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Comment by joegibbs | Hacker News Reader

I think that games are a medium where it's a lot harder to flood a store with garbage, since you've got to go through and actually make the game. There are plenty of shovelware games on Steam already but they're using marketplace content that's been created by real humans for game systems. If you're going to make some shovelware garbage you've got to put a lot of work in - game systems, saving, loading, achievements - and every game costs you the Steam creator fee. Also, 3D model generation isn't up to scratch yet, so it's only going to work on 2D elements.

My game has a few elements which I used AI for, but I don't think that it's particularly obvious which. Here's a screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yM_3Ih40breLznsqy7wrA0y7_iF...

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Not really. See: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/03/a-dev-trained-robots-...

In this article a developer made a completely automatic game generator for Android. A terrible slot machine game with graphics pulled from an image search, generated names, sound is text-to-speech, etc... Even the application process was automated. In the end, they published 1500 apps at a rate of 15/day, the maximum allowed by the Play Store. They are now all dead, but in the meantime, they made $50k.

Would this be any worse with generative AI though? You'd just be replacing the images from Google with images from Stable Diffusion. You couldn't let AI generate the code for it because you'd have to actually check that it successfully compiles.

Hmm this sound like a bad deal for that developer. Looks more like a performance art than business plan. The amount of work needed to automate all that stuff probably took more than a few months for only 50k income.

I admire your optimism. Look at the iOS App Store to see heaps and heaps of trash games. Even without any “AI” support.

"I think that games are a medium where it's a lot harder to flood a store with garbage, since you've got to go through and actually make the game."

Have you not seen mobile app stores?

> I think that games are a medium where it's a lot harder to flood a store with garbage, since you've got to go through and actually make the game.

That was only true before you could tell an AI to make a game for you while having zero programing skills, zero artistic skills, and zero writing skills. The better AI game generators get at creating whole games from nothing more than descriptions the worse things will get.

You couldn't make an entire game without those skills. In 10-20 years? Maybe. But at the moment unless you know how to code you'll have a million compiler errors and no game as the LLM hallucinates half the engine functions and gives you a ton of unconnected code which you can't put together. It's the same with the artistic skills, unless you know some artistic basics you're going to end up with art that clashes so badly (different styles, different themes etc) that people will be put off just by a screenshot.

You could use AI to make entire games without those skills at least three years ago!

Here's one from 2022 https://andrewmayne.com/2022/03/17/building-games-and-apps-e...

Here's another: https://nitter.cz/ammaar/status/1635754631228952576?lang=en

sites like this show where things are heading: https://www.rosebud.ai/ai-game-creator

I'm not too impressed with these examples. I mean it's impressive that it can build code, but it's a very long way off building entire games that you'd want to play.

The human still has to provide the creative input - the concept of the game, the rules, and multiple steps of guidance to get anywhere (when it works).

The code is sometimes generated correctly, but only if a) it's fairly trivial and b) the model can generalise from something else it's seen. There's squillions of maze examples out there so models build slight variations on this easily enough, but as soon as you inject some originality, the model flounders.

Try something more recent:

https://www.techspot.com/news/100718-someone-created-video-g...

Play it yourself here: https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html

This is exactly the kind of crap I expect to see on steam

He had to know how to code to tell it what to fix and diagnose what the errors were and it sounds like it was more arduous than simply writing it himself, so while technically it was entirely written by ChatGPT it still seems like it's not going to make a big difference in the short term - it wasn't just "ChatGPT, write me an Angry Birds clone".

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