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free_bip 5 hours ago [-]
If you use AI in your game I will not play it. Indie or not. I'm clearly not alone in this thinking, since the CEO of Epic Games is spreading AI-generated propaganda claiming that AI labels "hurt developers" due to significantly reduced sales.
vintermann 24 minutes ago [-]
That's your call. But I see a deeper problem:
"My plan for Spirit Call was a game like Genshin Impact (原神), with a new character every few weeks."
In other words, their plan was to get really rich with as little effort as possible, copying the essence of a highly profitable and exploitative gacha game.
Exploring new games or any media, to me, is all about avoiding the authors who have that as an objective. And right now, AI use for creative media (and even more AI praise in games, like this article) is a stronger warning sign than bargain bin asset packs.
But, I don't hate AI. It'd be hypocritical of me. I am still the person who got fascinated by the first blurry dogslug, and struggled to get Lua Torch running on my already then ancient GPU so I could play with the DCGAN code and make flowers from the Oxford dataset. Generative AI is damn amazing. It's people who would use it to get rich quick who suck.
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
Certainly not Epic, given that Unreal 6 development workflow is strongly based on AI as announced recently on the Tokio Unreal 2026 event, and will even drop C++ for gameplay, it will only be supported on the core engine.
lofaszvanitt 3 hours ago [-]
Everyone is using AI in the gaming industry. What you gonna do now?
vconnor 2 hours ago [-]
Not everyone, quit with the doomer propaganda.
There is in the indie scene a large group of people and studios that refuse to adopt it, and proudly advertise this fact. In fact it might turn out to be the very thing that separates ‘indie’ from everything else. And as a player of indie games, I actively steer away from games who have been created through AI assistance, as far as it is possible to tell.
41353aab 48 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
fallingbananna 7 minutes ago [-]
Stop playing games. Just like I stopped reading AI generated blogs.
Although that won't happen. There will always be some people passionate to create amazing and fun experiences.
krige 1 hours ago [-]
[citation needed]
aa-jv 1 hours ago [-]
AI is exposing everyones poor workflow management, and in the gaming industry this not only hurts profit but it hurts pride.
If your workflow sucks, your product sucks - and users can sense this from a distance, AI or no-AI.
There will come a point soon where you won't be able to spot the AI in the workflow. This is already happening all over many other industries - some of which, do have proper, robust software development workflows in place as an entrenched standard.
Game guys will catch up.
ajjenkins 4 hours ago [-]
Personally, I don’t care how a game was created (vibe coded or coded by hand) as long as the game is fun. I think it’s cool that LLMs let you focus on making the game fun rather than spending your time just getting the game to run. I’m obviously in the minority on Hacker News though.
vintermann 20 minutes ago [-]
Fun is a dime a dozen. You can have an LLM tell you jokes all day if you want to. Casino games are fun too. You almost certainly want something more than fun.
potsandpans 3 hours ago [-]
It's nice to read. I've been developing games with ai but putting a lot of hard work into the design and development. I'm afraid to share them with a wider audience because the anti ai sentiment in the community right now is so strong.
x______________ 2 hours ago [-]
> I'm afraid to share them with a wider audience because the anti ai sentiment in the community right now is so strong
Find your audiences and cater to them, haters will always be around and will always hate as loudly as they can.
Who are they to judge the creation process of another person's desires without being involved in any sort of way other than being another human with an opinion on the process used?
The way we were vs who we are now. Be passionate! Offer fun games, entertain your audiences!
krige 1 hours ago [-]
I've yet to see an LLM made game where the prompter actually spent any real amount of "saved" time on making it fun.
khiem2794 4 hours ago [-]
tks for the read, I like the style of your inked game
dolbex 8 hours ago [-]
I really like the inked town game
shannongreen 60 minutes ago [-]
The Inkline UI is so obviously designed by AI - the floating chips with drop shadow stuffed with numbers.
And the author admits they also completely lifted the art style off a tweet.
