Growing up, games were such a scarce commodity that you'd really suck all the marrow out and spend hours beating your best times, looking for Easter eggs, or messing with custom maps and mods. There was a whole genre of gameplay around just exploiting physics bugs to jump a bit further.
The other night I carelessly made an infinite runner game while watching TV and the feeling of sheer abundance quickly faded into a bit of depression. Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.
Why would a new infinite runner be something anyone would actually want to play, instead of the hundreds of already existing infinite runners, unless there's a good addition to the core mechanics? How long did you actually want to play it yourself?
What makes or breaks just about any indie game is a brilliant core loop, or on the other end of the spectrum a novel "feeling" / aesthetic. Latter especially visible in the horror genre. Then after the original, there's the tail of variants that can do pretty well for the next 6 months of so, and it's exhausted, which is the part AI affects the most as of now.
There's countless examples of indie games crafted with care over multiple years, with great looking (but sort of bland) graphics, that have not done well.
Further, even before AI, a lot of people whose games didn't make it, did not at all have a grasp on what counts as a finished and well crafted game. Same applies to music. It's clearer in sports where (for example) the insanity of a marathon ran in 2:00-2:10 is easy for all to see.
> Why would a new infinite runner be something anyone would actually want to play, instead of the hundreds of already existing infinite runners, unless there's a good addition to the core mechanics?
The future is individual(istic), everything will be mad libs style. You just add your own preferences and get out the piece of media customised just for you.
This is how mobile gaming works. Game mechanics are dime a dozen, someone invents a new big one like every 5 years. 99% of the success is the theme and execution (and massive amounts of money for UA and lawyers).
I played a ton of Canabalt[0] in ye olden times. I think I would pay 2€ if CDPR came out with Canabalt 2077. 1:1 same mechanics, but I'd be running in a Cyberpunk 2077 themed world. Or I can just have Claude create me one right now.
In the future Someone will have a platform where you can take a game mechanic and slap on any theme you like. Insert credit card and presto you have a custom game.
You can still have that. Share it with your friends or the whole world, just like this guy did ...
Of course the real problem here is the price. Making this came cost somewhere between 2560$ (minimum, not including elevenlabs or image generation) and 13000$ (13k if all tokens are output tokens)
For a single game that you intend to play this is not remotely reasonable, and this probably doesn't even include necessary updates and fixes after the initial game. If you own some IP and intend to sell it ... maybe.
Neither AI nor most players are talented game designers, and a future full of games which are mostly half-assed reskins of previous games sounds miserable.
Also, even the most talented game designers enjoy playing games created by others, in no small amount because they make different (and therefore more interesting) choices.
>Share it with your friends or the whole world, just like this guy did ...
Congrats, you just put the monetization back into the game you argued for as a means of avoiding monetization...
The currency here is attention, btw. Not raw dollars. Even releasing a free quality game with no strings attached is extremely hard without attention. I can't even get friends hooked on every game I bought and praise the highest accolades for, even if I buy and gift it to them.
I can imagine a future where LLM generated games would do placement ads within the generated game. May even be hard to remove. So enjoy while it lasts.
Yeah, you can make more stuff , but no one cares. Plastic used to be so rare and luxury , now most of them are crap. Software is the same. Creating software is becoming a practice that produces a tiny bit convenience at the price of sustainability.
AI let us conquer some squares in the game, but many others are still there: the software/game/picture ... you make is the result of your prompt which reflects your personality and creativity, it's where the "man bites dog" happens, whether the user or the machine made it, a carbon brain still thinks about it. Nobody complains about the vast majority of programmers not being able anymore to optimize their code by hand editing .asm sources produced by a compiler, just like nobody does if they can't place a bodge wire on a pcb to correct a bug, or for that matter doctors not being able to prepare penicillin at home or astronomers build their own lenses and telescopes. We moved forward; what makes all of this valuable is the ability to recognize the squares that follow in order to conquer them.
I wouldn’t discount the need for craft and deep knowledge in order to make advances — I don’t think bringing our own take on man bites dog will get us the hard yards
With music generation, it's good to not go all the way up the chain of abstraction.
Generate the synths, the DAW, the bass-line, the vocals, but never the whole thing. You can (and should) still compose by hand. The act of composing should be fun enough that you want to do it manually, otherwise you're not really the one making the song.
Also, a minimal amount of music theory knowledge helps significantly.
I mean, are we pretending that this is a surprise?
I know we've spent the better part of the last century debating what "art" is, but I think we have fairly conclusive evidence that it isn't this.
No intention behind it, no human connection, none of the things we seek to find in art (including video games).
Everyone needs to read the famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). He wrote about the Industrial Revolution, but his points become ever more salient in the age of AI.
His central thesis is the concept of "aura": the difference between a carefully crafted work of art and a mechanically mass-produced, but otherwise identical, object. When you describe something as "hollow", that's what's missing.
Yep. It's like when you discover emulation and ROMs for the first time. The initial thrill and excitement of all these games... then you play a few minutes on each and it feels pointless. AI is going to destroy so many things we love.
Everything is going to be pretty hollow without human connection, no? Playing those games and sharing in the experience with friends from school was fun. People used to talk about strats, secrets, or even just the best parts of stuff.
