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Would you play a game made primarily with AI if the gameplay was genuinely fun? It’s hard to tell since I’ve never played such a game, but I probably wouldn’t because I’m interested in unique stories and experiences, not just pure fun gameplay. But unique experiences are also part of what make gameplay genuinely fun for me; great games can only keep me hooked for so long before I want something new and fresh.
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Do you think AI will eventually allow people to create full-quality games without traditional development skills? Not really, because GenAI can mostly only recreate things that have been done before and can’t apply creativity to a project, which I think is extremely important to a “full-quality” game; else, it’s just generic slop. You could argue that the prompter is where the creativity comes from, but I disagree as you have very little control over what the AI outputs, and you can’t add your own touch to it. There’s no emotion, no personality behind the splotches of color in an AI image; it’s just an amalgamation based on training data, an guess of what the prompter wants.
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Do you see AI as a useful tool for indie developers, or do you think it causes more problems than it solves? I think it may have some useful qualities for helping with programming, provided it plays a very small role in the programming and doesn’t just generate everything for you. I think perhaps a local LLM that can detect the causes of critical errors would be useful, and I wouldn’t condemn someone for using it. If you’re not extremely cautious about using it intelligently ethically, however, it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.
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What would an AI-assisted game need to do to earn your respect as a player or developer? Well, to start, I think it’s worth mentioning what aspects of an AI-assisted would make me lose respect: Using AI for anything creative: art, music, sounds, etc. Those are what I tend to care about most in a game, besides the gameplay; if I see you attempting to replace real human effort with an algorithm, I instantly lose all respect for you as a developer. I’m not even kidding when I’m saying this, I would much rather play a game with graphics made in MS Paint than with AI-generated graphics. I’ve played many games with horrendous graphics by most peoples’ tastes, but they had a unique charm and I really enjoyed the gameplay. But when I see a game use AI-generated assets, my first thought is, “this developer was too lazy to put the effort to make these assets, I doubt they put any effort into making a fun game either.” Now to answer your actual question, for an AI-assisted game to earn my respect I would need to see a commitment to fully expressing your creativity, without being hindered by AI. This means pure human artwork, with no “touch-ups,” “assistance,” or “grammar checking” done by AI. I need to see that the developers actually care about the story they’re telling, and are willing to go through the effort to tell it their way, even if it means picking up a pencil and drawing for the first time in years. If AI is used, I want to see it used in ways that make sense, particularly in programming: small-scale autocomplete, repeating a chunk of code with variations, error-finding, etc.
Sorry that this is long, I just kinda went on a tangent lol. If there’s one really important thing I can leave you with that can help you as a developer, it’s that most average people don’t like AI. AI covers aren’t appealing, and they don’t stand out from others because they’re just generic. They’re quite literally an approximation of the safest option, never daring to take a risk or experiment with something new, and therefore they’re uninteresting and never stand out from the crowd. Dare to be creative, try something exciting and new, and hone your own skills to do so. Use AI for chores so you can do art, don’t use AI for art so you can do chores.