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 · 30m ago
> 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...
sbarre · 16s ago
I think "proportional" is the key word here..
zahlman · 40m ago
> 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?
yonatan8070 · 25m ago
Game companies already collect heaps of data about players, which mechanics they interact with, which mechanics they don't, retention, play time, etc.
I don't think it's much of a stretch to take this data over multiple games, versions, and genres, and train a model to take in a set of mechanics, stats, or even video and audio to rate the different aspects of a game prototype.
I wouldn't even be surprised if I heard this is already being done somewhere.
AlienRobot · 24m ago
Game developers will try anything before they actually write automated tests for their games.
nine_k · 7m ago
When you tweak game mechanics several times every day, keeping the tests useful is a large task. Basics can be tested. Map integrity can be tested. Most "normal UX" is hard to test, and even main functional tests tend to drift. (Source: a short involvement in actual gamedev recently.)
greesil · 1m ago
One can still write unit tests. I have been told from a couple different game devs that it's more because of release deadlines, and the cost of a bug is usually pretty small.
gmadsen · 24m ago
because it has millions of examples of that in its training data?
raincole · 1h ago
> 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.
nine_k · 18m ago
A bunch of ideas that had been tabled because of the difficulty of implementation were released once the difficulty of making a 3D world was somehow alleviated by Unity.
Maybe something else is currently holding back another bunch of good ideas in gaming. Once another threshold gets lowered, we will see another wave of good games enabled by by that, and a return to the average rate of creation again.
mirkodrummer · 1h ago
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
lkramer · 1h ago
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.
raincole · 31m ago
Correct, but it's really hard to comprehend how this is related to what I said.
zerr · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
ModernMech · 2m ago
LLMs have the same value proposition as no-code or low-code tools, and they also have the same failure cases. With pre-AI no-code tools, they also lowered walls but they didn't remove the barriers. The experience was a lot like we're seeing from the "vibe coders", like this post here:
"what's the point of vibecoding if at the end of the day I still have to pay a dev to look at the code anyway... I can't vibe my way through debugging, I can't ship anything that actually matters." [1]
That was the experience a lot of people had using no/low code tools, where you could make progress, but as soon as you hit a problem you are done, because overcoming it will require skills the no/low code don't teach or really support.
LLMs are only different because the interface is more accessible. But all the same problems are still there. AI is not a panacea.
That’s what a lot of people are missing about AI. You can do an exhaustive search which is effectively AGI. You already solved for a “solution” it’s simply a matter of searching for it. We are pretty close.
danjl · 2h ago
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.
AIPedant · 45m ago
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!
globular-toast · 1m ago
I don't know I feel like rewriting a backend for one card game into a backend for another wouldn't be that difficult, especially for the original dev. Once you've worked out how to represent cards and code the rules you're basically there for any card game.
Also, a refactor is by definition rewriting code without changing the behaviour. Worth knowing the difference.
latexr · 1h ago
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.
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 · 38m ago
> I strongly believe it's the communication among team members.
"Communication" within your own head is often also surprisingly difficult.
zarzavat · 20m ago
A healthy amount of my work is writing code, trying it out, and deleting it. This is something that the LLMs seem quite far from being able to do.
xdfgh1112 · 1m ago
It can automate a third of that at least. That seems useful!
overall I'd say around two working days. I used it as a test ground first for greenfield and then Brownfield development, so nothing serious, but I found myself in a loop of ever growing details I wanted tuned, more and more features (super rotations system, das, this and that).. I'd say it's maybe 10-20% of where I'd take it as a full game, even have a webgl version functional somewhere.. but I had to stop before I started making my ultimate Tetris since I don't want to get sued nor I have (probably) money for a full license to drive it through the end. I heard they charge a pretty penny.. but I am now confident I could drive it home and that's what I took, the experience, to other software development with llm now.
the other day there was an interesting link here on HN about parametric functions. I got an itch then as well, and within an hour or two a playground: https://www.susmel.com/graphy but also, details, details, details. If you know what you wanna see it's quite enjoyable actually.
singpolyma3 · 9m ago
If you want an all client side game... Why do you write it as though it has a "backend"? Why use different tech for "backend" vs the whole app?
rustystump · 8m ago
I have done a decent amount of hobby game dev including completing several games. The comments here i think show a strong lack of real game dev knowledge.
Coding is a hard part of game dev. Coming up with interesting novel mechanics or plays on known genres is rather easy but bringing them to life is hard esp the code. Multiplayer vampire survivors but with giant battletech mech customization. See, very easy. Good luck building that with an LLM.
