Comment by AstroBen
15 hours ago
To try to put a positive spin on it..
It enables smaller teams to put out better quality products
Imagine you're an artist that wants to create a video game but you suck at development. You could leverage AI to get good enough code and have amazing art
On the other side someone who invested their entire skill tree in development can have amazing code and passable art
The more I think about it the more it seems this AI revolution will hurt big companies the most. Most people have no hope of competing with a AAA game studio because they don't have the capital. Maybe this levels the playing field?
I am an artist. I have friends who like to code. I could leverage talking to my friends and saying "hey anyone wanna fool around and make some games". I could get Unreal and one of the 800 game templates available on their store for prices ranging from $0 to a few hundred bucks and start plopping my art in there and fiddling around. There's a bazillion art assets on there for the programmer with no art skills, too. And there's a section on the Unreal forums for people to say "hey I have this set of skills, who wants to make a game with me?".
Or we could all just generate a bunch of completely unmaintanable code or some uncopyrightable art, sounds great.
Your unpaid friend or a Unity game template is unlikely to be enough to compete with medium+ scope games
Can't forget animation or sound either. Someone needs to work on the actual game design too! Whose job is it for the marketing? Hope someone has video editing skills to show it off well. Who even did the market research at the start?
It's.. a lot. So normally you have to reallllyyy simplify and constrain what you're capable of
AI might change that. Not now of course but one day?
Undertale Exists.
Baba is You Exists.
Nethack Exists (and similar games).
Dwarf Fortress Exists.
Mountains of Indie Horror games made of Unity Store assets exist.
Coal, LLC exists.
Cookie Clicker Exists.
Balatro Exists.
And Stardew Valley... which took 4-5 years. Vampire Survivors. I'm aware of these. They all have one thing in common: limited in scope or massively simplified in some area
Dwarf Fortress still has basically no animations after close to 20 years in development, and spent most of its life in ascii for good reason. The final art pack I'm fairly sure was contracted out
That's my point. Larger scoped projects are gated by capital or bigger founding teams. Maybe they don't have to be. Maybe in the future 3 friends could build a viable Overwatch competitor
PUBG?
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