Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

The part of this that always confuses me is like nobody's aware gamejams exist, this has been a thing long before the LLM craze and people have been producing decent games on very limited timespans already, but people are forgetting how insanely high the bar is now, LLMs do not even remotely begin to fix the problem of your competition being incredibly stiff.

Just look at something like ludum dare and all the top entries (out of thousands of games submitted) are all usually quite polished given the timespan.

> are all usually quite polished given the timespan

The open secret is that they might not start coding or building assets until the start time, but they have spent a lot of time thinking about the ideas before then (even when the "theme" isn't known before hand people tend to make ideas fit theme with tweaks), which just speaks to the "code is not the bottleneck" thesis.

For one datapoint, I've participated in many gamejams and I've never ever spent any time beforehand thinking about ideas.

How many big game jams have you won/placed very highly in though?

Game jams typically require games to adhere to a theme that is only known the day of, and the best entries will make a game specifically around that, not just adapt some pre-existing idea to it.

The themes are so open ended it’s very easy to adapt most game ideas. Games that win tend to be the most fun to play not necessarily the ones that fit the theme the best.