alt Hacker News> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.
I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
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Indie dev here. Making games is hard it is one of the few spots in software where all disciples have to come together to make something compelling.
I've done a lot of programming on various sub sections of the disciple and it still remains to me the hardest one to crack for AI.
It's undoubtedly am incredible tool for accelerating output but I think it's going to be the hardest for ai to commoditize as a whole.
Speaking of game explorations/ideas enabled by LLMs, here is a 'craft anything' sandbox I'm trying to turn into a game: https://asciidia.com
most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the top
Built a custom tower defense type clone for a client maybe 10 years ago… Coding it up in Objective C & Cocos2d was fairly straightforward. Probably spent 50% of the dev time taking in feedback, balancing the values on everything, progression of items, etc. what i’m saying is the functioning game logic (code) was really only one part of it.
It is like writing novels: it is not the spelling or typing on the keyboard that is the bottleneck.
It is always the creative world building part.
The main criticism of the Harry Potter books are not spelling or sentence structure, it is the plot holes and contradictions in the world build.
The same holds for software.
I'm glad someone finally mentioned this. These are cute little interactive demos, not games. It has made me appreciate real game design much more.
Its because the people that are eager to develop with llms are talent-less and have no brain muscle of their own left, they're letting the connections between nuerons atrophy with every prompt they send (literally)[0].
Game design is hard. Back in the day I released 4 flash games. 2 completely tanked, 1 did ok, and one went quite well (hundreds of years total time spent in game).
There's a lot to getting it right, and like all software, you have to built it for your target market. There's no easy AI solution to getting a fun and engaging core loop. Nor is there one for building the right level of complexity and balancing the learning curve.
I think a lot of people who can't/don't code see themselves as game designers and had thought that AI would let them make games, and are now finding it wasn't really about the code after all. That, and if you can't code, vibe coding alone isn't really good enough for much beyond flash-level games (yet).