My latest game BossBattle[1] (html5, have a play) uses AI for graphics, some strobe effects, a C64 loading screen shader.
I have decided to lean in to it and I will document all the places I use AI in the game on my blog[2]. Not everything works, notably 3D assets[3] and sound effects.
There is a lot of human content… i paid for a lot out of my own pocket and have limited budget. It started in 2021 before chatgpt. LLMs cannot do everything and that’s not the purpose.
Generative AI makes me as an solo indie dev able to make the game. Without the AI the game wouldn’t exist
I don't think it's hate; the games market was oversaturated before AI, and it's even more saturated with it. Players have limited time and patience that usually doesn't work out in-favor of indies.
Making the game that OP made, a basic Simon-type color matching game, isn't that difficult. None of the vibe-coded games I've seen posted to HN would be difficult to make in any engine. If that or any other such game had been written by a human being and posted here it would be getting a similar reaction because none of them are any good on their own merits.
But because they're AI, and only because they're AI, people gas these things up regardless of quality, almost in spite of it. That's why people are mad. Not because they're "haters" but because people are flooding HN and the rest of the web with slop and insisting on being treated like masters of their craft.
And again, if a human had written this game in its entirety and posted it here, it would get flagged as spam, because it is first and foremost a bad game. Even as a "beta." And OP can't improve on it much because they're limited by whatever the AI happens to generate. Even just giving them encouragement is pointless.
"Games are impossible without AI" is a paltry excuse. My nephew, who isn't even in high school, is learning coding in school and is making games in Roblox. It's never been easier. If it's true that making a game in AI takes actual skill and work, as people claim, then making it in an engine is not at all beyond anyone's grasp.
If y'all want to shut up the "haters," make something with AI that's actually good, a game with a coherent visual look, well designed gameplay, an interesting concept, that's at least as good as a tutorial project for any existing game engine.
I spent quite a bit of time making games/social WebXR stuff in Three.js. There is unfortunately a ceiling to what commercial success you can have there. Sure there's all the .io games which see a bunch of kids playing games from their school computers, but as much as I'd like to see it, web games aren't going to be as impressive as native PC/Console games. It's not really technology, mostly just the market isn't there.
The models are pretty decent at building simple Three.js/Phaser games, but if you want to work with Unity/Unreal/Godot you're going to need a MCP or other tool to get them to work with the engine's tooling/context. I just so happen to work on one for Unity https://bezi.com
I will say, while I think the current models are very impressive with generating code for most game mechanics. They are still terrible at spatial awareness. Gemini Pro 3.1 is showing some promise here, the latest Opus/Sonnet models are...ok. But there's still a lot left to be desired. You also still really need to know how to make games both creatively and technically to pull off prompting a game into existence.
So are you going to vibecode your way to the next SimCity / Civ without knowing some game dev? Probably not right now and I think that's for the best. People want games that are creative and unique. But a passionate hobbyist who has never made a game, knows some programming, and has a vision for a great game now has an amazing tool set to build their dream game and that's pretty cool!
Shameless plug - and nothing so grandiose as SimCity but I built a pretty substantial 2D/3D blindfold trainer chess game. It's by no means "vibe coded" though, and there's a fair bit of manual work around the 3d modeling that I had to roll myself.
Even with that I'd still say 70% of the code was written using LLMs with the opencode agent.
If you want to see what the HN game dev community is building, I’ve been curating the list here (https://hnarcade.com) for the past months.
The output is quite impressive. And having spoken to a number of the developers, it does seem like AI has had a massive impact on delivering their ideas.
Awesome, I've submitted a game I made last year (https://blankwhite.cards) which was itself a remake of a game I made in 2019.
In my experience it took 5 years to find the time and motivation to build a v2.0 by hand. AI has since accelerated the production process to help me ship features that would otherwise have taken me another few years to even consider doing.
What if you get someone else to program it? By this logic, Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, Binding of Isaac, Mew-Genics) isn't a game developer, because he doesn't code.
Edmund McMillen isn't a game developer per se. As listed in his Wikipedia profile, he's a game designer and artist. He still did that work, though, and human beings still wrote that code. The end result is still an expression in part of his unique talent and creative process.
He could still be called a game developer in a general sense because "game development" doesn't have to explicitly refer to programming, as the game development process is multidisciplinary and multifaceted. But of course the dichotomy here isn't between "did this person or that person write the code" but rather "does a human who uses a machine to generate content deserve the same credit as a human who puts in skill and effort and does the work?"
Arguments equating the use of AI to using a compiler or photoshop or other tools fall flat because if those were equivalent no one would be using AI, the tools allow greater control and are less expensive. The entire use case of AI is that it replicates the creative process, not that it acts as a tool to facilitate that process for a human. AI can create assets and code that a person doesn't understand, and wouldn't be capable of replicating themselves, which wouldn't be the case using mere tools.
And yet AI people come up with these strained metaphors and false equivalences because they don't want to face up to the nature of what AI is, that it isn't liberating them from "gatekeepers" or freeing their creativity, it's commoditizing them and using them to generate content and putting them in a prison of their own device.
Oh please, just stop being silly. Being a game dev means you're building games which means you're thinking about the mechanics of the game and what makes something fun to play. The programming is not "game dev" and offloading it to an AI agent doesn't make someone any less of a game dev.
Totally! I'm sick of not being able to see what tools they use. In fact, I feel that we should also start tagging devs that use an IDE instead of properly coding games in notepad.
Call it whatever you want, the game wouldn't exist without them doing something about it. And because they did something about achieving their vision other people get to play the game.
How about we just call these people the game Producers instead. Thats what a producer does anyway right? They make decisions of how the game is built, what goes into it, ect, ect, ect.
