YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Or the small Battle Wagon around the height of a child quintupling in size the next frame. Kiddos having fun is the main mission though :)

This nephew game is indistinguishable from 90s arcade game styling.

That was already happening before AI, with in-house game engines dying off and all converging on the same quasi-realistic style and often the exact same assets.

Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.

Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.

I'm kind of hoping that the youth will recognize that stuff that can be made with AI is just nothing special anymore, and find something that is (or still is) special. I don't know what that is, maybe something that AI can't do on a fundamental level (maybe something physical?).

(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)

This style reminds me of those mobile game ads with helpless characters that need YOUR help not to freeze or something. Probably the exaggerated facial expressions.

Fable is $8/$40, with cache reads at $0.2 and cache writes at $10, so you simply calculate based on the info from the blog:

> about 320M tokens read from cache, 19M written to cache, 1M output

320 * $0.2 + 19 * $10 + 1 * $40 = $294

Yeah, it would have been expensive via the API; the tokens were free when I tested it, but it would have been something like $300 USD for the Claude tokens at Fable 5.2's API prices.

2029 has you covered.

In my 2 minutes of testing I liked the gameplay elements from Fable 5.2 much better. I think Opus 5.5 sound effects may have been a bit better but that's it.

"find all documents, descriptions, walk through of game XYZ, generate a consistent and declarative document that another agent would read to recreate the game without using existing IP or protected data, do not reuse art but describe general details with the ability to extend and add specifics later. focus on functionality first, then mechanics and then later art and gameplay. generate a 10 page document that will follow MVP to Production quality gameplay"

give it a link if you want

Based on what I've seen, there's a good chance this would work today (though Anthropic recently added some restrictions around this sort of prompt) -- try it!

I Googled it as I had never heard of that game, and it turned out that I knew it as Bop'n Rumble. Great game.

They are already growing up on slop. Look at brainrot and Roblox games, and YouTube shorts. This will fit right in with what they're used to. They won't even notice.

Remember 2025 when we thought future generations growing up on tiktok was going to be bad? Can't wait to see how 2027 will ruin society even more.

No.

I have been slopping out games for years now. The graphics don't matter unless the gameplay does. The gameplay doesn't matter if the game is too hard or too easy.

The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.

Every generation believes the next generation is growing up on slop.

You registered an account called “slopinthebag” 9 months ago, but you weren’t worried about this until you read this post?

I worry about them never having the satisfaction of working hard on something and truly creating something that is their own. I definitely sound like a boomer (even though I'm a millennial) when I say this but I totally believe that limitations breed creativity. The AI here is just looking at stuff artists from the 90s laboured t create for Arcades and made its own slop version. But then again, one could argue that Mario Paint let you create slop too back in the 90s. Yet, at least with Mario Paint you had to actually hustle quite a bit arranging pixels or musical notes to have something. There was effort and difficulty with overcoming a learning curve and that effort paid off with the creation of something you could be proud of even if it wasn't professional. But here, on the other hand, even a badly generated prompt still gets you a lot.

There's like, no challenge. Reminds me of that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" where a bank robber dies after getting shot by the popo five-o and he is greeted by a man (angel like guy) who takes him to a cool mansion or house where he fulfills everyone one of the guy's wishes: women, money, gambling, etc. etc. And he gambles all day long and never loses but after a while he gets bored and then depressed that he always wins and there's no effort and no risk, and then tells the angel dude that he wonders why he was put in Heaven and that he thinks he doesn't belong there and wants to go to the "other place" only for the angel guy to tell him he is in fact in "the other place".

Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.

So in a sense, I don't worry about generations not necessarily having hardships like us, cause, look at us, we don't write in assembly code like other folks had to do. But on the other hand I do worry that AI is basically removing all manner of human touch and the satisfaction that comes with suffering to generate that human touch.

I suppose there will be suffering later when you want to polish things, but it will be a different, more frustrating kind of suffering. The kind where you don't know what the hell the LLM did and don't even know where to begin.

Most games and shows for kids have been slop since long before AI.

