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- Hacker News
- This is very cool and on a lower level (more in the trenches) compared to what I did earlier in the year (i did a small writeup and built some skills [1]).
Because I am so-and-so pixel artist, the biggest unlock for me has been in rapidly iterating with graphics assets and sprites, and it's actually helped me become a better artist and animator (I built my own little tool for this [2]). The rest Codex or Claude Code seem to handle incredibly well (plus I have 30 years of programming behind me).
by armcat - I started coding because of gamedev, seeing this and potentially having some agents take care of the coding part is a blessing. I doubt this works as advertised but imagine iterating on stuff with a couple prompts and you can alt tab back into blender or libresprite. Very cool, lets put economics and employment asideby mawadev
- >> “LLMs are Bad At Games”
At making them? Maybe.
At already made ones? Well, I guess it depends.
Case study: a 1997 PC game I played as a kid, getting it to run on modern hardware, and in progress of making it look like it looked in my head.
Claude Code got the first part done in 30 minutes, and in process set up some basic RE environment. Then, iterating over various aspects, it gradually decompiled most of it, then - on my request, being annoyed with "computer use" plays taking over my PC - extended the shimmed DirectX DLL to run it headlessly (using "Private Desktop" feature of modern Windows, too, which I didn't even know existed), and this gave it the ability to run several game instances in parallel. As for playing, it quickly mapped relevant memory addresses and game logic scripts, and uses a combination of hand-written scenario files, patches to level data and memhacks, to do whatever it needs to be done.
All throughout, with some nudging from me, it produced a stupid amount of helper tools to give me insight into how the game is built, allowing me to verify its work and direct it better.
So I can't say I agree with the general gist, given that Claude is now writing me full level guides, complete with decent screenshots of important moments, all zero-shot.
TL;DR: just let LLMs instrument your game and figure it out on its own.
by TeMPOraL - This matches what I came up with on a small project. The biggest ones being screenshots and separated simulation.
Meta level, just push your agent to make things more legible, it’ll figure it out.
One other observation, remember that your agent is infinitely patient. So prompts like “build an interactive design doc with videos of each game mechanic in the style of Factorio dev diaries” can make reviewing changes easier. The general idea, all the small QoL dev tools that you don’t have time for, you can just spawn a side agent to build; if they are orthogonal to your main thread you can just progress them in the background.
One thing I think game dev has not (AFAIK) invested as much in is observability. There’s a lot of perf instrumentation available in debug builds, but things like measuring DPS, health, etc as an exported metric time series I have not seen before. I think agents will benefit from this disproportionately more than humans, eg for inspecting progression curves and balance.
by theptip - It's kind of funny how it took inventing AI for people to start caring about good software engineering practices (debuggability, iteration speed, reliability, etc.)by hatthew
- > I stand by a lot of what I’ve said, but am in the process of shipping a project where I’ve also used none of this. I think the scale I’m targeting here is really larger projects.
The author appears to be on track to learn an important lesson about LLMs and art. LLMs have completely solved the coding side of game development. But this was never the hard part. Not even close.
The fixed randomness and determinism thing sounds great on paper (all of this does), but in reality this is an extremely confining way to build a video game. Ensuring you maintain determinism across many platforms is where things get super nasty.
If you want a turnkey AI game development experience, why not double down on diffusion? This sidesteps virtually all of the tooling and integration concerns. There is no game engine to integrate with if you use a diffusion model.
by bob1029 - > [I give a small introduction to myself and my own work, that I’m omitting here, as you’re on my website]
kkukshtel: You should keep that info, with links, even if its links to your site. Dont burden the reader.
Edit: I read the first half of the article then skimmed the rest (I dont use LLMs outside of occasional searches).
I've been a gamedev for five years. I have a hunch LLMs will not take over game development because of the necessity to control many, many small details to shape a great experience for the player, and because some parts of development cannot be described with words.
Small details: My hunch is when it comes time to polish and fine tune all the moving parts, this process will remain much faster to do by hand. It will be faster to update a specific field or line of code and test/iterate than to prompt your way through that process (the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time)
Describing without words: An artist with a vision can only bring that vision to life with body movements. It is not possible to communicate all the details that go into a great piece of art with words. The colors, lines, shapes, positioning, specific emotions, history... is beyond spoken language.
by YesBox - > “LLMs are Bad At Games”
> Any time I tried to use an LLM for a game-y thing, it would fall over.
You know it's funny. I did a bit of LLM-assisted game dev this year.
I spent a few weeks working on a simple Pong game, just polishing it, making small changes here and there. Frontier models couldn't change or add a feature without breaking something else. It was still more productive than working "solo" but quite annoying.
Meanwhile, I asked a model to make an entire game -- about 100x more complicated -- and it just one-shotted it perfectly, no issues.
I'm not sure how both of those things can be true at the same time. Something something "in-distribution" ?
by andai