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

I have done a decent amount of hobby game dev including completing several games. The comments here i think show a strong lack of real game dev knowledge.

Coding is a hard part of game dev. Coming up with interesting novel mechanics or plays on known genres is rather easy but bringing them to life is hard esp the code. Multiplayer vampire survivors but with giant battletech mech customization. See, very easy. Good luck building that with an LLM.

This uses well known card games as the mechanics which is about as interesting as snake games. This is not a knock at the op. But it is clear many people here havent done much game dev from the comments.

I largely agree with your point, but interestingly I’ve always found the ideas and blue sky thinking game design part the hardest personally. I can code nearly any game mechanic at this point, but struggle with the writing/creativity part of game development. If you find that easy, you should consider yourself rather blessed, it doesn’t come naturally to us all.

> Coding is a hard part of game dev. Coming up with interesting novel mechanics or plays on known genres is rather easy but bringing them to life is hard esp the code. Multiplayer vampire survivors but with giant battletech mech customization.

I disagree. Sure, it's hard, but it's much harder to come up with novel and fun gameplay ideas. Once you have the fun idea, it's just a matter of splitting the problem in bite-sized chunks and iterating.

There is no methodology when you are faced with the dreaded blank page problem and need to come up with something out of nothing. Maybe going for a walk helps. Maybe taking a heroic dose of drugs. Maybe trying a few different things and see what sticks. It's a problem that has existed for millennia in all creative endeavours; whereas coding is "just" engineering.

I've been learning game dev the past month, had to learn a ton of maths to do anything, which was still easier than the question "what kind of game do I want to make?" which is still, to this day, unanswered. No 3Blue1Brown video is gonna help here, unlike learning how to do vector maths and what the hell is a quaternion.

I understand the “writers block” but once you do have a vision or idea, it is incredibly hard to bring it into reality. Much like building a product you have to cut and cut and cut due to time/skill/money constraints. I think many people get hung up on “originality” part too much.

Most of the comments lamenting the idea stage come from those who have not pushed past that. Once you do have an idea, a vision, that is when the real work begins. It is also the most difficult. For every completed game no matter how bad, there is a graveyard of thousands of incomplete projects that no one sees. People vastly underestimate the effort it takes to make a complete game.

If you do struggle with, “what kind of game”, go play games. Alot of games. Write about the games. Between the likes and didnt likes, is the kind of game only you can make.

People build up too great of expectations when the topic of “creativity” comes in. Nothing is new under the sun.

Also, i press “x” to doubt you can build any game mechanic not because i have no doubt you are a talented engineer but because the domain is really that vast. Multiplayer netcode is a prime example and why I used an idea which had a multiplayer component that was realtime.

Ideas are cheap. Making them real is not. It is why engineers get paid so well.

Hah. Obviously there’s probably something I can’t make but I mean it’s by far not the bottleneck for me. And funny you should say, because my last job was actually building peer to peer multiplayer netcode with fully deterministic rollback for a video game. It was hard and took years but we did it.

I think you keep saying “ideas are easy” (for you) and insisting therefore they’re easy for everyone else. They’re really not, good ideas anyway.

Getting high level ideas "X but Y with Z" is easy. What's hard is actually understanding what makes X work and how to adapt it to properly incorporate Y. I've played a bunch of games that had Vampire Survivors, FTL or Factorio as their starting point, but failed to deliver a good game loop.

I agree, turning a simple idea into a polished game takes like a year. Most of it isn't even in the core idea but surrounding polish, menus, extra features, etc. Source I did it. Also I'm just saying the stack from this post is insane. It would probably one shot the task in p5js or C/raylib

>but it's much harder to come up with novel and fun gameplay ideas

I'm going to give an analogy to fiction writing. You ever notice how seemingly everyone has an idea for a story, but shockingly few of them ever execute on their ideas? Why is that?

Well, it's because the ideation stage is the easiest fucking part of writing a book! Sitting down to turn that idea into reality is a process that takes months/years. It requires a lot of concentrated effort, and a willingness to deal with the fact that your writing skills (probably) suck.

It's the same with video games. Probably more so, because the medium is much less restrictive than fiction writing.

Also, quick tangent on the topic of "novel" gameplay ideas--if you listen to successful creatives, some common advice they give is that focusing on being original is a noob trap. Ideas are cheap in the arts, and most things have already been done. It's the execution that matters, which ties back in to my point above.