Comment by htdt
14 hours ago
Fair point, these demos are essentially raw single-run output, not cherry-picked or polished. The goal was showing the pipeline works end-to-end, not producing a finished game.
I'm planning to do a proper full game with more iteration and publish it as a playable build, not just a video. That should give a much better sense of actual quality ceiling.
Were those three games the best results you got? Only the bike one appeared to have an actual ... game to it.
The "Racing game" appeared to be a car following a set path with a freecam and there didn't seem to be any gameplay mechanics in the snowboarding one, just a physics entity wildly crashing down a hill with no consequences or score.
The year is 2050 and those are all AAA games.
they're already all available on the Nintendo E-Shop
the comment you are replying to says the results were not cherry picked nor iterated over
Can you speak to the total api costs to create one such game? Not looking for exact numbers but I'm curious if to create, say, that snowboarding game, it cost closer to $5, $50, or $500 in usage.
The LLM costs are hard to pin down exactly since I run it on a Claude Max subscription, but based on token usage I'd estimate it's in the low single digits — probably around $1–3 for a full game generation run if you were paying API rates.
The asset generation costs are tracked precisely. The current cost table: images are 5–15 cents depending on resolution (7 cents at 1K default, 10 cents at 2K, 15 cents at 4K). 3D models via Tripo3D run 30–60 cents depending on quality tier (a full 3D asset including the reference image is 37 cents at medium). Visual QA (Gemini Flash) is essentially free at this scale.
A typical game needs maybe 10–20 images and a handful of 3D models, so total asset costs usually land under $3. For something like the snowboarding game, you're looking at roughly $5–8 all-in — closer to your $5 bucket than $50. And image gen costs are dropping fast, Grok Imagine is 2 cents per image now, which is on the migration roadmap.
I'd love to see the results of that. I think calling a single prompt iteration lifeless misses the point. It's like looking at a game that has had a few hours of development and saying it's bad. Games need iterations. Seeing your results as the first iteration is impressive. I can see follow-up prompts and custom tweaking get really good results!
Last summer I built a factorio-like automation game with older models and over time the game really started to take life.