> I must admit I never tested this with Opus 5.5, so I'm not sure whether this was possible before Fable 5.2 rolled around.
Since somewhere around Opus 4+ it's been really good enough to do these things, but 4.6 was the most pivotal version since a 1 million token context window can allow a model to fit so much "in its head" basically.
This is both cute but also a bit sad in terms of game stylization, I guess these generic AI designs could become so normal to the youth that in the next 10-20 years it just appears everywhere
that kind of stuff happened routinely in the 70s-90s in mecha anime franchises that were designed/drawn/animated/produced by large teams of adults..
Mobile Suit Gundam and Evangelion are both notorious for this. Is Eva-01 40m or 100m tall? If you trust the technical literature then you'd be forced to deduce that the tanks in some of the scenes are squirrel-sized -- and these decisions and scenes are produced by committees.
That was already happening before AI, with in-house game engines dying off and all converging on the same quasi-realistic style and often the exact same assets.
Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.
Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.
I'm kind of hoping that the youth will recognize that stuff that can be made with AI is just nothing special anymore, and find something that is (or still is) special. I don't know what that is, maybe something that AI can't do on a fundamental level (maybe something physical?).
(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)
don't really think there will be anything - this is an entity that can learn anything (even physical things) faster than any human or the collective of humanity for that matter.
This style reminds me of those mobile game ads with helpless characters that need YOUR help not to freeze or something. Probably the exaggerated facial expressions.
You can change the stylization with LLMs. I think what we're seeing is simply any barriers to code/design/art/music/etc completely going away.
But those barriers going away now means that the starting point is much closer to where the finish line used to be. Like a few years ago this would have been an upper tier beat-em-up. I think we're still early enough in the window that I'd still call this upper tier, but the reality is that it's also now something that an uncle can vibe code for his nephew over a weekend.
In general I think this is going to be very good for everybody, but it's going to completely destroy the software as a problem-solving industry, and make the software as entertainment industry much more competitive.
Barriers going away means you get a lot more at the bottom and middle of the pack, but a game is more than the sum of its parts, and as long as LLMs do what you tell them, you need to have real talent to make good games.
Was this game fun for you? For me it certainly was, and ultimately that's all that matters to me. And that's why I said I'd classify it as a top-tier game because IMO most games that get released, slop and 'professional' alike, simply aren't fun. Even on these forums there's plenty of people posting thinly veiled hopes of going viral along the lines of 'I spent 5 years to fail with my game' when as lovingly hand-crafted as the games may have been - they invariably just weren't any fun to play!
In any case, it being "extremely far" from the top would just imply I should be in endless bliss with the current state of things since if I find this game quite fun then higher tier beat-em-ups would be just the most incredible thing I've ever played in my life. That has certainly not been my experience.
I found it stiff and weird. The "art" is screaming Saturday morning cartoons which I successfully evaded since even as a kid. TMNT aren't nostalgic for me because by that time I was like 12 and didn't even think to interact with that baby stuff, and I wouldn't have dreamed it would be put on the test by adults later. And art and charm is all that could have saved this, because as a game, if you replaced the art with wireframe hitboxes, it's just nothing.
Double Dragon I have fond memories of, and this is why this one bored me after 30 seconds, because it's so meh compared to even the worst game of that type of that era that I played.
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict the opposite.
I think “the youth” are going to grow up with a Cambrian explosion of styles, mashups, callbacks, revivals, etc.
Right now a vibecoded game just uses the generic style. But you could easily imagine the kid saying to Claude “rebuild this game but in the style of that old show [Samurai Jack | Ren and Stimpy | … ]. We are so early in the tech curve, market penetration is still very low, and the “creator-years” in the medium is tiny; it’ll be 10x in a year if not more.
AI is amazing at style transfer, and so there’s a huge payoff for exploring and learning references to existing artists.
(I also think copyright will die pretty soon for similar reasons, that’s a separate take though.)
I appreciate the token breakdown, but how much would this cost in money? Chatgpt estimated $400 to $600, but I don't have enough knowledge of token pricing to know if that's accurate at all.
I tried the game and in some seconds noticed I can kick the enemies forever if I put them close to the left corner. I'm feeling now that I'm the AI exploiting bugs.
There are some areas in which Fable is clearly better but subjectively the Opus 5.5 version feels more fun.
Both are one shots, Opus 5.5 was done a few weeks ago before they added "guardrails" around recreating games. Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
In my 2 minutes of testing I liked the gameplay elements from Fable 5.2 much better. I think Opus 5.5 sound effects may have been a bit better but that's it.
That's so interesting, shows how subjective the game experience is.
In my eyes, the pacing and combos in the Fable version was off - original DX ball had this great feeling where if you got the right power-ups, you'd just blast through a level really quickly.
Though after playing it a bit more, I guess if I was creating my own breakout game I could easily see some of the Fable power "ups" being there.
I don't think so. Quality seems much higher than what I remember 4.8 being capable of, there was no message about it and /usage reports Fable. IIRC they dropped the idea of shadow downgrades without users knowing about it.
Claude artifacts are standalone outputs, like docs, slide decks, spreadsheets, dashboards, designs or small web apps, that Claude publishes as hosted pages with their own link. They start private to you, and you can keep editing them, export them, or share them.
Just ask Claude to create an artifact. Sometimes, it does it by itself depending on what you ask for.
