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!
You know me, I'm all for this!
ReplyDeleteI would hope, probably naively, that even people who lose their minds about using Gen AI for assets wouldn't have as many issues with using AI to write the code. I'm not saying that makes sense, I just think that somehow visual/audio art has a more emotionally connection for people than code art.
But who knows? I wonder how many of the outraged used DLSS to make games look/run better and don't even understand they're using AI at that point.
At work we're being beat about the head and shoulders for not using AI ENOUGH. One of our annual goals this year was to show a way we're being more efficient by using AI.
Probably will make it easier for them to replace us. LOL
👍 -- Excellent points as always.
DeleteI'm tuned in to some pretty loud voices that hate AI art specifically, are worried about not having jobs in the future, and that also hate the environmental impacts. As you can tell, it leaves me conflicted. I'm glad I have some counter voices here.
As for my current job, I'm working at a government contract that restricts the use of AI on the contract. Kind of confusing, especially when there's a link to AI right on our desktops.
I could give you a long list of names that prove there's plenty of money in poetry. Maybe not when Graves was writing but certainly now. I nearly posted something about AI yesterday but then I lost interest, having already gone on about it enough. What I will say is that AI has allowed me to make the music I've always wanted to make without having to find a bunch of other people to help me and then persuade them to make what I want to hear, not what they want to hear. I'm not at all sold on the commercial uses but for private and personal projects I don't see the problems being anything like so great. Once I get my own LLM set up and train it only on my own words, I'll get it to write me stories only I want to read.
ReplyDelete👍 -- Thanks, Bhag, and apologies to Dr. Seuss and Maya Angelou! 😉
ReplyDeleteThat’s a good way to put it. I’m still conflicted about AI in a lot of ways, especially commercially as you say, but for small personal projects it does feel different. There’s something pretty amazing about being able to make the strange little thing that’s been sitting in your head for years, even if you don’t have a team around you to help make it.
That said, I’d still love to have an actual artist helping me. AI can make things fast, but artists bring standards and details I know I miss.
You may want to give Claude a try, not just ChatGPT. The way it deals with code agentically is a lot more amazing, imo, though I admit I haven't experimented with ChatGPT's Codex at all.
ReplyDeleteIn the three days Fable 5 was available, some guy apparently vibe coded World of Claudecraft.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1u3m6a8/i_vibe_coded_the_first_mmorpg_with_fable_5/
Some other fellow remastered a DOS game.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1u34370/fable_5_decoded_an_entire_1989_dos_game/
Me, I was midway through experimentally poking around and recreating Eric Miller's Sleuth DOS game... (well, Claude Fable 5 was, I just gave it the direction).
While that's temporarily unavailable for now, there's still three Opus models and the Sonnets, all of whom have been more decent at throwing code together than I am.
Reading those reddit links makes me feel incredibly behind the thought curve! I'll have to check out Claude.
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