>Or is the underlying 'brainrot' actually destructive to creative potential?
Creativity comes from constraints. Writing code hasn't been the hard part since the 90s. Deciding which things make for a good game and are worth spending your limited time on is where fun comes from.
AI makes it easy to spit things out, but it doesn't make things fun or good at all.
Writing code is not the hard part if you're a developer.
Otherwise it's an insurmountable barrier.
I think it's a bit like writing a novel.
Everyone's got a novel in them, but you absolutely need to know how to write to get it out. Unless you can dictate it but then... you could also hire a developer.
Those without the resources to hire a developer, without the years of education and practise to code at any level of proficiency, can now realize some form of their ideas.
I just logically can't see how the increased accessibility and output won't increase the amount of interesting games, even if 99% are slop (so is fan fiction, let them enjoy it).
I don't know, isn't it easier to learn enough programming to make a game, relative to all the other skills involved?
e.g. the programming concepts needed for Pong wouldn't take you more than a dozen hours or so. See how good you are at art or music after the same amount of time!
Time will tell! Certainly AI is unlocking a lot of stuff, a huge number of people who did not have the time or the special skills before to create games will do so. I can think back to my own start in making computer games, using Amos on the Amiga (vastly easier than C or assembly).
It's a separate question whether anything actually good will come out of it. It's incredibly unfair to look at any particular project and say: what, another clone of this or that done idea? Very few things are original in any time. Certainly I didn't make anything particularly original all those years ago. But, soon, there should be really something, if there's really something there. If it's not just burning tokens to copy older ideas. And we'll know it when we see it, this amazing thing that would not have existed otherwise.
I wanted to create a game (Pre-AI) and thought it would be easy. Turns out it is not at all.
Sure you might get lucky with the next Angry bird, but there is a whole range of skills required to make a good game, and actually get people to play it.
I even read a couple of books which gave me a better understanding of how out of my depth I was. Books were "Theory of Fun", "Achievement unlocked" and "The art of game design".
AI here appears to be accelerating the ability to see those gaps faster. I think without the understanding of those gaps anything created is going to be lacking.
I don’t really think AI would help much with the gaps related to the actual game design. It should allow for faster feature development, adding QoL, etc, but you need the actual game part coming from you.
I've build 10+ games which I am ashamed to show :)
Straight JS/html/css front-end with zero dependencies works well.
Ask for a node.js backend and can be instantly deployed as client/server or straight to html - multiplayer feels trivial.
C# Monogame works well for something heavier.
You can actually edit Unity scenes directly using the LLM as they're a readable text file which works ok, but Unity is bloatware when you can code it all yourself (it's an absolute nightmare of inexplicable bugs, do not use it. After updating to 0.62f from 0.48f my clang compiler now segfaults while building Webgl - luckily my team mate can do the builds)
The key is building exactly and only what you want and need. Make your design lean, suit the game as you are actually building it not a theoretical overengineered masterpiece - refactors are cheap later, but bloat will kill your project.
I've had my own rollercoaster relationship with Unity over the past decade, but telling people to roll their own game engine so that they can finally make a game is almost universally terrible advice.
People who want to build game engines should build game engines; people who want to build games should absolutely use Unity, Unreal or Godot in no particular order.
It's no different than needing to build a web framework so that you can make a website. The people who do it are often not even aware that they are procrastinating.
People who are making a simple 2D web game don't need an engine, with rare exceptions. Chrome's 30 million lines is plenty of bloat to build on ;)
Besides, in this context you're already outsourcing all the code to Claude or Codex or whatever. i.e. a "programmer" who has no problem handling the engine side of things.
That being said, most enginedev is creative procrastination. Randy's recent video on this is very illuminating — "I thought if I made a really good engine, making the game would be the easy part!" So he avoided actually making a game for like ten years...
Most 2D games don't even need an engine: you can just make the game "directly", on top of SDL or Canvas or what have you. (That being said, noob friendly stuff like Processing and Kaboom is great and highly recommended!)
--
Source: made lots of 2D games and a few engines. The engines were a complete waste of time. (Even ready made engines often did more harm than good!)
If I was making 3D games, then I would probably need an engine (but js13k begs to differ!), and it would probably not be a great to roll your own (unless you're going for something 90s themed :)
--
Edit: Most of my games are very "programmer art", or very retro. If I were an artist or working with artists, then an engine would be useful for that, for the visual side of things. Flash was probably unmatched in that regard
That being said, it's not that hard to roll your own level editor, so... ;) even that argument is questionable.
Edit 2: Also the web APIs are unfortunately kind of ass, so using a library (or engine) has the advantage of letting you avoid dealing with them directly for the most part.
Problems I've had with unity in my last 3 installs. All LTS default installations on windows. (I have delivered professional projects in Unity in the past):
1. Inspector for lists/arrays works once, crashes editor, must be restarted each time.
2. Race conditions in the basic animator functionality making animation events useless, killed a project because we couldn't edit the underlying code, didn't have time to redo animator-based functionality which should have worked in theory.
3. Segfaults in compiler -> 6 hours of debugging, gave up, still can't build reliably.
Each of these killed the workflow and therefore the ability to deliver the project dead, and were completely out of my control.
Vibe code your engine, at least you'll die on your own terms.
Unity is also just a fundamentally hostile organization waiting to pull the rug, as evidenced by their past behaviour.
Big plus for html/css/js, mostly Pixi 8 or around (I also have a couple threejs). Vanilla JS. I did this by hand before, but having the LLM tweak around the code and styling while I handle more gameplay related things makes this doable (otherwise I just would not have enough free time)
Im using UE5 which is arguably GUI heavier than Unity.
