A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion.
Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games.
Can I go back to the 80's please?
Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games.
Can I go back to the 80's please?
It helps that I mostly want to make certain types of games but I think everyone does. I have drop in CameraController, First Person rig, 2D inventory system, dialogue system etc. All flexible enough to get wired into the one off game manager or whatever it needs to plug into.
Things will change rapidly in the nest 12-36 months and people with vision will outlast "craftsman" 100 to 1.
You'll need to find a publisher, journalists, etc to market your game. You'll ask your friends what they are playing instead of scrolling the store page. Trusted platforms will promote games that are actually worth looking at. This problem already exists on modern platforms like Steam but AI is supercharging it.
If you want to test this, find yourself a record store and pick up a few LPs less than a few bucks from bands you've never heard. You might get something really great or it might be terrible.
Trust signals are going to be quite influential going forward, and that will get exploited too. I think we're going to see the return of high effort, high trust games journalism. Not necessarily as the commercial victor, but as a community we will rally around people and outlets we trust.
It will take at least a full decade for people to realize the slop isn't helping, has made us all collectively mediocre and will seek out people with real specializations. By then I sure hope those who are specializing haven't lost the motivation to do great things and moved on to other fields.
There are still... dozens of us left!
instead we will see something like flash or game maker, with new art styles driven by what agents make easy, and what children think is fun.
games have immediate feedback loops about quality. either theyre fun or theyre not.
I like the knittling analogy that was made by the OpenClaw inventor recently. Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.
Equally true for today's AI coding agents
In fact this whole analogy makes no sense, a knitting machine is far closer to a compiler in this analogy then it is to a language model. Many would argue that automatic looms were the first compilers of the industrial age, and I would agree with that argument.
The "art" of programming is going exactly that route, maybe with a little fewer ladies and more men.
An old lady could equally sit in front of her desktop PC write some HTML, and upload a blog page with her amazing knitting projects, or she could get pintrest. This was true before LLMs, and it is still true today.
Another potential flaw is the assumption that professional knitwear design does not exist. It does. Plenty of people work in industrial scale knitwear products. We have people designing new products, making patterns and recipes, we have manual labor in the production, operating machines or even knitting by hand. Case in point, travel anywhere and go to a local market popular with tourists, and you will see plenty of mass produced knitted products, most of them took great skill to design and produce. Nothing compatible to prompting an LLM to do this for you.
Oddly I feel AI is getting me off the endless learn new tech churn. I was looking at a few odd ball programming books on my shelf, graphics programming from scratch and retro game dev (c64 edition and nes editions) and thinking I might now have time to work through these instead of learning technology x.
https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/
And I'll be manually coding as I want to learn!
you make a good point. I lost interest around "MCP" in all this; now we're up to people not understanding map reduce and manually garbage collecting for the AI.
I have the Minix book, somewhere...
How is that a good thing? Sounds insanely dystopian to me. Especially considering all the other jobs that will be affected too.
yeah, it does suck, all the way to nvidia's bank account
meanwhile in reality many jobs still exist that could be automated..Why? because people dont let others automate their joy of life away.
its how it always goes.
people will be programming professionally, and such programs will be used by businesses.
The same people who were going to make something good will still make something good, the code imo has very little to do with it.
Passion is necessary but insufficient by itself to make good things
Every good and enjoyable game made was handcoded, with art, music, dialogue and design created with intent. I have yet to see a game created with an LLM that's even worth playing, despite countless LLM enthusiasts declaring the death of art , design and programming.
A tool that takes a simple prompt and generates a game from it isn't capable of any of that, and the necessary passion is nonexistent. It's an interesting technical demo but it's useless for gamedev unless your only goal is churning out programmatic slop, which is exactly what it will be used for.
I am not sure about you, but I do not know a single developer who isn't using LLMs with a passion, even if its only just cursor and auto-complete.
So, quite the opposite. Instead, literally all games are being made with AI now. I expect the same thing applies to the other professions that you brought up, if not now then soon.
A passion for using LLMs, not for making games. If they had a passion for making games they would recognize how limiting LLMs actually are to the creative process. They wouldn't be making Show HN's for what amount to barely coherent tech demos. But it's very clear from having seen many such projects that the actual game doesn't matter to them.
> Instead, literally all games are being made with AI now.
