“ can it build a game idea I've had for years, in a single shot?”

Do people do no research or introspection when they’ve had an “idea for years”? There are countless examples of this exact game. I played this on the Gameboy Advance! There’s like 50 of them on the App Store right now.

The standard “this almost certainly exists wholesale in the training data” applies, but I’m also interested in how you carry an idea for years and don’t notice this, or whether the “idea” here was actually “using this thing that’s been remade thousands of times as an AI benchmark”.

There’s nothing wrong with remaking an old classic formula, especially in game dev. It’s the describing it as “an idea I’ve had for years” that rings weird.

It's called Ostrich effect and we all do it. You enjoy toying with your own idea so much, that your brain shields you from the pain of finding out it already exists. Deep down you know it probably exists. It's harmless, unless there's other people's time and money involved.

I think that's exactly why AI is suited for 99% of stuff we do.

I have pointed out on here before that instances of truly unique human ideas not grounded in nature or previous ideas from others is almost nil, there are not many examples that someone can give me. All human ideas and work is derivative.

Elves? Humans with pointy ears. Werewolves? Humans mixed with wolves. Car tyre? Cart wheel...stone wheel/roller. Etc.

While I agree that it isn't revolutionary that it could implement this from a single prompt, what's surprising to see is how well done this one is compared to the other tries. The controls and movement are smooth, the animations aren't jittery, the ui makes sense, there's a clear progression in difficulty. This model clearly "understands" the implementation of this game far better than the others did.

I also realized this, a quick Google search would’ve told me that this game has been made several times before, also way before I ever had this idea. Apparently it’s a pretty obvious game idea.

Ah well, it’s still fun and it does appear to measure how good AI is in creating these kind of games.

I believe that AI is not a signal of all white collar jobs being replaced, it’s a signal that SWE was in its own bubble and this is the pressure to pop it.

Most software is not needed, YCombinator itself works on the philosophy of “maybe 2/300 ideas are good” and even among those their biggest hitters were social media platforms and undercutting existing services using VC money.

It was a big game that didn’t make a lot of sense in retrospect, and now with these AI super coders it just doesn’t make sense faster.

Software ate the world, and AI is the garbage disposal meant to chew up the leftovers.

If OP is anything like me, they probably played it (or saw and wanted to play it) on the GBA too, and the memory became an idea, forgetting they had actually played it because it did exist.

But also, how original can a game idea ever (now) really be – there's always going to be things you can describe it as 'like' or a mix of, even if not identical. And for such simple things, very little room for being non-identical to whatever they're like.

This is a thought I've had about genAI.

In case it all just comes from training data, "one shotting" a game would be more comparable to "git pull" and changing some assets than "generating code".

I'm not saying this is how it works, I'm trivializing LLMs with this statement, but when I see someone on linkedin excited about generating checkers and chess my first thought is "you could have done that with git pull for the past 20 years".

Same thoughts exactly. I personally started looking into indie game dev and I've just started to realize how naive I was and how hard just game design can be, and that I'll probably never be good at it, and that most of my ideas are pretty garbage (or incomplete at best).

Even with the perfect AI to write, one would need to iterate through many different ideas, play testing constantly, getting people to play test and analyze what they found fun and where they got stuck. And to get the best ideas you'll need to be playing lots of different kinds of games.

Well, “an idea I’ve had for years” and “something that has never been done before” are not the same thing.

90% of everything is crap according to the late SF write Theodore Sturgeon. That was true before AI and it remains true presently. Does it really matter whether this game was in the training data or not here? I guess if one is trying to assert it can build original ideas (and it can, I've done it), but it seems like this is the equivalent of pulling something from Stack Overflow and customizing it given the description of the problem.

IMO the ability to describe a game and let the AI implement a PoC is pretty wild. It's a signal as to whether such an idea is worth pursuing further to me rather than a finished product. And I am enjoying all the experimentation with existing genres as well as the occasional truly original experience due to the dramatically lower cost of entry. What these efforts lack currently is the playtesting and polish that is hard without a human in the loop. So much like agentic engineering, the productive work is in being a centaur. It surprises me how much pushback this is getting from the demographic that embraced the relatively inscrutable git over simpler alternatives for small teams along with the tower of Babel of equally inscrutable frameworks and APIs.

It's not unlike Martin Scorsese admitting upfront he's using GenAI as a creative tool to visualize scenes for his scripts. The predictable backlash that he dare use AI in any way for any aspect of his craft despite his irrefutable oeuvre is a sign of the times more than a legitimate objection to me. Ask the users of deviantArt to stop working with Photoshop and see how that goes.

Having worked in the game industry in the past and adjacent to Hollywood over my career, they were already top heavy exploitative cultures before AI. And any auteur that thinks they can replace humans with agents is as tuned in to GenAI as the tech CEOs and VCs that happily announced layoffs and instituted tokenmaxxing benchmarks to measure the "incredible" boost in productivity AI enables.

So my question, ahead of the mandatory downvotes for not chanting along with the torch-bearing mob against AI in every way is: beyond the CapEx and the buildout issues (both legit IMO), how is AI impacting you negatively and personally?

Most small games are recombinations of existing mechanics anyway

Usually it’s an idea somebody had in a flight of fancy or inspiration but they haven’t really shown much interest in the actual medium prior, so they don’t really have any knowledge of its existence and then they also don’t go out of their way to confirm if it already exists.

Like I remember in college I had something akin to the idea of “50 people 1 question.” I was starting to become interested in shooting my own documentaries and was particularly interested in man on the street style interviews. I pitched it to a friend who then told me about 50p1q, which baffled him because it was like the hot thing already a year or two prior haha.

Anyway that’s just something I think happens a lot. And now with genAI people don’t throw the idea around even, they quickly do a crappy version of the thing, present it, then find out it exists. Which isn’t terrible I guess but it’s one less filter for my better or for worse.