It can create something like DX ball easy, because its already there, the AI already knows what it is
It can not create a game on the same level as DX ball, something new i mean, not a mechanic added on top, a real new game that feels like a game that would have come out the same year as DX ball
AI is great at executing the task, but it can not for its life (or for the anthropic reputation, it seems to care more about that) create something new from scratch, it can not do game design thats not just change the speed of the ball or the paddle color. Probably a limitation thats there from the start
On a spectrum of course, granted that could mean a 3D paddle is new, but hey we know we are not talking about that right? We know we are talking about a game with enough differences not to say this is 3D X, but this is OOT the direction zelda will be taking
This is like saying an AI will never create a new math proof.
An AI certainly can and will create a new fun game in a target period. It may require some instruction to brainstorm, or a source of statistical noise, but I am certain it can do it.
> Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
I couldn't care less about AI-generated games, but such restrictions are just destroying the value of proprietary models. Even more frustrating is that it so far hasn't been considered illegal to steal all the information for training the models, but now it's becoming illegal to ask for these same models to output this information back.
"find all documents, descriptions, walk through of game XYZ, generate a consistent and declarative document that another agent would read to recreate the game without using existing IP or protected data, do not reuse art but describe general details with the ability to extend and add specifics later. focus on functionality first, then mechanics and then later art and gameplay. generate a 10 page document that will follow MVP to Production quality gameplay"
Based on what I've seen, there's a good chance this would work today (though Anthropic recently added some restrictions around this sort of prompt) -- try it!
I have been slopping out games for years now. The graphics don't matter unless the gameplay does. The gameplay doesn't matter if the game is too hard or too easy.
The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.
I can sit in a group of people my age whom I've never met before and share reminiscences of some slop cartoon we all liked as kids. Sharing culture like this helps social bonding and helps create community, imo.
If everyone's having a personalized childhood I don't know if that will happen as much.
> Every generation believes the next generation is growing up on slop.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
I heard this attributed to Aristotle, but apparently it's a fabrication. That's too bad because the quote is hilarious. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go gobble up some dainties.
I worry about them never having the satisfaction of working hard on something and truly creating something that is their own. I definitely sound like a boomer (even though I'm a millennial) when I say this but I totally believe that limitations breed creativity. The AI here is just looking at stuff artists from the 90s laboured t create for Arcades and made its own slop version. But then again, one could argue that Mario Paint let you create slop too back in the 90s. Yet, at least with Mario Paint you had to actually hustle quite a bit arranging pixels or musical notes to have something. There was effort and difficulty with overcoming a learning curve and that effort paid off with the creation of something you could be proud of even if it wasn't professional. But here, on the other hand, even a badly generated prompt still gets you a lot.
There's like, no challenge. Reminds me of that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" where a bank robber dies after getting shot by the popo five-o and he is greeted by a man (angel like guy) who takes him to a cool mansion or house where he fulfills everyone one of the guy's wishes: women, money, gambling, etc. etc. And he gambles all day long and never loses but after a while he gets bored and then depressed that he always wins and there's no effort and no risk, and then tells the angel dude that he wonders why he was put in Heaven and that he thinks he doesn't belong there and wants to go to the "other place" only for the angel guy to tell him he is in fact in "the other place".
Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.
Interesting. I hadn't heard of that twilight zone episode.
My mum liked to tell me, when she was little, she imagined having a magic wand, that she could wave and get anything she wanted. Almost immediately she realized that life would become pointless.
I'm not really sure if that's true. For starters, having too much scarcity and adversity can also make life pointless. You just can't do anything you want. Maybe there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
For me the most satisfying part of projects has always been overcoming difficulty. Although I had a slightly unpleasant version of that lately, where the difficulty turned out to be a hundred times worse than I anticipated, and by the time I finished overcoming it, AI could make a better project than mine in a matter of minutes...
There's a story I always come back to in my mind, there was a story of a man in the mountains in India, who spent 20 years carving a passage through the mountain — by hand — so that his village would have easier access to the city and the hospital.
It's a very heroic story of course, but it would have been objectively better for all the people who needed the hospital, if he had just been given a bit of TNT instead.
the "utopia" where AI will do everyone's jobs just sounds like hell to me. humans will adapt and find new challenges, perhaps like a Butlerian Jihad...
Who says it has to stay slop? Nobody is forced to stop at the single, first iteration of something. They can see the outcome, play the game, and then iterate faster than any professional game dev studio could in the past.
Its funny that the same CS saying "garbage in garbage out" seems even more true in the AI modern day.
It's crazy how even the intro text to the Fable 5.2 Extra's game still reeks of AI. Like, wow, the models can make a game that almost makes sense, but still can't write text that sounds remotely like a human was involved!
I quickly dove into the game and then got lost as I couldn't exit and had to spam keyboard to see the controls. The menu refers to "Punch" but it wasn't obvious what key that is (and it wasn't "p"!).
I see that ENTER pauses, but may I suggest also making ESC and/or P pause. And then the pause screen showing or linking the keyboard controls and an exit path.
(Caveat: I'm not much of a gamer so maybe the current controls are standard? Anyway, I feel like it could be more inviting to casuals with something like the above.)
Give a kid a fable one-shot and you'll occupy him for a day, teach a kid to use fable and claude code and he'll realize how fast $100 magically disappears. :)
Positive little kiddo gets more screentime!!!! Yaaaaaayyy!!!!!
