[uludag]

> 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.

[YesBox]

My bet is working through an abstraction layer (LLMs) will make crafting a fun game more difficult. The art of designing a (great) game is in the details. English is not sufficient to communicate the individual strokes of a brush on canvas.

Also, thank you for sharing your experience. I recently joined that subreddit just to see what people are creating and I too have been unimpressed.

[flyingcircus3]

For months, I've been thinking of how to express or name this idea that people misname the way other people use coding agents and make bad assumptions about what sorts of tasks they could be used for, seemingly all in the service of demonstrating how derivative the end results must be. So thank you for whatever you've done to help dislodge the blocker for me.

I think there is a model in a lot of people's minds that AI coding is exclusively handing off the thought processes and ideation processes to the agent, which seems to foreclose on the possibility that it offers the least friction of any other available method to translate the users thoughts into useful artifacts, some of which are the working software that is the primary goal of development. The model says something like "I don't know what it needs to consist of, but make me this thing I'll know when I see.". But there are also plenty of people who have spent the time learning these skills before AI came along, and remain capable of performing those feats without the ai, but realize they are even more capable to do those same things with AI, in volumes that would have been previously prohibitively tedious. And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever.

[skydhash]

> And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever.

I'm strongly skeptical of this argument, as there's only a few things you can not build a rough version and get something to ideate upon. Even with 3d games you can do design with blocks and buy models to have something to pinpoint the design.

[flyingcircus3]

This is still an incomplete model, in my opinion. You're still holding up what is possible as a non ai assisted developer as equal to the assisted one in the abstract, before adding in real world things like tedium, boredom, distraction, the ephemeral nature of novelty, frustration, and everything else that has derailed human software development, but inference engines are perfectly impervious to.

I can give you a concrete example: this week at work, it occurred to me that the 16 channels of expected and measured binary on or off test data I need to collect could benefit from a visualization because matching expectations will have visual properties that failures will not. So I had my AI agent create a script that encodes 16 channels of expected and measured binary wave forms over time, as a 32 channel 1Hz sampling frequency wav file, which I can view with audacity, which also has the necessary controls to measure time between transitions in the waveformms.

From hindsight, one could argue that since all of that solution consisted of rudiments of perfectly normal software that didnt need AI to be written or integrated, it was equally possible to create without AI. But knowing that could do it with the greatest of ease, for the total price of naming it, converted this from a project that required the motivation to figure out all of the necessary steps to one that just needed a good description.

[skydhash]

I do get your point about speeds and ease of producing working code. This kind of quick win can be a good example of AI assisted tooling. But I don't generate scripts that way as I prefer to have composable blocks that I can reuse later. AI is not great at reusable code.

Another things I noticed with AI assisted programming is the one track thinking. Someone has an idea, generate a working sample and then it becomes like a sunk-cost fallacy where they don't envision any other implementation choice or design. It's about adding more feature without taking a step back and assessing the overall goal of the project and if that feature is really needed.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has said it best:

  “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

This kind of cohesiveness is often missed in projects that are AI assisted because there's no refinement step. The product and the efforts are not tempered by real world usage.

[flyingcircus3]

But what about compositions of your reusable blocks an order of magnitude larger than you were ordinarily willing to manually compose? A lot of this misnaming Im circling around comes down to demanding that the ai user must be giving up their agency. Whatever you can name as a good practice you don't think an AI agent is a capable of employing on its own, I can retort that a human can demand the agent employ it, along with all of its other capabilities that outstrip the human typist.

[nwienert]

You have to have the models the create tools for you to paint.

I have a side project which is an experiment to build an interesting quick UI for local AI. As part of it I want a very very specific, interesting look involving shaders, animations, and so on.

I was trying to just get a prototype in place by prompting and it was going nowhere, just constant yo-yo'ing and never really getting what I wanted. This also was quite de-motivating and I found myself "yelling" at the model.

So I told Codex:

- Make this API first-class in our framework, with easy parameters (it had been sort of a hacked low-level thing)

- Add hot reloading to our system so I can edit it without any state loss or refresh

- Give me more knobs (X, Y, Z) so I can tune everything here as I need

- Add a HUD that lets me also drag sliders to tweak the same things

And I got my desired look within a few seconds.

The principles of good design and products have always been this btw, you need your feedback loop to be as tight as possible. Good design has always come from the ability to iterate incredibly fast, your brush needs to move precisely with your hands, and can't have delay from the time you put it down to the time the stroke shows up.

