this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Indie gamedev existed for years before AI. You can just sit down and make a game. And if you don't care enough to actually work on it, why would people even spend their money on "your" product?
Because these people do not understand the concept of craft nor care about the process of creating, they are soulless goons looking to grift people. It's not their fault that society is so fucked that it's necessary to trick and rob people so they can eat...
Yeah, they don't understand that the process of learning, of making mistakes and hitting dead-ends as you create your work of art is fucking important! Failures can lead to unexpected changes to your initial idea, and they might improve your work or at least make it iconic (the classic example of the fog in Silent Hill that was added to offset a technical limitation). You can't have that if the entire process of creating a piece is automated.
Yeah it's crazy how people who don't like a tool don't use it
Even today, people value photos differently than paintings, at least in part due to the amount of effort that goes into each.
There's no reasonable argument to preventing people from having the information up front to make the same sort of value decision about a game.
You're free to use AI, just declare it. The purchasing public is free to decide if that changes how much they're willing to pay for your game.
We aren't entitled to your time, but you aren't entitle to sales. If your use of AI is losing you sales, you're perfectly free to decide to stop or keep using it.
Games used to be programmed in low level code, if you don't care enough to hand code your game and instead rely on machines to "compile" it for you, why even spend money on "your" product that's all high level machine generated code?
There's a difference between coding your game in high level code + making all the other stuff like assets, levels and music and asking thiefgpt to ~~generate~~ plagiarize assets and music for you.
Games bring together a lot of different mediums and require a diverse set of skills. So for instance someone might be great at drawing, and have a great idea for a game that uses their art, but they have a hard time with coding, and use AI to simplify that part of it for them in a way that's more flexible than some other more restrictive solution like RPG Maker, which might make it closer to their vision for the kind of game they wanted to make. I think such a game could be worth playing, assuming the person making it cares about what they are making and puts their own work into it.
That's kinda fallacious as an argument. AI cannot create good code, it CAN be used to create code, but requires.expert to fix the tons of mistakes and simply bad coding solutions it comes up with. If you don't have the skills it's better to use a tool made to help you with that with its limitations (rpg maker in your example) rather than use a tool made to aid already expert users (that even they say it actually creates more work for them lol). I write code myself and LLMs simply suck at coding. They can create "art" but it's all the same and you can spot it on their steam page when they do. Honestly, I'm not even angry at them for thinking the same way as you do: it's just that those coding solutions are advertised as such, and people are simply ignoring the expert in the field that tell them they can't actually do that. If you try that road you will either create something that doesn't work or something that will put its users at risk (by creating trojan backdoors in theor system or sharing sensitive information) and that's something I can't simply condone.
You're kind of right, in that it's not a total solution right now and you probably won't be able to vibe code a whole game (except a really simple one maybe) with no knowledge. But that doesn't mean it couldn't lower the skill floor for someone. I'm assuming the person in my scenario would be also using an engine like Unity or Godot, maybe asking the AI to walk them through how to do what they want, write simple scripts and explain/suggest syntax. That shouldn't have too much risk of generating inadvertent backdoors, and I think LLMs are pretty good at explaining basic code. Game engines already enforce the basic design structure, which will make it easier to avoid big unfixable mistakes and do everything in small pieces a LLM is less likely to fuck up.
The same is true with using it for art; you're right that a lot of AI art on Steam is obvious and looks the same, but really good AI assisted art isn't. The amount of skill and effort required for that is not zero, but is less than it might be otherwise. There are probably a lot of games out there where you just can't tell, and because there's so much fear of backlash it just isn't disclosed.
No, it DOES. In fact, it RAISES the skill floor.
How is a dev supposed to be able to find an error in the code if they don't know how to code?
As a programmer, most of your time isn't actually spent writing code. It's mostly spent debugging. An amateur programmer relying on AI is minimizing a task that takes a minority of their time while maximizing a task that takes the majority of their time.
For amateur programmers, AI isn't an asset, it's a liability.
I didn't learn to program using AI, so I don't know all the details of how it would go for an amateur in the process of learning, but I have incorporated it into my work, so I know it can be very useful and save a lot of time, and that isn't just about generating code. If you want to plan out how to debug something, you can get solid guidance. If you want clarification on what an unclear part of a tutorial means, you can get that. The more introductory the topic, the better and more reliable the explanation. I remember when learning spending a lot of hours just staring at a screen being completely lost on what to do next to debug something. I'm assuming you haven't used it for coding very much? How can you be so confident it would be useless for them, isn't this just speculation?
Anyway, this is all kind of beside the point. If it's not useful, people won't use it, and there's no need to be angry about its use. If it is useful, it can be used to assist making games that are worth playing, and people shouldn't be attacked for that.
I don't know a single self-respecting artist who would use AI though. Artists are literally the most harmed people by the LLMs lol.
Other than that, I agree with what @spawn7586@lemmy.world said - if you don't know how to code, LLMs will generate the most unplayable game in existence.
And some people even outsource their defense of AI slop to AI.
I promise you, none of what I write here is AI, I'm against doing that
I will never believe you, since you've spent this entire thread defending AI slop.
Or, like in the past, people figure out solutions to the limitations and make something new. The fog in silent Hill is an example.
I'd rather pay for a game that looks shittier and handmade than ai garbage.
Silent Hill was made by a huge studio with large financial backing.
I'd rather pay for a game made by a solo Indie dev who used AI to help them over evil corpo garbage.
First of all, missing my point in bringing up the fog mechanic. It was a limitation that they found a clever workaround for that ended up enhancing the game greatly. If they didn't have that limitation, there wouldn't be the fog, and the game would suffer from it.
Secondly, don't try to pull the "oh AI is rebellious anti corporation tech" bullshit, AI is made and run by nothing but huge corporations with large financial backing who are making evil corpo garbage. You're not a rebel for using it, you're just another bootlicker.
I'd rather pay for neither.