You can get around a lot of the GUI-heavy stuff by using C++ in preference to Blueprint, and/or developing some tools to help you decompile/recompile Blueprints.
It has a pretty cool remote control plugin you can install which can be used to simplify a lot of test cases through automation.
I have a relatively large amount of experience with UE4/UE5 and C++ though, so it's probably not for the absolute beginner or the faint of heart.
I wish that people would just stop with the "vibe coding" thing.
If you want to get quality results from an LLM use a quality frontier model (I recommend Opus 4.5 thinking) in an agentic Plan -> Agent -> Debug loop inside of Cursor. Roughly 90% of the hate that gets assigned to AI anything is a direct result of the absurd notion that taking the human completely out of the loop is a valuable goal. In reality, it's expensive and almost guaranteed to produce crap.
If you treat LLMs as pair programmers and split your implementation into a set of sequential tasks of a reasonable scope, you can use Unity or Unreal or any number of JS engines built on ThreeJS to produce things that are worth playing.
I would strongly argue that pairing with Opus to write your controller code while you take primary responsibility for interacting with the UI sounds exactly like how you should proceed if you care about the end result.
I think the article is being s bit disingenuous. The real problem is triple A developers and publishers pushing for it to replace a not insignificant amount of creative work.
While still over charging everyone and scalpling every $ from everyone with micro transactions and game mechanics that need xp boosters.
I don't think the article pointing out the existence of AI use outside of that “real problem” is disingenuity. It's possible to simultaneously condone indie developers using AI to make the most of their limited budgets and condemn AAA studios for using AI to lay off their workers; conflating one with the other just makes it harder to have an honest and productive conversation about whether AI helps or hurts software development as a profession and a craft.
> I don't see the discourse of indie or single game developers being ostracized in some public shaming trend
Not specifically “game” developers, but I do see attempts at that ostracization on the OSDev subreddit; at least one participant there has posted progress updates on a vibe-coded hobby OS, and each of those updates ends up deluged with people complaining specifically about the AI use.
> and each of those updates ends up deluged with people complaining specifically about the AI use
I would genuinely like to see this thread, because if the comments are legitimate and backed up by examples, ie : "This is XSS vulnerable" etc.. then even with the prefix of "AI Slop" I'm fine with..
I think it's fair people don't get too comfortable with just trusting vibe coded agents, when in my own experience, the bugs they leave around are often harder to identify from a simple review than a simple architeture misalignment.
It would elevate the conversation significantly if people didn't use "vibe coding" and AI use interchangeably.
I don't use Reddit, but you don't have to look for a specific thread. It often feels like there's a mob of people just waiting for fresh meat to wander into their camp. Literally any thread referencing AI on this site is full of people who appear to have nothing but venom and contempt for people who use these tools.
It's not everyone, but loud minorities are still loud.
I'll try to only use the term AI as VibeCoding is more a derivative. There definitely are some people who are just doomers about AI entirely and I think it's always the case with any new technology. That said, you can't deny there is just an unholy amount of useless applications for the AI tooling that are really not providing anything useful other than generating 'slop'.
Using AI tools for protein folding or medical breakthroughs for example will impact the world in a positive way. People will champion that. Using them to automate your creativity hasn't been in demand by anyone except shareholders or people looking to milk a quick ad revenue for little to no effort. So of course, there's a negative sentiment.
> Nobody's sharing their work, because they used AI.
Really. What a stupid statement. As if AI bros aren't screaming all over the internet telling people their vibe-coded projects.
I do use AI for code, but I really don't know why AI users seem to have some sort of victim mentality when there are literally billions of capital stacking on their side.
I strongly disagree. Let me try and change your mind.
Let's say that you have been building your passion project; it could be a game, it could be a synth, it could be a mobile app. You were a year into development already when LLMs blew up, and you very quickly realized that you could leverage them to move much, much faster. This allowed you to tackle a long list of features that realistically would have never left the daydreaming to-do list because in reality, it'd have been a minor miracle to just get to v1.0 much less do all of the cool stuff you thought of along the way. This is the real power of the agentic workflow: in experienced hands, it's an incredible force multiplier.
And yet, even while your churning out features and knocking out bugs that you never would have found on your own without users being upset, the world gets progressively more and more pissy about this moment's Scarlet Letter. Suddenly mentioning that actually, you're getting amazing results from LLMs makes a significant percentage of people irrationally angry, leaving comments that would otherwise be appropriate to shame deviants and cheaters.
Suddenly, you're faced with a really awful realization: you'd love to loudly and proudly show the world how your LLM-assisted dev workflow has allowed you to produce something you honestly might not have ever finished in 2023, but if you do then people are going to write off what you've done as slop before even looking at it, and since you were actually thinking that maybe what you were building might have some legitimate commercial viability, you can't actually advocate for sanity and transparency without taking a serious hit to your product's success. By extension, this means that it might cause real damage to you and your family.
What I am describing is a chilling effect, and it is real. All of the billions in VC have literally nothing to offer someone who just wants to build cool shit and can suddenly do so faster and often better.
At the very least, consider that there is a tangible cost to telling the world that the thing you created exists at least in part because of AI but there is no such thing as people being more likely to pay for something simply because AI was involved. There is only downside. That is the chill.
It's not about victimhood. It is about not fighting battles that can only lose you ground.
Steam has an AI disclaimer now and many games with the disclaimer still sell well. So yeah it's totally victim mentality. The evidence is just right on Steam, but instead of actually looking at the largest market in the gaming world some AI bros chose to fight an imaginary enemy in their minds.
Per your link, only 6% of those games made more than $10k.
