Personally, I don’t care how a game was created (vibe coded or coded by hand) as long as the game is fun. I think it’s cool that LLMs let you focus on making the game fun rather than spending your time just getting the game to run. I’m obviously in the minority on Hacker News though.
If you use AI in your game I will not play it. Indie or not. I'm clearly not alone in this thinking, since the CEO of Epic Games is spreading AI-generated propaganda claiming that AI labels "hurt developers" due to significantly reduced sales.
Code is creative output, and delegating it to LLMs is at the cost of that creativity.
You won't know what you're missing or what lessons you would be learning. Sure, you're going "fast", and you'll ship something, but it doesn't look like meaningful engagement with the craft or an audience if a developer didn't execute on it themselves.
I also read peoples posts about spending tens of thousands of dollars on local hardware that they could have hired an indie developer to work with, or throwing untold sums at online LLMs that also equate to a year or more of paid development time without LLM use.
On style: the rationalization of LLM use reads like it was written by a LLM, which is kinda offputting but it also smells like highly agreeable output.
I think games like art should be one of the few areas that aren't developed by AI, because human expression is the point.
I mean code, reports and other stuff, those have utility outside of the creation process itself (although the creation process still has value) but the whole point of media is human sharing.
Personally, I don’t care how a game was created (vibe coded or coded by hand) as long as the game is fun. I think it’s cool that LLMs let you focus on making the game fun rather than spending your time just getting the game to run. I’m obviously in the minority on Hacker News though.
If you use AI in your game I will not play it. Indie or not. I'm clearly not alone in this thinking, since the CEO of Epic Games is spreading AI-generated propaganda claiming that AI labels "hurt developers" due to significantly reduced sales.
tks for the read, I like the style of your inked game
I really like the inked town game
Code is creative output, and delegating it to LLMs is at the cost of that creativity.
You won't know what you're missing or what lessons you would be learning. Sure, you're going "fast", and you'll ship something, but it doesn't look like meaningful engagement with the craft or an audience if a developer didn't execute on it themselves.
I also read peoples posts about spending tens of thousands of dollars on local hardware that they could have hired an indie developer to work with, or throwing untold sums at online LLMs that also equate to a year or more of paid development time without LLM use.
On style: the rationalization of LLM use reads like it was written by a LLM, which is kinda offputting but it also smells like highly agreeable output.
I think games like art should be one of the few areas that aren't developed by AI, because human expression is the point.
I mean code, reports and other stuff, those have utility outside of the creation process itself (although the creation process still has value) but the whole point of media is human sharing.