I've started trying to make some vibe coded games.
The best analogy to use is AI image generation e.g.
- someone posts a photo made with AI and your reaction is "that's amazing!"
- then you generate an image and it's pretty good but not exactly what you want
- then you try to get the AI to change the image to what you want and it's very difficult/requires a lot of steps
More specifically, you can easily spin up a game and parts of it are great. e.g. I made a game where you run a Soviet tractor factory [0]. The AI came up with some good mechanics and funny scenarios ("inspector comes to visit from Moscow: bribe him" etc). But the game mechanics are "off", the humor doesn't always work, you need to gametest A LOT etc.
I certainly can't think of any. I've gone through about 18,000 games on Steam (since I dig for hidden gems and interesting games) and the only time a vibe-coded game stood out to me was when it was so awful I did a double take.
There's so many vibe-coded roguelite deckbuilders out there and all of them look exactly the same. A bunch of shitty art with zero cohesion, mechanics that don't actually work and a UI that's actively offensive to engage with.
I've been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit and testing out the demos people have been sharing, as this would be the place where people most enthusiastic about vibe-coding games post and everything I've seen has been immensely underwhelming. The problem with these games fall into the following categories:
- An utter lack of animation. So many games feature mostly static images.
- AI assets make the game's art style feel horribly incohesive. I played a TCG game where there were high fantasy art, chibi 2d art, anime art, seemingly used haphazardly.
- Bad UX. For example, in the same TCG game, all of the cards had very fancy artwork generated, but the game board itself was far away enough that the made the cards look like blobs on the board.
- Buggy mechanics: There was this guy why shared a platformer generated by fable where you move a lamp to create a shadow path. The character had very awkward movement, would constantly get stuck/unstuck, and would be hard to control.
- Broken mechanics: A lot of games featured exploits that just rendered the game boring to play
- Poor balancing
- Lack of ovararching game structure: no story, no meta-progression, no world-map. These AI games tend to be isolated experiences.
I don't see the masses creating quality, sellable games anytime in the near future. There are so many aesthetic qualities to a game that have direct human bottlenecks. AI can even make games significantly worse as you can seemingly implement many bad mechanics without validating them. Good game devs seem to be relentlessly pruning out the things that down work.
When I was a boy my father forbade me playing Summer Olympics on our Atari 800XL, he didn't like the crunchy noises coming out of joystick and he didn't want to pay for the repairs.
I always enjoy hearing the thoughts of someone who took a slightly different path (indie game development being a favourite), and isn't committed to advancing some thesis -- pressing me to love this or hate that. It feels like it gives my brain a chance to step back from dopamine- or rage-induced habits and just... connect with other people.
I don't know what will happen either. I hope that you and I and other hardworking, basically good people will continue to have a somewhat meaningful, somewhat pleasant existence in the post-AI world, and I think that might be possible, but I just don't know.
> Why not? I think because it wasn't a good business decision to compete with me.
The owner of Pinboard has a great story about this:
"I ended up buying a competitor. Why? Because his choice of tech stack + server footprint cost more than mine. The consequence of this was that even with each of us charging the same price. I was profitable and he was not.
I have been building my own game and game engine for a while now, and cannot help but see whats really happening with vibe coded game generation: and investment into the content generation pipeline.
I feel a solid game engine paired with a good content pipeline can ship games at such a rapid clup that the gameslop gets lost as the noise it is.
I started building a VR game during COVID and released it 2024. When it released, I was using GPT and Copilot to add a lot of quality-of-life stuff (like visual juice) faster.
Yesterday, I finally got around to setting Opus 4.8 on the codebase. It was able to find and correct numerous subtle performance issues.
Features I could no longer spend time implementing, it could one-shot in roughly 10 minutes (not without issues). I could also fan out agents to work on multiple things at once.
One thing I found is that the knowledge I gained from doing things by hand greatly helped reject bad AI generated ideas. For example, my game is a starfighter flight sim and one idea was to tick AI collision detection checks lower the further AI ships were away from the player, which for a flight simulator leads to a lot of crashing into the terrain. A great idea for an FPS, but a terrible idea for a flight sim where enemy ships are often very close to the terrain.
My takeaway is that we are in a golden era where we currently have projects that are half human coded, where AI can pickup the slack. But soon we will be in the Dark Ages where AI generates all the code, and the end result will be much worse as the devs begin to lose an understanding of what they are creating.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] threadThe best analogy to use is AI image generation e.g.
- someone posts a photo made with AI and your reaction is "that's amazing!"
- then you generate an image and it's pretty good but not exactly what you want
- then you try to get the AI to change the image to what you want and it's very difficult/requires a lot of steps
More specifically, you can easily spin up a game and parts of it are great. e.g. I made a game where you run a Soviet tractor factory [0]. The AI came up with some good mechanics and funny scenarios ("inspector comes to visit from Moscow: bribe him" etc). But the game mechanics are "off", the humor doesn't always work, you need to gametest A LOT etc.
0 - https://alexpotato.com/games/tractor47/?l=hn2
There's so many vibe-coded roguelite deckbuilders out there and all of them look exactly the same. A bunch of shitty art with zero cohesion, mechanics that don't actually work and a UI that's actively offensive to engage with.
- An utter lack of animation. So many games feature mostly static images.
- AI assets make the game's art style feel horribly incohesive. I played a TCG game where there were high fantasy art, chibi 2d art, anime art, seemingly used haphazardly.
- Bad UX. For example, in the same TCG game, all of the cards had very fancy artwork generated, but the game board itself was far away enough that the made the cards look like blobs on the board.
- Buggy mechanics: There was this guy why shared a platformer generated by fable where you move a lamp to create a shadow path. The character had very awkward movement, would constantly get stuck/unstuck, and would be hard to control.
- Broken mechanics: A lot of games featured exploits that just rendered the game boring to play
- Poor balancing
- Lack of ovararching game structure: no story, no meta-progression, no world-map. These AI games tend to be isolated experiences.
I don't see the masses creating quality, sellable games anytime in the near future. There are so many aesthetic qualities to a game that have direct human bottlenecks. AI can even make games significantly worse as you can seemingly implement many bad mechanics without validating them. Good game devs seem to be relentlessly pruning out the things that down work.
I don't know what will happen either. I hope that you and I and other hardworking, basically good people will continue to have a somewhat meaningful, somewhat pleasant existence in the post-AI world, and I think that might be possible, but I just don't know.
The owner of Pinboard has a great story about this:
"I ended up buying a competitor. Why? Because his choice of tech stack + server footprint cost more than mine. The consequence of this was that even with each of us charging the same price. I was profitable and he was not.
Do not try to compete against Pinboard"
> 2012
sigh
I feel a solid game engine paired with a good content pipeline can ship games at such a rapid clup that the gameslop gets lost as the noise it is.
Yesterday, I finally got around to setting Opus 4.8 on the codebase. It was able to find and correct numerous subtle performance issues.
Features I could no longer spend time implementing, it could one-shot in roughly 10 minutes (not without issues). I could also fan out agents to work on multiple things at once.
One thing I found is that the knowledge I gained from doing things by hand greatly helped reject bad AI generated ideas. For example, my game is a starfighter flight sim and one idea was to tick AI collision detection checks lower the further AI ships were away from the player, which for a flight simulator leads to a lot of crashing into the terrain. A great idea for an FPS, but a terrible idea for a flight sim where enemy ships are often very close to the terrain.
My takeaway is that we are in a golden era where we currently have projects that are half human coded, where AI can pickup the slack. But soon we will be in the Dark Ages where AI generates all the code, and the end result will be much worse as the devs begin to lose an understanding of what they are creating.