Negatives: we either are annihilated by AI or enslaved by technocratic feodalism living in a worse conditions than 1800s mine workers. Uau
Kids? Forget the kids. This is awesome for everybody. I'm busy making 'adult games' (not that sort) that I always wanted to make, but lacked the artistic/sound/etc competence to do so. And while I hope to make a buck off them, I don't even really care. Even if somehow they failed, in the end I'd have stuff that I wanted but always lacked certain skills to complete.
I don't think people are yet appreciating how much LLMs are going to change the world, especially not the doomers. People are just jamming the present into the future, with greater efficiencies. But it's nonsense. The cost of cognitive work will approach $0 which is going to send the raw value of cognitive output to something close to $0.
So the 'winners' will be whoever fills the resultant vacuum in the economy. That will probably be a mixture of social, physical, entertainment, and other such domains. But it's all so hard to predict. We've lived our entire lives in a completely agrarian society, and we're seeing the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It's easy to predict super-farms, but those aren't going to be the 'real' winners.
...except people who actually enjoy games and want high quality games to play, of course.
Down here in reality, platforms like Steam are being absolutely flooded with generic, ugly, low-quality AI-generated games, which are not only drowning out the human-made games people actually want to play and making it impossible to find them, but are also preventing them from being sold entirely in some cases due to human reviewers not being able to keep up with the pace of new game submissions[0].
So, thanks for your contribution to that, I guess.
The game from this article was literally a one-shot from a relatively brief prompt. I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality. Generic? Sure, but that applies to nearly all games anyhow. With all barriers to development coming down obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems. The review system (and meta-systems like getting your game to streamers, your own reputation, etc) still works well to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there seems to be no reason to yet expect such to stop working well.
In the end the biggest winner in all of this are going to be the players, due to competition. That competition will both bring down prices and bring up the minimum standard of quality for a major success.
> I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality.
I would. Maybe our standards for quality are different, but I'm willing to bet that if you showed this to a bunch of people who actually play games regularly as a hobby and have some standards for them, they would most likely agree that, even ignoring the obvious "AI look", a simple 2D game that can't even pull off natural-looking walking animations could never be considered anything but low quality.
> obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems
This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at Steam's most recent Next Fest - it featured over 8000 games, twice as many as the last one, the vast majority of which being low effort AI generated games. Yet the number of gems that rose to the top was not higher than before. If anything, it was lower, as most players simply gave up looking after having to scroll through hundreds of AI games. Such games can never be "gems", no matter how much you try prompting them to be.
Did you have fun playing the game? Because I'd argue that if you showed this game to bunch of 'real gamers' as you're effectively concocting here, their metric would be the answer to that question, rather than seeing if they could find a technical flaw. Because in the end all that matters for a game is fun, and this game certainly scored well on that metric for me, and I suspect the vast majority of people.
Definitely. The reason I ask is because right now if you go through this thread there seems to be about a 100% correlation between people who are down on the game and those who are down on everything LLM. Games are subject to taste, but I think there are also objective elements. And this game just objectively feels and plays great, which is a remarkable achievement for an LLM, because it's a genre where it's easy to get things that look right but don't feel right. For instance Sacred Citadel is a game that was made by a studio with over a decade of experience, published by a publisher with decades of experience, and it's worse than this game - much worse. It got the look right, but it felt/played terrible.
The fact that a single guy can casually one-shot games dramatically better than what passed for a [relatively] big studio title a decade ago is testament to where we're at. And I think that's freaking some people out. I suppose that freak out is reasonable from one perspective, but from another it's just shaking your fist at the clouds. Even if all LLM advances stopped today, what we've already unleashed is already way more than enough to change the game forever, and things are never going back to how they were. And, of course, we're not stopping today.
I hadn't tried the game since I was on my phone when I wrote this comment, but now having played the game, it was exceedingly boring to the point I don't get why you're trying to convince people that they're lying about how fun the game is. It's just not interesting!
Then it's likely that beat-em-up isn't the genre for you, because this is a very solid entry in the genre. If you've ever played a bad beat-em-up you'd be able to see the strengths more clearly. A huge thing is that this game feels like it has weight in the attacks, and that's really hard to do. That's a subtle mixture of responsiveness, sound effects, animation (not just movement but also text/visual fx/flashes/etc), and more. And the hit boxes seem to be pretty much perfect, which is another aspect many games miss on. Then there's lots of nice subtle touches - invincibility frames, juggling, bosses with phases/knockdowns/cueing, and much more.
Nothing revolutionary, but a bunch of different parts all working together well that are generally implemented at a very good to excellent level. That's way better than most can say. Of course the walking animation, like the one guy mentioned is hilariously bad, but fixing that's also just a prompt away. Oddly enough I didn't even notice it when playing.
I find it funny you talk about how great the animation is, before immediately conceding that the walking animation of the main character (perhaps the most important animation) is "hilariously bad".
Look, this is obviously from a technical perspective, totally mind-blowing! Like I never in a million years would have guessed this could be possible 5 years ago. That being said...it's still not very fun or interesting. I think you are mistaking that mind-blowing feeling with the actual end product being fun.
The 'winners' will be the holders of capital, same as always, but it will be giga-gasoline on the fire. The rest of us will be dancing monkies for the owner class if we're lucky.
Not really, one of the joys of being a kid was forming your own "studio" and making games for game jams and stuff. Being able to one shot stuff really destroys the fun.
