This is the saddest blog post I ever read. Asking a machine to “make it fun”… I really hope this is the bottom of the barrel, because I am not sure I can take more.
Yeah, so sad. You hate games that are “designed by committee”, just wait for “designed by a machine regurgitating the most common designs by committee”.
I had this nightmare of a gaming company where the owner sicked a multi-agent swarm on scraping the internet to do market analysis on what trends would make a successful game. Had another model craft a prompt to turn it into a game and past that prompt to Opus5.5.
I swear to god I am close to just going off grid. We are so past the pale
My dream is to make video games for five people and not even care if they enjoy it
Make it fun - No mistakes!
be creative, make it look great
Looks like we just found our new Executive Lead Developer boys! Tells us more about these prompts.
We leverage the latest AI models to deliver seamless gameplay workflows. We are disrupting traditional video game paradigms with cross-platform, competitive prompts
It’s crazy to me that people can get so excited by pumping out slop.
What do they think creativity is?
They don’t care, they just want to make some easy money.
Most of them want to just create without learning how to. The problem is there’s a reason why it’s hard and takes time. It’s not enough to have a good idea, you need artistic vision to make the art to back it, logic to make the structure that holds it together and a ton of other pieces. Thinking an averaging machine trained on thousand of stolen products can skip all those processes is dumb at best: you will create slop that will appeal to no one and probably will run like shit. If they only understood that they are also doing actual damage…
Good luck competing with the 120000000 other sloppies lso made by people who were also capable of typing the prompt “can you make me a cool game and also make it really fun”
What is your value proposition? Why on earth would I pay money for this when we live in an age of entertainment abundance?
This is not where it is. It’s when the next person really does have a great idea, and doesn’t need to beg a publisher or spend thousands of hours honing an unrelated skill like blender to build a prototype.
That, or they legitimately hate the indie gamedev scene, because they don’t make edgy flash game inspired stuff.
Like… Newgrounds circa 2002?
What do they think creativity is?
Pretending to be a human as a fish on the Internet.
Quote from the post:
Now turn this into an actual game - quadruple the size of the playable area, introduce fun game mechanics, add a plot that isn’t too cliche, some twists, a magic system, make it really good
To be fair, the post is about the models’ capabilities, but, that doesn’t prevent people from publishing “games” “made” like this.
You make a fair point. If one is excited about the advances in this technology, I can see how this is development is in fact noteworthy. I do not share the excitement for legions of low-quality generated content.
The reason is money, not creativity. If the money spent on tokens doesn’t yield a profit, nobody would be releasing 5 games a week.Edit: didn’t realize that it had already been mentioned. I’ll change to something else to avoid parroting;
You should give it a try and see find out yourself. The issue is not that people vibecode their own games, who cares. Let them enjoy themselves. I believe that the fun part is watching your game come alive and tweaking it to your preference. The issue is rather that a lot of people choose to publish them, which I suspect is because of the potential profit it may have. My question is why aren’t there a website where people can share, or even sell their vibecoded games for those interested? That would benefit all since sharing assets, prompts, MCP, and what not, would lower cost of spent tokens.
Edit 2: A quick search answered my question. Apparently there are multiple websites dedicated to serve this purpose already.
I’m working on a website to help improve things! I’m looking to make a steamdb - like but all about categorizing games on whether they’re tainted by genAI or lovingly hand-crafted.
oh hey that sounds cool—WAIT I KNOW THIS GUY
🤢
That one “battle drones” screenshot looks like it just copied a Warcraft 2 level verbatim.