Also, the AI disclaimer covers the very broad category of “AI has touched some part of this project at some point, no matter how minor, and no matter if it was eventually replaced with non-AI assets”. The original article seems to be more about the narrower category of “AI is a significant part of this project”, which would exclude nearly all of the top-12-grossing games that your link covers.
Here's a social experiment for you to try: create or switch to a different profile, put on your debate club hat and post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions. Speak eloquently and be polite. Say things that are defensibly reasonable if you were arguing the opposite position.
Then watch the silent downvoting begin. Perhaps y'all aren't aware that this is happening, or the degree to which it doesn't matter how coherent or fair your point may be.
If you speak out in favour of considered, responsible use of agentic LLM usage, there's a mob of socketpuppets that are eager to punish you because you're not on their team.
> post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions
> Then watch the silent downvoting begin
I express my pro-AI positions on HN all the time.
Also, top 3 comments in this very thread are all pro-AI right now. That's how deeply your victim mentality rooted. You chose to ignore all the positive parts and cling to the downvotes. That's a choice you made and I won't bother to convince you otherwise anymore.
i don’t like ai art bc it lacks and sort of “soul” or “human touch” (nebulous and subjective but iykyk) games are just another form of art, so why would i waste my time with just another form of slop?
Similar. I want to see games made by humans who have put in the effort and taken the time to build something good. I don’t want to see the market flooded with low effort AI slop.
You should consider that there is a rather large gulf between low-effort crap and using agentic LLMs to make more sophisticated games faster before you downvote me.
It's just not black and white, and to treat it as such devalues the conversation.
ofc there’s a spectrum in LLM usage, but the usage scenario of LLMs as a “supervised force multiplier” (paraphrasing your linked comment) isn’t how most near anyone uses them. I can’t imagine gamedev is any different.
what a vast majority of LLM usage appears to me is as a unsupervised slop multiplier. any social media platform, including hacker news is rife with a deluge of unpolished LLM generated turds that creators pass off as their own work when they can’t even explain half of how it works or what it does.
circling back with gamedev specifically and art more generally. sure if LLMs are just one part of the process to push out some grander, well thought out vision who am I to really care. again thought, that isn’t what I see. I only see untalented lazy “excommunicated devs” passing off the most bottom of the barrel trash as “games”
> the usage scenario of LLMs as a “supervised force multiplier” (paraphrasing your linked comment) isn’t how most near anyone uses them. I can’t imagine gamedev is any different.
That's just it: you don't know this. You're speculating from within your confirmation bias bubble. Everything you're saying is completely anecdotal.
I mean all the major hurdles of making a game aren't really helped much by AI...
AI has no training data on complex logic and systems so you gotta do that all yourself.
It definitely doesn't get anything visual right really.
There isn't large amounts of automated testing you can setup ahead of time for a lot of game-play so the AI can't iterate on it to make something work it'll just be hopeless.
The art is also going to all be really derivative plagiarism overly averaged scammy looking stuff. So that's basically an insurmountable hurdle. No unique style.
>I mean all the major hurdles of making a game aren't really helped much by AI...
I have been using Claude Code to develop a game in unreal engine. It is fricking amazing. Its like hiring someone with 10 years experience to work for you. I am really impressed by how it know game patterns.
>It definitely doesn't get anything visual right really.
Sometimes it struggles to things things right visually, other times it nails it!
I have been using an MCP from gemini image 1.5 to generate my icons. And once it go my styles down, after 20 experiments, it does really good. Notice: It uses high quality by default which will burn up your credits. But if you turn down the image quality to low, it cost around 3 cents an icon.
>There isn't large amounts of automated testing.
Some things can be easily automated for testing. But other things require play testing.
>The art is also going to all be really derivative plagiarism
I am just using it to generate icons, and it does great. For 3D artwork I either use things from the FAB Store, or I pay a team of artists in Pakistan to do it.
Overall I say it is the equivalent to have a senior dev on your team, for 100 bucks a month
My latest game BossBattle[1] (html5, have a play) uses AI for graphics, some strobe effects, a C64 loading screen shader.
I have decided to lean in to it and I will document all the places I use AI in the game on my blog[2]. Not everything works, notably 3D assets[3] and sound effects.
There is a lot of human content… i paid for a lot out of my own pocket and have limited budget. It started in 2021 before chatgpt. LLMs cannot do everything and that’s not the purpose.
Generative AI makes me as an solo indie dev able to make the game. Without the AI the game wouldn’t exist
[1] http://epicwin.team/play/solo/BossBattle/ - (public beta) .
[2] https://generative-ai.review .
[3] https://generative-ai.review/2025/08/3d-assets-made-by-genai...
This is the exact sort of thing being unlocked that inspired me to write the article.
I’m so happy folks are finding fun and creativity in this space.
I commend you for being willing to share.
The "able to make the X" thing is something haters love to ignore.
Best of luck with your beta!
I don't think it's hate; the games market was oversaturated before AI, and it's even more saturated with it. Players have limited time and patience that usually doesn't work out in-favor of indies.
Making the game that OP made, a basic Simon-type color matching game, isn't that difficult. None of the vibe-coded games I've seen posted to HN would be difficult to make in any engine. If that or any other such game had been written by a human being and posted here it would be getting a similar reaction because none of them are any good on their own merits.
But because they're AI, and only because they're AI, people gas these things up regardless of quality, almost in spite of it. That's why people are mad. Not because they're "haters" but because people are flooding HN and the rest of the web with slop and insisting on being treated like masters of their craft.
And again, if a human had written this game in its entirety and posted it here, it would get flagged as spam, because it is first and foremost a bad game. Even as a "beta." And OP can't improve on it much because they're limited by whatever the AI happens to generate. Even just giving them encouragement is pointless.
