YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Epic Games tells employees to use AI to get Disney game done

44 points pavel_lishin 1 hour ago 18 comments

PunchyHamster 50 minutes ago | parent

Gonna be interesting flop

pfdietz 17 minutes ago | parent

Epic will blame the workers and say they sabotaged it, I predict.

hypfer 38 minutes ago | parent

Arguably, that game is the right testing ground for this kind of development pattern.

Ashes to ashes. Slop to slop.

arealaccount 36 minutes ago | parent

This is why I haven’t been able to play split screen Fortnight with my son for the past several seasons.

You used to be able to do a trick where you login with one controller, then log back out with another, then back in with the first (thanks reddit for finding that), but now that doesn’t even work.

Elsewhereindeed 11 minutes ago | parent

That sounds like a bug and not a feature.

Jcampuzano2 34 minutes ago | parent

> “No more hand-written code” and that the game will be “generated with full AI workflows,” employees were reportedly “stunned,” which many hoped the news was some kind of sick joke.

The biggest surprise to me is that they're reporting that the employees themselves are surprised. I don't personally know a single dev who would or even should be "surprised" by this given the current industry state.

This doesn't even really seem headline news worthy. Practically every large company you've ever heard of is doing exactly the same thing right now. And I know very few devs who actually hand-write basically anything right now even if its just an unspoken truth.

At my job it's essentially the same. Everyone is actively encouraged to use AI to move faster and barely anybody writes code by hand.

Note this is not me making a value judgement saying this is good or bad, its just my observation. Having very little hand-written code is quickly becoming the norm.

joshstrange 27 minutes ago | parent

Agreed, you've got to have had your head in the ground to be "stunned" by what is largely "industry standard" now.

mycocola 11 minutes ago | parent

I think you'd be also stunned about the custom scripting/tooling studios have built for themselves over the years. Like the Blueprint system of Unreal, and plenty of low-code scene editors and map editors.

Since games are fuzzy, it's also important that developers are in touch with the underlying systems of what makes the games games, and that requires understanding those systems -- easily done through writing and modifying them.

danaris 11 minutes ago | parent

Or perhaps the fact that they were stunned should tell you that it's not quite as standard as you think, industry-wide...?

Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?

tyromaniac 3 minutes ago | parent

I agree. I wouldn't think twice about hearing this about a small SF startup, or maybe even a large company during the height of tokenmaxxing, but its definitely a distruption, and a shocking one at that, for some C-suites to start mandating things like the disallowal of non-AI code.

fabian2k 4 minutes ago | parent

The statement did include that all art should also be AI-generated, which is a whole other thing. I'd also make a large difference between most code being AI-generated to start with, and actually not writing by hand at all anymore.

whateveracct 24 minutes ago | parent

i miss the days when my text editor was a blackbox to those above me in the org chart.

avh02 13 minutes ago | parent

Omg I've been thinking about this... You have to use company provided tooling and they're sure to log every single thought of yours.

slg 22 minutes ago | parent

There’s this tendency for a lot of tech folks to think their expertise in tech gives them special insights into other disciplines. Often when this happens, they’ll be doomed by missing many of the details that the old domain experts took for granted. I feel like AI is going to supercharge that. Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI. The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.

12ajsh7 13 minutes ago | parent

Are they trying to get bought by MBS like Electronic Arts? They know that AI figures from Slop Wars will be hated by gamers. But MBS buys any crap.

xbar 10 minutes ago | parent

Epic fail incoming?

Madmallard 6 minutes ago | parent

Skull Emoji

Game dev seems like one of the worst places for LLM code

Maybe some of the generic scaffolding and tooling you could use it for, but any game mechanics and effects you want to make artistically represent your game will just turn into sloppa when generated by an LLM unless you just have it make the generic functions that you fully specify then manually tweak yourself

but how much faster will that be to someone that actually knows what they're doing?