You've always had amazing ideas for games... but never got around to learning to code, right? I feel you hard, bro.

But now, glory of glories, you've stumbled upon these largely unknown, and near magical tools, that can literally make your crummy AWESOME game for you! Now we're in business! 

Okay, okay. All joking aside. I love games. I love crummy games. Seriously. Weird, raw, sometimes downright dumb games are my cup of tea. Polished professional type games are BORING. But I try out very nearly *every* new incremental/idle game that pops up on Itch. If I think it's kind of neat, I'll probably even give you some moneyz for it, yeah? So for many of you devs out there:

I am your audience. 

And I care exactly 0% about you using AI to code you game, or make your art, your sounds, your story. Whatever. If it gets me a new amusing little game? DO IT, bro! 

But for the love of Itch.io... please, try to not do it in the absolutely most obnoxious way you possibly could, yeah? So:

• FIX YOUR GAME DESCRIPTION
  • Your game description should accurately, briefly describe your game. Why?
    • 1: So people know if they want to play it.
    • 2: So when I'm trying to figure out this half-broken, badly designed, unintuitive mess you've given me to play, I have at least some idea that, for example, somewhere there should be an upgrade menu!
  • What's wrong with the "AI Wrote It!" game descriptions that I see on half the games now?
    • They're long and spammy. Thanks to AI, text is now cheap because no one has to write it anymore! But I'm not going to spend more time wading through a lengthy and comically poorly written 'game description' than it took for you to have AI make the entire game
    • They mash together:
      • a) awesome descriptions of your high game concepts
      • b) descriptions of game features 
      • c) lies 
      • d) gibberish
      • in ways that make me, an adult human person with a very fancy education, want to exclaim "WHAT THE **** IS THIS SAYING?"
    • They idiotically brag about dumb crap, in a way that makes it seem that your game must be dumb crap. Common examples:
      • "⚡ Zero-Friction Web Experience — Instant play directly in your browser (PC & Mobile)."
        • translation: This is an online game. WOW!
      • "🔊 Dynamic Web Audio Engine — Custom CRT frequency buzz and real-time audio impacts."
        • translation: There is a buzz sound when you press the one functional button on the game. WOW!
      • "💾 Persistence Layer — Hybrid local & cloud state sync."
        • translation: Your game saves. WOW!
  • Look, bro. I know you didn't write it, okay? But at least READ it before posting it, yeah? Or at a minimum, please, tell you AI coding/art/writing buddy something like:
    • "Draft a brief and accurate game description. Write it for someone who has not played the game before Lead with a short introduction. Use a catchy tagline, but also include a few sentences that very clearly, very accurately convey the basic idea or concept. Then give a brief, well-organized overview that includes only game features that are significant for the player. Name the features and explain them briefly but clearly. Do not waste space and make a fool of me by bragging about ordinary, basic game elements (it's a game! it's online! it saves! it has sound!) that literally no one will find to be impressive. Do not lie by listing features that do not exist in the current build of the game as current features; any planned features should be shown after the current features, and must clearly be labeled as 'planned' or
• STOP LYING ABOUT FAKE FEATURES
  • Again, I know, I know. It wasn't you. It was the AI! And those features will be in your game, someday, probably!
    • But... see the above. Tell it to not lie!
  • But... but... it's really a real feature, player, you're just misinterpreting it!
    • OH? I see. So that "⚠️ Authentic, organically evolving natural economic simulation" actually just means "your number of coins goes up when you press the one button in the game"?
      • Where I come from, we call that a lie. Don't let the AI put lies in your game description. Why?
        • Because it makes me angry. That's why.
        • You want me to play your game, leave a nice comment, give it a good review, tell my friends, post about it on X, send you some money? Then don't get my hopes up and then break my heart waste my time.
        • I'll probably try out your barely-any-features-at-all 'game' if I run across it. If any aspect of it looks even vaguely promising, I'll probably check back. I will not check back if you trick my into clicking 100 times, only for me to discover "Oh, I guess upgrades aren't even in the game yet..."

