tool within their workflow, it doesn’t fall into the same bin as the vibecoded games that are being referenced in the article.

There are three kinds of people:

- those who needlessly reduce things to binaries

- those who articulate nuanced positions that tend to confuse and bore people

- those who lose the plot entirely by making self-referential meta-points

- those that tremble as if mad

As an experienced dev but who hasn’t done any game dev since my teenage years (I’m 40 now), I can say that getting anything that meets my standard for “this is worth showing to anyone” is really high and I’ve spent dozens of hours working on a few games and don’t really like any of them yet. But it’s been a lot of fun. The open models and an RTX 5090 can crank out models that are good enough that Astra can clean them up in Blender and get you a pretty good asset pipeline. But good looking assets do not a fun game make. That requires a lot of patience and small tweaks to get something that feels fun. But if you want a full 3D game with ray tracing and beautiful HDR visuals and particle effects, that stuff is easy.

This is a good point, if you could describe it sufficiently to that standard, do you think it might be able to get close?

The latter is definitely the challenge.

Someone who's played a lot of games and can keep iterating seems like not always a bad thing.

I'm on the verge of strategy 2, because I've been doing strategy 1 and financial pressure keeps derailing me.

My heart's not really in it though. Would be a lot more convenient if it was though.

A lot of those games are attempts at cheap cash grabs more than "I can finally make my dream game".

I remember reading a lament by a journalist in a video game magazine like 25 years ago "why don't they invent tools that would make game making easier for people like us who don't know programming?"

Well it seems we are here now.

Monkey paw curls.

Using today's AI models make games is more like doing a Unity Asset Store flip than a higher-level abstraction. I mean, in a sense, just gluing together bought assets is operating at a "higher level of abstraction", but in a categorically different way compared to using a higher-level language or game engine.

You know it's an interesting question. If an amateur makes a terrible game and puts it on Steam, is that slop? If they use AI to make a better game, is that somehow worse?

Good point, slop isn't new, it's the volume and speed that has changed.

Slop isn't only a description of the quality, it's also alluding to a level of cynicism. Someone pouring their soul out into a flaming turd didn't make slop, whereas a professional team using ai to pump out hundreds of fairly well polished, gripping, pleasant games with no new ideas or soul in them are making slop.

I heard writing works the same way. If you actually want to make money, you pick a popular genre, and you write something very predictable.

(Also, turns out making money is non-optional for most creative people. Someone once snapped at me, "is money all you care about!" I replied "yeah, reliable access to food and shelter is pretty important to me.")

It seems to mostly come down to do I want to do the predictable thing in my own kingdom, or as someone else's serf. (Or just yolo it every time. I've been mostly doing that and honestly would not recommend it.)

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