Playing online games in servers across the late 90s and into the 2000s, it was easy enough to pick up connections with regular players. Forums existed for organising events, sharing screenshots of things we didn't expect, and for making mods together. Custom maps and all sorts of things were produced through the decisions made with blood, sweat, and tears.
imo - using LLMs for anything creative - coding, prose, documentation is anti-community building, and anti-creative.
Ironically I learned this messing with game memory in the 90's. As soon as I could give my character whatever power-up or combination of power-ups I wanted, the game was only fun for 10 more minutes.
I've ruined so many games with "god mode" hacks that way. Even something like giving the player obscene amounts of currency and continuing the play the game "as normal" afterward slowly killed it.
So, I save that kind of thing for _after_ the 100% mark (or even 90% for some). When I'm done going as far as I plan to go, then I open up the hacks and mods and see what craziness awaits.
Final Fantasy XII. found a guide -- gameFAQs? -- on how to cheese random generation fairly early on to get the End Game +1 final weapon and kick butt through the rest of the game.
didn't really take too long, got the weapon.
rest of the game lost it's charm immediately. just stopped caring. in hind sight part of it was also the piss poor anime-style writing, but without the challenge all that was left was the lack of interesting drama.
Cyberpunk 2077 got pretty easy pretty quickly but was still interesting enough to stick out.
The video games analogy goes even further: playing Doom growing up I'd always enable god mode because it was slightly scary, so it was not a super fun game for me despite being such a cultural phenomenon. Similarly, cheating and getting all the answers/saves from a machine robs the satisfaction of the journey. And we're all strapped with cheating machines.
I discovered this too playing an edited OP hero in Diablo II. But what I did then was reintroducing difficulty in a way I liked. I made a glass canon that was simultaneously both weaker and stronger than the game would allow, letting me both one shot enemies and letting them one shot me. Was fun and scary.
>The other night I carelessly made an infinite runner game while watching TV and the feeling of sheer abundance quickly faded into a bit of depression. Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.
This is just a lack of ambition. LLMs allow one to make far more sophisticated games than ever before, even as a single developer, and if doing so development still takes many months even if running an agent 24/7.
Arguably, the music industry has been in this state for years, at least since 2010's or even 2000's when it became possible to make quality sound with relatively small investments. I feel like AI music didn't really change much for an average listener.
> Growing up, games were such a scarce commodity that you'd really suck all the marrow out and spend hours beating your best times, looking for Easter eggs, or messing with custom maps and mods
I can relate to this, today when I play games I do still try to get them 100% complete but new generations do not seem to appreciate that. I see that they complete the game with minimal hours and move on to the next one.
My main relaxation hobby has always been video games.
I finally, about 10 years ago, made the conscientious decision that I didn't need to finish a game if I wasn't enjoying it, when before I'd always just pushed through no matter what. Mainly that there's more good games being made than I'll ever have the time to play, whereas when I was younger it was more the opposite.
I probably spent 18 months almost exclusively on Quake2, with the multiplayer mod scene.
I burned myself out of playing games end to end when piracy and always-on internet became ubiquitous - individual new games stop being novel if you've got a dozen others downloading and ready to play.
I also kind of became a slave to my mood. With infinite possibilities of games, I could just endlessly scroll, looking for that perfect fit to how I was feeling. Unfortunately, moods can be more nuanced than even an ostensibly endless list of games, so the gaming session just became scrolling instead of playing.
I think it's something like FOMO. Even if you're having fun in one game, it's ruined because in the back of your mind you're thinking about the other games you could also be playing and perhaps you'd be having an even better time with them. So obvious answer is obvious - don't think about your other games. Just pick a game, and go crazy with it. Probably some good relationship advice metaphors in there too.
I just mention this because I think what describing something basically 100% of people experience, and it completely ruins gaming for many - or they think it's because they're an adult or whatever. When we were young and had limited access to games, everything was amazing. Then you have a Steam library with 800 hand-picked games, many of which you've never even launched, and you're like 'mehhhh, nothing to play.' It's just FOMO.
Of course this means you'll literally never get through your library for most of us, but what can you do? If our younger selves could only imagine us trying to deal with such brutal problems.
Yep, in hindsight, I think my dissatisfaction with games started when I could get pirates Dreamcast games. Then emulation meant that I had access to a ridiculous choice of games to play.
Hiroshi Yamauchi knew this when the Famicom / nes launched. There's a quote from him somewhere about it. Anyway that's why third party publishers were limited to a few games a year.
I need to find a way to lock down my steam deck to only one game a month.
That's not really true. Music is still valuable even though the value of music people write themselves is already practically 0 and has been for a very long time. Same with paintings. People are always looking for a connection. Just because some exists now doesn't mean it automatically earns it. It has to have something else going for it. I think that promises a bright future for creaters and consumers of that creativity.
You can't compare enthusiasm you felt at 12 with the one you feel at 36 or 48.
Even if it's exactly the same, for a kid week of fun feels like life formative experience because it is. For adult a week of fun passes almost instantly because time itself is perceived differently. And you are back to baseline which might feel depressive if your baseline is not great.
This sounds like something people would say about books in the 16th century after the printing press. revolution. How mass production and wide availability of books has led to people not appreciating books anymore.
And yet today, when we have more "great" books than can be read in 10 lifetimes, people still obsess over their favorites and re-read them 10s of times.
