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

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.

> 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...

> 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

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.

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.