[theahura]

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

[Zanfa]

> Over time the gems will rise to the top

I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.

Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.

[RicardoLuis0]

while SEO has made search worse, i don't think it's the core reason why things are impossible to find, i think it's simply the fact that, over time, google has been butchering the ability to search for exact terms in favour of "natural language" searching, which makes simple things like "how do i make an orange cake" or whatever return useful results, but makes any actually technical query return a lot of pure garbage

[soulofmischief]

A man of culture! Motherload was great. There really were a ton of great flash games, both on corporate websites like Cartoon Network, on popular sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, etc. all the way to the back alleys like Albino Blacksheep.

These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.

[cardanome]

> You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer

That has been true even without AI.

Solutions to create games with barely any programming knowledge have existed for a long time. You can create a full featured Unreal Engine game with just using its visual scripting language.

Lots of amazing games have absolute dogshit code. It doesn't matter. You can write super simple, procedural code without any fancy abstraction and just get the job done.

Programming is the easiest part of game dev.

Plus you don't have to be a solo dev. Sure, just being a game designer might be hard but if you bring artistic skills to the table as well then you are golden and can partner up or outsource the programming if needed. Honestly people with an artistic background often do much better than people from a software engineering background who are used to overcomplicate things.

So no, programming was never the hurdle and AI doesn't help here. It just helps people to produce more slop faster.

[kg]

This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.

[theahura]

Not all the things that are good will rise to the top, but most of the things that rise to the top will be good. We've gotten pretty good at ranking systems as a species at this point, I'd say

[SpicyLemonZest]

It really depends on what kind of "good" you're optimizing for. I'd point towards Instagram as a good counterexample: their signup page says that you can "See everyday moments from your close friends.", but most Instagram users see very few such moments, because the algorithm points them towards ragebait reels and thirst traps. If there's a 100x explosion of games, I think it's very likely that organic discovery will simply stop functioning, and nearly all gamers will find themselves leaning on algorithmic recommendations that aren't aligned with what they'd really like to play.

[no-name-here]

But for your IG example, isn’t that probably because although most people may claim they want to see everyday moments from friends, people in real life actually click more on the “thirst traps” etc?

[SpicyLemonZest]

It is, but I don't think you can infer a revealed preference from that. It's perfectly consistent for someone to want to avoid thirst traps because they know they're too inclined to click.

[unleaded]

Strong AI enthusiasm like on there and poor taste tend to correlate pretty strongly. I'm sure there are lots of developers using LLMs to assist with the boring work of coding and keeping mostly quiet about it, still keeping it on a short lead & doing the more creative parts themselves. There have always been indie developers who hate coding and see it as just a necessary step to get their idea out the door, and they still make good games. All the dialogue in Undertale is implemented in a giant 5k+LOC switch statement.

[wincy]

Yeah I’ve been working on a game just for my kids, it convinced me to upgrade to Codex Pro and I absolutely wouldn’t release it to anyone until I felt 100% it actually was fun to play. It’s easy to get stuck not doing the stuff that can’t be automated. The crazy thing is that making the game pretty good looking (like Nintendo Switch level graphics) is basically trivial now and can be largely automated, maybe with a little Blender cleanup for your most important assets. That doesn’t make a game fun though.

[MachineBurning]

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).

[ngruhn]

I agree. I'm not a game dev. I had a game idea and vibe-coded it with Claude. I kinda got what I had in mind but the game is just not engaging. I don't even know what to prompt. I tried "how could the be made more engaging" but no good ideas are falling out. I just have a lack of intuition for this kind of development. And Claude doesn't help.

[solumunus]

That’s close to what I want Claude but just make it good! Hilarious.

[walterlw]

On the other hand it should be so much easier to port full games to mobile. For example Stacklands is a game that would feel right at home on a iPhone or iPad, but currently it's not an app I can download and play on a bus.

[thsbrown]

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.

[bombcar]

Making games is hard for the greatest game designers and programmers of all time.

We have had any number of quite competently programmed absolute flops.

[christoph]

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.

[sampullman]

I've built a few little games for myself both with and without AI, and completely agree. AI can help prototype an idea faster, or clone something very specific, but it can't make your control scheme feel good, invent a unique mechanic, etc (at least not yet).

[silvestrov]

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.

[thatguymike]

The next Jonathan Blow is going to be massively empowered by their tools and make something wonderful. Having fewer people involved can lead to a more focused execution of their vision - most amazing indie games are like this. But yes your average game isn’t bad because it’s hard to write C#, it’s bad because it’s hard to design great unique mechanics and levels, and it’s hard to see AI helping (indeed not harming) that.