Thanks, i hate it :(
I’m baffled by all of the people who think individuals who just want to make a game without needing thousands of dollars in a development budget are somehow evil. No. AI isn’t perfect and probably never will be. However, it helps people to put their ideas into something that they can’t do and can’t afford to hire someone for. AI, in a way, democratizes the ability to create projects without the need to hire out work that can’t afford otherwise. One day, someone will put out a great game using AI, because it id possible. The code won’t be perfect, but the game will playable and enjoyable - but thousands of people will boycott the game, because a 15 year old kid who doesn’t run a development company made it with AI. Not everything made with AI is slop. It depends on the people using it. Yes, there’s tons of slop out there… and quite a lot of it was written by humans without AI. Personally, I don’t care how the game was made, as long as no people were harmed by the process. Do I think AI companies are acting insane with building data centers every damned where? Yes. However, AI has helped me do things I don’t know how to do, don’t have time to spend years learning how to do, and can’t afford to hire anyone to do because… this shitty economy we’re all slaves to. AI production isn’t always slop, but some people will ever accept that. That’s sad, because they knee-jerk react when they learn that someone used AI because they couldn’t afford to hire people to do it. If the person actually creates a good game with it, though, those people will miss out because they hate AI so much that they ignore reality and brand everything AI as enshittified. South Park, ne South America, uses AI quite well to troll Trump. Iran uses it to troll him too, and personally, I love the results. If a single person uses AI to make a decent game, and someone absolutely will, I’ll play it. So will many others. So many people wear tunnel vision blinders in their hatred of AI. Fine. Don’t participate. It’ll be your loss. But please, stop spamming the universe with "all AI produced products are slop. You don’t know that, and the evidence will eventually prove you wrong. I’ll put money on that, because AI is already solving mathematical and scientific problems that we haven’t been able to solve for centuries. Ask yourself this: if you have leukemia and AI is used to find a cure, will you refuse the cure because it’s “just AI slop?” Don’t get me wrong, the tech bro billionaires pushing AI down people’s throats are wrong. I see those people as just evil, but AI is just another tool. Declaring it all bad is just foolish, though. Right now, it produces more bad than good. That will change, though. Mark my words. AI is here to stay, the genie is out of the bottle and won’t go back, because people are using it to do good things, and just like products made by human hands, a lot of just sucks, but there are pearls and nuggets of gold there too… just like everything made by humans. If AI sucks, it’s because people suck even more.
Public service announcement: there is a massive puddle of word soup on aisle 72—I repeat: there is a massive puddle of word soup on aisle 72.
Hey, I think you dropped these paragraphs.
¶ ¶ ¶
Personally, I don’t care how the game was made, as long as no people were harmed by the process.
The process itself is harming, as well as the tool and what was used to make it, so you can stop.
Every process that is a byproduct of good ol capitalism is harmful. If that’s our line in the sand then why are we even using computers.
Half of ais harm is caused exclusively by large businesses for the purpose of selling people ai.
The other half is purely legal bullshit copyright nonsense thats stupid regardless.
Large corporations need to fuck off, their data centers shut down and the ceos hung by their toes over a pit of lava.
But the rest of the argument is wrapped to tightly into the bullshit that is modern copyright for me to give a flying fukk about.
If we had a reasonable copyright system I would lean more towards understanding the outrage but as it is. Meh
I don’t think you realize the scale of pollution your beloved data centers are doing, is way more than half. You’re so wrapped up in your convenient delusions, that I’m not going to waste anymore time debating with you: even if copyright law is badly written that doesn’t make theft alright.
Did I say a single word about loving data centers? Or AI? Because I didn’t. What I said was, in nutshell, that AI, like almost everything in this world, is not a black and white issue. I have zero love for the billionaire tech bros who are raping and pillaging in the name of AI. However, I don’t see everyone who uses AI as a villain or asshole, nor a thief, nor uncreative. AI is a tool, and it can be valuable. It creates more than just slop, and that’s been proven. So stop putting words in other people’s mouths.
Are you even replying to the right guy? I fucking hate the god damn data centers. Where in the world did you even get that from?
What part of basically asking for a lynching over Data centers do you not understand?!?
I’m actually fucking baffled right now.
no u
I wasn’t sure about this, but all the sucking at the end really brought it home.
