The audience won't like it because they have beef with the tools I'd choose to use, but that's a them problem, not a me problem. Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art. They'll never know, I guess.
I don't believe you can.
Still, a weekend-long indy game jam in which the contestants are expected to use AI, rather than being forbidden to use it, would be pretty interesting to see.
You said "for practically no money". How much are we talking about here?
> weekend-long indy game jam
There was apparently one at GDC earlier this year but I couldn't find any details about the winners. I did find https://www.genjam.net, the nicest thing about which I can say is that many of the examples appear to function.
Not entirely a rhetorical question. I've found any images need serious review and touch-up at a minimum and usually multiple rounds of revision. The topology on any generated 3D models is generally atrocious. TTS is not tuned for voice acting to an extent it's absolutely no good for that purpose as far I can tell, and that would be a cornerstone of any serious modern "Myst-class" adventure game. I can't comment on music and SFX in particular and have heard secondhand that current models are "all right", but imagine it's probably the same situation: no care taken, you get uselessly mid results. If it's really that easy and that cheap, I'd like to see it.
Good example: watch people on /r/stablediffusion goofing around with Minimax-H3. It's clear the model can do amazing stuff including game scenes [1], but it just dropped last week so there's nothing to see yet.
If I were inclined to make the next Myst, that's what I'd start with. I'd need taste and talent (which admittedly are showstoppers in my case), but not a lot of money or skill.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1virhsf/do...
And yet you yourself said:
> I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend
Which of these am I to believe?
So yes, if we're talking "Myst class" relative to the 1993 release, I'm very confident that I could vibe-wrangle something just like it in a week, using only open models that were released within the last month or so. When I say "It's just too soon," I mean that the capabilities exist now, but they are new enough that no one has had time to do anything interesting with them. And cloning a 1993 game is not especially interesting, at least not to me.
Obviously the Myst franchise hasn't stood still since then. I don't know anything about the newer releases, so I'd have to do some hedging there. You would rightfully complain that any new Myst game that someone hacks in a week would not be competitive with the SotA. But it could certainly stand up to the original.
I feel like unless you've grokked that art (and most importantly art direction) is also important to communicate the game design to the player, then you clearly aren't god's gift to game design :)