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Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

starchild3001

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. The real grind is in all the invisible layers on top; balancing the loop, tuning difficulty, creating assets that don’t look uncanny, and building enough polish to hold someone’s attention for more than 5 minutes.

That’s why we’re not suddenly drowning in brilliant Steam releases post-LLMs. The tech has lowered one wall, but the taller walls remain. It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. LLMs are doing the same thing for code, and image models are starting to do it for art, but neither can tell you if your game is actually fun.

The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? That’s when we start moving beyond "AI as productivity hack" into "AI as collaborator in design." We’re not there yet, but this article feels like an early data point along that trajectory.

kaiokendev

> It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts.

But we did? We've come a long way from the limited XBLA catalog. It didn't happen overnight, but doubtless we wouldn't have the volume of games we have today without Unity, Godot, Gamemaker, Renpy, RPG Maker...

zahlman

> The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged?

How is AI supposed to simulate a player, and why should it be able to determine what real people would find engaging?

raincole

> we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game

We definitely saw an explosion of good indie games by around early half of 2010s. Whether it had anything to do with Unity is another moot point.

mirkodrummer

even indie games are painstackingly hard to develop, don't make the mistake of associating indie with easy, rather harder i'd say if you go solo or with a few others in a very high risk job

raincole

Correct, but it's really hard to comprehend how this is related to what I said.

lkramer

I don't think the post you replied to says otherwise, but Unity meant there was now a path with professional grade tools without spending a fortune. It definitely did create a new wave of indie games, some of them amazing.

zerr

My litmus test for generative AI: generate a complete spritesheet for a 2D pixel art action game, e.g. only for the battle tank or main hero movements. No success so far.

smokel

Mind sharing what you have tried? Have you considered training a diffusion model on pixel art, and then conditioning it on a 3D model?

pjmlp

And the main reason why actually making a game with interesting gameplay is more relevant than discussing what is the best language to do a game on.

nahnahno

This is not true in my experience. Cranking out code is obviously the bottleneck, unless you have the luxury of working on a very narrow problem. The author describes a multi-modal project that does not afford this luxury.

danjl

As a much lower bar, I'd love it if more of the LLMs used for coding were actually multimodal, accepting images of games as part of the context. In general, LLMs are far better at generating web apps than they are at pure 2D or 3D games that use graphical APIs. There's far less training data, and there's no way to test anywhere close to what you can do with testing on a DOM. In an interactive game, with physics, animations and game logic, the AI just falls on its face because of the complexity.

benbreen

I realize this isn't the same thing as your point about images as part of training data, but just flagging it in case anyone isn't aware: Claude Code lets you copy and paste images into terminal. I've been designing a "universal history simulator" game for use in my history classes lately, and it is really helpful to be able to make a mockup of a ui change I want and then paste it in, rather than trying to explain it verbally. Also good for debugging graphics issues.

null

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fxtentacle

cough how about 24 hours?

https://nordicgamejam.com/

I've been participating in these for way longer than our current breed of LLMs or GenAI or engines. Back in the day, your best option was Microsoft's XNA and C#. (Unity had not been invented yet.) Plus most art looked like hand-drawn in paint, because it was. Still, we saw plenty of enjoyable games each year. And some made it to a wider audience, like Baba is You or Braid.

The coding was never the bottleneck. I strongly believe it's the communication among team members.

zahlman

> I strongly believe it's the communication among team members.

"Communication" within your own head is often also surprisingly difficult.

danjl

The LLM started with a three month headstart, both in terms of code, using the previous game as a template, and more importantly, all of the learnings and mistakes you made in the hand-coded pass.

latexr

Not only that but it was also their first game, meaning they faced a ton of unknown unknowns which are no longer there. If they were starting to program a card game today without LLMs they would still be able to apply all the knowledge and insights they gained from the previous experience; it would take significantly less than three months.

AIPedant

Yeah, I figured this was clickbait but my jaw still dropped a bit when I saw this:

  I cloned the backend for Truco and gave Claude a long prompt explaining the rules of Escoba and asking it to refactor the code to implement it.
How long would it take the human dev to refactor the code themselves? I think it's plausible that it would be longer than 3 days, but maybe not!

sneak

[flagged]

k__

But they're right and you're not addressing anything

fsloth

I don’t get these arguments.

