It's nice to read. I've been developing games with ai but putting a lot of hard work into the design and development. I'm afraid to share them with a wider audience because the anti ai sentiment in the community right now is so strong.

> I'm afraid to share them with a wider audience because the anti ai sentiment in the community right now is so strong

Find your audiences and cater to them, haters will always be around and will always hate as loudly as they can.

Who are they to judge the creation process of another person's desires without being involved in any sort of way other than being another human with an opinion on the process used?

The way we were vs who we are now. Be passionate! Offer fun games, entertain your audiences!

The audiences exist, but there's ten of you for every one of them. There is a market for low effort - always was - but AI has saturated it worse than ever.

Use AI for the things that aren't art, but craft. And accept that no one will pay for the craft, so the more things you resign to be craft-not-art, the less reason there will be for anyone to play, let alone buy, your game.

I've yet to see an LLM made game where the prompter actually spent any real amount of "saved" time on making it fun.

Fun is a dime a dozen. You can have an LLM tell you jokes all day if you want to. Casino games are fun too. You almost certainly want something more than fun.

I think this discussion highlights something interesting:

Our society is moving towards a more one-dimensional conception of enjoyment, or in other words, "base fun". Not to say that simple fun is bad, but I think it would be a shame if life enjoyment were reduced to straightforward fun and nothing else.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last five weeks poking at an MNA and fluid dynamics solver for Minecraft, of all things. That’s the kind of fun I like. It’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it?

Heavy use of AI, of course. I’d never have gotten anywhere on my own; I’ve got my hands full just playtesting everything.

But you're

* not selling it

* not expecting to get the attention for it that someone would get from e.g. porting Sonic to the Amiga.

That makes all the difference in the world.

It's a game. Fun is the literal definition of what I'm looking for

Yes, but tastes differ as to what fun is, and endless banal dialogue in Claudish would, for most people, wear thin as quickly as smalltalk with chatbots.

AI driven development doesn't allow you fine enough control to really implement anything specific, you're stuck with whatever generalities the model derives from the prompt on top of whatever random changes and bugs it introduces between iterations. One could take care of those things outside of an LLM, but let's be realistic - for the vast majority of people "making the game fun" means adding "make the game fun" to the prompt and calling it a day. This is why the technical implementation by LLMs constantly improves but things like affordance, graphic design, level design etc so often fail.

So you would be right if you only get a single prompt of limited length, no assets, no documents, instructions to iterate until complete, and an hour of wall clock time.

So ...ok... there's a few fable 5.2 demos out there that do crazy things with even that.

But yeah... possibly we're more in agreement than not.

If you write hello world in python or slap some paint on a canvas or blow into a concert flute with no practice; it's painfully obvious that you're not done yet. You have a long way ahead of you to make something that looks or sounds like something.

In the case of LLMs and image generators, you often do immediately get something that looks like something. It you're a "most people" you'd be forgiven for thinking that you're done, and that that's all it can do.

But that's not true at all. If you're a "some people", you might just realize that You're not done yet . Not by a long shot. That's just a starting point. Bring in more tools. Work in layers. Write 10000 prompts on a single model and throw the results away, just to get a feel for the latent space. Do it again for 20 more models. Have an LLM do research into algorithms on the half that's less important to you. Have one dig up textbooks and papers on the half that's more important to you. Read them. Ask "Has anyone had this idea before?". Look up those artists and writers. Read their works. Be inspired. Now you might finally have a spec for your model that isn't just tropes. Get to work. Write your first 100000 words and put them aside. Now you might have enough skill to design a plot that holds together. Etc. etc.

And a 100 important things more that either I don't know or hasn't even been invented yet.

Work the problem step by step. ;-)

A new thing is: you can apply your artistic vision without needing a gigantic team to help you. That's very neat!

Of course I wonder, what if a large team did get together? How would they work? What could they build?

AI driven development allows as much control as you're willing to put in. You can have it make single digit changes if that's the amount of control you wanted