YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Google Playground: Create and play custom games

61 points acossta 2 hours ago 49 comments

sgarrity 1 hour ago | parent

That promo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxvrvfyicp0) made me feel even older than I actually am.

I was out after the slurping sound in the first 1-second.

aqme28 1 hour ago | parent

How long until someone makes a tiktok-style game platform?

Play a little game, then when you're done it generates a new one based on what you've enjoyed. Repeat ad infinitum.

rationalist 57 minutes ago | parent

Thanks for giving people (or an AI scraping this), the idea :-/

regenschutz 49 minutes ago | parent

Environmental impact aside, that seems way less harmful than TikTok, though. You'll probably play the average game for longer than you watch the average TikTok video, meaning that your attention span won't be that bad.

You also have to actively use your game for most games, unlike TikTok videos which you can just watch with your brain turned off.

aqme28 42 minutes ago | parent

I'm not the first one to have this one for sure. I would have started working on this if not for the small problem of finding it unethical to build :(

Permik 41 minutes ago | parent

Technically there is already one, it's called HypeHype, but it's using their in-house graph-style editor. Vendor-lock-in out the whazoo.

Haven't followed them too closely, but wouldn't be surprised if they'd added LLM tools to the platform.

glenstein 21 minutes ago | parent

>How long until someone makes a tiktok-style game platform?

Well to your point, youtube already has these little mini games that exist in portrait mode. Seems like something is liminally out there pointing in that direction.

xnx 1 hour ago | parent

Just got #2 in the world (for now) on "Steampunk Match". Very impressive what's possible in the browser. No way I would've thought this was AI generated. It was much higher quality than the vibe coded games out of Claude. The best outcome would be for this to enable some new weird games that wouldn't have gotten made otherwise, and also to bankrupt games that basically operate as casinos.

jenniferhooley 47 minutes ago | parent

No, this is exactly what Claude vibe codes, this is definitely a one-shot Claude style game (assuming it looks up a decent pixel art pack). LLMs are pretty decent these days at making standard game clones like this, you just have to add a system prompt about making it look like a real indie-style pixel art game instead of just letting it make it's standard "web game" style. I assume google has a good background system prompt/harness to do this automatically.

zamadatix 20 minutes ago | parent

This played waaaay better than a one-shot Claude style game but I'm sure it was not one-shot either.

komali2 55 minutes ago | parent

For some reason they're 403'ing us in Taiwan. I can access from a USA vpn...

regenschutz 52 minutes ago | parent

I got 403'ed too (Sweden). Then I saw this in the fine-print on the blog:

>Playground launches today for users in the U.S. (18+)

mijoharas 48 minutes ago | parent

UK too.

w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 42 minutes ago | parent

Italy too

ahmedfromtunis 55 minutes ago | parent

I’ve been thinking of building a personalized game full of inside jokes as a birthday gift for a friend who moved to the other side of the planet.

This looks like it might be very useful indeed!

bearjaws 50 minutes ago | parent

I do kind of believe this is the "end game" at this point.

"Friend-slop" has already proven wildly successful, and significantly lower effort than AAA games.

Combine this with the fact your game will be stolen and put into Roblox, it really feels like we're approaching a era of just rapidly produced games that live for weeks rather than years.

jenniferhooley 40 minutes ago | parent

Yeah agreed, I was talking to a friend few years ago when Google first wiped out blogging by taking over the blog content and showing snippets instead of real links.

Obviously the end-game is for the companies to automate all the text, games, and software so you just go to their feed and pay them a monthly instead of individuals making making this content.

tonyhart7 23 minutes ago | parent

lol, except most friend slop game is actually good

You be tripping if you actually think AAA soulless that has filled with agenda is better

vmg12 48 minutes ago | parent

If you want to try this but with free multiplayer servers check out https://snack.game (my site)

I also didn't bother with in-app game dev for now since I figured your local agents will be better. So for now you just develop locally with a CLI and your favorite subsidized model.

regenschutz 45 minutes ago | parent

I've always found Google Slides to be a great way to create cute, personal games. It requires no coding, and anyone can play them easily in their browser. Seeing what people are able to do with a simple presentation (PowerPoint, if you will) has been repeatedly eye-opening every time I've seen one.

I'm a bit worried that Google Slides-games will fall out of fashion now ;(

torben-friis 38 minutes ago | parent

Am I the only one that feels repulsed by this kind of offerings?

Im not sure how to justify the feeling. Maybe it's that I expect more than entertainment out of creative works (which I consider games to be), but this... Corporate slop firehose seems fundamentally empty in a way that raises goosebumps, like a black mirror episode.

argentinian 33 minutes ago | parent

Is just your interpretation. AI will eventually be used to produce any kind of media or product that humans can think of.

If you are disgusted by this, the resources spent on AI adult content would make you mad. But why judge what other people choose to do.

There's an episode of President Curtis where USA is running out of energy and the final solution is to (spoilers) tax AI porn.

sham1 28 minutes ago | parent

It's honestly both very funny as well as very sad that one of the most unbelievable aspects of that is them taxing the AI pornography industry. Given that being a Rick&Morty spinoff means that Prez Curtis has plenty of outlandish aspects to it already, yet suspending one's disbelief about an industry actually getting taxed kinda goes over the limit.

torben-friis 22 minutes ago | parent

I don't care at all about it being used about porn, or ads, or corporate videos, that kind of stuff is soulless by definition.

And I don't have a problem with AI assistance in creative work.