Scarcity forces us to search for depth (even where none may exist; case-in-point - people analyzing how hot the Dothraki drink their soup in Game of Thrones) whereas abundance alows us to choose depth
If so, these recent times have shown us that the vast majority choose to wade in the shallow pool. And sadly it seems an entire generation is being raised that way. I know I'll invoke the rebuttal of Socrates with this, but I really do worry about the future at our current trajectory.
I feel for kids growing up with LLMs like this. They will never impress a parent, teacher or peer with a simple “hello world” type text game, when the peer could generate a full multiplayer video game with a couple of prompts.
I don't know about that. My son is about 13. He's got into coding using godot and initially built a few games in Javascript (via. a book which I worked through with him). Then, he picked up Godot from tutorials online and recently has built something multiplayer. He asked for a Claude subscription for his last birthday and since then has been doing all the parts he enjoys by hand (combat mechanics etc.) but using Claude to do things like trailers, website aesthetics, sound effects etc. It's been nice and the results are impressive. e.g. one of his first games was a simple hangman. Now, he added a keyboard to that via Claude so that it can be played using a browser.
Wondering if you thought about the effects that AI exposure can have on a young brain? Adults are experiencing brain rot, do you think kids could have it even worse?
Honest question, I don’t mean that sarcastically. Wondering if AI exposure will be compared to doomscrolling social media in the future.
It's a line I've been trying to balance. I don't think outright bans are helpful. AI is going to be there in some shape or form in the future and we need to know how to use it to our advantage. Getting hooked onto it is a problem. I know I experience that myself.
My main barrier against this has been to talk with him regularly about this. Amplify the positives rather than warn about the negatives so that the first gets done more and the latter gets atrophied.
I think at that age your son was "lucky" in a way that he got into it fairly late, or "at the right time." like my generation was with mobile phones and Internet, appearing around our teenage years so we were slowly growing up alongside the technical and cultural evolution.
If you grow up with it already established and before there are any cultural safeguards based on long time exposure and experience, it's a different matter. Like the newer generations growing up addicted to social media, which is only now starting to change for the better (hopefully).
Love the retro feel to it. He even has a guestbook. I was about 13 when I created my first website. Of course that was in the days when it all needed to be done by hand and there weren't really programming languages for the web yet. Hope he keeps at it!
Completely agree, looks like 13 - 14 yo is the right age to dab in both side (traditional coding and LLM assisted coding) for instance, my son (13 yo), knows a bit of coding (python, javascript, roblox, etc.) and some experience, but giving him Claude Code with Godot MCP was the true unlock, he spend so much time building his own gam, focusing on the aesthetics, gaming mechanism, story line, overall effects and look and feel:
This just proves the point more than anything, really.
Both the website's design and the games presented look indistinguishable from every other AI-generated website and game I've seen in the past. I do not feel any sense of individuality while looking at them, they could've been prompted by just about anyone. Even the little text blurbs are plain unfiltered Claudeslop ("no spoilers, just green and red squares").
Any one of your son's peers could create something identical by typing "claude, make me a cool website with some games" and waiting an hour or two, and that's the problem. How do you think he would feel if he showed this to one of his friends, hoping to impress them, and one day later, that same friend approached him and said "look, I made a website exactly like yours, it was so easy"?
> How do you think he would feel if he showed this to one of his friends, hoping to impress them, and one day later, that same friend approached him and said "look, I made a website exactly like yours, it was so easy"?
Competition and one-upmanship to that level in kids has existed since the internet became widespread. The solution is to build something even better the next time you show something to that friend.
Just like sports, music, grades. Once the bar is raised, the top performers just keep getting better.
Have you played competitive sports in your life? The kids who practiced more, had more opportunities to practice, grew up around athletes in the home, etc. will also have that "I can do exactly what you did. That's easy!" attitude. That's normal.
If you get instantly discouraged by others making your hard work look easy, then you don't have enough drive.
Thanks. He's got a Youtube channel and an itch.io account. Wants to really get into the game development space. I'll show him your comment. :)
There was a local contest where I am and his entry for that was his latest game which has multiplayer support over the net. He set up a server on a VPS for this. https://waitinggodot.in/games/legends-of-crumbs.html
"Look what software/app/... my kid created" appears to become the new "oh look at these cute pictures of my kids". The interest of the forced recipient is equally low, usually.
I am still imoressed by hand-painted signs in Nepal and India - enough to take many pictures of them - even though AI-generated signs are now everywhere.
My watercolours still impress people enough to get requested even though they're fairly mediocre.
I can't imagine not being impressed by something made by _the person that I created_ because a machine can spit out a neater version of it.
Because we're not curating a culture of this, certainly not in tech. On HN, we celebrate AI output more than human work, in the sense that many stories make it to the top only because a project was done with AI. There are several on the front page right now. When people point out that they prefer human output, they usually get comments about getting on with the times. In threads about mathematics, most commenters root for the destruction of that community. And on and on.
Other communities are more protective of human output. For example, you'll get chased with pitchforks from the watercolor community if you post anything that smells of AI. But in tech, the number of people you can impress with human creativity has diminished by orders of magnitude.
Game dev sits in a now awkward range between tech and art, so I expect it to become much more polarised on this topic than other collectives which lean either way.