Good call. I haven't really tested it much on the keyboard - we mostly used the PS4 controllers, but I'll add these fixes.

Agreed. Could you imagine? Those kids must have been so stoked!

Though, now they will never stop asking for more and more. OOP may have opened Pandora's box. :)

Positive little kiddo gets more screentime!!!! Yaaaaaayyy!!!!! Negatives: we either are annihilated by AI or enslaved by technocratic feodalism living in a worse conditions than 1800s mine workers. Uau

its insane, to actually get a custom game made for you for your birthday, that you enjoyed? wow... never thought id see this happen.

The article clearly explains what the author/their nephew did. There is no ambiguity. One-shot never means 'so perfect there is literally nothing to be improved.' It means no back-and-forth iterations between the human in the loop and the AI.

One shot: One prompt; no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done. You are totally inspecting other parts of the game. Not the same meaning.

I don't think this effects the kids more than playing any other video game.

the crazier possibility is that little kids' drawing skills - whatever pedagogical value that has, i agree that it has some - may stop improving, but there might be way more videogames authored by them that turn out to be really good.

I mean… it was a birthday present. Everything in moderation, and there are a lot of ways to involve the kids in the process more.

I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.

I'm not OP, but it seems to me that LLMs offer extraordinary access to new skills and information to the uninitiated. Someone who has a positive experience creating a game like this is only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented, the language used, the architectural choices and rationale, etc. The LLM is a competent tutor in all. What I would have given as a child for such access... I had to make due with the help docs, and an occasional book from the library.

I first learned to program in middle school with Logo, and the extent of that was "telling the commander" (or whatever the term was) what to do in almost plain english.

That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.

As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.

When you buy your kid a cake for his birthday, do you think that it's hurting the development of his baking skill, because now he knows cakes are something that he can just hire someone to make with money?

Yes, these are great questions, and I appreciate your politeness.

Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.

My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.

Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.

Counterpoint, I think it’ll get them more into making things, because they don’t have that big frustrating period where their output is nowhere near as interesting as the giant smorgasbord of interesting stuff being pushed on them constantly. I’d much rather they spend their time making stuff with AI than passively consume the garbage streaming on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon 24/7, which was the status quo with my generation. Making can now compete on instant gratification with all the other stuff now.

It's important to keep thoughts like yours in mind because of what degradation AI might bring to human skill, self-confidence, patience, and discipline in the big picture of society's future.

But at the same time, it's worth remembering that reading about an adventure in the forest instead of going on one yourself, or assembling constructs with LEGO instead of learning to cut and join wood doesn't need to be so different than whipping up an interactive toy with the magic software slopper instead of writing one yourself.

Sometimes convenience can open up new doors, like experimenting more freely or boldly with game/theme design rather than getting mired in art design or game construction. Other times, it can be okay for just be a kid (even an adult one) and just play with toys for the delight or calm or wonder they might bring.

If the first thing you felt when hearing about an uncle making his young nephew's fantasy come to life was concern, you might want to take a step back and consider if you might be swept up a little too much.

I'm personally quite skeptical about technology and its impact on human experience and have been for a long time, and AI is rings all sorts of alarm bells for me. But at the same time, it's a pretty fascinating and expressive new medium and not every playful and casual use of it needs be weighed and scrutinized.

It's a one-shot. Iterate and you can make magic happen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiWKfq4niC8

Could you even call it "working" for video games, based on the result?

It's missing all the work that would normally happen at the "make it interesting and enjoyable to play" stage of iteration, e.g. you can walk through every stage unchallenged mashing punch, there's no evidence from the 2 stages I played of the interesting mix of enemy types and AI which can combine in ways which add challenge and variety to a belt scroller, you can stand and basic punch the first boss to death stepping aside only for its AOE attacks, the second boss infinitely spams a running move when it reaches low health and sometimes bumps into the edge of the screen behind it.

You have something which has has all surface indicators of being a video game without the core of what it takes to be an interesting and enjoyable one, same for those other media.