Shepherd's Dog: A Game by the Most Dangerous AI Model

My Belgian Tervuren and I have a basic herding title and about 4 years of herding experience.

The sheep movement is excellent. You could make it even more realistic by having them favor lusher areas and by having one occasionally bolt spastically (hard mode?)

A handler mode where you play as a human and shout commands at the dog could be cool too!

“ can it build a game idea I've had for years, in a single shot?”

Do people do no research or introspection when they’ve had an “idea for years”? There are countless examples of this exact game. I played this on the Gameboy Advance! There’s like 50 of them on the App Store right now.

The standard “this almost certainly exists wholesale in the training data” applies, but I’m also interested in how you carry an idea for years and don’t notice this, or whether the “idea” here was actually “using this thing that’s been remade thousands of times as an AI benchmark”.

There’s nothing wrong with remaking an old classic formula, especially in game dev. It’s the describing it as “an idea I’ve had for years” that rings weird.

I think it’s impressive that an LLM can take you to a local maxima in one-shot.

But once you start maintaining it, improving it and fixing bugs, you’ll eventually need to rip it apart and put it back together again while understanding how it all works.

This is why I think the better approach isn’t to one-shot but to have the architecture in your head and build it up piece by piece, with the AI accelerating the code writing.

"a game idea I've had for years"

Bruv, there are already countless games with this exact mechanic...

The article’s title seems needlessly dramatic, the article itself doesn’t reference the LLM’s danger.

The title could have been just “Shepherd’s Dog: A game by Fable 5”.

As far as I can tell it is possible to get this sort of quality game with a properly tuned harness out of one of the cheaper models.

Looks kinda like "Sheepherds" which came out recently.

However as others have pointed out the idea is a common one, probably because many people are exposed to sheep and sheep dogs and farming. Which further reinforces a previous point I made that all human work is derivative and barely anything actually original.

But that's why it doesn't matter! Make that game/app/website that someone else has made before, make your own interpretation! The beauty and uniqueness is in the skin not the flesh!

I sure do miss Fable. It just knew how to do things and do them well. Sad it’s now blocked.

Enjoyed playing it, here's the direct link to play as otherwise you have to click from the article to the GitHub and then find the correct demo link

https://vnglst.github.io/when-ai-fails/shepards-dog/claude-f...

Forces me to rotate to get warning message to disappear (works fine on portrait, but regardless forces me to play with two hands..), when rotate doesnt even fit on phone.

fROnTEnD DeV Is DeAd

DeSiGN Is DeAD

Cool idea tho, could be a fun game if if the UX wasnt so hostile.

Brilliant marketing here in the title

Playing on iphone13 mini.

It instructs me to rotate my phone. The pasture doesn't get any bigger, but now the top bar blocks half the screen. The tooltip about rotating stays in the middle of the screen. Unplayable. There's a music note indicating sound, but I never heard the dog bark.

It's exactly the kind of unpolished slop I expected it to be.

BAA VRAM EWE

Now next game - The Boy who cried wolf! Wolf!

I didn't even have to play. Immediately after opening, some notification about rotating my phone is obscuring the instructions and I cannot read them.

That’s one tired sheepdog.