Seriously. I remember coding something in Macromedia Flash to impress my computer-illiterate parents. It was silly but it was all mine. I am sad that I will never see that for the future generation, not this way at least. The bar is too high now.
It's truly awful. Best case, they go on and start tinkering and fixing and learning. What is more likely and awful is they will sit there pulling the dopamine lever and get hooked on using AI to do everything difficult.
I got zero praise for my preteen coding experiments. Notably, I made a really simple clone of a popular JRPG battle and was so excited to show it to a family friend who was a programmer; he "Okay, kid"ed me and that was the end of my enthusiasm for it.
There are countless examples of things where your kid is going to get walloped by comparison. So, don't compare. Make the effort to meet them where they are and praise them for their effort and focus and passion, not their output. Judy and Elroy will be okay as long as you realize kids and their needs don't change much even as the world does.
> the peer could generate a full multiplayer video game with a couple of prompts.
I think this is a bit exaggerated, it's not at all trivial to come up with a couple of prompts so llm generates a genuinely engaging game. It still requires a lot of creative input to generate an interesting game, which is in my opinion the hardest part of game development. Technical part of writing the game code can be side-stepped now with the tool, but it's not even the 50% of what it takes to make an impressive game.
Just last week I saw a post on Reddit where someone was discussing how we would never discover another element ever again, then a couple of days later there was an announcement that a new element had been discovered. Obviously not a continent, but there are new things out there to be discovered. Just a shame that it's going to be AI doing the discovering, not humans.
> I feel for kids growing up with LLMs like this. They will never impress a parent, teacher or peer with a simple “hello world” type text game, when the peer could generate a full multiplayer video game with a couple of prompts.
Adults are also desensitized to impressive deliverables. We see it even among peers who barely bat an eye when someone goes above and beyond to deliver a feature. The toxic ones even try to downplay your achievements by throwing around claims that your deliverables were vibecoded.
Try to go back before our era though. In the early age of computers, computers were basically really big one-way calculators that could execute an algorithm and output a result. In this context a kid creating a program to output the fibonacci sequence would have been quite impressive. But by our era, we needed to be able to produce basic text games to impress. Did we really lose anything in the process? I don't think so.
And now too the impressive demo isn't going to be just making an interactive or multiplayer game which anybody can do with a single prompt, but creating something that's actually interesting/fun. Interestingly enough this now overlaps quite well with the sort of stuff that could be monetized today. That's why I think LLMs are going to throw a curveball in the economy in ways many aren't yet appreciating.
I agree. But I think the problems have now just moved. What is 'hard' is different. I don't think we've collectively grasped that yet. We're going to need to use our imagination and show others when we find something. I'm looking forward to what we can solve, I just hope the opportunity and benefit is well distributed.
Maybe doing something with an LLM soon won't count as "I did it" at all. Just like you can't impress your peers by taking someone else's work and saying you did it, you won't impress them with something an LLM did for you. But you can still impress with things you actually do yourself.
On the topic of Byung-Chul Han, I'd also recommend reading "Non-Things" as a good exploration of the digital/physical world dynamics we find ourselves in today.
tbh, make-your-own-games software has been around for decades, most of which much simpler than creating a "real" game - Roblox comes to mind first and foremost, but it goes as far back as ZZT.
They don't need to impress a parent/teacher/peer, life kinda sucks if you search for or need external validation. Especially if, as you say, someone's own creation is overshadowed by something 100x shinier.
An old tech friend and I were talking a few years ago about hobbies, and how our old CTO was one of the most impressive hobbyists we knew of. Not only was he an incredibly accomplished exec but he also produced amazing YouTube content about his model railway collection and model rocket building all in a custom home where everything had custom smart interfaces with a growing family who enjoyed home cooked meals together on furniture he built himself.
Built himself? Well, designed by him and built in his home workshop. Some of it done by him at least with his assistants. They had a home chef too of course who gave the kids a bowl of stuff to mix during prep. The model railway involved design work that was more like commissioning 3D prints and model assembly. Input on the design really, as a lot of it was handled by assistants. Assistants assisting assistants based on prompts and review and feedback. Everything was custom and bespoke and made in his vision. Almost the entirety of the labor and craftwork were outsourced.
This person was a great leader — or “orchestrator” in the language of agents — but a lot of his accomplishments boiled down to having the physical world equivalent of a massive token budget: money and staff.
The great scientists of the 19th century, the ones whom we named fundamental units after, had skilled craftsmen who cut precision screw threads and blew perfect glass for them. Major scientific leaps are written up on papers authored by department leads et al. Les chefs célebres of the world front a kitchen filled with skilled staff supporting the name over the door.
If your work can be done on a computer though, AI can provide you with a Python line cook or a C++ glassblower of your own, so you can’t just show us your perfectly julienned potatoes or evaporation flask and expect us to praise anything other than your wallet, and your ability to motivate robots to do your bidding.
LLMs are exactly what I and my friend dreamed of when we were about 10. A tool that could make whatever game we dreamed of. I distinctly remember discussing it. Oh, what a horrible world to live in.
Did Hideo Kojima code a single line of Death Stranding? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't. Yet it is still clearly his artistic creation.
Is there a reason that creating a game with AI can't parallel that process?