This uses well known card games as the mechanics which is about as interesting as snake games. This is not a knock at the op. But it is clear many people here havent done much game dev from the comments.
estimator7292 · 13m ago
I like LLMs because it helps abstract code in a way that's more directly compatible with how I think about programs.
When I read code, it gets turned into something akin to an AST, where functions and calls are more of an abstract notion of input and result.
The LLM vastly simplifies the inverse process. Instead of having to go and find the way to represent an idea in code, or digging through my memory and code archives for an example, I can instead tell the LLM to write the boilerplate to initialize WiFi or whatever. It simplifies code into Lego pieces that I can assemble into a program that's more representative of my internal conception of the problem.
I've been flying through different programming languages with LLMs. When the text and grammar can be abstracted away, I can focus on the program. I was able to do this before LLMs, but with a lot more effort. Like, sure, I don't learn a whole lot about each language as I go, but that's exactly the point. The text and semantics of any one language should be largely irrelevant to the logical flow of the program itself. The text is nothing more than a semi-standardized way of representing logic in a form that can be parsed by machines and (secondarily) by humans.
First we abstracted machine code to assembly. Then low level languages like C, then higher and higher level languages until the machine itself became utterly irrelevant. It only seems natural that we'd further abstract these languages and move closer to the goal of programming instead of coding.
I don't think we've even seen hints of how this will look in the end, but I'm certain that we'll spend less and less time writing and more time programming.
kousthub · 1h ago
Asking for information - Is Go/wasm doing something here which React/JavaScript cannot?
znort_ · 24m ago
in this case, no. it's a client game and performance isn't at all critical, so the state and loop could be trivially handled by a regular js function. if at some point a server architecture was desired, it would be trivial to host that function on node.
my take: as a backend developer he was fixated with the idea of having a server no matter what (if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail), and as go was his main language he just went with that. then he figured out it didn't really have a point, but instead of just translating that simple logic to js he overengineered the whole thing and overcomplicated his design and build process by transpiling to wasm.
there are some bugs, though. i just won a couple of matches at escoba (very nice little game, i hadn't played this for ... decades!) and the game state wasn't properly reset for the next. that's probably the llm ...
garbagepatch · 1h ago
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.
furyofantares · 1h ago
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.
adastra22 · 1h ago
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.
Halian · 9m ago
AI slop must be abolished.
deadbabe · 2h ago
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??
rustystump · 48s ago
This is because LLMs are not good enough. Seriously, the bottle neck is still code, art, sound, etc.
There are a bunch of games made using heavy gen ai but it is usually for art and dialogue. Most players can tell quickly and drop the game. Games are fundamentally creative things and most interesting art work was not done in 5s with a prompt.
Profan · 2h ago
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 · 58m ago
> 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 · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
maloga · 23m ago
I think the reason is because you have to pay a non-negligible amount of money per game you publish, and most don't expect to make that back. In my case, making money wasn't my goal, as I explain in the article.
jayd16 · 2h ago
This is like asking "where are all the very polished and professional LLM books."
hiAndrewQuinn · 2h ago
About 50 games are released on Steam every day. How much higher are you suggesting this number should go?
og_kalu · 2h ago
I'm not going to say this is all LLMs but Steam game releases have exploded.
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 · 1h ago
>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.
zerr · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
Some people think the fun part is the requirements and gameplay, and code is the boring part.
Xss3 · 1h ago
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 · 2h ago
LLMs can't help much with assets?
schaefer · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
AI generated assets look like dogshit
risyachka · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
Why not just copy the mechanics of an existing fun game?
sdwr · 2h ago
If it's identical, you made a clone. If it's evenly slightly different, the design needs to be rethought. In a good game, the mechanics, assets, and game loop harmonize. Change one piece, and the balance shifts.
shortrounddev2 · 2h ago
Many people do and then sell nothing
qnleigh · 1h ago
This is a great analogy. There's a wider Fermi paradox here regarding business productivity. Where's the 10x economic output?
znort_ · 9m ago
in the stock market?
all2 · 2h ago
If they're like me, they finish something and then sit on it for a variety of anxiety inducing reasons. I've got a state chart library I'm sitting on that I'm quite hesitant to share...
leetrout · 2h ago
Share it!
tonyedgecombe · 2h ago
Yes, these LLM’s need feeding.
mattbuilds · 2h ago
I’m sorry but the difficult part of making games isn’t the coding, it is making something that is appealing and enjoyable to play. An LLM isn’t going to help with that at all. How is it going to know if something is fun? That’s the real work.
