It's interesting that while gamers are pretty critical of games made with AI/LLM assistance there are some game developers really going full steam ahead (pun intended) with coding agents for game development.
The website redesign is incredibly cool too, sure it starts the fans on my potato of a laptop (and stutters a bit) but it runs well enough that it's actually made me interested to give it a go.
I'll save everyone a click and encourage them to check it out too, not just the blog post:
I'll speak not as a professional gamedev, but a hobbiest. I enjoy offloading a lot of the work to LLMs because that's what a game engine did anyway in the before times. A lot of core logic in computer graphics, user input, dialog systems, etc... are incredibly tedious to build and have been built a thousand times over.
my guess would be virtually all games are going to made with AI assitance. People are going to have to get over their AI phobia and just judge the quality of the result, there's awful things and good things.
Interestingly, a number of my non coder gamer friends are having a lot of fun lately making their own games using AI.
>gamers are pretty critical of games made with AI/LLM assistance
I think this is a misinterpretation of this general dynamic.
Gamers are pretty critical of "art" made with AI assistance. That includes not just graphical art, but voice over work, animations, writing, etc. And most of that criticism surely comes from the fact that it's apparent and ruins the willing suspension of disbelief while gaming.
But I don't think most of these gamers care at all if the game's code was made with AI assistance. I don't think they care at all at that level, just like they don't care what language the code is written in, the frameworks and engines used for the game, or even things like the developer environment. I'm sure there are some diehard anti-AI folk who would disagree, but those people are more "anti-AI" than they are "pro-gamer".
I'll add that even on the art front it's really just a matter of survivorship bias. Gamers hate AI art because it looks bad, is clearly low-effort, or is even because its putting real artists. But we're well past the point of proper AI assistance in art looking bad, and the gamers who don't notice it will simply not care about it.
Would Duangle's tale for NOWHERE have made a diversion into making the programming language NONE if AI was involved?
Would Voxel Quest have been nearly as interesting if all the dev blogs were just "I asked claude to do X, Y, and Z"?
I don't doubt that most don't care, same with how most people fairly don't care about most things, but I do think those that like to immerse themselves in the whole journey as well as the result are probably not feeling great. At the very least, this one doesn't feel great.
On the train jumping demo, I'm noticing a lag after pressing space bar before I see my character jump. I remember even with the 8-bit Nintendo, the controller would be polled and my sprite immediately updated every 60Hz screen draw cycle. Despite all the new technology, that simple thing doesn't happen here.
The website redesign is incredibly cool too, sure it starts the fans on my potato of a laptop (and stutters a bit) but it runs well enough that it's actually made me interested to give it a go.
I'll save everyone a click and encourage them to check it out too, not just the blog post:
https://littlejsengine.com/
EDIT: And it looks like there's an ongoing jam for it too, mentioned in the blog post:
https://itch.io/jam/littlejs-jam
Interestingly, a number of my non coder gamer friends are having a lot of fun lately making their own games using AI.
I think this is a misinterpretation of this general dynamic.
Gamers are pretty critical of "art" made with AI assistance. That includes not just graphical art, but voice over work, animations, writing, etc. And most of that criticism surely comes from the fact that it's apparent and ruins the willing suspension of disbelief while gaming.
But I don't think most of these gamers care at all if the game's code was made with AI assistance. I don't think they care at all at that level, just like they don't care what language the code is written in, the frameworks and engines used for the game, or even things like the developer environment. I'm sure there are some diehard anti-AI folk who would disagree, but those people are more "anti-AI" than they are "pro-gamer".
I'll add that even on the art front it's really just a matter of survivorship bias. Gamers hate AI art because it looks bad, is clearly low-effort, or is even because its putting real artists. But we're well past the point of proper AI assistance in art looking bad, and the gamers who don't notice it will simply not care about it.
Would Duangle's tale for NOWHERE have made a diversion into making the programming language NONE if AI was involved?
Would Voxel Quest have been nearly as interesting if all the dev blogs were just "I asked claude to do X, Y, and Z"?
I don't doubt that most don't care, same with how most people fairly don't care about most things, but I do think those that like to immerse themselves in the whole journey as well as the result are probably not feeling great. At the very least, this one doesn't feel great.
And I invite everyone to join their Discord: https://discord.gg/zb7hcGkyZe
The author is very welcoming and helpful.