Can you one-shot a game using AI?

Imagine my face, when I completed a new newsletter issue and got a new issue of a different newsletter I subscribe to. And the rest of the evening looks like this:

The article in question is

In which Mr “Guy Brooklyn” tries to one shot some games and kinda succeeds but kinda fails at it. It shows also some weak techniques in prompting an AI.

First of all, Mr Brooklyn prompts the AI to:

Make a game like Hexen but instead it’s Vikings. Three classes are berserker, Valkyrie, and Shaman.

Even the AI highlights that it can refer to one of two games. Here we already see that using the AI requires you to be specific, as specific as possible. Would be better to say “Make a first person perspective game like Hexen from 1995” to limit the query.

Don’t make the AI guess. Really, it has a lot of info to guess from. That’s not always a good thing.

Secondly, as Mr Brooklyn quotes Claude Strife:

I’m planning to build a raycasting-based dungeon crawler in HTML canvas

Make a game in HTML? I mean, I understand, some people can do that. Just look at JSLegendDev! He achieves a lot using JavaScript engines, but even there you can see the challenges when you want to treat your games like a publishable solution.

Of course, you should think seriously about a web build to show off your game as a prototype. It’s a benefit, as long as your tech stack supports it. But starting a serious game in HTML? Risky choice. Unless you want to make only web games.

Remember, AI is trained on specific type of programming languages. It might choose to pick Python (happened once to me, one of those WTF moments). If you want to use AI to make games, pick the tech stack yourself!

Later on we learn one of the next prompts from Mr Brooklyn:

There are building materials randomly generated on the map. Please make it so that the player has to gather materials from their proper places.

Poorly defined. What is a proper place. There are spaces where you want the AI to fill in the blanks, but I’m not sure that’s level design. This you want to do yourself. Also, if you don’t specify what a proper place is, AI will guess. Oh, shit...

Also, Mr Brooklyn says,

when launched, it was difficult to figure out how to attack or gather materials.

Would be easier to specify that in the prompt, to be honest. You can’t be sure if AI would even implement controls. I once implemented a PONG game, and the AI forgot about viewing the score. Dumbass… Wait, I should’ve specified that. I’m the dumbass :D

The island is also very small with tons of enemies. Very odd design choices for this one.

No, Mr Brooklyn, you are the designer! You make the game! You should make the choices! AI is your skilled intern. Skilled, but still intern.

Mr Brooklyn said it himself:

a full game can’t be generated in a single prompt

And that is VERY TRUE!

Myself, I don’t even make a game by prompts. I design the game in markdown files, where I define what I want it to do, then refine it, and then use it for implementing.

Why in separate files? Well, these files, are my history, my point of reference, my documentation, and my user stories. Like the Constitution, or your Job Contract, you want to have that in a separate document.

You should also have a file that teaches your AI how it should work with you and what you expect from it.

Consider that your programming environment. Every programmer configures one.

Well, it all comes down to a few things. Let’s start with the fact, that the more complicated the process the more control you want to have over it.

Secondly, if you don’t work in iterations, step by step, you end up having something you don’t like. So you want to design your process to have checkpoints. And from time to time, you check the state of your game. Does it work? Does it have the additional features you want to implement in this iteration? Does it have any bugs? Did it break anything you implemented before it? Do you like the direction in which you’re going? This AGILE approach is very needed when using an AI.

You are not only the designer now, you're also the code’s first tester. And quality assurance. And responsible for the result. Not the AI, you.

And don’t even get me started on Polish.

Not Polish language, Game Polish!

There was never a game that didn’t require any polish. Game feel is impossible without you.

You need to play the game, test it, provide feedback, and enhance it.

Well, apparently, you can’t just know nothing, use an AI, and create a game. The gates are defended! The gatekeepers won! You still have to learn how the sausage is made. All parts of it.

You can use AI to help you with it. But you have to know what needs to be done. AI will help in this, but you don’t want it to make all the choices. You want to make the choices. You are the creator, the game designer, the Hideo Kojima of your studio!

That doesn’t make you a person who sits in a chair smoking a cigar and throwing ideas at the screen. The organizational job is yours, anyways.

Even if you want to use AI (like I do, but I’m not a person to look up too... yet), ask yourself one thing: Who are you in your team (even if it’s a one-man-army)? Are you the storyteller? Are you the game designer? Are you the artist? Because you have to be some artistic person there. These games need to be yours, not AIs. Your vision comes first. AI is the helper, not the designer, not the story writer, not the artist. It’s the helper. It helps, not decides, not does everything for you.

If you want to use AI, you need to know what do you need it for. Because there’s a reason you want to make games, and that blank you fill yourself! You tell the stories, you design the game! AI helps you implement it.

Also, making games is not only about the game itself. It’s also about the tools. Sometimes you will use tools made by other devs. But back in the day, real men made their own tools ;-) And yes, that is another project. And it requires time. And you can use AI to do it.

I guess this is to convince some people of the capabilities of AI. And especially investors. These investors, they’re very specific people.

Some people listen to those opinions, but investors? They snort these opinions like they’re cocaine lines. And then they do some weird investor stuff, throw money at the companies and we learn how much they are now worth. Obviously, I’m not the person to talk to when it comes to stock market. But we all know of the impact stock market made on the game industry. Which leads me to a lack of trust to these people. They need to be convinced - for the money. But somebody forgot that not only they are listening.

Also, what we see shown on these presentations are demos. And they always make it look easy. You know what isn’t easy? It’s every project made in any tech that doesn’t resemble the demo. Believe me, I saw it multiple times in web development.

In games it’s like using a game engine which (unlike Unity or Godot) are usually very specialist in nature. Remember when DICE made their Frostbite engine (specialized in first person shooters like Battlefield) and then EA said: hey guys, you want to make Dragon Age? Do it in Frostbite!

That was not the purpose of this engine. It can be used for it, but it will require some additional work. And it did.

It is the same with AI - it won’t work for serious projects without the preparation you need to make.

I appreciate people like Some Guy From Brooklyn, because they actually put in the work to test the new tech.

Not to mention ask excellent questions like:

• If we develop a game completely with AI, can I actually sell that for money?

• If a game is fully created using AI, how does one protect the games IP?

But the conclusion that it’s good for prototypes but not the whole game development process sounds a bit overshot. Sure, you can one shot a prototype, but not one-shot a game. I agree.

But that doesn’t mean you cannot use AI in making games. You still can do it, but you need to learn how to use AI.

I work in a company that decided to embrace AI and see how it works for us. And the truth is - it works great! You can use it in enterprise solutions. But you don’t one shot them. You work like you have always worked, but the actual process of implementing things are delegated to the AI. You still control what has to be done, you do not rely on that on AI to figure it out. You still talk with other people. But you can achieve things faster.

A security expert once looked at an old project I was maintaining and suggested an important security change. He said that it would take 2-4 weeks. With AI, it took me one to two days. Including testing. AI not only understood what I wanted to do. It also knew how to do it. It found edge cases I wasn’t thinking about. It found spaces that would be affected that I forgot about. It understood how to tackle some errors, faster than I could google them. But I was still in charge of the process. And I still tested it to check whether it was still working. And sometimes, AI helped me even create testing scenarios, write them to text files, and use them to check certain use cases.

Importantly, no one was fired from my company. It’s not about saving money. It’s about doing more in less time. It’s about empowering. Expertise and speciality are still valued.

Companies that fire with AI as an excuse have different problems. And AI did not solve them. It just gave a reason to fire people. Don’t be like that. Don’t be like an investor. Detached from the real world.