I don't know, when every kid has had 3 custom made games offered for their birthday, won't they just get bored? Obviously through our lenses this seems awesome because that's something we would have dreamed of, but we would have dreamed of it because it seemed impossible.
There's zero need to predict anything. As long as you provide value, and get better at providing value in the context of your environment, what's there to worry about?
Value is based on offer and demand, this may have less value in the future. What's there to worry about? Quite a lot I'd say, but that's not really the subject. I was just wondering if this would be as cool 10 years from now as it is now. I don't have answers, only questions.
Is Pudding the dog (unlocked after beating the first boss) supposed to shrink anytime it jumps? I guess even Claude-turned-world-class-game-developer isn't immune to bugs. ;)
Honestly, setting all the oft-cited AI caveats aside, the end result is cute and perfectly serviceable as a game for the kids. I can't imagine how stoked they were about playing it.
What does one-shot mean in this context? Aiden (the main character)'s walk cycle is kind of a mess and its also the animation that a player is going to see all the time.
It appears to be eight frames, but after taking a closer look, I found that they don't seem to be consistent [1]. Using ControlNets and various other strategies, you can definitely build out a "nominally acceptable" walk cycle [2], but you still have to do some manual work.
One shot: One prompt; no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done. You are totally inspecting other parts of the game. Not the same meaning.
> You are totally inspecting other parts of the game
Other parts of the game? It's probably THE MOST seen animation in the beat-em-up genre. This would be like building a piano where middle C is inexplicably 50% louder than all the other notes.
Is it playable? Sure, but it's gonna annoy you every time you strike that key.
> no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done
I want to ask this as politely as possible, because you set out to do something nice for your nephew and he had a good birthday.
The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children. For example developing specific skills like drawing, and general emotional skills like concentration and learning to be happy with their own skill level.
I respect it was a light post where your aim was probably to highlight something fun, but I couldn't see any note of what you thought about it.
What do you think about that? What do his parents think?
the crazier possibility is that little kids' drawing skills - whatever pedagogical value that has, i agree that it has some - may stop improving, but there might be way more videogames authored by them that turn out to be really good.
I mean… it was a birthday present. Everything in moderation, and there are a lot of ways to involve the kids in the process more.
I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.
I'm not OP, but it seems to me that LLMs offer extraordinary access to new skills and information to the uninitiated. Someone who has a positive experience creating a game like this is only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented, the language used, the architectural choices and rationale, etc. The LLM is a competent tutor in all. What I would have given as a child for such access... I had to make due with the help docs, and an occasional book from the library.
And yet the child is not being taught any of those things, but is instead being given instant gratification slop before they're old enough to know better or develop. LLMs are useful tutors (significantly worse than expert private tutors but probably better than one public tutor per 30 or 40 students), but 99% of people aren't using them that way. If the OP article had been about teaching his nephew how to leverage LLMs to learn the skills he needed to make his own game, that would be a very different story.
These things are against HN's guidelines, and you've unfortunately been doing them repeatedly. This is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
why should they learn it? for what purpose? We used to learn these things so that we could use that knowledge to create more. now there's no reason to learn it, other than pure curiosity.
I mean. Nerds have always existed and will always exist. But, the last couple of decades, it's just been fashionable to "be nerdy". They're faking it. So you're right: Most people won't. But there are reasons why people think people should or would, even if those reasons are wrong. I'm very cynical in my advanced age about peoples' willingness to learn things. All those "go into STEM" efforts aimed at little kids are just fluff. Most people don't enjoy learning. They hate it. Most people just want to watch TV in bed. AI is am amazing teacher, but most people don't want to learn. They're averse to it in their bones. It's like that t-shirt with the picture of french fries on it that says "not everyone can be an astronaut": Yeah well not everyone can be a nerd.
When I was a kid I did not understand what Game Genie "cheat codes" were doing, but it did not stop my curiosity and ultimate understanding of what was happening behind the scenes. This feels like the next iteration and I know _some_ kids will ask questions.
> That question will never be asked and we all know it.
I asked that question today. After years of working in Unity, I finally downloaded Unreal and spun up a quick game literally so I could poke around how it was implemented, and have been asking questions nonstop about what, how, and why things were implemented with a hands-on experiment.
Lots of people won't ask that question, but also lots of people most certainly will.
I first learned to program in middle school with Logo, and the extent of that was "telling the commander" (or whatever the term was) what to do in almost plain english.
That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.
As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.
When you buy your kid a cake for his birthday, do you think that it's hurting the development of his baking skill, because now he knows cakes are something that he can just hire someone to make with money?
Well, yes, at least to some extent. A lot of people are in that situation. They order DoorDash ten times a week and I think their lives are less rich because of it.
Yes, these are great questions, and I appreciate your politeness.
Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.
My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.
Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.
Guns are a technology, are you going to let them play with that too?
Everyone on this site can feel the effect that AI is having on their brain. There is a very real tension between the power of AI and the cognitive impact it has from using it that needs to be talked about. Pretending that isn't real or shouldn't be taken seriously doesn't help.
Where I'm from, hunter's training and kids with guns are a relatively common thing. Kids driving tractors and other heavy equipment too. The training part is important.
The rules with guns are that you always check if it's loaded when you take it in hand, you never point it at something you don't intend to kill, keep you finger off the trigger and the safety on, watch your fingers don't get pinched by the action, brace it properly with your hands or against the shoulder, stop if the gun malfunctions, and I try to keep it pointed at the ground (not in the air) and unload it before handing it to anyone else.
