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points by NothingAboutAny 2 days ago | 0 comments
yeah some friends of mine in game dev are a bit doom and gloom about all this and I need to keep reminding them that the hard work is making the million decisions that communicate the vision, the code/assets were never really what people were buying your game for. Even assuming an AI could do literally every technical part of game dev someone (for now) needs to sit there and go "nah this part doesn't feel right" and "that boss 2nd phase opener attack is too long" etc. until AI can also answer those questions and intuit what is good and bad taste there's still stuff for game devs to do. "minecraft in skyrim" is cool for about 10 seconds till you think about actually sitting down to play it.
[–] pigpop 2 days ago
They're getting surprisingly good at identifying why things don't seem right. I came back to an old game project that I had shelved due to the core game loop not feeling right and I decided to just ask Astra to analyze the gameplay and figure out what was wrong and it was able to provide a good direction to take it that also works well with the game mechanics that were already in place.

The new Terra 6.1 is pretty good at doing user testing as well via computer use, going through all the features and noting any bugs or inconsistencies.

It feels like we might be on a trajectory that takes us to a place where someone can just say "I'm bored, make me a new game" and then provide minimal feedback like "this isn't fun, make it better" and get an entertaining game without a lot of iteration. Of course we'll still have games that come from human ideas as well but vibe games seem like they're here to stay.

[–] NothingAboutAny 2 days ago
I'm not so sure, I've made an autobattler and even recently using Astra to come up with new mechanics or cards they're usually always bad as if it doesn't "get it" even if I feed it all the current cards in game and say "like this, these are good because of x and y." When brainstorming, I usually get it to generate 20 ideas and then I come up with something entirely new based on bad stuff it responded with. I've never been able to actually use its ideas verbatim.

I'm not sure if this is a limitation of the tech or whether it will eventually have "taste" in such nebulous domains as "what is fun." They still can't write funny jokes despite trillions of dollars of training because even though there's plenty of funny material and discussions on what funny is, I guess it's still kind of a human thing.

[–] pigpop 1 day ago
All models bias towards the taste of the evaluation model which was built on the preferences of a group of people who did manual ranking of output. It results in a pretty bland design by committee style (though sometimes it works really well like with the early Claude models that seemed to have a coherent and interesting personality).

Currently, if you want better results, you have to prime the model with what I like to think of as a Context Mood Board consisting of material that you select to express a gestalt. Turning reasoning off also helps since it forces it to rely on what's already in the context.

This is a lot of manual work to set up but you can save it as something that gets loaded when needed. For open weight models you can create a LoRA based on a dataset that represents what you consider to be good taste.

The point is that it is possible to do even though it's currently not available from the major providers. They're more focused on maintaining their lead in capability, taste takes a backseat. At some point it will become more important and then we'll probably see either a curated selection of styles to choose from or they'll just keep them hidden and automatically route you based on your request and your user profile.

If you want a preview of the difference this can make try out some image generation models in ComfyUI and compare the results from the same prompt using the original base models versus the fine tunes and LoRAs created by the community. It's incredible what a difference it can make in the output and what you're seeing is the design sense or artistic taste of the person that did the fine tuning and the artists whose material was selected as input.

Looking even further ahead, there's a huge amount of undiscovered talent out there in people who lack the technical ability to produce art but have a very good sense of taste. Somehow getting access to their preferences would advance things even more. There's still a lot of training to be done so we're hardly at the limit of what is possible for instilling taste or artistic sense in LLMs.

[–] andsoitis 2 days ago
> not feeling right

That came from you. And it’s a deep thing.

[–] pigpop 1 day ago
Yes but the solution didn't, though it seemed somewhat obvious after I read it (as is usually the case). Crucially, it also identified what didn't feel right without me specifying it.
[–] andsoitis 16 hours ago
Ask AI for a range of solutions and then apply your critical thinking and further dialog to select which solution.
[–] captainclam 1 day ago
> "minecraft in skyrim" is cool for about 10 seconds till you think about actually sitting down to play it.

Yeah, it is kinda wild how the infinitude of possibility suddenly makes everything so dull.

[–] zf00002 2 days ago
Yes, Opus 5.5 can build out quite a bit on its own that is super impressive when you first look at it. But spending just a couple minutes will make you realize dozens of things that are off.