What horrifies me is the picture of someone absent mindlessly placing a half formed thought into a textbox and people consuming it, no deep thinking at all involved in neither creators nor users. It's the mental equivalent of the wall-e humans.

argentinian 16 minutes ago | parent

Many people do many absent minded activities with no deep thinking. Social Media sites are now in a big part about that, feeding pointless low effort distraction.

You may analyze why do people seek such a thing and feel compassion. and what should humans do instead? Why? Is there an objective answer?

AIblemblio 13 minutes ago | parent

When do you draw a line then?

I had an idea for a small game for ages, never the time for it and now i'm vibing on it randomly because its fun.

How much finetuning/prompting would you allow me until you think its reasonable? One prompt? Or a certain amount of resources i put in?

Don't get me wrong, i'm curious on when you think a certain quality is reached. I ask this myself too. Like i have a lot of experience in the area of game development, game mechanics, programming and usability. Now the game itself i adjust constantly because i have a lot of strong opinions.

But will this ever be something i might release for free and people get a benefit out of this?

efields 29 minutes ago | parent

I was repulsed too at first, but honestly cheap build-your-own-video-game tools have been out there since the 90s at least. This is just the modern version. Fine.

I could see microgames creep into social media feeds maybe. That's what this allows for. Games that might be novel for a few minutes. Some folks will put in the effort to make a modern multi-hour game here but very few, like their player-base.

Also, prototyping! Maybe it's good for that (just don't share it publicly).

AIblemblio 16 minutes ago | parent

Nope.

We are in the ara of commoditization and we just have to learn handling it.

And its not just AI 'slop' making it so, its also A LOT of peole having acess to so much more.

The indiegame scene got crazy. As soon there is one new game concept, hundreds of small adjustments to this idea are popping up.

The sorting game thing? Has now a lot of clones/variations.

AI adds more of this for sure, but its not the underlying issue.

danvoell 25 minutes ago | parent

Best case scenario for this is...replace Roblox with games that don't have reward systems solely based on you playing as long as possible. We are losing a generation of children to these games.

stephenlf 22 minutes ago | parent

I predict a very orthogonal outcome. This is an interesting experiment. If it gains some traction, Roblox and Minecraft are both very well situated to build a similar product and dominate the market.

hmokiguess 21 minutes ago | parent

If anything, this is them trying to eat their lunch by grabbing the market share and using the same playbook.

Do you really think Google cares about gameplay in the same likes of, say, Nintendo?

zamadatix 18 minutes ago | parent

I don't think Google gives a crap about games one way or the other, they just want people to use their AI.

ragazzina 20 minutes ago | parent

Since this thread will contain the intersection of people interested in coding games and people interested in AI, can I ask whether the latest AI coding tools can help someone vibe code a simple low-poly 3D game? I only ever used Twine before.

gobdovan 11 minutes ago | parent

Yep. Simplest is browser game with three.js, the only lib you need. But for low-poly 3D, you can basically tell the frontier LLMs to build yourself the rasteriser itself in whatever language you want. Literally just put your comment into Claude Code or Codex and see it do it.

educar 18 minutes ago | parent

I got a 403 from Germany

giarc 7 minutes ago | parent

For the main page or for the playground.google link?

FinnLobsien 15 minutes ago | parent

Google seems to have some desire to enter the gaming world, with Stadia before this.

Perhaps it's their culture of letting engineers experiment with stuff during work hours that also led to Gmail, Maps, etc. and the mobile game ad market is certainly big.

I guess this mainly competes with mobile games, most of which are mediocre at best and aim to get a few "whale users" to spend inordinate amounts of money on coins, gems, or whatever in-game currency.

Maybe the theory is that those games are so easy to vibe-code that completely democratizing it will lead to enough of a flood of games?

And a few will stand out and become Candy Crush-sized successes?

Or perhaps it's the idea that if you can have millions of extremely niche games, each may have a few hardcore fans because it caters to their specific interests (the same way Kindle Direct Publishing enabled hyper-niche literary genres)

hmokiguess 12 minutes ago | parent

I'm okay with Google offering models, but I'm not okay with Google offering more PaaS offerings.

Let developers use your models and tools and build stuff with it. Why own everything.

Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform.

pjmlp 10 minutes ago | parent

Because many devs don't pay for tools unless forced otherwise via a network paywall.

pjmlp 11 minutes ago | parent

Great, 1983 crash will look like a joke compared with the crapware and copycats that will come out of this.

kingstnap 7 minutes ago | parent

Error 403 unfortunately.

> To keep the experience safe and welcoming, every published game undergoes safety screenings aligned with our Community Guidelines, along with user reporting.

Kind of cringe. I mean I suppose its one thing to stop people making CSAM but safety screens make it sound like you can't have any sort of mature game? Gore, violence, drugs, suggestive themes or nudity etc all disallowed or something? Everyone has to make a T for Teen game?

fancyfredbot 5 minutes ago | parent

I'm usually very pro AI and the idea that people could vibe code their own games which combine exactly the things they enjoy appeals to me so was quite excited for this.

I played a few editors picks. "Westbound Frontier" is a kind of RTS. On mobile all the windows open on top of eachother and the text is very hard to read. The amount of resource required to build the first building after town hall was way too high by and you had to wait ages to do anything. There was an infuriating AI sound track singing "ooo-wee-ooo". 0/10 from me, broken and not fun.

Next I tried volcano run, a 3D infinite runner. Not my kind of game but a nice aesthetic and it actually worked. After about 30 seconds though the graphics changed to a really low contrast mode (night?) and I couldn't see the rocks I was supposed to dodge. 2/10.

Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this. It's obviously not ready, the "Editor" who picked these games should have known that. I am not sure if this is some kind of set of skills for Gemini or a fine tune or just a prompt but it certainly feels very low effort and embarrassing.