Not sure what the equivalent for AI should be yet.
There are lots of "dangerous" things. Kitchen knives at Target, cars and roads and highways, subway stations, mountains, strong tides, fire, falling. I think we're perfectly capable of surviving in this landscape.
We evolved to explore this landscape. Stop living in Disneyland plastic bubbles. Step outside into the dangerous world. Dream about the impossible.
I'm far more worried about social media and gamification/exploitation of emotions and insecurities. Our billion year old biology can survive in the wild - it isn't so great at dealing with the algorithm.
Just like many forms of content there's an appropriate age. The problem with AI, with regards to kids, is it's as wide as the internet.
There's lots of great parts. Then there's lots of parts that shouldn't be introduced until later and parts that arguably not introduced at all. I've met kids who have unfettered internet access at age 10, and the results aren't great.
Introducing AI should be done in a controlled way - similar to the internet.
Counterpoint, I think it’ll get them more into making things, because they don’t have that big frustrating period where their output is nowhere near as interesting as the giant smorgasbord of interesting stuff being pushed on them constantly. I’d much rather they spend their time making stuff with AI than passively consume the garbage streaming on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon 24/7, which was the status quo with my generation. Making can now compete on instant gratification with all the other stuff now.
I feel this as an adult. As I've gotten more into making things with AI for fun, it's displaced some of the other more passive activities I was spending time on, especially things like watching videos and scrolling social media.
It's important to keep thoughts like yours in mind because of what degradation AI might bring to human skill, self-confidence, patience, and discipline in the big picture of society's future.
But at the same time, it's worth remembering that reading about an adventure in the forest instead of going on one yourself, or assembling constructs with LEGO instead of learning to cut and join wood doesn't need to be so different than whipping up an interactive toy with the magic software slopper instead of writing one yourself.
Sometimes convenience can open up new doors, like experimenting more freely or boldly with game/theme design rather than getting mired in art design or game construction. Other times, it can be okay for just be a kid (even an adult one) and just play with toys for the delight or calm or wonder they might bring.
If the first thing you felt when hearing about an uncle making his young nephew's fantasy come to life was concern, you might want to take a step back and consider if you might be swept up a little too much.
I'm personally quite skeptical about technology and its impact on human experience and have been for a long time, and AI is rings all sorts of alarm bells for me. But at the same time, it's a pretty fascinating and expressive new medium and not every playful and casual use of it needs be weighed and scrutinized.
Guy that argument is still dumb: "Oh no we'll be stoopid if we don't do everything manually" like bruh when was the last time you sowed a frickin seed to grow the wheat in your McWhopper buns or whatever
This applies generally: How many comforts does everyone enjoy everyday that they have no clue how to make themselves?
Do you refine the fuel in your car from raw petroleum by yourself? The list can go forever.
No. We let prior technology make these things "solved" and forget about them so we can move on to the shit that's important to us.
This is back with Opus 4.1 when I was still amused with these things. It definitely took better part of two weeks of intense non-stop prompting, but I wanted to see how far I could go with just prompting for everything (now called vibing) when this became viable https://www.susmel.com/stacky/ (press h for help)
Turns out, you could go far but you never lose that AI touch to it which I find absolutely horrible and (s)tacky, albeit technically impressive to be able to do that by not touching any code whatsoever.
Ooooof the results here are rough. A very young child might find this charming, but I think it's kind of embarrassing. Like, the walk cycles alone are. Yeah...
To say nothing of ur word shaders, inconsistency in the characters, questionable gender stereotypes, etc.
This definitely tells me that AI definitely isn't there yet.
This is a bizarre complaint. There's plenty to complain about with regards to you know, normalizing kids consuming AI content, giving a gift from a slop machine instead of something hand-made, etc. But come on. The game itself is insanely impressive for something generated in one prompt from a bunch of doodles (cool doodles, but still!) If a single human hobbyist dev created this in a few days we wouldn't call it "kind of embarrassing".
When it gets there eventually (5-10 years??) it's gonna be pretty rough for the humans that used to do those things. Then again I suppose that applies to the rest of the economy as well.
i button-mashed my way through the first level and, what can i say, this is kind of dream i have when i spend my days button-mashing my way through side scrollers.
when i was between about 6 and 8 years old, i used to have this same dream about travelling through space, feeling the tranquillity of the celestial orchestra, and then whizzing down to feel the speed at which they were actually moving from a completely different frame of reference.
there was a sense of fullness and emptiness at the same time, raw power but also serenity. as though everything was coming into being and going out of being at the same time.
i always woke up feeling mystified but full of wonder. I carried that sense of wonder with me through many days and it always came back to me when i looked up at the stars and felt myself on the edge of this sphere, zipping through space at hundreds of miles an hour, but only seeing the tiny twinkling of stars as evidence of this enormous cosmic play.
but i suppose getting revenge on the goons by kicking and punching them, in order to save puddles, is basically the same
I have experienced this myself, although the novelty kind of wears off after a while. It is still fun to make small games to co-op on the TV.
Yes, hard to believe but most of these games can be almost one-shotted in my experience, with bugs but still playable. We are not talking about some properly made games but imagine for a second that there are some number of casual players out there that wont mind spending 30 minutes on a game for just a bit of fun and having these just materialised just in time is a lot more convenient then hunting for them on the app stores.