"Games are impossible without AI" is a paltry excuse. My nephew, who isn't even in high school, is learning coding in school and is making games in Roblox. It's never been easier. If it's true that making a game in AI takes actual skill and work, as people claim, then making it in an engine is not at all beyond anyone's grasp.
If y'all want to shut up the "haters," make something with AI that's actually good, a game with a coherent visual look, well designed gameplay, an interesting concept, that's at least as good as a tutorial project for any existing game engine.
I am excited about game dev with AI, but the games you posted are kind of a joke.
My kids made similar games with Claude code in js.
Was hoping to see some serious indie games, but these looked pretty terri-bad.
Is anyone building the next SimCity, Civilization, etc.?
I spent quite a bit of time making games/social WebXR stuff in Three.js. There is unfortunately a ceiling to what commercial success you can have there. Sure there's all the .io games which see a bunch of kids playing games from their school computers, but as much as I'd like to see it, web games aren't going to be as impressive as native PC/Console games. It's not really technology, mostly just the market isn't there.
The models are pretty decent at building simple Three.js/Phaser games, but if you want to work with Unity/Unreal/Godot you're going to need a MCP or other tool to get them to work with the engine's tooling/context. I just so happen to work on one for Unity https://bezi.com
I will say, while I think the current models are very impressive with generating code for most game mechanics. They are still terrible at spatial awareness. Gemini Pro 3.1 is showing some promise here, the latest Opus/Sonnet models are...ok. But there's still a lot left to be desired. You also still really need to know how to make games both creatively and technically to pull off prompting a game into existence.
So are you going to vibecode your way to the next SimCity / Civ without knowing some game dev? Probably not right now and I think that's for the best. People want games that are creative and unique. But a passionate hobbyist who has never made a game, knows some programming, and has a vision for a great game now has an amazing tool set to build their dream game and that's pretty cool!
Shameless plug - and nothing so grandiose as SimCity but I built a pretty substantial 2D/3D blindfold trainer chess game. It's by no means "vibe coded" though, and there's a fair bit of manual work around the 3d modeling that I had to roll myself.
Even with that I'd still say 70% of the code was written using LLMs with the opencode agent.
https://shahkur.specr.net
If you want to see what the HN game dev community is building, I’ve been curating the list here (https://hnarcade.com) for the past months.
The output is quite impressive. And having spoken to a number of the developers, it does seem like AI has had a massive impact on delivering their ideas.
Awesome, I've submitted a game I made last year (https://blankwhite.cards) which was itself a remake of a game I made in 2019.
In my experience it took 5 years to find the time and motivation to build a v2.0 by hand. AI has since accelerated the production process to help me ship features that would otherwise have taken me another few years to even consider doing.
[dead]
Having AI generate a game for you no more makes you a game dev than ordering a happy meal makes you a chef.
What if you get someone else to program it? By this logic, Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, Binding of Isaac, Mew-Genics) isn't a game developer, because he doesn't code.
Edmund McMillen isn't a game developer per se. As listed in his Wikipedia profile, he's a game designer and artist. He still did that work, though, and human beings still wrote that code. The end result is still an expression in part of his unique talent and creative process.
He could still be called a game developer in a general sense because "game development" doesn't have to explicitly refer to programming, as the game development process is multidisciplinary and multifaceted. But of course the dichotomy here isn't between "did this person or that person write the code" but rather "does a human who uses a machine to generate content deserve the same credit as a human who puts in skill and effort and does the work?"
Arguments equating the use of AI to using a compiler or photoshop or other tools fall flat because if those were equivalent no one would be using AI, the tools allow greater control and are less expensive. The entire use case of AI is that it replicates the creative process, not that it acts as a tool to facilitate that process for a human. AI can create assets and code that a person doesn't understand, and wouldn't be capable of replicating themselves, which wouldn't be the case using mere tools.
And yet AI people come up with these strained metaphors and false equivalences because they don't want to face up to the nature of what AI is, that it isn't liberating them from "gatekeepers" or freeing their creativity, it's commoditizing them and using them to generate content and putting them in a prison of their own device.
Having a compiler compile machine code for you no more makes you a software developer than ordering a happy meal makes you a chef.
This is funny as most Michelin star chefs I've had the luxury of knowing love fast food
This 100%. After all, why do you think so many chefs feature "elevated X" items? Have you tried our take on the Taco Bell Chalupa made with A5 wagyu?
Also, they make their kids boxed Mac and Cheese because that's what they ask for.
Gotta love a good false dichotomy on late-night HN.
Oh please, just stop being silly. Being a game dev means you're building games which means you're thinking about the mechanics of the game and what makes something fun to play. The programming is not "game dev" and offloading it to an AI agent doesn't make someone any less of a game dev.
Well as long as they keep labelling it as AI so I can avoid buying it, we’re all good.
If you buy a game and can't tell it's made with AI, isn't that just as good?
Totally! I'm sick of not being able to see what tools they use. In fact, I feel that we should also start tagging devs that use an IDE instead of properly coding games in notepad.
Call it whatever you want, the game wouldn't exist without them doing something about it. And because they did something about achieving their vision other people get to play the game.
How about we just call these people the game Producers instead. Thats what a producer does anyway right? They make decisions of how the game is built, what goes into it, ect, ect, ect.
Exactly. The artist is in their output.
Paul McCartney can't read music or speak in theory, is he not a musician?
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I am so bullish on this.
AI is obliterating the barriers to game production for the next generation.
Will this be the next flash revolution? Or is the underlying 'brainrot' actually destructive to creative potential?
I am optimistic about the human spirit in this regard. Making games with AI will be cool when the games are cool, and the only barrier is design.
