There are plenty of critiques of the AI labs but it's a bit ironic leveling criticism in a game which was obviously one-shotted by their models and which would never have been made without AI
Nintendo wasn’t even trying, it was all their old sprite characters from Japan market that didn’t do well smashed together in a rushed title for an NA launch. It surprised them.
Huh? This is very much not my understanding of SMB1’s development. Are you maybe thinking of Donkey Kong (made to replace a failed arcade game) and/or the US version of SMB2 (a re-skinned non-Mario Japanese game)?
Nope, SMB1 was a smash up. SMB2 was made by folks that had no idea what they were doing so SMB3 went back to basics. I very much remember the sequence of events. Mario Bro's (and Donkey Kong) were games on the Famicom in Japan that were decent. The issue was with Arcade's in Japan making more money than home systems so they introduced the Nintendo VS cabinets. This helped but it wasn't enough and so in 1985 they greenlit the Super Mario Bros proposal while dealing with the NA launch and the NYC event. Shigeru Miyamoto carried the development and he deserves the credit but corporate was throwing shit at the fan and seeing what sticked. He just so happened to have a plan that required less work from creative.
It seems that you do lose a life when hit by an enemy or falling in a pit, but the latter freezes until you click the toggle sound button, and running out of lives resets the counter to 3 and halves your "valuation".
Yep. Additionally having experimented pretty heavily in this space, I'll state that even with state-of-the-art models (like NB Pro or GPT-Image-2), good luck getting them to generate sprite sheets with consistent frames for animation particularly if you're shooting for a pixel art aesthetic.
I've made a few sprite-based animations with AI assistance but it still required a fair amount of manual photoshop (or in my case Aseprite) post-processing.
If you're not going for pixel art, use the video to video models (the character swap ones that take in a video reference of the animation and a still of the character (the tiktok deepfake models)).
You can e.g. download a run cycle from Mixamo, use Blender to render a video from whatever angle you wish, and feed that into the model along with your sprite on a green background, it's pretty much perfect.
Thanks for the info! I'll give this a shot. Most of my knowledge is from over a year ago, when I would set up OpenPose-style positioning with a controlnet at a high strength to guide an image-to-image workflow in comfyui. But it was pretty tedious and prone to errors.
Nice. I need to go check them out again. I really liked their original Retro Diffusion models but this a while back in the SDXL days. It felt like it was trained on more natural language, so prompting it was quite nice for that era.
But if they’ve been working on it specifically for animation, that’s pretty neat.
They have a few different specialized models now and have put a lot of work into generating sprite sheet animations. The latest thing is a pipeline for ensuring pixel perfect results that also look good stylistically.
One-shotting is a bit of a red herring, imo. Let's say I wanted to build a "Super Dario" meme platformer. I would do some research, find a platformer on Codepen or Github that "feels" good, tweak it to my liking, change the sprites, and voila.
I constantly have to tell agents to just "look it up online" and "don't hallucinate your own components" because people have already done this a million times. Ironically, being more lazy could make these models more useful.
So you're saying that it's not fair to rate a coding model on its ability to code, and instead the best way to use it is to tell it to find existing human-written code online rather than generate actual code on its own?
If you're testing how good LLMs are at compressing information, then I think that's a fair test. Personally, I don't really think that's where their strength comes from. And besides, we already have a "super-intelligence"—it's called the internet, so just use the darn thing.
Thinking about it now you could probably get even better quality if you pre-write the code yourself and hand it to the LLM. That way it outputs exactly what you want.
Haters will suggest AI built this, but I can personally tell there’s at least a kilomolyneux (approx. 55 centikojimas) of PhD-level game dev expertise involved.
I was expecting this to drown in the flood of /newest, so seeing so many folks get a chuckle out of this is a very pleasant surprise. The obvious spark for this was yesterday's second last-minute extension of the Fable promotional window (a phrase comprised of two heavily strained words at this point), and an hour or so of back-and-forth with GLM-5.2 and Opus later, here we are.
The game is, of course, unwinnable on purpose. There is no ending. The flag always escapes, the date always extends, and new GPT releases will continue to wipe your valuation no matter how many coins or funding round power-ups you collect. The win condition is closing the tab because you're tired of it, which I'd argue makes it the most realistic AI-industry simulation currently available on the internet.
The code is, of course, vibe-slopped, most of the imagery is original human-slop. Happy to answer any and all questions and take any and all flak. The bugs are a part of the joke, I swear!
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 45.4 ms ] threadGood thing I have a day job. Where I don't use AI.
https://claude.com/community#:~:text=What,Claude%3F
AI still cannot oneshot 2D platformers, the most documented videogame genre with so much source code available.
But yeah guys, AI sure will be writing all the code just give it another 6 months...
https://grantland.com/features/the-rise-of-nintendo-video-ga...
https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/mario25th/4/0/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w1zl4/when_...
I've made a few sprite-based animations with AI assistance but it still required a fair amount of manual photoshop (or in my case Aseprite) post-processing.
You can e.g. download a run cycle from Mixamo, use Blender to render a video from whatever angle you wish, and feed that into the model along with your sprite on a green background, it's pretty much perfect.
https://retrodiffusion.ai/
But if they’ve been working on it specifically for animation, that’s pretty neat.
I constantly have to tell agents to just "look it up online" and "don't hallucinate your own components" because people have already done this a million times. Ironically, being more lazy could make these models more useful.
Thinking about it now you could probably get even better quality if you pre-write the code yourself and hand it to the LLM. That way it outputs exactly what you want.
Usually the ones I provide myself are better than the ones they find themselves.
I'm not super clear how they search the web or what they do and don't have access to. It seems to be quite fast.
I was expecting this to drown in the flood of /newest, so seeing so many folks get a chuckle out of this is a very pleasant surprise. The obvious spark for this was yesterday's second last-minute extension of the Fable promotional window (a phrase comprised of two heavily strained words at this point), and an hour or so of back-and-forth with GLM-5.2 and Opus later, here we are.
The game is, of course, unwinnable on purpose. There is no ending. The flag always escapes, the date always extends, and new GPT releases will continue to wipe your valuation no matter how many coins or funding round power-ups you collect. The win condition is closing the tab because you're tired of it, which I'd argue makes it the most realistic AI-industry simulation currently available on the internet.
The code is, of course, vibe-slopped, most of the imagery is original human-slop. Happy to answer any and all questions and take any and all flak. The bugs are a part of the joke, I swear!
Can you release a version playable on mobile?
Either way I had a good laugh when I realized it wasn't going to end and getting the coins/tokens was pointless.
Love it!