I wouldn't be so pessimistic, its what they create by themselves that is valuable, not some meaningless comparisons. The road != result unless parents screw up badly. Don't forget comparison is the thief of joy.
Its like saying there is no reason to hand draw anything since computers can generate a better picture. My kids love drawing, painting and other physical endeavors. Of course we don't drown them in screens, we may fail them somehow in future but not like that.
If they made it the old way, without LLMs, I guarantee most parents/teachers who have real (pre-2025) programming experience will still be impressed.
Are kids doing photography also not impressive because smartphone cameras all default to full-auto, computational processed modes? Obviously not. You can still stand out just by giving more effort and being more detail-oriented. The average smartphone photo taker doesn't even know how to utilize focal lengths effectively.
You're in a bubble. Go look at what actual kids are doing. Only the actually extemely motivated/smart ones are generating playable full-multiplayer games from raw code (AKA not in another game's sandbox); even with claude/codex.
I spent so much of my youth building things that were far beneath what I wanted to be building because it took all my time/energy/attention/expertise to build the lesser thing.
Would you rather your kids draw you a picture, or print out something they generated with AI. 'Hey son this drawing is beneath you, I'd prefer something AI generated'. What about the note they write in your father/mothers day card. You want them to write that using AI or come up with something themselves? I'm not saying your kids can't leverage AI to build things, but there is something special about the process of creation, and iteration and learning that can't be shortcut.
But the energy and effort you put there made you learn all those things. Also gave you some satisfaction as a reward. I’ve never oneshot games in an afternoon, but I remember really well the thrills I had when I learnt how to open the first TCP connection in Python.
We’re entering into a new era of mankind. With good and bad consequences.
I don't really understand how the door relates? Are you suggesting that understanding and answering all the details about how a door fits into your game is the lesser thing that you should not saturate your time with?
Not sure whar you are mourning. It is just that the bar has gotten stratosphericly higher, which is awesome.
I along with most of HN probably had a new idea every month for a game or software back in the day. 12 year old me could only dream to maybe work on something tangential to them in the next twenty years or even a lifetime. Now i could prototype most of those ideas as i thought them up and really get into the promising ones.
I feel like i was born too late and missed out, straight up jealous of the possibilities in front of the kids willing to take it
The way people view this stuff is so crazy to me. Coding is literally the work that stands between an idea and bringing that idea to life. That's now gone so your ideas can take flight almost instantly and people are complaining? Wild. Now you can spend your time creating amazing ideas that you never would have considered before due to the technical knowledge required. Now a kid can create a game that people might actually want to play. That's a bad thing?
Yeah that doesn't exactly stand the test of history. Look at the media explosion that happened in the late 90s and early 00s when the internet allowed anyone with an opinion to suddenly become a media outlet that could be accessed from anywhere on earth via blogs, personal websites, podcasts, etc. The exact same things were said during this era that you're saying now, but none of it turned out to be true. There will be a lot of junk projects due to AI, but the very good ones will rise to the top, will become well known, and will gain traction. We will learn to filter and ignore the junk.
"one-shotting" is fun for a low (human) effort toy, but it's a mistake to get overly hung up on LLMs getting everything right on the first try, since a lot of that is the harness and the internal prompting that makes it burn extra tokens to test everything to get it in that one "shot" (ui turn).
While it's nice that LLMs are getting better at arriving at the desired deliverable with fewer surprises (or broken things) doing it is not necessarily a sign that the model is actually smarter, just an indication that what you are doing is likely a well-trodden path for the model, the RL and the harness.
I have a personal benchmark suite that runs a bunch of difficult algorithmic problems in 3 tiers: vibe coded prompt (just a few sentences), vibe coded prompt plus a description on what the solution will be evaluated on, and finally a fully specc'd prompt that leaves little space for interpretation.
The current Fable models are approaching a level where the -eval runs perform systemicallty better than the "clear spec" runs. (And right now its just Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 that behave so well, all the other models I tested - all the OpenAI and the leading Chinese models - work better with clear specs). I'd encourage everyone to experiment a bit; I am running my serious workflows with labourious force-me-through-all-the-design-questions mode, whereas my hobby projects, some of them hard, I am trying to see how much I can get away with with vibe-grade prompts. My conclusion is, with Fable its starting to look like what Vibe coding was promissed to be a year ago - a magical box that generally does things very well.
Btw, congrats to the OP -- the game is enjoyable and I played a few levels. I dont remember when I last played any games for more than 5 minutes. Good stuff.
My experience has been that cruft accumulates and creates back pressure via growing token usage.
The APIs aren’t clean, which creates indirections to other parts of the codebase to check on leaking abstractions. It doesn’t learn, though, so you pay for those indirections every time (right now, anyways).
I’ve not been impressed with its ability to clean that up with a generic “make it gud” kind of prompt. I have to point it at something crufty, but it will fix it then
I agree, but for some projects, that first vibed version is just about good enough and becomes the final version. I have a few things like that and it was nice not to have to bother.
For work stuff, I don't dare 'vibing' anything, and force myself through torturous design cycles and regular refactoring runs. But thats serious stuff with hundreds of thousands of users.
Btw. Fable 5.2 seems to burn through tokens with gusto. I ran my benchmark suite on it, added a complex feature to a hobby project (a gothic cathedral designer), and voila, 2 resets gone.
