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Comment by weakfish | Hacker News Reader

I think the software engineer types in this thread misunderstand what makes game developers tick. A lot of people here do game dev as a way to explore new ways to code. My sister is an indie dev and to her, code is an unavoidable means to an end (creating a game). So many games are absolutely spaghetti on the inside because the creator is deeply uninterested in the art of code. So to that end, LLMs are actually an awesome thing to enable creators to experiment more freely.

FWIW, I’m a platform engineer who is actively mourning the loss of reliability and care given to production code. I just think games aren’t an area where this is nearly as much of an issue.

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This doesn't just generate the code though. It generates the "art" and everything else as well. Ideas are beyond cheap. It's the personal creativity that makes games good or bad.

And saying the code doesn't matter is just ignorant. In plenty of great games the art doesn't matter. In plenty of others the code doesn't matter. Or the dialogue. But the reverse is just as true. In a game with tight, fluid player controls, the code to make that happen takes just as much creativity and skill and human touch as any other form of art. A driving sim made by someone deeply uninterested in the code they write will never feel good to play.

It is just so disingenuous to say that people who focus more on the code side of game development aren't creators. If I can make a demo with a black rectangle jumping around on some red rectangles and hand it to someone and have them say it feels like they're jumping around as a cat, with no art or animations, I'd say that took creativity and a human touch that ai is nowhere near being able to emulate.

So if AI can't emulate it, what's the issue?

I do think AI can emulate it - one of the earliest headlines I remember is an AI piece winning a digital art competition. The piece was great and the influence of the (human) artist was obvious.

If something is beautiful, I can't be assed to care what kind of paint was used to create it. If you trust human beings to continue to appreciate art as we have done since the beginning, there's not going to be any intractable issues.

>If you trust human beings to continue to appreciate art as we have done since the beginning, there's not going to be any intractable issues

When did the discussion become about trusting the audience? I think the discussion has always surrounded whether it's worthwhile to treat art as a problem that needs solving.

Well, if you think it's not a problem to solve then you should go tell all the paintbrush manufacturers that their services will no longer be needed. Ditto for publishers, patrons of the arts, etc., etc.

If art is worth doing it's worth doing with good tools.

> If art is worth doing it's worth doing with good tools.

Yeah, that's why we should keep LLMs out of it.

There are many great games absolutely full of attrocious code.

I'd wager that there are no great games without some amount of atrocious code.

> I just think games aren’t an area where this is nearly as much of an issue.

That's news to me as a game dev. I only get a few milliseconds every frame in which all my calculations need to run. If my program is built on spaghetti code, performance suffers and it becomes very noticeable very quickly.

Yes, in fact there is a ridiculous amount of people in software that want to gatekeep how others do things.

In the context of making a personal project it will never ever matter whether you know how to code or not as long as you enjoyed the process.

It probably stems from a place of fear and pride.

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