You could literally make all this in probably 24 hours and not spend any time mucking around with prompts.
Like what are we even seeing here? Basically a tech demo of a physics engine, a little UI interaction for throwing a collidable entity into other entities, and some code for setting up a level?
Show me the maintenance, adding new features, bug fixing, cross platform compatibility, shaders, networking code, sound, etc.
I'm a game developer. It's impressive.
I'm extremely aware of how short a game jam demo is compared to an actual product. There's an ocean between the two.
That doesn't diminish how much easier and more approachable it suddenly is for someone with little experience to make a game jam demo, and with kinda-passing art.
I couldn’t make that art in 24 days.
The big thing about the state of current AI isn’t that it does a bunch of things, it’s that it drastically increases the number of people who can do things.
That is, I could not make this game in a day before AI. With it, maybe I could. I am far from unique.
Giving the whole world blogspot.com 20 years ago didn't measurably improve the internet, it just added a few more winners and a gigantic increase in low-quality spam pollution.
But it's mostly been used to pollute the internet with useless spam. With generative AI, the same thing will happen. The very example shown here is an Angry Birds clone, patient zero of the pay-to-win hellscape of mobile games. I don't think it's an accident that they had AI in their hands and decided to build that.
> With generative AI, the same thing will happen
I’m not sure what your point is. Of course it will. When powerful tools are available and perverse incentives exist, humans will follow them.
I've learned Kubernetes and Powershell this exact way.
Isn’t everything you just listed (physics engine, UI, collide entities) how you make a simple game? It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t have networking code, shaders, or sound. Those things can be added later.
I don’t think it’s productive to gatekeep who is and isn’t a game developer. They developed a game, that makes them a game developer—it doesn’t matter how they got there.
This person successfully developed a game. Just because it isn’t how others would have done it doesn’t minimize the result.
Similarly, using AI to develop a game makes you as much of a game developer as someone who hires someone to make a game for them. And some development studios are basically that, people hiring developers to make games. But AI can’t compete well with that.
It’s like coming up with a new fusion power plant, but it takes more energy to run than what it produces. Inspiring, but useless.
Using a computer to write a letter makes you as much of a writer as someone how hites someone to write a letter for you. And some writers are basically that, hiring scribes to write for them. Computer can't compete well with that.
Except it does.
This really sounds like “real programmers write in assembly” to me. An AI is a tool, not dissimilar from a higher level language. This person used a tool to create something that didn’t exist before. The result is right there.
Regardless, I can pull down some off the shelf assets from an asset store and make a game with them.
Where are the ones that look different from the ones 50 other game makers used?
I don't know, and now I don't need to care.
Maintenance and new features are more of the same already done. Networking code is a library. Sound is a library. Cross-platform is a library. Shaders are a library. AI fixed bugs.