I really have to agree. GameDev is hard and takes a lot of skills. If you want to create a video game on your own, you need to know Programming. Game Design. Graphic Design. How to create Music & Sound. Storytelling. Marketing. Some people manage to do that, but it’s hard and takes a lot of experience.
I really understand why people use AI to help them here. If you are not a graphic designer, generate some AI art. If you do not know how to code, use Claude. Ask some AI music tool for background music. That does work and it is totally ok.
People will cry that you can maybe ask artists or musicians for help. Yes, you can do that, but finding and managing a group of volunteers is another skillset that not everybody has. And if you’re working on a hobby project, you might also not have the budget to hire artists for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
The author of the article is right: AI is able to create games. And it is a joy to create your own games.
I really have to agree. GameDev is hard and takes a lot of skills. If you want to create a video game on your own, you need to know Programming. Game Design. Graphic Design. How to create Music & Sound. Storytelling. Marketing. Some people manage to do that, but it’s hard and takes a lot of experience.
All you need is effort and creativity. And, my god, of you need AI to create things, you’re brain-dead and lazy.
Volunteers? Have you joined a game jam recently? Every day there are thousands of people all over the world doing ALL this for FREE.
I’m sorry; I’m a game dev and I am sick of this attitude. We literally have ALL the tools we need to create our own games already. There is literally no need to use AI. MAKING A GAME DOESN’T COST YOU AN ARM AND A LEG, LET ALONE THE PLANET.
Kids are learning and making games without any monetary input. I met a 14 year old who made a kick ass rhythm game using Scratch. And you know what sucks? When she goes out to find a job using the skills she’s developed over the years, will she be able to find an entry level position and earn a living? Probably not, because it seems that we’re no longer valuing hard work and the joy of learning.
Thanks for sharing that! It’s super nifty ^^
It’s cute and these little jam games are important but pretending they’re the same as what studios do is fairly delusional.
I have dire news for you, itch.io is hosted in the cloud! In a data center! The horror!
- A game jammer who always codes their own engines during the jam because using a pre-built engine is cheating.
Woah there. Pulling meaning where there is none - who’s pretending that jams are what studios do? And besides, have you seen how an indie studio works? Because I have, a great many, and there’s no one way to do it. We’re all flying by the seat of our pants and driven by passion.
And you expect one person, no money and an LLM prompt to be able to match a small and experienced indie team, or AAA studio of thousands of people? Get real.
And who said anything about data centres? They’ve been around far longer and are much better off being used to serve the users than an LLM.
And why would you even code your own engine during a jam? Why would using an existing engine be cheating?
I have so many questions that I don’t want to know the answer to.
We haven’t really valued hard work in a long time here in the good ol us of ass sadly. ):
Aw… :(
I agree with your last quote there, and that’s why I don’t use AI to create games for me ^^
It’s why I don’t use engines!
I couldn’t imagine using an engine for a jam game and getting what I want out of the jam.
But I can respect that decision, because for some folks it’s the vision, for others it’s the marketing, for some it’s making the assets.
There are a lot of pieces that go into making something that stands out.
For me, it depends on what is defined as an engine.
If an engine is a suite of prepackaged tools and editors—e.g. Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc.—then I dislike game engines.
If an engine is more like a library, or a framework—e.g. Raylib, SDL, LÖVE, etc.—then I very much prefer working with an engine.
I suppose the difference is akin to operating systems: on one hand, we have full suites of software, such as the BSDs and Godot; on the other, we have lots of seperate software, like Linux distros and SDL (+ the code and asset editors of choice).
My exception to all of this is writing ROMs for console emulators, and fantasy consoles like PICO-8.
My point is, engines are fine.
Even though I like my jam games hand-rolled C or JS with assets made in paint (or laid out in text!) it’s a matter of taste. Even unity, which I could shit on at length, is fine.
Running around hosting purity tests about engines, or AI, only hurts creators who are just trying to make something by whatever means are available to them.