Just because LLM learned the entire internet does not mean it can’t 10x a developer.

Were all standing on shoulders of giants - LLM or no LLM. LLM gives you extra pair of ladders. That are wobbly for sure. But ladders still.

Using LLM invalidates nothing and the 10x stories are totally plausible.

The plagiarization argument is to me moot - most of us are plagiarizing previous work, weather we know it or not.

null

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virgildotcodes

[flagged]

fsloth

” but it only did so by stochastically parroting hallucinated slop”

I’m not sure what the argument here is. That you should only use the most primitive tools available?

”LLMs suck” arguments sound exactly like ”IDE:s suck! True engineers writes everything in notepad.exe”. Or ”debuggers suck! Use only printfs!”

People have different ways of cognition and different strategies of problem solving and tool use. The fact you can’t understand other persons tool use is not an argument against those tools. It simply points out the tools may not be usefull to the critics mode of cognition or problem solving. Not that the tools suck.

kousthub

Asking for information - Is Go/wasm doing something here which React/JavaScript cannot?

garbagepatch

The front end is still react. But I'd be curious to know if LLM's are less prone to errors generating code for strongly typed languages over others like Javascript.

adastra22

In my experience, a massive YES. At least with agenetic models that have an iteration loop, and in languages like Rust where the type system is strong enough to prevent categories of bugs.

furyofantares

From experience: A static type system is MUCH better for agents than dynamic. I've done a few projects both ways - the agent is just much, much better with the static system because it sees compile errors right away, and also has access to better static analysis tools. I don't know how much the types themselves help the LLM, it's better context but more tokens, but the agent seeing errors is just a huge difference.

It's also much easier for you as a developer to digest the code if you need to refactor because you got lazy and accepted some slop.

mirkodrummer

I don't see the point of exposing something that looks so unfinished, unpolished, with bad looking graphics, ugly loud sound which multiplies on overlapping events and with a subpar ux. I'm sorry for being so rude, but what's the difference between this and the same game made with scratch by a kid? The latter i can recognized it is made by a kid and i'm glad it's his learning journey. As a senior developer I would be ashamed of showing a game in that state, cherry on top made in React, total non sense

epolanski

Can you show us what you have shipped solo and share how many users it has?

Because if you have nothing, let me remind you that talk is cheap.

mirkodrummer

The only reason I can think of is some sort of virtue signaling, like to promote one self. But even then why not spending ~6 months and super polish the game that would make you look like a rockstar? Eventually using ai in the process to learn where it can be useful... otherwise i don't understand

maloga

No need to think or guess. You can just bite the bullet and actually read the article. I explained why I built it.

deadbabe

A developer who can build a game by hand in 24 hours could probably build and publish something very polished and professional on Steam within 3 days using LLMs, which leads to some kind of software Fermi paradox: where are all the games??

Profan

The part of this that always confuses me is like nobody's aware gamejams exist, this has been a thing long before the LLM craze and people have been producing decent games on very limited timespans already, but people are forgetting how insanely high the bar is now, LLMs do not even remotely begin to fix the problem of your competition being incredibly stiff.

Just look at something like ludum dare and all the top entries (out of thousands of games submitted) are all usually quite polished given the timespan.

sarchertech

> are all usually quite polished given the timespan

The open secret is that they might not start coding or building assets until the start time, but they have spent a lot of time thinking about the ideas before then (even when the "theme" isn't known before hand people tend to make ideas fit theme with tweaks), which just speaks to the "code is not the bottleneck" thesis.

sheepolog

As a Steam-based game developer, I am starting to use AI more and more in new projects for asset generation (images and text) as well as some help with code. Here are some of my ideas for why we haven't yet seen a huge increase in steam game releases due to AI:

1: Even with AI, it's a lot of work to make a full game. When most people think "I have a cool game idea", they're usually imagining something polished and non-trivial, possibly 3d. You could make a short text adventure in a few days with AI, or a very simplistic 2d game, but anything more ambitious (like 3d) is going to take a lot more effort.

