Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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Kids? Forget the kids. This is awesome for everybody. I'm busy making 'adult games' (not that sort) that I always wanted to make, but lacked the artistic/sound/etc competence to do so. And while I hope to make a buck off them, I don't even really care. Even if somehow they failed, in the end I'd have stuff that I wanted but always lacked certain skills to complete.

I don't think people are yet appreciating how much LLMs are going to change the world, especially not the doomers. People are just jamming the present into the future, with greater efficiencies. But it's nonsense. The cost of cognitive work will approach $0 which is going to send the raw value of cognitive output to something close to $0.

So the 'winners' will be whoever fills the resultant vacuum in the economy. That will probably be a mixture of social, physical, entertainment, and other such domains. But it's all so hard to predict. We've lived our entire lives in a completely agrarian society, and we're seeing the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It's easy to predict super-farms, but those aren't going to be the 'real' winners.

Have you published the games anywhere? Would love to see what you've made.

The 'winners' will be the holders of capital, same as always, but it will be giga-gasoline on the fire. The rest of us will be dancing monkies for the owner class if we're lucky.

> I don't think people are yet appreciating how much LLMs are going to change the world, especially not the doomers

Read that sentence out loud. Slowly.

> This is awesome for everybody

...except people who actually enjoy games and want high quality games to play, of course.

Down here in reality, platforms like Steam are being absolutely flooded with generic, ugly, low-quality AI-generated games, which are not only drowning out the human-made games people actually want to play and making it impossible to find them, but are also preventing them from being sold entirely in some cases due to human reviewers not being able to keep up with the pace of new game submissions[0].

So, thanks for your contribution to that, I guess.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valve-admits-its-run...

There goes the neighborhood, amirite? Who let all of this riffraff in?

Perhaps other sites beckon.

The game from this article is quite fun and was literally a one-shot from a relatively brief prompt. I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality. Generic? Sure, but that applies to nearly all games anyhow. With all barriers to development coming down obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems. The review system (and meta-systems like getting your game to streamers, your own reputation, etc) still works well to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there seems to be no reason to yet expect such to stop working well.

In the end the biggest winner in all of this are going to be the players, due to competition. That competition will both bring down prices and bring up the minimum standard of quality for a major success.

> I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality.

I would. Maybe our standards for quality are different, but I'm willing to bet that if you showed this to a bunch of people who actually play games regularly as a hobby and have some standards for them, they would most likely agree that, even ignoring the obvious "AI look", a simple 2D game that can't even pull off natural-looking walking animations could never be considered anything but low quality.

> obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems

This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at Steam's most recent Next Fest - it featured over 8000 games, twice as many as the last one, the vast majority of which being low effort AI generated games. Yet the number of gems that rose to the top was not higher than before. If anything, it was lower, as most players simply gave up looking after having to scroll through hundreds of AI games. Such games can never be "gems", no matter how much you try prompting them to be.

Did you have fun playing the game? Because I'd argue that if you showed this game to bunch of 'real gamers' as you're effectively concocting here, their metric would be the answer to that question, rather than seeing if they could find a technical flaw. Because in the end all that matters for a game is fun, and this game certainly scored well on that metric for me, and I suspect the vast majority of people.

Do you think they had fun? Did you read their comment?

Definitely. The reason I ask is because right now if you go through this thread there seems to be about a 100% correlation between people who are down on the game and those who are down on everything LLM. If this was 'published' 3 years ago there'd be nothing but praise, and it's not because the beat-em-up genre radically changed in those 3 years.

Games are subject to taste, but I think there are also objective elements. And this game just objectively feels and plays great, which is a remarkable achievement for an LLM, because it's a genre where it's easy to get things that look right but don't feel right. For instance Sacred Citadel is a game that was made by a studio with over a decade of experience, published by a publisher with decades of experience, and it's worse than this game - much worse. It got the look right, but it felt/played terrible.

The fact that a single guy can casually one-shot games dramatically better than what passed for a [relatively] big studio title a decade ago is testament to where we're at. And I think that's freaking some people out. I suppose that freak out is reasonable from one perspective, but from another it's just shaking your fist at the clouds. Even if all LLM advances stopped today, what we've already unleashed is already way more than enough to change the game forever, and things are never going back to how they were. And, of course, we're not stopping today.

I think you have the converse effect as well; people who are overly llm-pilled are often completely uncritical.

I hadn't tried the game since I was on my phone when I wrote this comment, but now having played the game, it was exceedingly boring to the point I don't get why you're trying to convince people that they're lying about how fun the game is. It's just not interesting!

Then it's likely that beat-em-up isn't the genre for you, because this is a very solid entry in the genre. If you've ever played a bad beat-em-up you'd be able to see the strengths more clearly. A huge thing is that this game feels like it has weight in the attacks, and that's really hard to do. That's a subtle mixture of responsiveness, sound effects, animation (not just movement but also text/visual fx/flashes/etc), and more. And the hit boxes seem to be pretty much perfect, which is another aspect many games miss on. Then there's lots of nice subtle touches - invincibility frames, juggling, bosses with phases/knockdowns/cueing, and much more.

Nothing revolutionary, but a bunch of different parts all working together well that are generally implemented at a very good to excellent level. That's way better than most can say. Of course the walking animation, like the one guy mentioned is hilariously bad, but fixing that's also just a prompt away. Oddly enough I didn't even notice it when playing.

I find it funny you talk about how great the animation is, before immediately conceding that the walking animation of the main character (perhaps the most important animation) is "hilariously bad".

Look, this is obviously from a technical perspective, totally mind-blowing! Like I never in a million years would have guessed this could be possible 5 years ago. That being said...it's still not very fun or interesting. I think you are mistaking that mind-blowing feeling with the actual end product being fun.

>The reason I ask is because right now if you go through this thread there seems to be about a 100% correlation between people who are down on the game and those who are down on everything LLM.

That "correlation" is a proxy for the people who don't want to consume low effort garbage.

Yet you still posted your comment.

What are you twelve?

>I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality

Just from looking at the screenshots, the art style is wildly inconsistent across sprites which leaves the "game" without any visual identity.

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