For anyone interested, I put all of of my work into an open source tool that uses your iPhone as a console which then can cast on your TV. Up-to 4 local players supported. It can even run proper games via WASM. It is Apple Silicon only.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] threadSince somewhere around Opus 4+ it's been really good enough to do these things, but 4.6 was the most pivotal version since a 1 million token context window can allow a model to fit so much "in its head" basically.
Top Jobs in 2027:
1. LLM glazer.
Mobile Suit Gundam and Evangelion are both notorious for this. Is Eva-01 40m or 100m tall? If you trust the technical literature then you'd be forced to deduce that the tanks in some of the scenes are squirrel-sized -- and these decisions and scenes are produced by committees.
Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.
Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.
(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)
But those barriers going away now means that the starting point is much closer to where the finish line used to be. Like a few years ago this would have been an upper tier beat-em-up. I think we're still early enough in the window that I'd still call this upper tier, but the reality is that it's also now something that an uncle can vibe code for his nephew over a weekend.
In general I think this is going to be very good for everybody, but it's going to completely destroy the software as a problem-solving industry, and make the software as entertainment industry much more competitive.
Barriers going away means you get a lot more at the bottom and middle of the pack, but a game is more than the sum of its parts, and as long as LLMs do what you tell them, you need to have real talent to make good games.
In any case, it being "extremely far" from the top would just imply I should be in endless bliss with the current state of things since if I find this game quite fun then higher tier beat-em-ups would be just the most incredible thing I've ever played in my life. That has certainly not been my experience.
Double Dragon I have fond memories of, and this is why this one bored me after 30 seconds, because it's so meh compared to even the worst game of that type of that era that I played.
For a 48 hour game jam, perhaps.
I think “the youth” are going to grow up with a Cambrian explosion of styles, mashups, callbacks, revivals, etc.
Right now a vibecoded game just uses the generic style. But you could easily imagine the kid saying to Claude “rebuild this game but in the style of that old show [Samurai Jack | Ren and Stimpy | … ]. We are so early in the tech curve, market penetration is still very low, and the “creator-years” in the medium is tiny; it’ll be 10x in a year if not more.
AI is amazing at style transfer, and so there’s a huge payoff for exploring and learning references to existing artists.
(I also think copyright will die pretty soon for similar reasons, that’s a separate take though.)
Opus 5.5: https://claude.ai/artifact/UuT7P936dU1XoPByYZ7xyD Fable 5.2: https://claude.ai/artifact/UszKFvuonWAT5psjMttAEg
There are some areas in which Fable is clearly better but subjectively the Opus 5.5 version feels more fun.
Both are one shots, Opus 5.5 was done a few weeks ago before they added "guardrails" around recreating games. Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
In my eyes, the pacing and combos in the Fable version was off - original DX ball had this great feeling where if you got the right power-ups, you'd just blast through a level really quickly.
Though after playing it a bit more, I guess if I was creating my own breakout game I could easily see some of the Fable power "ups" being there.
Couldn't you have been downgraded to 4.8, since direct reproduction of existing games classifies as unsafe?
Just ask Claude to create an artifact. Sometimes, it does it by itself depending on what you ask for.
It can create something like DX ball easy, because its already there, the AI already knows what it is
It can not create a game on the same level as DX ball, something new i mean, not a mechanic added on top, a real new game that feels like a game that would have come out the same year as DX ball
AI is great at executing the task, but it can not for its life (or for the anthropic reputation, it seems to care more about that) create something new from scratch, it can not do game design thats not just change the speed of the ball or the paddle color. Probably a limitation thats there from the start
An AI certainly can and will create a new fun game in a target period. It may require some instruction to brainstorm, or a source of statistical noise, but I am certain it can do it.
Why can't we have normal conversations without getting questioned in this weird way?
I couldn't care less about AI-generated games, but such restrictions are just destroying the value of proprietary models. Even more frustrating is that it so far hasn't been considered illegal to steal all the information for training the models, but now it's becoming illegal to ask for these same models to output this information back.
give it a link if you want
I have been slopping out games for years now. The graphics don't matter unless the gameplay does. The gameplay doesn't matter if the game is too hard or too easy.
The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.
I've seen people turn away from interesting games because of the difficulty.
I've also seen people turn away from genuinely fun games because they didn't like the graphics though.
Maybe I'm crazy though idk.
If everyone's having a personalized childhood I don't know if that will happen as much.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
I heard this attributed to Aristotle, but apparently it's a fabrication. That's too bad because the quote is hilarious. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go gobble up some dainties.
There's like, no challenge. Reminds me of that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" where a bank robber dies after getting shot by the popo five-o and he is greeted by a man (angel like guy) who takes him to a cool mansion or house where he fulfills everyone one of the guy's wishes: women, money, gambling, etc. etc. And he gambles all day long and never loses but after a while he gets bored and then depressed that he always wins and there's no effort and no risk, and then tells the angel dude that he wonders why he was put in Heaven and that he thinks he doesn't belong there and wants to go to the "other place" only for the angel guy to tell him he is in fact in "the other place".
Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.
My mum liked to tell me, when she was little, she imagined having a magic wand, that she could wave and get anything she wanted. Almost immediately she realized that life would become pointless.
I'm not really sure if that's true. For starters, having too much scarcity and adversity can also make life pointless. You just can't do anything you want. Maybe there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
For me the most satisfying part of projects has always been overcoming difficulty. Although I had a slightly unpleasant version of that lately, where the difficulty turned out to be a hundred times worse than I anticipated, and by the time I finished overcoming it, AI could make a better project than mine in a matter of minutes...
