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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately level design has evolved into a complex indistrial process. The earlier days from DOOM to Half-Life was a lot more fun.

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Level design can still be an engaging hobby. In fact there's never been a better time to be a hobbyist level designer. Never before have amateurs had access to so much tools, education, and resources.

Except if you want to do level design for existing AAA FPS games other than Counter-Strike, the days where user maps and modding were allowed have come and gone long ago.

There's nothing out there like there was for Counter-Strike 1.6.

Well, there's always Trenchbroom + Quake 1 + community = the incredible, amazing Arcane Dimensions.

I cannot stress enough how artful, imaginative and incredibly fun Arcane Dimensions is - while still being very much Quake 1.

Thank you very much!

Good thing those are still around.

I had a blast making levels and sharing them in BBS and FTP servers 1996-2002.

No worries, one promising use of LLMs is that we could describe a level someday with all its key features and just have it created fully formed, instantly!

Imagine a game mode where you as a player can just describe what you want while the LLM builds something fun and challenging! I think in simpler games such as Doom this should be possible already.

Are you an llm?

why would I be an LLM

use of grammar and overly excited? (or are you trying to make a point? like look how bad LLM's are... hard to tell on the inet. or x2 are you trying to emulate an llm to see how many people you can catch?... its all so confusing now)

I’m a human being

I think the confusion is here:

"...we (humans) could describe ..."

that's what a LLM would say

I can believe we'd get a level, but I'm not ready to believe we'd get something as refined as the undead burg (a case study in the book).

Trying not to mention LLMs in any Hacker News comment section about anything challenge (impossible)

level 9999 difficulty

"we could", but how many people can actually describe a level with all its key features? It's not this easy. In your other sentence you mention that the LLM builds "something fun and challenging", but how would an LLM know what fun and challenging is? You, the "prompt engineer", would have to do that. An LLM can only replicate what it already knows, meaning that level design would be copies of existing level design instead of something creative and novel.

Sure, it can be done. But you can already generate levels and environments generatively. How is AI going to be better at it than a person that clicks around in the Unreal editor?

That sounds awful. What’s the actual point? If you don’t enjoy level design, do something else.

Some people just can't understand that the process of making art is enjoyable by itself. They think the product is the hobby.

Thankfully there’s not enough money in hobby level design for AI slop investment, so this won’t happen.

I keep seeing comments like this and can't help but feel like that would be like suggesting someone who makes pottery as a hobby could make it way faster by just ordering the vase they want from someone else; I imagine the fun part in this, as in many other hobbies, is making it, because if just want to play something someone else made, you can already do that, can't you? Maybe it won't be exactly what you wanted, but the LLM generated one won't also.

That’s just procedural level generation with extra steps. Why ask humans for input when you can just as easily ask the LLM to generate a list of key-features that would be received well by user_profile 400231862?

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