For nearly all projects a trash version is good enough for V1. That has been true long before LLM coding. I think that fine as well. My home server doesn't need a monthly tested disaster recovery plan
I think one-shorting avoids some of it because most of the project should still be in context.
I’ve noticed because I’ve been doing Clojure and turns are taking notably longer due to unit tests because it doesn’t really grok its own system anymore. It is like 20k LoC at this point with unit tests lol
I've been searching for the right term for this; you've nailed it: back pressure.
Whether the "cruft" is test accumulation, multiple conflicting architecture approaches, a bazillion ADRs/"laws", or just pure code sprawl, the outcome is token and time waste which gets worse as it compounds. And it compounds quickly.
I've tried automated code review through multiple lenses, more ADRs, instructions out the wazoo, but at the end of the day I just cannot figure out how to replicate the "through-line" consistency that responsible humans who need to maintain a system generally create.
Of course, most software projects do eventually fall victim to this same problem and need to be rewritten, but it takes place on the order of years, and by the time you need a rewrite the business has changed enough to demand one anyway. But with AI-owned products, this can happen in days or months.
I’ve been going sort of hybrid and using more targeted prompts. I skeleton the API most of the way and have the LLM fill it in and implement. This is at the code level, not the HTTP API.
Most of the time, anyways.
It keeps me in the code enough to feel the friction of bad APIs but high enough that I’m not reviewing every line of code.
I also try to scope my reviews to only the intersections between systems (SQL schema, library APIs, CLI flags, etc).
I’ve got nothing on the tests. Mine writes a million of them. Some are brilliant, some are stupid.
Like it once did TDD by storing transformations to the same base object in a list rather than specifying the whole object. Clever.
The very next test was an arity test to make sure it threw errors if you gave the function the wrong number of arguments. In a webapp, not a compiler or something. Stupid. Do not unit test the language’s runtime lol
The process of using AI to create things changes how you evaluate the quality of what's generated, so really the answer is "until you accept the output first time."
That's a combination of AI improving and your standards changing.
They also change because of (1) how cheap things have become and (2) how easy it is to iterate. If I paid $500k for an app from a good dev team, I will worry that anything I don't declare a bug won't ever get fixed, or will cost me dearly. If I get the same app for $300 in tokens and 2 days of someone's work, I am fine with what I am not sure about. It will cost me next to nothing to keep iterating it until I am satisfied.
That’s astute. I’ve increasingly felt over the last few months that people just don’t particularly value quality. The bar for most people is much lower than professionals (in whatever domain).
I definitely remember a game I played for more than 5 minutes recently. A lot of those were not AAA(A) games but rather indie or previously-indie-now-got-a-publisher-to-notice games. None were "AI one shots" that just built something that looks like a re-skinned version of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge", which I'm sure is pretty abundant in training data? And that was a great game btw!
> "one-shotting" is fun for a low (human) effort toy, but it's a mistake to get overly hung up on LLMs getting everything right on the first try, since a lot of that is the harness and the internal prompting that makes it burn extra tokens to test everything to get it in that one "shot" (ui turn).
I'd be more specific and state that these models are now way far from being LLMs and instead they are full blown agent orchestration systems capable of running multi-layer ReAct loops and tool-calling, and with your whole session history as context. It doesn't make any sense to refer to them as glorified chatbots as the LLM part is nowadays far from being the component that delivers the highest value.
> as the LLM part is nowadays far from being the component that delivers the highest value
Yes it is. The rest of the agent could basically be a while loop, a two sentence system prompt and a shell invocation, and it would still work reasonably well.
These agent swarms with harnesses are certainly more than just an LLM, but the LLM is certainly the integral part that delivers the most value. Without it, there is no AI.
With a LLM alone, all you have is a stateless chatbot. If you increase the parameters of the LLM by a few orders of magnitude, you still have a stateless chatbot.
If you start with an anaemic LLM and run it with a ReAct loop and tool-calling, you now have something you can use to do agentic coding and RAG-like capabilities.
There's a reason why relatively small open weights models are starting to perform on par and even outperform models that need a huge datacenter to run.
Which ones, and which models? https://openrouter.ai/benchmarks/gpqa-diamond shows Kimi K3.1 (not small) roughly on par with Gemini 3.7 Flash. I see no coding benchmark there that could substantiate your claim, and it doesn’t match my experience either, so I’m curious what you are basing it on, but you’re leaving the onus on me to prove you right.
But one shot prompting does not mean one shot testing. I see continually that Fable can design and test prototypes before committing to a design goal and testing multiple layers until the goal is reached. Many of the tests are code unit or integration tests that can be re-used without token spend.
There are some areas in which Fable is clearly better but subjectively the Opus 5.5 version feels more fun.
Both are one shots, Opus 5.5 was done a few weeks ago before they added "guardrails" around recreating games. Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
> Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
I couldn't care less about AI-generated games, but such restrictions are just destroying the value of proprietary models. Even more frustrating is that it so far hasn't been considered illegal to steal all the information for training the models, but now it's becoming illegal to ask for these same models to output this information back.
In my 2 minutes of testing I liked the gameplay elements from Fable 5.2 much better. I think Opus 5.5 sound effects may have been a bit better but that's it.
That's so interesting, shows how subjective the game experience is.
