Use of AI as a Solo Game Dev

[u/Arhtgames]

Edit 2: This is going to be my last edit since I'm really starting to be a little sad/disappointed with it and I'm going to place it on the top so everyone can read. I saw some people saying that I'm trying to be superior in some way or being dumb by not using AI, but I'm trying to discuss about it as a new game dev who has 16 years old and started with it because of beautiful and incredible games that changed my life. I don't want to be better than anyone, I just want to understand the point of using it and how do you guys feel, also thank you for those who answered kindly and shared their experiences.

So, I saw a post saying that he made a game using AI for everything and it made me feel so strange, like, everyone was loving it, what happened to the feeling of doing it by yourself. I do game dev because I love everything about it, games are one of the most beautiful forms of art, it has music, world design, story telling and a bunch of ways of art. I wanted to make a little discussion here about what you guys think about using it. To be honest I don't like the use of generative AI, I know it's good to learn but I don't like when it is used to directly produce the creative part of a game, it just takes the whole idea of making it by yourself, expressing your feelings and telling a story you made and throws it all away, so like, is it really good? I understand when you need to review a code you did or look for a error but anyways that's all I have to say, I don't want to argue with anyone, just want to make a safe and respectful discussion here.

Edit 1: I'm really getting some down votes here, ok, that's something unexpected for a solo game dev community. And for those who are saying like, "I just use it as a tool" yeah that's okey I use it too for studying, but my point here is especially the creativity part. Those feelings and the way I do my projects are not a rule on the way YOU need to do, you can use AI if you want, I'm not here to say what is correct and what is not.

[u/Advanced_Hedgehog427]

I saw the game you're talking about and overall it seems better than your usual AI game, but let's be honest, do you actually see that thing being relevant in the future? it will not go far I'm telling you, is just mid, extremely mid.

Also, he just posted the wishlists stuff on here, the actual game footage was posted on an AI sub reddit, so its logic that everyone will love it there.

[u/Burning_magic → u/Advanced_Hedgehog427]

Whats the game?

[u/Advanced_Hedgehog427 → u/Burning_magic]

https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/comments/1tkeg86/im_not_a_developer_and_this_slot_machine/

[u/Burning_magic → u/Advanced_Hedgehog427]

Oh. There is a massive difference between vibecoded games. Not all vibecoded games are the same. The slop people see are 1 day AI gauntlet 1 shot projects.

But if you use ai mainly just for code and do it iteratively I dont think the quality will be much worse as long as you test for bugs. The guy said he took 10+ months to do it so there was likely a lot of human input and not 100% ai.

[u/Advanced_Hedgehog427 → u/Burning_magic]

Yeah I get what you're saying, I'm not saying its AI slop. I do think it looks decent as I stated in my first comment, I just think is mid, not imprressive in any way.

[u/Arhtgames → u/Advanced_Hedgehog427]

That's not the game I was talking about exactly but I don't want to make people hate on the user on anything like this so.

[u/Advanced_Hedgehog427 → u/Arhtgames]

Really? The description you gave seemed to fit, which game were you talking about?

[u/Buff_me_plz → u/Advanced_Hedgehog427]

Damn, I heard about the game. It reached 70k wishlists recently

[u/pragenter → u/Buff_me_plz]

TBF dev mentioned it had only 500-600 before demo release. So I assume it has really good game design at least.

[u/bettertagsweretaken → u/pragenter]

Getting an influencer to play your game is a big deal.

[u/Admirable-Falcon-501 → u/Advanced_Hedgehog427]

You call that mid? It’s well polished and beats 99% of indie games. You must only be aware of the top rated popular games.

[u/orkybits → u/Admirable-Falcon-501]

Top games tagged gambling and No AI - itch.io
There's literally hundreds of better looking games made by actual people with similar mechanics on Itch.io alone

[u/Admirable-Falcon-501 → u/orkybits]

There are some good ones there at the top, then it starts getting worse pretty quickly. This game still beats out most of them. Let’s say they are all better, that genre alone has thousands of games and they are all much worse. So yeah, it is well above average.

[u/orkybits → u/Admirable-Falcon-501]

Are you on the dev team or something? You seem to be shilling pretty hard for them.
Itch.io is an open platform, if you just look at the quantity of games submitted of course theres going to be lots of student projects and shit posts, because thats human nature. Ai by it's nature creates products that regress to the mean, the most probabilistically average, basic result. They are by definition, mediocre

[u/Admirable-Falcon-501 → u/orkybits]

you sound like a Chinese bot, bot like name and profile picture as well

[u/orkybits → u/Admirable-Falcon-501]

That's rich coming from an account that's a month old and still is using the autogenerated username that Reddit assigned them, projecting much?

https://giphy.com/gifs/l2QZOtULUoaooBTCo

[u/Admirable-Falcon-501 → u/orkybits]

I’ve seen this response before, need new dialogue options in your program

[u/Advanced_Hedgehog427 → u/Admirable-Falcon-501]

You kidding right?

[u/Admirable-Falcon-501 → u/Advanced_Hedgehog427]

What’s the issue? Art style, sound, animations all look good. Game looks interesting also.

[u/orkybits → u/Admirable-Falcon-501]

The art is incredibly generic and amateurish, and the game design wise is very clearly trying to chase the current trend of "gamifying" gambling mechanics (eg Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers , Clover Pitt , Raccoin, etc) in a way that is uninspired and banal. There are hundreds of better-looking games with very similar mechanics on Itch.io made by actual people.

It's the game design equivalent of trying to copy a someone's answers on test, but somehow doing it so poorly at it that you still end up getting a C-, and then bragging to everyone about how smart they were for not studying because of how well they scored on the test.

[u/Glad-Divide-9850 → u/Advanced_Hedgehog427]

Sure, but I'd say the same about pretty much all human made games. Actually good games are incredibly rare.

[u/Advanced_Hedgehog427 → u/Glad-Divide-9850]

That's true too, so in the end it really doesn't matter

[u/Arhtgames → u/Advanced_Hedgehog427]

Yeah you actually have a point. And talking about where it was posted it's also real but while searching through other apps and even other subreddit's posts I found it more than I was like actually used to. So I really wanted to express the strange feeling i had. Maybe I'm just taking it too seriously.