Or the small Battle Wagon around the height of a child quintupling in size the next frame. Kiddos having fun is the main mission though :)

that kind of stuff happened routinely in the 70s-90s in mecha anime franchises that were designed/drawn/animated/produced by large teams of adults..

Mobile Suit Gundam and Evangelion are both notorious for this. Is Eva-01 40m or 100m tall? If you trust the technical literature then you'd be forced to deduce that the tanks in some of the scenes are squirrel-sized -- and these decisions and scenes are produced by committees.

This nephew game is indistinguishable from 90s arcade game styling.

I was alive in the nineties. This game is radically different. For one, characters used both their legs when they walked in the 90s.

The things I noticed:

- punch and kick don't seem to have differences in effect, just animation - bosses don't have obvious gimmicks to beat them

But the main take-away for me is that this takes me back to computing in my youth, where you could dream up a project and bash it out in a few days. It wouldn't be polished, it wouldn't be perfect, but it would be yours. It would do what you wanted. Computing was ours, it didn't yet belong to big corporations controlling what we could do and how we could do it.

Projects like this give me hope that a new generation will experience that. Aiden won't ever forget this game, even if it's nothing special to you or me. Aiden won't ever forget that feeling of imagining a change, and having it happen. The price for it would've been somewhere around $300-$500, so not exactly broadly accessible - making AI efficient enough to run cheaply should be the main goal of humanity, but we're letting computing get locked up by a few rich sociopaths once again.

Related: I don't see how any kid is going to have the motivation and patience to learn how to program a game like this from scratch now when you can just conjure it up with an LLM.

Why would I sit through years of education? The number of competent programmers is going to drop significantly, but also, people are not going to learn the patience and commitment necessary to do hard things, which is part of learning to program.

That was already happening before AI, with in-house game engines dying off and all converging on the same quasi-realistic style and often the exact same assets.

Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.

Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.

I'm kind of hoping that the youth will recognize that stuff that can be made with AI is just nothing special anymore, and find something that is (or still is) special. I don't know what that is, maybe something that AI can't do on a fundamental level (maybe something physical?).

(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)

don't really think there will be anything - this is an entity that can learn anything (even physical things) faster than any human or the collective of humanity for that matter.

I've found analog photography to be a rewarding hobby, and although an LLM can help me refresh my memory, the overall experience is certainly not something that an LLM can replace.

Yeah, it can "learn" anything except how to have a fulfilling emotional connection

sure. so we'll spend the rest of our lives dating and chatting?

anything that doesn't explicitly involve interaction with a human is RLable. frankly even those things are as well.

We also connect to people through art and play. So if we automate those things, then I guess we'll spend the rest of our lives living unsatisfying experiences.

anything that can be automated will be automated.

If you "automate human interaction and connection" you simply no longer have those things. Which, from the top down, seems to be a goal, to isolate people from one another, make them 100% disposable cogs. As this chick in the streets of Paris said in some YT short when asked about "AI", fuck that, humans want to be together, you can't beat that. And why would we even want to... it's easier, and more sensible, for a person to seek help or get over themselves, than for them to drain all humanity out of the rest of humanity just so they themselves can blend in without having to change. Fix the root problems, rather than spending such huge amounts of resources and intellectual integrity for workarounds that, at the end of the day, are kind of sad and cringe.

The thing I’ve noticed is that if anyone can do something, many will. And then, like always, the challenge will be in doing something unique.

What if they find it special because they build memories with the AI games they play? Is that something you hope doesn't happen?

>What if they find it special because they build memories with the AI games they play? Is that something you hope doesn't happen?

I hope the kids learn that putting in work to create something by hand has value beyond the result itself. I hope they try making art, games, books by hand, and learn from the experience of failing, and revel in the joy of success. I hope that through years of doing this over and over they start to develop their own unique perspective on life, and then contribute that perspective back to the world through art.

This style reminds me of those mobile game ads with helpless characters that need YOUR help not to freeze or something. Probably the exaggerated facial expressions.

You can change the stylization with LLMs. I think what we're seeing is simply any barriers to code/design/art/music/etc completely going away.

But those barriers going away now means that the starting point is much closer to where the finish line used to be. Like a few years ago this would have been an upper tier beat-em-up. I think we're still early enough in the window that I'd still call this upper tier, but the reality is that it's also now something that an uncle can vibe code for his nephew over a weekend.

In general I think this is going to be very good for everybody, but it's going to completely destroy the software as a problem-solving industry, and make the software as entertainment industry much more competitive.

This is extremely far from upper tier.

Barriers going away means you get a lot more at the bottom and middle of the pack, but a game is more than the sum of its parts, and as long as LLMs do what you tell them, you need to have real talent to make good games.

Was this game fun for you? For me it certainly was, and ultimately that's all that matters to me. And that's why I said I'd classify it as a top-tier game because IMO most games that get released, slop and 'professional' alike, simply aren't fun. Even on these forums there's plenty of people posting thinly veiled hopes of going viral along the lines of 'I spent 5 years to fail with my game' when as lovingly hand-crafted as the games may have been - they invariably just weren't any fun to play!

I found it stiff and weird. The "art" is screaming Saturday morning cartoons which I successfully evaded since even as a kid. TMNT aren't nostalgic for me because by that time I was like 12 and didn't even think to interact with that baby stuff, and I wouldn't have dreamed it would be put on the test by adults later. And art and charm is all that could have saved this, because as a game, if you replaced the art with wireframe hitboxes, it's just nothing.

Double Dragon I have fond memories of, and this is why this one bored me after 30 seconds, because it's so meh compared to even the worst game of that type of that era that I played.

> Like a few years ago this would have been an upper tier beat-em-up.

For a 48 hour game jam, perhaps.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict the opposite.

I think “the youth” are going to grow up with a Cambrian explosion of styles, mashups, callbacks, revivals, etc.

Right now a vibecoded game just uses the generic style. But you could easily imagine the kid saying to Claude “rebuild this game but in the style of that old show [Samurai Jack | Ren and Stimpy | … ]. We are so early in the tech curve, market penetration is still very low, and the “creator-years” in the medium is tiny; it’ll be 10x in a year if not more.

AI is amazing at style transfer, and so there’s a huge payoff for exploring and learning references to existing artists.

(I also think copyright will die pretty soon for similar reasons, that’s a separate take though.)