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by uludag 7 days ago
Here's an example of this regarding the recent indie hit "Mina the Hollower." They were recently interviewed and asked the question "What is Yacht Club's stance on AI and has AI been used in the production of Mina the Hollower at all?" to which their reply was "We all got caught up in AI fever like the rest of the world, but we didn't find it was very effective for what we're doing. Maybe our work just isn't that generic! We've found some ways it can help... like Google or a thesaurus, but it hasn't affected what's in our game." [1]

It's hard to immagine that even the best AI model would result in anything better than a marginal reduction in release timeline. Like maybe for such projects one could spend $X00,000 worth of tokens for maybe like a %single-digit-percent reduction in time to release. Marginally good, maybe even project saving, but not any larger a paradigm shift than Unity was.

[1] https://www.gamereactor.eu/mina-the-hollower-interview-discu...

2 comments

The conversation around AI in games is such a polluted mess of confusion and bad faith. I would hate to have to answer such an interview question.

Recently I came across a game on Steam that was getting review-bombed because the devs admitted to using AI on an entirely different game. By "using AI" I mean they admitted to using Cursor of all things. Not assets, just a coding assistant.

If we're going to get backlash for stuff as stupid as this, it's probably best to just keep one's entirely mouth shut about all things AI.

> "What is Yacht Club's stance on AI and has AI been used in the production of Mina the Hollower at all?" to which their reply was "We all got caught up in AI fever like the rest of the world, but we didn't find it was very effective for what we're doing. Maybe our work just isn't that generic! We've found some ways it can help... like Google or a thesaurus, but it hasn't affected what's in our game." [1]

Can you see how this intentionally coy and evasive answer was made specifically to not say "No, we didn't use AI." but still sound like "No, we didn't use AI." so that people wouldn't immeidately bust out pitchforks and start review bombing their game before it takes off?

Yeah, I get all forms of media are avoiding the appearance of using AI like the plague. I still think that what they're saying can still be taken at face value. Like if the game has a 3D sequel I don't immagine the time to release or quality would be outside the distribution of how long similar games take pre-AI.