Yeah, the engines help a lot with rendering, physics, and scene/level building/making custom tooling, and a bunch of other things. They are honestly amazing tools.

AAA and indies now use the same engines for the most part

In game dev however, there's a lot fewer reliable open source tools around. You have a game engine, a small number of great plugins, and a lot of dodgy stuff. You have to/get to make a lot of things yourself.

The scope and complexity of indie games, even allowing for this, is still increasing staggeringly.

...and don't get me started on unreal engine physics and pathfinding issues, or rendering bugs in unity

Yes, AI tooling.

Indie games didn't get THIS good because of Unity and Godot, if you think that you're deluding yourself.

I've done amateur and professional game-dev and Unity and Godot existing don't make making an FPS any easier than before, engines have existed for a long time.

A solo dev can create (from scratch) an FPS engine, assets, music, levels from scratch over a weekend now.

This is only possible with AI.

> A solo dev can create (from scratch) an FPS engine, assets, music, levels from scratch over a weekend now.

And when they do, this is what we get:

https://i.imgur.com/w25SmDR.jpeg

This link doesn't work outside of the US.

It didn't work for me inside the US, either. https://rimgo.bloat.cat/w25SmDR.jpeg

Works fine in Sweden

Indie games have been this good for 10 years now?

Which good indie games, specifically, are you talking about here?

There's been a lot of good indie games recently (Queen's Domain[0] being a recent example that's taken off) but I don't know of any which are using an AI-coded engine or use AI-generated assets extensively.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1799840/Queens_Domain/

If we exclude AI art assets from that criteria, wasn't AI also used for coding in Mecha Chameleon, which recently achieved big success? Quite a few games have AI code in them. I know of a Korean game company too. It's just that labeling yourself as having used AI is marketing-negative, so it hasn't become widespread.

Just recently, someone used AI code to fix a Unity engine bug and hand-wrote the rest, and it still caused a huge uproar. It's a world where honestly disclosing that you used AI code is not a good idea.

I'm not talking about using AI to help code, which seems obvious, the parent commenter is talking about people building game engines and assets from scratch in a weekend. Meccha Chameleon was built on UE5[0], and Big Walk (the game you're talking about where the devs solved a bug using AI) is using Unity. Both of these games, I believe, took longer than a weekend to create.

[0] https://www.unrealengine.com/developer-interviews/meccha-cha...

I misunderstood what you said Thank you for correcting me.

>A solo dev can create (from scratch) an FPS engine, assets, music, levels from scratch over a weekend now.

What does "from scratch" even mean when using an LLM trained on existing assets, music, art and code? Why even bother with that parenthetical? No one believes an LLM creates ex nihilo like God.

Show me the AI generated game that's superior to Balatro, or Hades, Or Undertale/Deltarune? Cult of the Lamb? Expedition 33? Factorio? Kerbal Space Program? Ultrakill?

It not being easy means it requires actual effort and skill, and effort and skill are where the quality comes from. No one is ever going to care about whatever vibe-coded slopfest you had Claude shit out over a weekend. Being able to make low quality low effort shit quickly is not better.

But can't we then say that software engineering *has* advanced, when the tooling has improved?

No, because the quality of the tooling and the output they afford hasn't changed.