The other night I carelessly made an infinite runner game while watching TV and the feeling of sheer abundance quickly faded into a bit of depression. Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.
What makes or breaks just about any indie game is a brilliant core loop, or on the other end of the spectrum a novel "feeling" / aesthetic. Latter especially visible in the horror genre. Then after the original, there's the tail of variants that can do pretty well for the next 6 months of so, and it's exhausted, which is the part AI affects the most as of now.
There's countless examples of indie games crafted with care over multiple years, with great looking (but sort of bland) graphics, that have not done well.
Further, even before AI, a lot of people whose games didn't make it, did not at all have a grasp on what counts as a finished and well crafted game. Same applies to music. It's clearer in sports where (for example) the insanity of a marathon ran in 2:00-2:10 is easy for all to see.
Generate the synths, the DAW, the bass-line, the vocals, but never the whole thing. You can (and should) still compose by hand. The act of composing should be fun enough that you want to do it manually, otherwise you're not really the one making the song.
Also, a minimal amount of music theory knowledge helps significantly.
I don't use generative UI either but I don't question why someone would be interested in it. The world is bigger than you think.
Also, making a DAW using agents is just fun.
I know we've spent the better part of the last century debating what "art" is, but I think we have fairly conclusive evidence that it isn't this.
No intention behind it, no human connection, none of the things we seek to find in art (including video games).
Everyone needs to read the famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). He wrote about the Industrial Revolution, but his points become ever more salient in the age of AI.
His central thesis is the concept of "aura": the difference between a carefully crafted work of art and a mechanically mass-produced, but otherwise identical, object. When you describe something as "hollow", that's what's missing.
Huge numbers of people are going to spend billions of hours playing GTA6 though, and that won’t be scarce once it finally arrives.
Playing online games in servers across the late 90s and into the 2000s, it was easy enough to pick up connections with regular players. Forums existed for organising events, sharing screenshots of things we didn't expect, and for making mods together. Custom maps and all sorts of things were produced through the decisions made with blood, sweat, and tears.
imo - using LLMs for anything creative - coding, prose, documentation is anti-community building, and anti-creative.
I can relate to this, today when I play games I do still try to get them 100% complete but new generations do not seem to appreciate that. I see that they complete the game with minimal hours and move on to the next one.
This is why we have to go to Mars.
Even if it's exactly the same, for a kid week of fun feels like life formative experience because it is. For adult a week of fun passes almost instantly because time itself is perceived differently. And you are back to baseline which might feel depressive if your baseline is not great.
That's subjective.
This is just a lack of ambition. LLMs allow one to make far more sophisticated games than ever before, even as a single developer, and if doing so development still takes many months even if running an agent 24/7.