That's a statement of faith. It's something you want to be true, and believe must be true. And it may prove more accurate as time goes on but it certainly isn't true now.
The latest stack overflow survey puts AI dev usage at 84% of their respondents, increasingly your position is the faith based one.
In some ways the kind of complaining I see is like complaining about a chef's meal because the chef didn't mine the ore to make his knife.
Look in the specific case of this post... none of the games are "good".. however.. one-shoting games WITH ASSETS.. seems pretty impressive to me.
There's levels to it, it's not black and white.
And floppies, sure, the 3.5" ones had some shovelware, included in trade magazines and whatnot. Maybe someone has a directory listing of a floppy from this era showing what it was like, i'd be interested; i know about AOL disks, too.
But CD-ROM. never before could humans distribute 200 games / software packages so easily. my first computer with a cd-rom had a hard disk 350MB larger than a CD-ROM. 2 shovelware CD-ROMs was more than my PC could handle!
If you want to handcraft something, do it. How popular it is among other people isn't relevant.
I've switched to emulators, a bluetooth controller and zero android games (and zero ios games on my work phone). But yeah it was/is horribly enshittified already. And what people predicted did happen.
The fact that the app store allows updates means existing games get systematically worse. Even the games I used to enjoy, and bought 5 years ago, like collossatron now have ads after every play.
*Atari 1980 (20 games) vs Steam 2025 (20,008 games)
It's the literal definition of gatekeeping.
The problem you describe (quantity over so-called quality) is a discovery and curation problem.
Yet you blame the tools of creation and lament the lack of restriction or controls on production instead.
Yes these tools make it easier to produce, and yes that means that you have more low-quality work out there. I'm not pretending like that doesn't introduce new challenges.
But the answer isn't to gate-keep the tools or the process of creation or to stop or shame people from being creative with these new tools by universally calling their work "slop" or "bad".
> It becomes a problem for everone when spaces meant for meaningful work become overrun with an awful stream of endless mediocre slop that someone quickly generated without giving it a second thought. The problem here is not that it is fast and easy. The cardinal sin is that it is fast, easy AND bad.
So..
"a problem for everyone" <- the fallacy of assuming your personal feelings and opinions are universal and apply to all of us (they're not and they don't).
"spaces meant for meaningful work" <- tells me that you don't seem to believe anything made with these new tools can be meaningful, implying they don't belong etc..
And again the hubris of believing that your personal opinion reflects the ideal state or voice of a broad and diverse community (a fucking textbook definition of gatekeeping btw)
And lastly, do you truly believe that AI tooling is the dividing line?
That all non-AI games made today are meaningful?
There's tons of quick and dirty stuff out there like asset flips and weekend projects that people throw up on Steam or Itch for sale, and there have been for years and years.
If your fear is that bad games are going to get out into the world you haven't been paying attention for the last (checks watch) 50+ years...
The phrase "a problem for everyone" doesn't mean everyone agrees, it just means the described situation would affect everyone broadly...
And even you literally admitted you agree it will introduce problems just in the previous post: "I'm not pretending like that doesn't introduce new challenges", it's a little too late to try walk that back now.
> "spaces meant for meaningful work" <- tells me that you don't seem to believe anything made with these new tools can be meaningful, implying they don't belong etc..
No, just that the non-meaningful work they create risks overwhelming any meaningful work created with or without the tools, which is a real problem AI is already creating in online communities today. Knitting patterns on Etsy is a prime example. It is an accurate description of a problem that already exists today, and trying to avoid discussing it helps no-one.
Again, even you admit the problem is real and don't really have any real complaints except that you keep complaining about my phrasing. It seems you would have been happy if I'd just used the more polite terms you introduce instead, like "new challenges" instead of "problems", "low-quality work" instead of "awful slop", and "not low-quality" instead of "meaningful"? Which is fine, but not really an interesting discussion.
To avoid admitting you are simply annoyed with my phrasing you instead try to pin extreme opinions on me that are nothing close to anything I have ever said, like "you believe your personal opinion reflects the ideal voice of the community", "you believe your personal feelings and opinions are universal", "you believe nothing made with these new tools can be meaningful" and that I think "all non-AI games made today are meaningful", which is just silly.
Since you agree that you see the same problem I see, and just want to discuss other opinions you invent for me that I don't actually share, I don't think we will reach any conclusion here and I probably won't engage further. Thank you for your time anyway.