In my eyes, the pacing and combos in the Fable version was off - original DX ball had this great feeling where if you got the right power-ups, you'd just blast through a level really quickly.
Though after playing it a bit more, I guess if I was creating my own breakout game I could easily see some of the Fable power "ups" being there.
Claude artifacts are standalone outputs, like docs, slide decks, spreadsheets, dashboards, designs or small web apps, that Claude publishes as hosted pages with their own link. They start private to you, and you can keep editing them, export them, or share them.
Just ask Claude to create an artifact. Sometimes, it does it by itself depending on what you ask for.
It can create something like DX ball easy, because its already there, the AI already knows what it is
It can not create a game on the same level as DX ball, something new i mean, not a mechanic added on top, a real new game that feels like a game that would have come out the same year as DX ball
AI is great at executing the task, but it can not for its life (or for the anthropic reputation, it seems to care more about that) create something new from scratch, it can not do game design thats not just change the speed of the ball or the paddle color. Probably a limitation thats there from the start
On a spectrum of course, granted that could mean a 3D paddle is new, but hey we know we are not talking about that right? We know we are talking about a game with enough differences not to say this is 3D X, but this is OOT the direction zelda will be taking
This is like saying an AI will never create a new math proof.
An AI certainly can and will create a new fun game in a target period. It may require some instruction to brainstorm, or a source of statistical noise, but I am certain it can do it.
I don't think so. Quality seems much higher than what I remember 4.8 being capable of, there was no message about it and /usage reports Fable. IIRC they dropped the idea of shadow downgrades without users knowing about it.
I have experienced this myself, although the novelty kind of wears off after a while. It is still fun to make small games to co-op on the TV.
Yes, hard to believe but most of these games can be almost one-shotted in my experience, with bugs but still playable. We are not talking about some properly made games but imagine for a second that there are some number of casual players out there that wont mind spending 30 minutes on a game for just a bit of fun and having these just materialised just in time is a lot more convenient then hunting for them on the app stores.
For anyone interested, I put all of of my work into an open source tool that uses your iPhone as a console which then can cast on your TV. Up-to 4 local players supported. It can even run proper games via WASM. It is Apple Silicon only.
What does one-shot mean in this context? Aiden (the main character)'s walk cycle is kind of a mess and its also the animation that a player is going to see all the time.
It appears to be eight frames, but after taking a closer look, I found that they don't seem to be consistent [1]. Using ControlNets and various other strategies, you can definitely build out a "nominally acceptable" walk cycle [2], but you still have to do some manual work.
The article clearly explains what the author/their nephew did. There is no ambiguity. One-shot never means 'so perfect there is literally nothing to be improved.' It means no back-and-forth iterations between the human in the loop and the AI.
- In traditional ML/vision, it meant learning to recognize a new category from a single training example.
- In LLM prompting, it has always, at least the last seven years, meant giving the model one example in the prompt (zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot).
- Vibe coders/AI-influencers use it to mean "one-shotting" a task on the first try with no back-and-forth.
> The article includes the entire prompt OP used in the first section. I think it is pretty clear.
According to TFA, Fable 5.2 was starting with a preexisting codebase generated with CC (via Fable 5 and Opus 4.8) back in June. The author describes that version of the game as working, but not fun.
The Fable 5.2 prompt then starts with:
> I want you to help me finish this game.
I don't think you can really describe this as "one-shot" when there's already a fully working codebase? That's a stretch.
One shot: One prompt; no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done. You are totally inspecting other parts of the game. Not the same meaning.
> You are totally inspecting other parts of the game
Other parts of the game? It's probably THE MOST seen animation in the beat-em-up genre. This would be like building a piano where middle C is inexplicably 50% louder than all the other notes.
Is it playable? Sure, but it's gonna annoy you every time you strike that key.
> no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done
I used my $200 free fable 5.1 credits to build a WhatsApp sticker maker, it created a version I was not happy with, but it burned the 200 in one sitting. Node.js app, vue frontend, etc.
I didn't used the project a lot since I kind of hate it on how much was spend.
Last week I used just a little bit of my $20 pro account to build a replacement with rust end to end, just to gain some experience with the rust hype. Very happy with the result, not perfect but snappier, and even better: a single executable, I no longer need to fire up a backend and front service separately.
I use Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 both on Medium to produce apps in Rust/Tauri all day every day on a $20 Pro sub, and absolutely these two models do a great job with that stack. I rarely run out of weekly credits, unless I use Opus 5.5 on high or ultra code. Medium does the job 99% of the time. Fable is good, but it'll never be as good as Opus when well prompted and with some iteration. I see Fable as a preview of what the next model will be able to do, but it's really not a good production model unless you have a lot of cash to burn.
I am not convinced with Fable capabilities. I think Fable is for lazy people with a lot of money, but still, a skill-able person can out run fable with the $20 pro account.
I don't know, when every kid has had 3 custom made games offered for their birthday, won't they just get bored? Obviously through our lenses this seems awesome because that's something we would have dreamed of, but we would have dreamed of it because it seemed impossible.
There's zero need to predict anything. As long as you provide value, and get better at providing value in the context of your environment, what's there to worry about?
Value is based on offer and demand, this may have less value in the future. What's there to worry about? Quite a lot I'd say, but that's not really the subject. I was just wondering if this would be as cool 10 years from now as it is now. I don't have answers, only questions.