2: Releasing on steam requires you to pay $100. I imagine this is a substantial deterrent for "3-day projects", unless you think it'll sell $100 worth.

3: There's more to game development than creating assets and writing code. The author of the article recreated an existing game, which sidesteps one of the most difficult parts of gamedev: design. Creating a compelling game is surprisingly difficult. Granted, you don't need a compelling game in order to release on steam, but I myself have made many prototypes over the years which I've abandoned because the idea just wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be.

4: I've made a few prototypes with AI assets, and one issue I frequently run into with image generation is: it still takes a fair amount of work to generate the same character in different poses, facial expressions, outfits, etc.

5: There is still considerable prejudice against using AI to make game assets. I think some people (myself included) are hesitant to release a game with lots of AI generated assets at the current moment, for fear of public backlash. Eventually that will calm down and it will become more socially acceptable to use AI to generate game assets.

I am bullish about AI improvement over the next decade, and I think we'll gradually see all of these issues resolve themselves as AI improves. But at the present moment, it's not quite as easy as the article makes it seem.

TechSquidTV

I've been "able" to make likely decent games for a number of years now. Code and 3D I could potentially have covered. That's no longer what scares me.

Having a good and semi unique idea, is a rare. If I had a great game mechanic idea, the rest would be trivial.

Say you do get a good game loop together that you feel will be successful. You will also now need to loop in art teams for artistic direction, music, character design, etc. A good game loop isnt enough, it needs to be presented in an equally interesting and unique way.

Finally, there is the risk. There is a massive time investment in making games, and you are catering to an audience that is not only accustomed to pirating but finds it morally righteous to steal your work. This is why app developers prefer to make iOS apps. The customers are accustomed to paying and have little interest in pirating.

post-launch and even before that, your job becomes paying and convincing streamers to play your game constantly in the HOPE people start to notice it.

All of this stress and work to hopefully just make an ok amount of money. I have so many excellent games in my steam library by indie devs that gave up after one or two very successful games. And I doubt it's because everything was going so well.

hiAndrewQuinn

About 50 games are released on Steam every day. How much higher are you suggesting this number should go?

og_kalu

I'm not going to say this is all LLMs but Steam game releases have exploded.

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

mattmanser

Still seems to be roughly following the pre-AI trajectory though.

Which is really easy to argue it's more down to Unity + successors making game dev accessible as it starts in 2015.

No huge spike since Claude code got released or anything like that.

og_kalu

>Still seems to be roughly following the pre-AI trajectory though.

Not really. The jump from 2023 to 2024 is bigger than the jump from 2019-2022 in raw numbers and 2020-2022 in %. So the jump of 3 to 4 years happened in a single year.

jayd16

This is like asking "where are all the very polished and professional LLM books."

zerr

Delegating all the fun of making games to LLMs and leaving only the boring part for yourself puts you in the infinite procrastination mode.

Watching LLM generating the code doesn't help with producing the dopamine.

brookst

Some people think the fun part is the requirements and gameplay, and code is the boring part.

Xss3

Games dev at my alma mater was split into two courses, bachelor of science (which focused on the technical side) and bachelor of arts which focused on 3d modelling, animation, concept art, etc.

Both groups wanted to make games.

macleginn

LLMs can't help much with assets?

schaefer

But image generation and cloning a visual artist’s style is one of AI’s apparent strengths.

So it’s interesting to think about what the gaps are between fulfilling a single prompt and completing a project.

shortrounddev2

AI generated assets look like dogshit

risyachka

This.

You may as well buy a shooter game starter pack or whatever that can save you >1year of coding, no llm needed.

Code is not a hard part.

Making mechanics fun and good assets is what is hard and takes forever.

Sure you can use llm to write a generic game, but its easier to find same game on github and just use that code, why would you write it again with llm.

deadbabe

Why not just copy the mechanics of an existing fun game?

bgwalter

[removed wrongthink]

youtubeuser

What model did you use?