This just proves the point more than anything, really.
Both the website's design and the games presented look indistinguishable from every other AI-generated website and game I've seen in the past. I do not feel any sense of individuality while looking at them, they could've been prompted by just about anyone. Even the little text blurbs are plain unfiltered Claudeslop ("no spoilers, just green and red squares").
Any one of your son's peers could create something identical by typing "claude, make me a cool website with some games" and waiting an hour or two, and that's the problem. How do you think he would feel if he showed this to one of his friends, hoping to impress them, and one day later, that same friend approached him and said "look, I made a website exactly like yours, it was so easy"?
> How do you think he would feel if he showed this to one of his friends, hoping to impress them, and one day later, that same friend approached him and said "look, I made a website exactly like yours, it was so easy"?
Competition and one-upmanship to that level in kids has existed since the internet became widespread. The solution is to build something even better the next time you show something to that friend.
Just like sports, music, grades. Once the bar is raised, the top performers just keep getting better.
Have you played competitive sports in your life? The kids who practiced more, had more opportunities to practice, grew up around athletes in the home, etc. will also have that "I can do exactly what you did. That's easy!" attitude. That's normal.
If you get instantly discouraged by others making your hard work look easy, then you don't have enough drive.
Does anyone know if the code in this file (or the others) is the direct output of the Agent or is this the output of another tool? I guess the other tool could be the 'Agent' but hoping my coworkers do not start having me review code in this dense format. Maybe we really are past the point of code needing human review at all IDK....
I've found Claude will default to that dense verging on minified style unless you tell it to write it in a way that humans can read and grok it. Even then it doesn't really comply
...except people who actually enjoy games and want high quality games to play, of course.
Down here in reality, platforms like Steam are being absolutely flooded with generic, ugly, low-quality AI-generated games, which are not only drowning out the human-made games people actually want to play and making it impossible to find them, but are also preventing them from being sold entirely in some cases due to human reviewers not being able to keep up with the pace of new game submissions[0].
So, thanks for your contribution to that, I guess.
The game from this article is quite fun and was literally a one-shot from a relatively brief prompt. I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality. Generic? Sure, but that applies to nearly all games anyhow. With all barriers to development coming down obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems. The review system (and meta-systems like getting your game to streamers, your own reputation, etc) still works well to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there seems to be no reason to yet expect such to stop working well.
In the end the biggest winner in all of this are going to be the players, due to competition. That competition will both bring down prices and bring up the minimum standard of quality for a major success.
> I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality.
I would. Maybe our standards for quality are different, but I'm willing to bet that if you showed this to a bunch of people who actually play games regularly as a hobby and have some standards for them, they would most likely agree that, even ignoring the obvious "AI look", a simple 2D game that can't even pull off natural-looking walking animations could never be considered anything but low quality.
> obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems
This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at Steam's most recent Next Fest - it featured over 8000 games, twice as many as the last one, the vast majority of which being low effort AI generated games. Yet the number of gems that rose to the top was not higher than before. If anything, it was lower, as most players simply gave up looking after having to scroll through hundreds of AI games. Such games can never be "gems", no matter how much you try prompting them to be.
Did you have fun playing the game? Because I'd argue that if you showed this game to bunch of 'real gamers' as you're effectively concocting here, their metric would be the answer to that question, rather than seeing if they could find a technical flaw. Because in the end all that matters for a game is fun, and this game certainly scored well on that metric for me, and I suspect the vast majority of people.
Definitely. The reason I ask is because right now if you go through this thread there seems to be about a 100% correlation between people who are down on the game and those who are down on everything LLM. If this was 'published' 3 years ago there'd be nothing but praise, and it's not because the beat-em-up genre radically changed in those 3 years.
Games are subject to taste, but I think there are also objective elements. And this game just objectively feels and plays great, which is a remarkable achievement for an LLM, because it's a genre where it's easy to get things that look right but don't feel right. For instance Sacred Citadel is a game that was made by a studio with over a decade of experience, published by a publisher with decades of experience, and it's worse than this game - much worse. It got the look right, but it felt/played terrible.
