No one needs another SaaS. Games are the real killer app for AI. Hear me out.

I've wanted to make video games forever. It's fun, and scratches an itch that no other kind of programming does. But making a game is a mountain of work that is almost completely unassailable for an individual in their free time. The sheer volume of assets to be created stops anything from ever being more than a silly little demo. Now, with Gemini 3.1, I can build an asset pipeline that generates an entire game's worth of graphics in minutes, and actually be able to build a game. And the assets are good. With the right prompting and pipeline, Gemini can now easily generate extremely high quality 2d assets with consistent art direction and perfect prompt adherence. It's not about asking AI to make a game for you, it's about enabling an individual to finally be able to realize their vision without having to resort to generic premade asset libraries.

▲

johndough 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I tried using Gemini for asset generation, but have not yet found a good way to animate them. It does not seem to understand sprite sheets or bone-based animation. Do you know a solution for that?

	▲	ramesh31 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>It does not seem to understand sprite sheets or bone-based animation. Do you know a solution for that? This is precisely what I'm running into as well. There's a few SaaS solutions that are ok, but I gave up after an attempt at building a pipeline for it. Sticking with building 4X/strategy card games that don't need character animations for now until the models catch up.

▲

dawnerd 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Except all of the ai created games posted to the various subreddits are awful. No one likes them, no one plays them. The ones that make it to steam end up getting abandoned when the devs hit a performance wall.

Game development just isn’t something AI can do well. Good games are not just recreations of existing titles.

	▲	ramesh31 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Except all of the ai created games posted to the various subreddits are awful. No one likes them, no one plays them. As with anything else, 95% of it will always be crap. Taste is now the great differentiator.

▲

skydhash 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

High quality assets is orthogonal to fun. If you can create a fun concept with generic assets, I believe you may find an artist willing to produce the assets for you.

	▲	ramesh31 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>High quality assets is orthogonal to fun. Not necessarily. It's a very "programmer brain" thing to think that novel mechanics are the be-all end-all of what makes a fun game. Extremely simple games can become incredibly engaging given high quality detailed beautiful art design. Think of deck builders and board games that would be pointless with just placeholder images and spreadsheets of data, that actually become enjoyable because of the creative work that went into the assets.