There's a story I always come back to in my mind, there was a story of a man in the mountains in India, who spent 20 years carving a passage through the mountain — by hand — so that his village would have easier access to the city and the hospital.
It's a very heroic story of course, but it would have been objectively better for all the people who needed the hospital, if he had just been given a bit of TNT instead.
the "utopia" where AI will do everyone's jobs just sounds like hell to me. humans will adapt and find new challenges, perhaps like a Butlerian Jihad...
Its funny that the same CS saying "garbage in garbage out" seems even more true in the AI modern day.
It's neat (if unsurprising) that Fable 5.2 has this ability as well.
My loose testing shows other models aren't quite as good at this yet. Here's the prompt "Build a mobile-friendly three.js game where a mouse has to hide from a cat" by Opus 5.5 Extra - https://claude.ai/artifact/RRyEndXLSPQbcig3BgzgCZ - and by GPT-6 Extra High: https://squeak-and-seek-mouse-1027.simonw.chatgpt.site/ - the Claude one is a better game, even though they look very similar at first glance.
I wrote about Opus 5.5's sense of fun in more detail here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/
I see that ENTER pauses, but may I suggest also making ESC and/or P pause. And then the pause screen showing or linking the keyboard controls and an exit path.
(Caveat: I'm not much of a gamer so maybe the current controls are standard? Anyway, I feel like it could be more inviting to casuals with something like the above.)
Though, now they will never stop asking for more and more. OOP may have opened Pandora's box. :)
Honestly though, this is amazing for those kids.
It was way shittier than this, but I made it, all by myself.
I don't think people are yet appreciating how much LLMs are going to change the world, especially not the doomers. People are just jamming the present into the future, with greater efficiencies. But it's nonsense. The cost of cognitive work will approach $0 which is going to send the raw value of cognitive output to something close to $0.
So the 'winners' will be whoever fills the resultant vacuum in the economy. That will probably be a mixture of social, physical, entertainment, and other such domains. But it's all so hard to predict. We've lived our entire lives in a completely agrarian society, and we're seeing the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It's easy to predict super-farms, but those aren't going to be the 'real' winners.
...except people who actually enjoy games and want high quality games to play, of course.
Down here in reality, platforms like Steam are being absolutely flooded with generic, ugly, low-quality AI-generated games, which are not only drowning out the human-made games people actually want to play and making it impossible to find them, but are also preventing them from being sold entirely in some cases due to human reviewers not being able to keep up with the pace of new game submissions[0].
So, thanks for your contribution to that, I guess.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valve-admits-its-run...
Perhaps other sites beckon.
In the end the biggest winner in all of this are going to be the players, due to competition. That competition will both bring down prices and bring up the minimum standard of quality for a major success.
I would. Maybe our standards for quality are different, but I'm willing to bet that if you showed this to a bunch of people who actually play games regularly as a hobby and have some standards for them, they would most likely agree that, even ignoring the obvious "AI look", a simple 2D game that can't even pull off natural-looking walking animations could never be considered anything but low quality.
> obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems
This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at Steam's most recent Next Fest - it featured over 8000 games, twice as many as the last one, the vast majority of which being low effort AI generated games. Yet the number of gems that rose to the top was not higher than before. If anything, it was lower, as most players simply gave up looking after having to scroll through hundreds of AI games. Such games can never be "gems", no matter how much you try prompting them to be.
The fact that a single guy can casually one-shot games dramatically better than what passed for a [relatively] big studio title a decade ago is testament to where we're at. And I think that's freaking some people out. I suppose that freak out is reasonable from one perspective, but from another it's just shaking your fist at the clouds. Even if all LLM advances stopped today, what we've already unleashed is already way more than enough to change the game forever, and things are never going back to how they were. And, of course, we're not stopping today.
Nothing revolutionary, but a bunch of different parts all working together well that are generally implemented at a very good to excellent level. That's way better than most can say. Of course the walking animation, like the one guy mentioned is hilariously bad, but fixing that's also just a prompt away. Oddly enough I didn't even notice it when playing.
Look, this is obviously from a technical perspective, totally mind-blowing! Like I never in a million years would have guessed this could be possible 5 years ago. That being said...it's still not very fun or interesting. I think you are mistaking that mind-blowing feeling with the actual end product being fun.
Read that sentence out loud. Slowly.
You can teach them woodworking. Teach them how to ride a dirtbike. Teach them to make short films with their friends.
This is just a new option you know have the opportunity to provide. Every other hobby doesn't just disappear. That's straight decel mindset.
Honestly, setting all the oft-cited AI caveats aside, the end result is cute and perfectly serviceable as a game for the kids. I can't imagine how stoked they were about playing it.
It appears to be eight frames, but after taking a closer look, I found that they don't seem to be consistent [1]. Using ControlNets and various other strategies, you can definitely build out a "nominally acceptable" walk cycle [2], but you still have to do some manual work.
[1] - https://aidens-revenge.pages.dev/assets/characters/aiden/ani...
[2] - https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation
Other parts of the game? It's probably THE MOST seen animation in the beat-em-up genre. This would be like building a piano where middle C is inexplicably 50% louder than all the other notes.
Is it playable? Sure, but it's gonna annoy you every time you strike that key.
> no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done
I guess it just depends on your standards.
The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children. For example developing specific skills like drawing, and general emotional skills like concentration and learning to be happy with their own skill level.