The fact that a single guy can casually one-shot games dramatically better than what passed for a [relatively] big studio title a decade ago is testament to where we're at. And I think that's freaking some people out. I suppose that freak out is reasonable from one perspective, but from another it's just shaking your fist at the clouds. Even if all LLM advances stopped today, what we've already unleashed is already way more than enough to change the game forever, and things are never going back to how they were. And, of course, we're not stopping today.
I hadn't tried the game since I was on my phone when I wrote this comment, but now having played the game, it was exceedingly boring to the point I don't get why you're trying to convince people that they're lying about how fun the game is. It's just not interesting!
Then it's likely that beat-em-up isn't the genre for you, because this is a very solid entry in the genre. If you've ever played a bad beat-em-up you'd be able to see the strengths more clearly. A huge thing is that this game feels like it has weight in the attacks, and that's really hard to do. That's a subtle mixture of responsiveness, sound effects, animation (not just movement but also text/visual fx/flashes/etc), and more. And the hit boxes seem to be pretty much perfect, which is another aspect many games miss on. Then there's lots of nice subtle touches - invincibility frames, juggling, bosses with phases/knockdowns/cueing, and much more.
Nothing revolutionary, but a bunch of different parts all working together well that are generally implemented at a very good to excellent level. That's way better than most can say. Of course the walking animation, like the one guy mentioned is hilariously bad, but fixing that's also just a prompt away. Oddly enough I didn't even notice it when playing.
I find it funny you talk about how great the animation is, before immediately conceding that the walking animation of the main character (perhaps the most important animation) is "hilariously bad".
Look, this is obviously from a technical perspective, totally mind-blowing! Like I never in a million years would have guessed this could be possible 5 years ago. That being said...it's still not very fun or interesting. I think you are mistaking that mind-blowing feeling with the actual end product being fun.
In game (or UI) development animation isn't just what you might think of with things like moving. I tried to allude to this in the parenthesis, but any sort of transitionary state for something is an animation. The walking animation is irrelevant in terms of making the combat feel 'weighty'. I imagine most people didn't even notice it - I certainly didn't, even though it's very much a 'once you see it, you can't unsee it' thing.
But when making a combat game there's a million subtle things going on that the game gets very right to actually make it feel like the hits have weight - the flashes, text, and other aspects all have subtle animations in them that make them feel good the hitbox triggers at exactly the right moment meaning it's a tight fit, and much more. These are things many human studios screw up. It's really hard to make combat feel good, and this game does it.
For some context, Streets of Rage 4 [1] was a very well received beat-em-up. So that's pretty much the top tier for the genre. And yeah it's obviously better than this game, but the gap is not huge, and that's borderline absurd when considering that this was a one-shot LLM generated game. And that gap could easily be closed with some refinement from a single developer - in this case our rando uncle. Interesting times ahead.
>The reason I ask is because right now if you go through this thread there seems to be about a 100% correlation between people who are down on the game and those who are down on everything LLM.
That "correlation" is a proxy for the people who don't want to consume low effort garbage.
Type declarations are still quite limited, though. For example, you can declare that a function returns an array or a string, but not an array of strings.
You can annotate the method as `@return array` or even `@return list` (array of strings = indexed via anything that can be used as a key in PHP vs list of strings = indexed via incrementing integers, starting from 0). I guess the OP suggestion was to use Arrayable / Iterable interfaces, which would work as well, but would require more effort (= yes, declare a class)
You must have replied to the wrong comment, since the one you did replied to never claimed that the test and validation suites were "never looked at." They are reviewed, and the test/data results are reviewed.
My understanding is that everyone gets this at the same time.
Ubuntu Pro provides security updates for packages that wouldn't otherwise be supported by Canonical at a given point in time. If your version of Ubuntu is still within the (non-extended) support period, kernel security updates are always provided regardless of Pro.
Like... some way to "branch" out of the main development repo and make changes independent of it before "merging" it back in?
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