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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

Game code is also art, it defines the game as much as the assets. I don't know why the game industry has such a contempt for the coding side.

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The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about. It's possible to write two functions that look different but have identical properties for anything that ends up being perceived by the player. For assets, the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.

Adding to the fact that people who write code are in general much better compensated in most industries than people who produce art, having software replace artists feels like "punching down" in a way that having software replace people who write software doesn't. As a software engineer, Ilif I use AI to write a bunch of code for myself, I'm much better able to understand the tradeoffs to my future employment in a much more visceral way than I ever could for what using AI-generated art might mean for an artist. Even with all of the recent proclamations that code is "solved" and fearful predictions that programming jobs are going to stop being so cushy, the job market for the average software engineer is probably at least an order of magnitude better than it is for the average artist in terms of compensation and job security, and AI or not, I don't see that changing any time soon.

That's not true though. Bad code will manifest in a lot of ways. Affecting players and how they perceive the game. See Cyberpunk 2077, the art is pretty good, but the game is extremely buggy. I stopped playing because of that

Sure, I don't disagree with bugs being problematic. As your example indicates though, games that came out well before LLM coding was a thing still could have buggy code. My point is that the actual behavior of the game's code is what players care about, not the code itself. The code is a process rather than the output, and players care about the output rather than the process used to produce it. Art assets are the output the player looks at directly, so it's not crazy that they might care more about it.

> the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.

But a line of buggy code will be substantially more impactful than a poorly drawn model. An extra finger on a model doesn’t cause your save to be corrupted or a quest to hard lock.

Buggy code, yes, but that's not what I said. Players never look at the code directly, only the end product, whereas they do look directly at the assets. My point is that the scrutiny likely is (and should be, IMO) on the direct player experience, and that ends up meaning that the code itself being sloppy is only indirectly relevant, compared to the assets that they see directly. The comparable output of the code is the behavior, which is possible to scrutinize more directly in most cases.

> The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about

I don't think that's true, I could mention a few examples, the cliché of the Unreal Engine hair style or lights and on the other side of the spectrum, the custom made engine which made TinyGlade what it is.

Game development iterates with what's brought from the coding side.

My point is that the code only affects the experience indirectly because they interact with the output of it rather than looking at it directly. The assets aren't as much of a process as the output themselves.

I’d go a step further. The game code is the game. Everything else is there in service of the interactive experience.

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