Comment by talloaktrees
2 hours ago
Many of us have the exact same thought process. Related: I have heard indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
I have some strong feelings about this particular story (people point LLMs at your devlog)…
- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)
- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.
This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.
I've been vibe coding a game on the side.
It really makes me appreciate how important good game design is. Claude is doing a fine job coding everything I describe, but it doesn't really understand fun, so I need to.
(It's not a great game)
It doesn't need to recreate your game. It can still muddy your marketing and redden the ocean. Especially if someone is in the business of trying to front run an indie game, they don't need to be any where close to a full or good game to attempt to steal any mindshare your project had.
Is this happening at any significant rate?
AFAICT this is a fear that some game developers have, that someone will steal their game and run with it, and the stories told are more repeated based on this shared fear than based on realistic scenarios. People repeat it because it’s a good story.
And yes, I’m aware of some situations like 0x10c and the like.
> Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
The whole problem with LLMs is that you don't need the detail.
Details have a huge impact on how fun a game is. So far the vibeslop games I've seen look about as fun as crappy unity assets flips or mobile games. every so often the Instagram algo will show me some post a long the lines of "The game industry is finished!" and there is no way anyone can seriously looks at the games in those posts and say they look fun to play.
And someone trying to vibe copy another person's game is definitely the type who has no idea of value to add. So many of the slop games the whole concepts are so generic that they definitely just asked chatgpt for everything.
In the modding scenes for some games I play I've seen vibe coded mods where the gameplay additions make no sense and have no sense of balance or fun, with these completely new to the community devs having ko-fi links set up from the start.
2 replies →
Ok, so let’s get some data points. Are there games being recreated from devlogs? I’d like to see what the recreations look like.
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> indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
And that's why we can't have good things...
(This is just gonna keep happening more and more until eventually we'll need something like a patent system for ideas)
>a patent system for ideas)
So, a patent?