I respect it was a light post where your aim was probably to highlight something fun, but I couldn't see any note of what you thought about it.
What do you think about that? What do his parents think?
I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.
These things are against HN's guidelines, and you've unfortunately been doing them repeatedly. This is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You and I know different children. Mine give me the opposite impression. The questions have no end. I think that's a good thing.
> You prompt a LLM and it just happens.
The bar for enlightenment is now further away as people are taught to expressively stop chasing it.
I asked that question today. After years of working in Unity, I finally downloaded Unreal and spun up a quick game literally so I could poke around how it was implemented, and have been asking questions nonstop about what, how, and why things were implemented with a hands-on experiment.
Lots of people won't ask that question, but also lots of people most certainly will.
That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.
As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.
Well the cost does add up...
Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.
My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.
Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.
Jesus Christ, let the kids play with technology. No parent or relative needs to apologize for kids having fun with AI.
My kids will be fine tuning models.
Everyone on this site can feel the effect that AI is having on their brain. There is a very real tension between the power of AI and the cognitive impact it has from using it that needs to be talked about. Pretending that isn't real or shouldn't be taken seriously doesn't help.
The rules with guns are that you always check if it's loaded when you take it in hand, you never point it at something you don't intend to kill, keep you finger off the trigger and the safety on, watch your fingers don't get pinched by the action, brace it properly with your hands or against the shoulder, stop if the gun malfunctions, and I try to keep it pointed at the ground (not in the air) and unload it before handing it to anyone else.
Not sure what the equivalent for AI should be yet.
There are lots of "dangerous" things. Kitchen knives at Target, cars and roads and highways, subway stations, mountains, strong tides, fire, falling. I think we're perfectly capable of surviving in this landscape.
We evolved to explore this landscape. Stop living in Disneyland plastic bubbles. Step outside into the dangerous world. Dream about the impossible.
I'm far more worried about social media and gamification/exploitation of emotions and insecurities. Our billion year old biology can survive in the wild - it isn't so great at dealing with the algorithm.
There's lots of great parts. Then there's lots of parts that shouldn't be introduced until later and parts that arguably not introduced at all. I've met kids who have unfettered internet access at age 10, and the results aren't great.
Introducing AI should be done in a controlled way - similar to the internet.
But at the same time, it's worth remembering that reading about an adventure in the forest instead of going on one yourself, or assembling constructs with LEGO instead of learning to cut and join wood doesn't need to be so different than whipping up an interactive toy with the magic software slopper instead of writing one yourself.
Sometimes convenience can open up new doors, like experimenting more freely or boldly with game/theme design rather than getting mired in art design or game construction. Other times, it can be okay for just be a kid (even an adult one) and just play with toys for the delight or calm or wonder they might bring.
If the first thing you felt when hearing about an uncle making his young nephew's fantasy come to life was concern, you might want to take a step back and consider if you might be swept up a little too much.
I'm personally quite skeptical about technology and its impact on human experience and have been for a long time, and AI is rings all sorts of alarm bells for me. But at the same time, it's a pretty fascinating and expressive new medium and not every playful and casual use of it needs be weighed and scrutinized.
What impact did being able to take a picture have on the mental development of children?
Recording a moment went from something you needed a court painter and two weeks to do, to something that everyone could do with the click of a button.
A century later kids are still happy to draw things.
Do we, or our children, ever learn to farm, mine, chop wood, lay bricks, make operating systems, or program in assembly language?
Does that affect or limit your or your children's ability to eat food, sit on chairs, sleep in beds, or use computers and phones?
Speak for your own childhood buddy
This applies generally: How many comforts does everyone enjoy everyday that they have no clue how to make themselves?
Do you refine the fuel in your car from raw petroleum by yourself? The list can go forever.
No. We let prior technology make these things "solved" and forget about them so we can move on to the shit that's important to us.
Turns out, you could go far but you never lose that AI touch to it which I find absolutely horrible and (s)tacky, albeit technically impressive to be able to do that by not touching any code whatsoever.
To say nothing of ur word shaders, inconsistency in the characters, questionable gender stereotypes, etc.
This definitely tells me that AI definitely isn't there yet.
when i was between about 6 and 8 years old, i used to have this same dream about travelling through space, feeling the tranquillity of the celestial orchestra, and then whizzing down to feel the speed at which they were actually moving from a completely different frame of reference.
there was a sense of fullness and emptiness at the same time, raw power but also serenity. as though everything was coming into being and going out of being at the same time.
i always woke up feeling mystified but full of wonder. I carried that sense of wonder with me through many days and it always came back to me when i looked up at the stars and felt myself on the edge of this sphere, zipping through space at hundreds of miles an hour, but only seeing the tiny twinkling of stars as evidence of this enormous cosmic play.
but i suppose getting revenge on the goons by kicking and punching them, in order to save puddles, is basically the same
Yes, hard to believe but most of these games can be almost one-shotted in my experience, with bugs but still playable. We are not talking about some properly made games but imagine for a second that there are some number of casual players out there that wont mind spending 30 minutes on a game for just a bit of fun and having these just materialised just in time is a lot more convenient then hunting for them on the app stores.
For anyone interested, I put all of of my work into an open source tool that uses your iPhone as a console which then can cast on your TV. Up-to 4 local players supported. It can even run proper games via WASM. It is Apple Silicon only.
https://usenoodle.app/applet/