We discuss the rise of Generative AI in game development, with Darren Grey, Jeremiah Reid and Tommy Thompson.
You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Synopsis & Useful Links
- What is generative AI?
- The major negative aspects of generative AI
- How generative tools have improved drastically in recent months and years, and how developers are finding ways to fit them into production
- The hype and the hate in public discourse
- Vibe coding, and how it has become more viable with recent advanced coding assistants
- Jeremiah's vibe-coded 7DRL, his practical experience of putting it together and lessons learned
- Lack of creativity in generator outputs
- The rise of "AI free" as a label used in marketing, and how hard this will be to stay viable as AI makes its way into all software tools
- Normalisation of coding assistants, whilst AI art remains controversial
- Games that experiment with embedded LLMs, and the risk of 'time to racism' and unpredictable outputs
- Small Language Models as a more economical alternative to LLMs
- World model games that generate the whole game on the fly (albeit just as an interesting experimental thing)
- Mike Cook's Games by Angelina from 10 years ago, and how different AI generators are now
- What's the future? Will hand-coded games become like hand-woven clothes today?
- Our previous Roguelike Radio episode about AI in 2018 (a very different era)
- Wyverning Heights - Jeremiah's vibe-coded Seven Day Roguelike where you control a dragon in a turn-based 3D space
- Tommy's AI and Games Youtube channel with many educational videos and highlights of new advances
- Pragmatic Engineer trends in software engineering report
I suppose the big question here will be if 'I' was to try and create a roguelike, someone with absolutely no sort of real experience with anything associated with coding whatsoever, would I be able to pull it off with the help of AI?
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, how much of a mess of a project would it end up being?
@Davion since I seem to be the one pushing this, I'll respond. :)
ReplyDeleteI absolutely think you could make a roguelike with no coding experience. The breadth, depth, and quality will depend on how much time and patience you have of course. For anything beyond "small toy example" it's definitely not "push button => make game", but for the toy example that's basically what it is.
Code quality can be bad and inconsistent, but I find that *kind of* doesn't matter because: 1) you're not reading the code anyway and 2) you can ask for the code to be cleaned up.
If you make a giant project spanning weeks/months of iteration and you put no effort into organizing, cleaning up, or documenting the code, yea it will probably be a mess. I would recommend starting with something very small just as a fun exercise, which is the same advice we gave before AI. And if you run into stumbling blocks there are parts of the community very happy to help (r/roguelikedev) or the roguelikes discord (ai-dev, roguelikdev, etc.).
Maybe indie developers could instead learn from roguelike communities that it is alright to create games without art, and so, no need for AI art either.
ReplyDeleteThe note about Picasso is interesting, I feel like games still focus too much on "photorealistic art", and similar to the Picasso shift mentioned, should focus on alternative styles, and the classic ASCII roguestyle is one of the cool alternative styles they could play with. Might sound a bit crazy, but then, permadeath was also considered crazy and indie devs have learned (and forgotten) that permadeath is actually cool. Anyway, ASCII is one element of our "use less-known aspects of roguelikes for something completely different" project , and we get anti-AI for free.
I feel that the "organic" label is more deceptive marketing than an actually valuable product; like, some people observe that while synthetic fertilizers are not allowed directly in organic food, it is fine to use them to grow grass, feed them to a cow, and use that cow's output as fertilizer. It seems that future AI-free devs could be criticized in a similar way. Like, I avoid actively using AI in the project I mentioned above, but I do check things using Google, and it does show AI summaries. IMO various things to simplify programming done by modern programming environments for last 15 (?) years qualify as Artificial Intelligence (in a very broad "computer makes decisions" meaning), and genAI-based inventions will probably be hard to avoid in newer versions.