Using AI to make a game -- There's no money in poetry

 Ok, y'all, story time and a bit of a follow up post to me being conflicted about using AI for art. 

*cough*

Yeah, I went full on dark side here and decided to try my hand at making a game with AI's help. The first time I tried this was about a year ago when I wanted to make a VR game in Unreal, but that failed miserably since, I'll be honest, my experience in Unreal is pretty small . . . like 3 months of dev time and a week of game jam. The platform I'm best at making games in is Unity. I used that for about five years to do mobile game development (AND Battlebows VR development) at both KingsIsle and WIMO.

Continuing with story time (sorry, I know this is a long build up), I have a friend at work, and she was talking to me about how her father uses AI to develop little apps and things as a hobby. That discussion combined with a discussion with my old boss from WIMO (who also gave AI a shot) got me really thinking . . . if these guys can do it and have success, I should be able to as well!

And so . . . I started solo dev working on a game. It's a game that I've had in my back pocket for several years, in fact, this game had even made a top 10 list for being presented to our CEO as games we felt we could easily make and be profitable. Long story short, when the CEO saw my game pitch, he was flabbergasted by it and saw no possible way that this game would make money . . . and so it died there . . . but it didn't die for me!

I mean, he's right of course, it's a hyper casual game and the only way it's going to make money is if it became hugely successful around a very niche topic of poetry. As Robert Graves said, "There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either." 

. . . and so, no one in the world would make this game but me (much like no one in the world would make Button Bombers but Andrew Stout), so I might as well do it while recovering from Chemo. I threw on a blanket, sat in my computer chair, and shared my game idea with ChatGPT and I started chatting with AI about how to make this prototype, my overall vision for the game, and how it could help . . . and especially how it could help given I failed using ChatGPT to build my last game.

You know what? Where ChatGPT might have struggled horribly with VR about a year ago, it excelled at coding scripts in C# for a 2D mobile game made in Unity. Does that mean I'm vibe coding? Or am I just letting AI code for me?) Now, will it give the game a blackmark for being made with AI? Probably? I believe you have to mark your game as being made with AI in any storefront, but I haven't investigated that far or even determined if I'm going "store front" yet. But, this game never had a hope of being made otherwise, and again, there's no money in poetry anyway . . . .

So while I'm not really ready to share the details of this project just yet, I guess just know it exists and I'm on Version 0.03 of my prototype. I've shared the download link with a select few, and I'm gathering some feedback as I make my game.

Give me time and you'll be sure to hear more about it here on TFN.

Happy Dueling!