So I'm not sure where they exercised the 'taste' they mention so many times in the article.
turpentine 9 hours ago [-]
Code is creative output, and delegating it to LLMs is at the cost of that creativity.
You won't know what you're missing or what lessons you would be learning. Sure, you're going "fast", and you'll ship something, but it doesn't look like meaningful engagement with the craft or an audience if a developer didn't execute on it themselves.
I also read peoples posts about spending tens of thousands of dollars on local hardware that they could have hired an indie developer to work with, or throwing untold sums at online LLMs that also equate to a year or more of paid development time without LLM use.
On style: the rationalization of LLM use reads like it was written by a LLM, which is kinda offputting but it also smells like highly agreeable output.
scuttlebutt98 10 hours ago [-]
I think games like art should be one of the few areas that aren't developed by AI, because human expression is the point.
I mean code, reports and other stuff, those have utility outside of the creation process itself (although the creation process still has value) but the whole point of media is human sharing.
x______________ 2 hours ago [-]
> I think games like art should be one of the few areas that aren't developed by AI, because human expression is the point.
Being human as a perk: it lets everyone think and do as they please.
People let you think as you please, let them do as they please.
Why are you(or anyone) so gung-ho on restricting someone else's access to creating a game when you are not involved in their personal lives whatsoever?
"My plan for Spirit Call was a game like Genshin Impact (原神), with a new character every few weeks."
In other words, their plan was to get really rich with as little effort as possible, copying the essence of a highly profitable and exploitative gacha game.
Exploring new games or any media, to me, is all about avoiding the authors who have that as an objective. And right now, AI use for creative media (and even more AI praise in games, like this article) is a stronger warning sign than bargain bin asset packs.
But, I don't hate AI. It'd be hypocritical of me. I am still the person who got fascinated by the first blurry dogslug, and struggled to get Lua Torch running on my already then ancient GPU so I could play with the DCGAN code and make flowers from the Oxford dataset. Generative AI is damn amazing. It's people who would use it to get rich quick who suck.
There is in the indie scene a large group of people and studios that refuse to adopt it, and proudly advertise this fact. In fact it might turn out to be the very thing that separates ‘indie’ from everything else. And as a player of indie games, I actively steer away from games who have been created through AI assistance, as far as it is possible to tell.
Although that won't happen. There will always be some people passionate to create amazing and fun experiences.
If your workflow sucks, your product sucks - and users can sense this from a distance, AI or no-AI.
There will come a point soon where you won't be able to spot the AI in the workflow. This is already happening all over many other industries - some of which, do have proper, robust software development workflows in place as an entrenched standard.
Game guys will catch up.
Find your audiences and cater to them, haters will always be around and will always hate as loudly as they can.
Who are they to judge the creation process of another person's desires without being involved in any sort of way other than being another human with an opinion on the process used?
The way we were vs who we are now. Be passionate! Offer fun games, entertain your audiences!
And the author admits they also completely lifted the art style off a tweet.
So I'm not sure where they exercised the 'taste' they mention so many times in the article.
You won't know what you're missing or what lessons you would be learning. Sure, you're going "fast", and you'll ship something, but it doesn't look like meaningful engagement with the craft or an audience if a developer didn't execute on it themselves.
I also read peoples posts about spending tens of thousands of dollars on local hardware that they could have hired an indie developer to work with, or throwing untold sums at online LLMs that also equate to a year or more of paid development time without LLM use.
On style: the rationalization of LLM use reads like it was written by a LLM, which is kinda offputting but it also smells like highly agreeable output.
I mean code, reports and other stuff, those have utility outside of the creation process itself (although the creation process still has value) but the whole point of media is human sharing.
Being human as a perk: it lets everyone think and do as they please.
People let you think as you please, let them do as they please.
Why are you(or anyone) so gung-ho on restricting someone else's access to creating a game when you are not involved in their personal lives whatsoever?