• STOP WRITING STUPID
  • What? You weren't given a MacArthur Fellowship for your ground-breaking literary merit? I'm shocked. But... I bet you still write better than AI.
    • note: Honestly, it's bizarre. You'd think LLMs would generally write well at this point. And many of them do. 
      • BUT... whichever one is writing these flagrantly obnoxious game descriptions (and in-game text) that are all over Itch.io is bad. Like really bad, bad. (Is it Claude? I don't know for sure. But I bet it's Claude.)
  • But you're lazy, I get it. Or maybe not a native English speaker. Whatever. Again, I care 0% if you use AI in, like, any way, at all.
    • EXCEPT... if the way you use it is just badly.
  • How do you know if the AI is giving you egregiously bad text for your game? Look for things like this:
    • Things are stupidly, pointlessly written backward. This is one of the most common and most annoying problems:
      • wrong: "Your gear equips itself." 
        • right: "Your automatically equip gear."
      • wrong: "The path walks itself." 
        • right: "Your character travels automatically"
      • wrong: "Orbs of arcane energy heedlessly fling themselves into the pack in a burst of inspiration without the inconvenience for active intervention."
        • right: "You automatically pick up XP orbs."
    • EVERYTHING sounds like super-excited hype.
      • This ties into the prior mention of bragging about mundane, trivial, or pointless aspects of your game - for instance, the fact that your game is ONLINE. Yeah, yeah. If I need to know something, just state it plainly. I want to play, not read an Infomercial transcript.
    • Language about what the player DOES in the game is wordy, vague, and has no obvious correspondence with any kind of concrete game-playing action
      • What do I do in your game? Specifically, in the most immediate sense? Click buttons? Hit 'play' to start a round? Click to upgrade? Use my mouse, or arrow keys, or whatever, to move [my character? a ball? something?] around in some kind of environment?
      • Whatever it is that I actually do in your game, at least make sure that is reasonably obvious, FIRST, before your LLM-hype-beast spams its bad poetry about "Three systems. Two divides. And every second you hold, is another second the energy doesn't cause a meltdown." 
  • "Yeah but how me is illiterate?" I know, I know. Just... try telling your AI to not write like a moron:
    • "Write in a plain, straightforward style. Do not attempt to write in a clever or stylish manner. You will fail. Write in standard, fluent, boring English. Prefer to write using standard, common sentence constructions. Use simple, standard constructions when possible, such as: subject + verb + object. Make the subject explicit when needed to avoid ambiguity. Write for the player of the game. Assume the player is not already familiar with the game, and try to provide them with clear, useful instructions or descriptions when relevant. Prefer using common terms and expressions when possible, rather than uncommon or unusual language. Write in a way that will be accessible and helpful for diverse readers of varying literary levels, including language learned, non-native speakers, etc." 

Still reading?

Yeah, no you're not. The people posting games with issues like these (and that's assuming their AI 'agents' aren't just posting these directly, which they may be) don't care. They're just slopping it out in the (surely unrealistic) hope that someone is going to donate a couple of bucks... I guess?

Mostly. There are actually a few recent games that I found to be really innovative and excellent, that still have some of these issues.

The point here isn't "OMG this is so annoying, I personally hate it so stop!" Naw. The point is that laying on the above junk thickly enough can make your game description (as well as your in-game text) confusing, or even literally incomprehensible. And it might promise, or suggest, features that don't actually exist. All of this is self-defeating. Bad for potential players, bad for the game, bad for you, if you're hoping people play it.

Not that the worst offenders are actually going to read any of this, of course.

But hey, maybe their 'AI agents' will!

And then, perhaps, some of them will start to write a bit more clearly and honestly.

• "⚡FOUR BUTTONS. Two features. This game (like the developer's other dozen published games this month) has four buttons. You click the first button, and it makes your number go up. The other three buttons link to Stripe subscription pages. The developer would really like you to send money. Lots of money."

This is actually a really useful guide 😂 AI can be a great tool, but it shouldn’t replace creativity or player experience. Definitely worth a read for anyone making games!

I'm glad that you didn't straight away attacked AI users. Actually all what you said makes sense and fair enough. If someone does not have the time to write their own description or just read it after AI generated it totally doesn't deserve their game to be played. Personally, I used AI when I made my game because it's my first game and my friend and I are still new to the Game Development field. However, we didn't use it in text generation as you'd mostly pointed out. Hope to hear your opinion about our game if it's your type. ☺️