Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with LLMs

Re:Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with... by hcnews on Sunday August 24, 2025 @03:49PM (#45007151)

> What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI.

This is not true at all. I have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game. While I know a lot of good practices about software development and decade+ of FAANG experience, I don't know the intricacies or even the basics of game development.

I recently experienced this for a different usecase. As an experienced backend developer, I wanted to automate some javascript/browser stuff. I tried on my own for 2-3 days and had couple of prototypes but nothing actually worked. I spent 2 hours with an AI and I had a working solution. We even iterated together quickly and solved some runtime issues and the solution is working for me seamlessly now.

So, I definitely see value of AI even for coding for experienced developers like myself.

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Re:Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with... by whoknowsidont on Sunday August 24, 2025 @03:58PM (#45007243)

> have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game.

You're contradicting yourself. I promise it wouldn't take you months, unless you're just a really bad developer.

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Re:Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with... by __loam on Sunday August 24, 2025 @04:29PM (#45007493)

Don't be a prick in public man, it looks bad

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Re:Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with... by whoknowsidont on Sunday August 24, 2025 @04:48PM (#45007635)

I mean it's a simple fact that the baseline for creating a game, roughly using the average developer experience/capability, is not months. Making a _good_ game might take months, it often takes years.

And that's the part AI is not going to be able to help you with.

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Re:Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with... by 3036e4 on Sunday August 24, 2025 @05:27PM (#45007962)

Making a good boardgame, with zero need for programming, excluding artwork, is months or years of work. I would expect that much at a minimum for a (good) simple digital game, unless it is just going to sell on graphics and marketing alone (or luck).

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Re:Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with... by hcnews on Sunday August 24, 2025 @09:45PM (#45009439)

Maybe you are a games developer and are overlooking the fact that people have to first learn the basic apis/models/etc. of graphical systems, engines, etc. before using them. Not sure how you are saying that it wouldn't take a few weeks to code even a simple production game like chess or more complicated but still simple Jump king etc.

Just think of the speciality in which you aren't an expert, javascript/storage/networking ...

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Re:Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with... by whoknowsidont on Monday August 25, 2025 @01:04PM (#45016065)

I've dabbled and continue to dabble in areas where I know nothing about. And in this case, there's nothing super special about making a game.

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Re:Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with... by hcnews on Sunday August 24, 2025 @09:43PM (#45009428)

What is the contradiction? I am guessing it will take me a non-significant effort to learn game mechanics and code them etc.

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Re:Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with... by whoknowsidont on Monday August 25, 2025 @01:02PM (#45016039)

You've never worked on games yet you are exceedingly confident about your estimation or the difficulty involved.

It's not that difficult to get a base level game up and running; ESPECIALLY with modern tooling.

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