alt Hacker NewsI've been working on a clone of Sid Meier's Pirates but with a princess theme (for my daughters).
I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple conclusions:
- AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly
- It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc
- Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g. what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective
- Playtesting alone + iterating still occurs at human speed b/c if humans are the intended audience, getting their opinions takes human time, not computer time
I've started using this example more and more as it highlights that, yes, AI can save huge amounts of time. However, as we learned from the Theory of Constraints, there is always another bottleneck somewhere that will slow things down.
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I have very similar experience. I vibecoded a foreign language practice app for myself. It works decent from functional perspective and I don’t see too many bugs. But the biggest productivity constraint I see is the time I need to spend using it in order to understand what is working and where the issues are.
I've tried a few game projects with coding agents - having never worked on a game before in my life - and the main thing I learned is that the hard part is designing it to be fun.
Coming up with a genuinely interesting gameplay loop with increasing difficulty levels and progressively revealed gameplay mechanics is a fascinating and extremely difficult challenge, no matter how much AI you throw at the problem.