>Or is the underlying 'brainrot' actually destructive to creative potential?
Creativity comes from constraints. Writing code hasn't been the hard part since the 90s. Deciding which things make for a good game and are worth spending your limited time on is where fun comes from.
AI makes it easy to spit things out, but it doesn't make things fun or good at all.
The most fun games were made when code and resources to code/run that code were the constraints.
Writing code is not the hard part if you're a developer.
Otherwise it's an insurmountable barrier.
I think it's a bit like writing a novel.
Everyone's got a novel in them, but you absolutely need to know how to write to get it out. Unless you can dictate it but then... you could also hire a developer.
Those without the resources to hire a developer, without the years of education and practise to code at any level of proficiency, can now realize some form of their ideas.
I just logically can't see how the increased accessibility and output won't increase the amount of interesting games, even if 99% are slop (so is fan fiction, let them enjoy it).
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1414/
I don't know, isn't it easier to learn enough programming to make a game, relative to all the other skills involved?
e.g. the programming concepts needed for Pong wouldn't take you more than a dozen hours or so. See how good you are at art or music after the same amount of time!
Time will tell! Certainly AI is unlocking a lot of stuff, a huge number of people who did not have the time or the special skills before to create games will do so. I can think back to my own start in making computer games, using Amos on the Amiga (vastly easier than C or assembly).
It's a separate question whether anything actually good will come out of it. It's incredibly unfair to look at any particular project and say: what, another clone of this or that done idea? Very few things are original in any time. Certainly I didn't make anything particularly original all those years ago. But, soon, there should be really something, if there's really something there. If it's not just burning tokens to copy older ideas. And we'll know it when we see it, this amazing thing that would not have existed otherwise.
I wanted to create a game (Pre-AI) and thought it would be easy. Turns out it is not at all.
Sure you might get lucky with the next Angry bird, but there is a whole range of skills required to make a good game, and actually get people to play it.
I even read a couple of books which gave me a better understanding of how out of my depth I was. Books were "Theory of Fun", "Achievement unlocked" and "The art of game design".
AI here appears to be accelerating the ability to see those gaps faster. I think without the understanding of those gaps anything created is going to be lacking.
I don’t really think AI would help much with the gaps related to the actual game design. It should allow for faster feature development, adding QoL, etc, but you need the actual game part coming from you.
Which game engine is recommended for vibe coding games? I assume something like Unity is not very practical, since it's very GUI heavy.
Pick an engine that's been around for a long time like Love2D or PhaserJS as they'll almost assuredly be in the training data of any substantial LLM.
https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Löve_(game_framework)
I've build 10+ games which I am ashamed to show :)
Straight JS/html/css front-end with zero dependencies works well.
Ask for a node.js backend and can be instantly deployed as client/server or straight to html - multiplayer feels trivial.
C# Monogame works well for something heavier.
You can actually edit Unity scenes directly using the LLM as they're a readable text file which works ok, but Unity is bloatware when you can code it all yourself (it's an absolute nightmare of inexplicable bugs, do not use it. After updating to 0.62f from 0.48f my clang compiler now segfaults while building Webgl - luckily my team mate can do the builds)
The key is building exactly and only what you want and need. Make your design lean, suit the game as you are actually building it not a theoretical overengineered masterpiece - refactors are cheap later, but bloat will kill your project.
I've had my own rollercoaster relationship with Unity over the past decade, but telling people to roll their own game engine so that they can finally make a game is almost universally terrible advice.
People who want to build game engines should build game engines; people who want to build games should absolutely use Unity, Unreal or Godot in no particular order.
It's no different than needing to build a web framework so that you can make a website. The people who do it are often not even aware that they are procrastinating.
People who are making a simple 2D web game don't need an engine, with rare exceptions. Chrome's 30 million lines is plenty of bloat to build on ;)
Besides, in this context you're already outsourcing all the code to Claude or Codex or whatever. i.e. a "programmer" who has no problem handling the engine side of things.
That being said, most enginedev is creative procrastination. Randy's recent video on this is very illuminating — "I thought if I made a really good engine, making the game would be the easy part!" So he avoided actually making a game for like ten years...
Most 2D games don't even need an engine: you can just make the game "directly", on top of SDL or Canvas or what have you. (That being said, noob friendly stuff like Processing and Kaboom is great and highly recommended!)
--
Source: made lots of 2D games and a few engines. The engines were a complete waste of time. (Even ready made engines often did more harm than good!)
If I was making 3D games, then I would probably need an engine (but js13k begs to differ!), and it would probably not be a great to roll your own (unless you're going for something 90s themed :)
--
Edit: Most of my games are very "programmer art", or very retro. If I were an artist or working with artists, then an engine would be useful for that, for the visual side of things. Flash was probably unmatched in that regard
That being said, it's not that hard to roll your own level editor, so... ;) even that argument is questionable.
Edit 2: Also the web APIs are unfortunately kind of ass, so using a library (or engine) has the advantage of letting you avoid dealing with them directly for the most part.
Problems I've had with unity in my last 3 installs. All LTS default installations on windows. (I have delivered professional projects in Unity in the past):
1. Inspector for lists/arrays works once, crashes editor, must be restarted each time.
2. Race conditions in the basic animator functionality making animation events useless, killed a project because we couldn't edit the underlying code, didn't have time to redo animator-based functionality which should have worked in theory.
3. Segfaults in compiler -> 6 hours of debugging, gave up, still can't build reliably.
Each of these killed the workflow and therefore the ability to deliver the project dead, and were completely out of my control.
Vibe code your engine, at least you'll die on your own terms.
