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

    (marianogappa.github.io)
    358 points maloga | 11 comments | 24 Aug 25 15:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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    starchild3001 ◴[24 Aug 25 17:30 UTC] No.45006027[source]▶
    What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI. The real grind is in all the invisible layers on top; balancing the loop, tuning difficulty, creating assets that don’t look uncanny, and building enough polish to hold someone’s attention for more than 5 minutes.

    That’s why we’re not suddenly drowning in brilliant Steam releases post-LLMs. The tech has lowered one wall, but the taller walls remain. It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. LLMs are doing the same thing for code, and image models are starting to do it for art, but neither can tell you if your game is actually fun.

    The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? That’s when we start moving beyond "AI as productivity hack" into "AI as collaborator in design." We’re not there yet, but this article feels like an early data point along that trajectory.

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    1. kaiokendev ◴[24 Aug 25 18:55 UTC] No.45006690[source]▶
    > It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts.

    But we did? We've come a long way from the limited XBLA catalog. It didn't happen overnight, but doubtless we wouldn't have the volume of games we have today without Unity, Godot, Gamemaker, Renpy, RPG Maker...

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    2. sbarre ◴[24 Aug 25 19:25 UTC] No.45006930[source]▶
    I think "proportional" is the key word here..
    3. milesvp ◴[24 Aug 25 19:33 UTC] No.45006989[source]▶
    > we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts.

    I'm not sure the 2 of you are disagreeing. We definitely saw an explosion of indie games. In 2010, there were less than 10 indie games released on steam per month. By 2022, there were ~500/mo, and today there's ~750/mo (I expect that the 250/mo jump around 2022 can likely be attributed to LLMs).

    What's hard to say is if this increase significantly increased the number of good games. Mostly because "good" is highly subjective, but also, I think something else happens. I've been playing games for the better part of 40 years, and what I noticed, is that in that time, the number of must play games each year has largely gone unchanged, despite the industry being orders of magnitude larger than it was 40 years ago. But that is also tricky, because 2 things happen every year, our standards get higher, and our preferences get more refined.

    https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492

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    4. kaiokendev ◴[24 Aug 25 19:38 UTC] No.45007044[source]▶
    You also still have the same amount of time you had 40 years ago. There are definitely more games available, and I would argue the proportion of high quality games has also increased massively, but since you're still limited by the number of games you can play in any given year, you'll never feel that increase.
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    5. Vetch ◴[24 Aug 25 19:56 UTC] No.45007208{3}[source]▶
    Why would the proportion of high quality games increase? The number yes, but I expect not the proportion. Lowering the entry barrier means more people who have spent less time honing their skills can release something that's lacking in polish, narrative design, fun mechanics and balance. Among new entrants, they should number more than those already able to make a fun game. Not a value judgement, just an observation.

    Think of the negative reputation the Unity engine gained among gamers, even though a lot of excellent games and even performant games (DSP) have been made with it.

    More competitors does also raise the bar required for novelty, so it is possible that standards are also rising in parallel.

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    6. ◴[24 Aug 25 20:51 UTC] No.45007660[source]▶
    7. jonny_eh ◴[24 Aug 25 20:56 UTC] No.45007692[source]▶
    Since it led to more games, it led to more bad AND good games.

    I don’t think we would’ve seen a Hollow Knight without Unity, built by a team of 2-3 devs.

    replies(1): >>45007767 #
    8. Ekaros ◴[24 Aug 25 21:04 UTC] No.45007767{3}[source]▶
    Looking at shareware days and games like Jazz Jackrabbit with team of 2-3 devs also. I don't know if Unity would have been necessary. Ofc, after 20 years there is lot more processing power and lot less memory constraints. But still, I am not sure if such engines fundamentally changed anything.
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    9. marcus_holmes ◴[25 Aug 25 02:46 UTC] No.45009713{4}[source]▶
    We had shovelware games 25+ years ago (and probably 40 years ago, though I suspect the lack of microcomputers limited that). There were bargain-bin selections (literally bins full of CDs) that cost a few bucks and were utterly shite. I suspect the target audience was tech-unaware relatives who would be "little Johnny likes video games, I'll get him one of these...". Most of them were bad takes on popular games of the time.

    Unity + Steam just makes this process a bit easier and more streamlined. I think the new thing is that as well as the dickwads who are trying to rip people off, there are well-intentioned newbie or indie developers releasing their unpolished attempts. These folks couldn't publish their work in the old days, because making CDs costs money, while now they can.

    10. pjmlp ◴[25 Aug 25 07:12 UTC] No.45011161[source]▶
    As someone reaching 50 years old, we always had such indies, we used to call them bedroom coders, and distributions came in tapes, floppies in magazine covers, shareware CD-ROM and DVD-ROMs.

    Maybe it only got visible to the consoles generation around the time of XBLA arcade, and even that was already predated by PS Yaroze and PS2Linux efforts.

    Before Unity, we had SDL, Ogre3D, SFML,... but naturally all of those require more coding skills than engines designed with UI workflows in mind.

    11. roenxi ◴[25 Aug 25 11:35 UTC] No.45012732{4}[source]▶
    It'd be quite difficult to deploy the processing power and other resources without an engine.

    A 90s PC can't do a complex 3d engine because it lacks the grunt. A 2020s game dev can't do a complex 3d engine themselves because they don't know how to do complex 3d.