alt Hacker NewsThis was made in 2 days and 91% of the Max 20x plan, as the author stated on the Reddit thread, so roughly ~$200. Supposedly, existing free assets were used and weren't generated.
I'd say demos like these stand to profit the most from LLMs, if the goal is to make as much as possible in a few days: a barrage of quests are easy to generate, so are gear choices, and some skills for the initial 9 classes to pick from. A human would generally spend a lot of time here, thinking about whether the class/skill choices fit their world, what type of progression is fun and isn't. It's also where player testing would be important for a game to set good pacing and balance the difficulty.
Of course, the game itself is barely playable, it randomly stutters when I walk too far away from camp, the character controls are unintuitive, etc. A lot of this stuff could be chipped away by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself, getting a feel for what you want the game to be. That by itself should require a game to take more than a few days, if we expect others to play it and enjoy it. Something simple like movement controls could take many game iterations to iron out, and those aren't hard technical tasks.
Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.
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> a barrage of quests are easy to generate, so are gear choices
Yeah that sounds like WoW retail heh.
Kill 200 boars.
Kill 300 boars.
Kill 250 boars and use this sword.
Kill 251 boars and use this special sword.
I heard about a better sword over there. You have to get past the 200 boars.
Wow, thank you for saving me from the boars. Please take this Boar Bane sword. You should try it out on 200 boars.
You'd be a fool to spend more than 30 seconds on it if you'd played an actual MMO anytime in the last five years. It's immediately apparent how poor quality AI-generated games like this are.
The plans have weekly limits, but are charged monthly. So this is actually only about ~$45.
> Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.
I don't know what that means. I can post something random on social media and there is a chance some person will spend 10 minutes on it. I don't need an LLM nor any money for that effect.
> by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself
> a human would generally spend a lot of time here,
This was always the hard part - game engines, asset libraries and all other services / SDKs were always making code-generation cheaper every generation.
Releasing a bug-free, thoughtfully built product requires a lot of attention and product skill.
>Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.
Does this excite you?
> a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans
"Create" is doing a lot of lifting here. As you (and the original author) mentioned, almost everything was assembled from downloaded free assets and libraries. Almost everything is a copy-paste. The Fable part is linking and debugging until it doesn't crash.
The main value proposition of LLMs is to wash the credit away from the giants and take it for yourself.
I wish we would give credit to Kenney [1] for making sick asset packs, mrdoob for making THREE.js [2], etc. than Fable for running curl/wget...
[1] https://kenney.nl/assets [2] https://threejs.org/