Unity is also just a fundamentally hostile organization waiting to pull the rug, as evidenced by their past behaviour.
Do not build your castle on someone else's land.
Big plus for html/css/js, mostly Pixi 8 or around (I also have a couple threejs). Vanilla JS. I did this by hand before, but having the LLM tweak around the code and styling while I handle more gameplay related things makes this doable (otherwise I just would not have enough free time)
Im using UE5 which is arguably GUI heavier than Unity. You can get around a lot of the GUI-heavy stuff by using C++ in preference to Blueprint, and/or developing some tools to help you decompile/recompile Blueprints.
It has a pretty cool remote control plugin you can install which can be used to simplify a lot of test cases through automation.
I have a relatively large amount of experience with UE4/UE5 and C++ though, so it's probably not for the absolute beginner or the faint of heart.
I wish that people would just stop with the "vibe coding" thing.
If you want to get quality results from an LLM use a quality frontier model (I recommend Opus 4.5 thinking) in an agentic Plan -> Agent -> Debug loop inside of Cursor. Roughly 90% of the hate that gets assigned to AI anything is a direct result of the absurd notion that taking the human completely out of the loop is a valuable goal. In reality, it's expensive and almost guaranteed to produce crap.
If you treat LLMs as pair programmers and split your implementation into a set of sequential tasks of a reasonable scope, you can use Unity or Unreal or any number of JS engines built on ThreeJS to produce things that are worth playing.
I would strongly argue that pairing with Opus to write your controller code while you take primary responsibility for interacting with the UI sounds exactly like how you should proceed if you care about the end result.
It's been a while since I used it, but afaik the editor is GUI heavy, the code is still there in C#.
Much like AI is great at Boulter plate code like FE, it's probably great at that sort of Unity code.
I think the article is being s bit disingenuous. The real problem is triple A developers and publishers pushing for it to replace a not insignificant amount of creative work.
While still over charging everyone and scalpling every $ from everyone with micro transactions and game mechanics that need xp boosters.
I don't think the article pointing out the existence of AI use outside of that “real problem” is disingenuity. It's possible to simultaneously condone indie developers using AI to make the most of their limited budgets and condemn AAA studios for using AI to lay off their workers; conflating one with the other just makes it harder to have an honest and productive conversation about whether AI helps or hurts software development as a profession and a craft.
What you are describing is a completely different set of problems.
They are both real and coexist, often at the same time.
> They are both real and coexist, often at the same time.
Are they though because I don't see the discourse of indie or single game developers being ostracized in some public shaming trend.
I see it only in the double/triple `A` scene.
> I don't see the discourse of indie or single game developers being ostracized in some public shaming trend
Not specifically “game” developers, but I do see attempts at that ostracization on the OSDev subreddit; at least one participant there has posted progress updates on a vibe-coded hobby OS, and each of those updates ends up deluged with people complaining specifically about the AI use.
> and each of those updates ends up deluged with people complaining specifically about the AI use
I would genuinely like to see this thread, because if the comments are legitimate and backed up by examples, ie : "This is XSS vulnerable" etc.. then even with the prefix of "AI Slop" I'm fine with..
I think it's fair people don't get too comfortable with just trusting vibe coded agents, when in my own experience, the bugs they leave around are often harder to identify from a simple review than a simple architeture misalignment.
It would elevate the conversation significantly if people didn't use "vibe coding" and AI use interchangeably.
I don't use Reddit, but you don't have to look for a specific thread. It often feels like there's a mob of people just waiting for fresh meat to wander into their camp. Literally any thread referencing AI on this site is full of people who appear to have nothing but venom and contempt for people who use these tools.
It's not everyone, but loud minorities are still loud.
I'll try to only use the term AI as VibeCoding is more a derivative. There definitely are some people who are just doomers about AI entirely and I think it's always the case with any new technology. That said, you can't deny there is just an unholy amount of useless applications for the AI tooling that are really not providing anything useful other than generating 'slop'.
Using AI tools for protein folding or medical breakthroughs for example will impact the world in a positive way. People will champion that. Using them to automate your creativity hasn't been in demand by anyone except shareholders or people looking to milk a quick ad revenue for little to no effort. So of course, there's a negative sentiment.
> Nobody's sharing their work, because they used AI.
Really. What a stupid statement. As if AI bros aren't screaming all over the internet telling people their vibe-coded projects.
I do use AI for code, but I really don't know why AI users seem to have some sort of victim mentality when there are literally billions of capital stacking on their side.
I strongly disagree. Let me try and change your mind.
Let's say that you have been building your passion project; it could be a game, it could be a synth, it could be a mobile app. You were a year into development already when LLMs blew up, and you very quickly realized that you could leverage them to move much, much faster. This allowed you to tackle a long list of features that realistically would have never left the daydreaming to-do list because in reality, it'd have been a minor miracle to just get to v1.0 much less do all of the cool stuff you thought of along the way. This is the real power of the agentic workflow: in experienced hands, it's an incredible force multiplier.
And yet, even while your churning out features and knocking out bugs that you never would have found on your own without users being upset, the world gets progressively more and more pissy about this moment's Scarlet Letter. Suddenly mentioning that actually, you're getting amazing results from LLMs makes a significant percentage of people irrationally angry, leaving comments that would otherwise be appropriate to shame deviants and cheaters.
Suddenly, you're faced with a really awful realization: you'd love to loudly and proudly show the world how your LLM-assisted dev workflow has allowed you to produce something you honestly might not have ever finished in 2023, but if you do then people are going to write off what you've done as slop before even looking at it, and since you were actually thinking that maybe what you were building might have some legitimate commercial viability, you can't actually advocate for sanity and transparency without taking a serious hit to your product's success. By extension, this means that it might cause real damage to you and your family.