Also the idea that a dev who could making a game in 24 hour would create something professional and polished in 3 days is a joke. The answer to “where are all the games” is simple: LLMs don’t actually make a huge impact on making a real game.
socalgal2 · 2h ago
Easy! Ask the LLM to play the game and if it’s not fun to try again. just like when you ask it to compile the code and if it fails to try again
…Joking…. For now
shortrounddev2 · 2h ago
Code is not the hard part of making a game
bgwalter · 1h ago
[removed wrongthink]
youtubeuser · 1h ago
What model did you use?
mirkodrummer · 1h ago
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 · 51m ago
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 · 55m ago
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 · 27m ago
No need to think or guess. You can just bite the bullet and actually read the article. I explained why I built it.
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.
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...
How is AI supposed to simulate a player, and why should it be able to determine what real people would find engaging?
I don't think it's much of a stretch to take this data over multiple games, versions, and genres, and train a model to take in a set of mechanics, stats, or even video and audio to rate the different aspects of a game prototype.
I wouldn't even be surprised if I heard this is already being done somewhere.
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.
Maybe something else is currently holding back another bunch of good ideas in gaming. Once another threshold gets lowered, we will see another wave of good games enabled by by that, and a return to the average rate of creation again.
LLMs are only different because the interface is more accessible. But all the same problems are still there. AI is not a panacea.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1mudy12/th...
Also, a refactor is by definition rewriting code without changing the behaviour. Worth knowing the difference.
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.
"Communication" within your own head is often also surprisingly difficult.
overall I'd say around two working days. I used it as a test ground first for greenfield and then Brownfield development, so nothing serious, but I found myself in a loop of ever growing details I wanted tuned, more and more features (super rotations system, das, this and that).. I'd say it's maybe 10-20% of where I'd take it as a full game, even have a webgl version functional somewhere.. but I had to stop before I started making my ultimate Tetris since I don't want to get sued nor I have (probably) money for a full license to drive it through the end. I heard they charge a pretty penny.. but I am now confident I could drive it home and that's what I took, the experience, to other software development with llm now.
the other day there was an interesting link here on HN about parametric functions. I got an itch then as well, and within an hour or two a playground: https://www.susmel.com/graphy but also, details, details, details. If you know what you wanna see it's quite enjoyable actually.
Coding is a hard part of game dev. Coming up with interesting novel mechanics or plays on known genres is rather easy but bringing them to life is hard esp the code. Multiplayer vampire survivors but with giant battletech mech customization. See, very easy. Good luck building that with an LLM.
This uses well known card games as the mechanics which is about as interesting as snake games. This is not a knock at the op. But it is clear many people here havent done much game dev from the comments.
When I read code, it gets turned into something akin to an AST, where functions and calls are more of an abstract notion of input and result.
The LLM vastly simplifies the inverse process. Instead of having to go and find the way to represent an idea in code, or digging through my memory and code archives for an example, I can instead tell the LLM to write the boilerplate to initialize WiFi or whatever. It simplifies code into Lego pieces that I can assemble into a program that's more representative of my internal conception of the problem.
I've been flying through different programming languages with LLMs. When the text and grammar can be abstracted away, I can focus on the program. I was able to do this before LLMs, but with a lot more effort. Like, sure, I don't learn a whole lot about each language as I go, but that's exactly the point. The text and semantics of any one language should be largely irrelevant to the logical flow of the program itself. The text is nothing more than a semi-standardized way of representing logic in a form that can be parsed by machines and (secondarily) by humans.
First we abstracted machine code to assembly. Then low level languages like C, then higher and higher level languages until the machine itself became utterly irrelevant. It only seems natural that we'd further abstract these languages and move closer to the goal of programming instead of coding.
I don't think we've even seen hints of how this will look in the end, but I'm certain that we'll spend less and less time writing and more time programming.
my take: as a backend developer he was fixated with the idea of having a server no matter what (if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail), and as go was his main language he just went with that. then he figured out it didn't really have a point, but instead of just translating that simple logic to js he overengineered the whole thing and overcomplicated his design and build process by transpiling to wasm.
there are some bugs, though. i just won a couple of matches at escoba (very nice little game, i hadn't played this for ... decades!) and the game state wasn't properly reset for the next. that's probably the llm ...
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.
There are a bunch of games made using heavy gen ai but it is usually for art and dialogue. Most players can tell quickly and drop the game. Games are fundamentally creative things and most interesting art work was not done in 5s with a prompt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
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.
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.
Watching LLM generating the code doesn't help with producing the dopamine.
Both groups wanted to make games.
So it’s interesting to think about what the gaps are between fulfilling a single prompt and completing a project.
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.
Also the idea that a dev who could making a game in 24 hour would create something professional and polished in 3 days is a joke. The answer to “where are all the games” is simple: LLMs don’t actually make a huge impact on making a real game.
…Joking…. For now
Because if you have nothing, let me remind you that talk is cheap.