25 points kkukshtel 3 hours ago 8 comments
bob1029 56 minutes ago | parent
The author appears to be on track to learn an important lesson about LLMs and art. LLMs have completely solved the coding side of game development. But this was never the hard part. Not even close.
The fixed randomness and determinism thing sounds great on paper (all of this does), but in reality this is an extremely confining way to build a video game. Ensuring you maintain determinism across many platforms is where things get super nasty.
If you want a turnkey AI game development experience, why not double down on diffusion? This sidesteps virtually all of the tooling and integration concerns. There is no game engine to integrate with if you use a diffusion model.
pton_xd 52 minutes ago | parent
This is not quite true. Currently you still need to give them guidance on what type of architecture would best work for your game, or after many iterations on gameplay you'll end up with terrible performance and a complete mess of a codebase. I expect that will be solved sooner rather than later, though.
LogicFailsMe 14 minutes ago | parent
PS no, I am not interested in your alternative harness that will supposedly 100% trust me bro fix all these issues
glimshe 48 minutes ago | parent
But many top games have complex engines and online services that require technical mastery beyond the current AI capabilities. For those genres, engineering is a huge barrier of entry.
For a not so extreme example, you won't vibe code Cyberpunk 2077 while just taking care of art and gameplay ideas. Gosh, humans could barely pull that one off!
simonw 44 minutes ago | parent
I learned that one the other day - I've been building a little RTS game with a replay mechanism, and replays in Safari broke where they worked in Chrome. Opus 5.5 fixed it by replacing calls to things like Math.sin() and Math.cos() with its own deterministic functions: https://gist.github.com/simonw/7df96ed7296c69b70a9990102cae0...
roger23 21 minutes ago | parent
Will be releasing with my updated compiler (Turbo Ada v1.6): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_wKRh1dwT0
theptip 9 minutes ago | parent
Meta level, just push your agent to make things more legible, it’ll figure it out.
One other observation, remember that your agent is infinitely patient. So prompts like “build an interactive design doc with videos of each game mechanic in the style of Factorio dev diaries” can make reviewing changes easier. The general idea, all the small QoL dev tools that you don’t have time for, you can just spawn a side agent to build; if they are orthogonal to your main thread you can just progress them in the background.
One thing I think game dev has not (AFAIK) invested as much in is observability. There’s a lot of perf instrumentation available in debug builds, but things like measuring DPS, health, etc as an exported metric time series I have not seen before. I think agents will benefit from this disproportionately more than humans, eg for inspecting progression curves and balance.
gcampos 8 minutes ago | parent