[dannyw]

Let LLMs help you with coding. Design the game and the mechanics yourself. I can see this being an incredibly empowering tool in the right game developer's hands; but if you come into it with a token-maxxing / AI-maxxing mentality, I doubt you'll make a fun game to play.

[butlike]

I wonder if you could prompt for configurable values "knobs" like:

"Let's make a super mario 2D sidescrolling clone. I want the impulse, angular velocity, and gravity influencing the feeling of the jump to be configurable"

So you essentially design the parts that require detail while building up a custom engine

[kalcode]

Well I've enjoyed making little "flash" like games with AI. I have a SKILL.md for how to build out a pico8 game that it updates when it finishes a game.

I give it an rough idea, or none and have it make a game.

See if there something here you enjoy to convince you I do think AI can slowly as they improve make more variety of lightweight 15 minute games.

https://4rc4de.com

[deterministic]

I completely agree. The #1 thing you need as a game designer is taste. AI's doesn't have that. It will happily take your low-quality-seen-many-times-before game design idea and generate code for a low-quality-seen-many-times-before game.

[levmiseri]

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

[anon1094]

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.

[wincy]

I ran into this wall too. Someone here on HN said their general test is “make a browser only simple rts game with no AI and no multiplayer” What makes a game fun is very different than the engine of a game. My kid asked me to make a game where you brew potions. Okay, done. Adding ingredients, having physics to drop the items rather than “okay they just appear in the pot” (or worse it just says “okay they’re in there!”) Especially for kids there’s a physicality you have to capture to make it both fun and understandable to a seven year old.

Getting cutesie stylized 3D models is something that’s trivial with an RTX 5090, a ChatGPT pro subscription (unlimited image generation), you run Trellis2 plus a few other open source things in a pipeline that your agents can queue and it’s astonishing how much cool stuff comes out the other side. But the graphics don’t make the game fun at all, they’re just set dressing for the fun.

There’s been a lot of learning going from 0. “Okay, 3D model of a character. Oh, this model is useless since it isn’t in a T Pose I can’t rig it. What’s a rig? Okay, there’s a rigging ML model. Download that. Okay, how do I animate it? Oh, cool there’s a model for that. Oh wait my model has holes in it, that looks weird. Okay there’s an ultra shapes library that helps improve geometry. Whoops, that strips all the textures and shaders. Okay, trellis2 has a mode that takes an existing model and retextures it. Okay wow these look good, the characters are walking around! This goblin is break dancing! Okay uhh, what do you actually do in this game?”

Like it feels like that trap you can get stuck in when one part of something is trivially easy, so I have like 500 random 3D assets that are honestly pretty good looking for a game where the core gameplay loop is not developed at all because I have no idea what would make it feel fun. Because I can prompt and say “oh wouldn’t a Christmas village be cool?” And I wake up the next morning with 50 3D models of Christmas village stuff and characters and I say “wow, neat!” (It takes maybe 8 minutes end to end for the pipeline to generate one 3D model, so I just run it overnight). But then I have to manually place them in the world (if you let the AI do it in unreal engine 5 it places them via coordinates which become impossible to move inside the unreal editor).

The fun part is “wow, this is something I’m making with my kids, and it’s unique to us”. That’s what keeps me at it. I’ve never seen my kid so engrossed and excited to help me with something, she’s the one coming up with ideas and saying “what if we did this and that?” and then seeing those things become real is really neat. The bottleneck is there’s a dozen agents that can work on different parts of the game but it’s a chaotic mess.

Still, I’d imagine this is how people learn is by making something that’s a piece of junk then making something that’s better. I don’t plan on releasing my pieces of junk unless I feel like they’re actually fun.

[enraged_camel]

>> And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code.

But those games have already been designed a specific way, based on the developer's ideas and imagination and vision.

If you're the sort of person who always thinks along the lines of "I wish there was a way to upgrade spells" or "it would be great if you could open this door and see what is behind it" or "I hate the way orcs and goblins are friends, they should actually fight each other"

That has always been the issue with games: they capture the imagination... and then stop there. There's no way to expand them the way you want (except for submitting requests/wishes to the devs and hope they listen and add it in a short enough time period) and customization options are always very limited.

AI, on the other hand, empowers everyone to bring their own ideas to life. Sure, those ideas may not be great, or the execution may not be great, but at the end of the day it's a way to express one's imagination that would otherwise take years to do.