What I am describing is a chilling effect, and it is real. All of the billions in VC have literally nothing to offer someone who just wants to build cool shit and can suddenly do so faster and often better.
At the very least, consider that there is a tangible cost to telling the world that the thing you created exists at least in part because of AI but there is no such thing as people being more likely to pay for something simply because AI was involved. There is only downside. That is the chill.
It's not about victimhood. It is about not fighting battles that can only lose you ground.
Steam has an AI disclaimer now and many games with the disclaimer still sell well. So yeah it's totally victim mentality. The evidence is just right on Steam, but instead of actually looking at the largest market in the gaming world some AI bros chose to fight an imaginary enemy in their minds.
https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/games-with-ai-disclosures-h...
Per your link, only 6% of those games made more than $10k.
Also, the AI disclaimer covers the very broad category of “AI has touched some part of this project at some point, no matter how minor, and no matter if it was eventually replaced with non-AI assets”. The original article seems to be more about the narrower category of “AI is a significant part of this project”, which would exclude nearly all of the top-12-grossing games that your link covers.
Here's a social experiment for you to try: create or switch to a different profile, put on your debate club hat and post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions. Speak eloquently and be polite. Say things that are defensibly reasonable if you were arguing the opposite position.
Then watch the silent downvoting begin. Perhaps y'all aren't aware that this is happening, or the degree to which it doesn't matter how coherent or fair your point may be.
If you speak out in favour of considered, responsible use of agentic LLM usage, there's a mob of socketpuppets that are eager to punish you because you're not on their team.
> post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions
> Then watch the silent downvoting begin
I express my pro-AI positions on HN all the time.
Also, top 3 comments in this very thread are all pro-AI right now. That's how deeply your victim mentality rooted. You chose to ignore all the positive parts and cling to the downvotes. That's a choice you made and I won't bother to convince you otherwise anymore.
i don’t like ai art bc it lacks and sort of “soul” or “human touch” (nebulous and subjective but iykyk) games are just another form of art, so why would i waste my time with just another form of slop?
Similar. I want to see games made by humans who have put in the effort and taken the time to build something good. I don’t want to see the market flooded with low effort AI slop.
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I mean AI art is for sure super samey and plagiarized and uninteresting stylistically
It's instantly recognizable and makes most indie games that disclose it just dead on arrival
> plagiarized
Unless you can point to specific works that something allegedly plagiarizes, the “plagiarism” allegation is meaningless.
not at all true
depending on what you ask for it might generate something 99% as similar as an existing artist
Exactly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229458
You should consider that there is a rather large gulf between low-effort crap and using agentic LLMs to make more sophisticated games faster before you downvote me.
It's just not black and white, and to treat it as such devalues the conversation.
ofc there’s a spectrum in LLM usage, but the usage scenario of LLMs as a “supervised force multiplier” (paraphrasing your linked comment) isn’t how most near anyone uses them. I can’t imagine gamedev is any different.
what a vast majority of LLM usage appears to me is as a unsupervised slop multiplier. any social media platform, including hacker news is rife with a deluge of unpolished LLM generated turds that creators pass off as their own work when they can’t even explain half of how it works or what it does.
circling back with gamedev specifically and art more generally. sure if LLMs are just one part of the process to push out some grander, well thought out vision who am I to really care. again thought, that isn’t what I see. I only see untalented lazy “excommunicated devs” passing off the most bottom of the barrel trash as “games”
> the usage scenario of LLMs as a “supervised force multiplier” (paraphrasing your linked comment) isn’t how most near anyone uses them. I can’t imagine gamedev is any different.
That's just it: you don't know this. You're speculating from within your confirmation bias bubble. Everything you're saying is completely anecdotal.
I mean all the major hurdles of making a game aren't really helped much by AI...
AI has no training data on complex logic and systems so you gotta do that all yourself.
It definitely doesn't get anything visual right really.
There isn't large amounts of automated testing you can setup ahead of time for a lot of game-play so the AI can't iterate on it to make something work it'll just be hopeless.
The art is also going to all be really derivative plagiarism overly averaged scammy looking stuff. So that's basically an insurmountable hurdle. No unique style.
>I mean all the major hurdles of making a game aren't really helped much by AI...
I have been using Claude Code to develop a game in unreal engine. It is fricking amazing. Its like hiring someone with 10 years experience to work for you. I am really impressed by how it know game patterns.
>It definitely doesn't get anything visual right really. Sometimes it struggles to things things right visually, other times it nails it!
I have been using an MCP from gemini image 1.5 to generate my icons. And once it go my styles down, after 20 experiments, it does really good. Notice: It uses high quality by default which will burn up your credits. But if you turn down the image quality to low, it cost around 3 cents an icon.
>There isn't large amounts of automated testing.
Some things can be easily automated for testing. But other things require play testing.
>The art is also going to all be really derivative plagiarism
I am just using it to generate icons, and it does great. For 3D artwork I either use things from the FAB Store, or I pay a team of artists in Pakistan to do it.
Overall I say it is the equivalent to have a senior dev on your team, for 100 bucks a month
edited for line breaks.
Did you mean gpt-image-1.5? (the Gemini models are Imagen or NB)
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this url https://www.tyleo.com/blog gives a 404 when infact it should retrieve a list of all the blog posts. Might want to fix that
It's actually intentional. The literal strings are just routed to pages.
However, if users are trying to do it, it should be a behavior. I'll make a note to change this.
For now, if you'd like to see more posts, you can go to www.tyleo.com and scroll down to the Writing section.
This is a WIP. I hadn't anticipated the popularity my site reached/extent of the blog.