Give a kid a fable one-shot and you'll occupy him for a day, teach a kid to use fable and claude code and he'll realize how fast $100 magically disappears. :)
I don't see why we want to encourage children to outsource their creativity and problem solving to AI. And no, prompting is neither creative nor problem solving.
Positive little kiddo gets more screentime!!!! Yaaaaaayyy!!!!!
Negatives: we either are annihilated by AI or enslaved by technocratic feodalism living in a worse conditions than 1800s mine workers. Uau
Not really, one of the joys of being a kid was forming your own "studio" and making games for game jams and stuff. Being able to one shot stuff really destroys the fun.
Kids? Forget the kids. This is awesome for everybody. I'm busy making 'adult games' (not that sort) that I always wanted to make, but lacked the artistic/sound/etc competence to do so. And while I hope to make a buck off them, I don't even really care. Even if somehow they failed, in the end I'd have stuff that I wanted but always lacked certain skills to complete.
I don't think people are yet appreciating how much LLMs are going to change the world, especially not the doomers. People are just jamming the present into the future, with greater efficiencies. But it's nonsense. The cost of cognitive work will approach $0 which is going to send the raw value of cognitive output to something close to $0.
So the 'winners' will be whoever fills the resultant vacuum in the economy. That will probably be a mixture of social, physical, entertainment, and other such domains. But it's all so hard to predict. We've lived our entire lives in a completely agrarian society, and we're seeing the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It's easy to predict super-farms, but those aren't going to be the 'real' winners.
The 'winners' will be the holders of capital, same as always, but it will be giga-gasoline on the fire. The rest of us will be dancing monkies for the owner class if we're lucky.
...except people who actually enjoy games and want high quality games to play, of course.
Down here in reality, platforms like Steam are being absolutely flooded with generic, ugly, low-quality AI-generated games, which are not only drowning out the human-made games people actually want to play and making it impossible to find them, but are also preventing them from being sold entirely in some cases due to human reviewers not being able to keep up with the pace of new game submissions[0].
So, thanks for your contribution to that, I guess.
The game from this article is quite fun and was literally a one-shot from a relatively brief prompt. I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality. Generic? Sure, but that applies to nearly all games anyhow. With all barriers to development coming down obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems. The review system (and meta-systems like getting your game to streamers, your own reputation, etc) still works well to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there seems to be no reason to yet expect such to stop working well.
In the end the biggest winner in all of this are going to be the players, due to competition. That competition will both bring down prices and bring up the minimum standard of quality for a major success.
> I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality.
I would. Maybe our standards for quality are different, but I'm willing to bet that if you showed this to a bunch of people who actually play games regularly as a hobby and have some standards for them, they would most likely agree that, even ignoring the obvious "AI look", a simple 2D game that can't even pull off natural-looking walking animations could never be considered anything but low quality.
> obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems
This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at Steam's most recent Next Fest - it featured over 8000 games, twice as many as the last one, the vast majority of which being low effort AI generated games. Yet the number of gems that rose to the top was not higher than before. If anything, it was lower, as most players simply gave up looking after having to scroll through hundreds of AI games. Such games can never be "gems", no matter how much you try prompting them to be.
Did you have fun playing the game? Because I'd argue that if you showed this game to bunch of 'real gamers' as you're effectively concocting here, their metric would be the answer to that question, rather than seeing if they could find a technical flaw. Because in the end all that matters for a game is fun, and this game certainly scored well on that metric for me, and I suspect the vast majority of people.
Definitely. The reason I ask is because right now if you go through this thread there seems to be about a 100% correlation between people who are down on the game and those who are down on everything LLM. If this was 'published' 3 years ago there'd be nothing but praise, and it's not because the beat-em-up genre radically changed in those 3 years.
Games are subject to taste, but I think there are also objective elements. And this game just objectively feels and plays great, which is a remarkable achievement for an LLM, because it's a genre where it's easy to get things that look right but don't feel right. For instance Sacred Citadel is a game that was made by a studio with over a decade of experience, published by a publisher with decades of experience, and it's worse than this game - much worse. It got the look right, but it felt/played terrible.
The fact that a single guy can casually one-shot games dramatically better than what passed for a [relatively] big studio title a decade ago is testament to where we're at. And I think that's freaking some people out. I suppose that freak out is reasonable from one perspective, but from another it's just shaking your fist at the clouds. Even if all LLM advances stopped today, what we've already unleashed is already way more than enough to change the game forever, and things are never going back to how they were. And, of course, we're not stopping today.
I hadn't tried the game since I was on my phone when I wrote this comment, but now having played the game, it was exceedingly boring to the point I don't get why you're trying to convince people that they're lying about how fun the game is. It's just not interesting!
Then it's likely that beat-em-up isn't the genre for you, because this is a very solid entry in the genre. If you've ever played a bad beat-em-up you'd be able to see the strengths more clearly. A huge thing is that this game feels like it has weight in the attacks, and that's really hard to do. That's a subtle mixture of responsiveness, sound effects, animation (not just movement but also text/visual fx/flashes/etc), and more. And the hit boxes seem to be pretty much perfect, which is another aspect many games miss on. Then there's lots of nice subtle touches - invincibility frames, juggling, bosses with phases/knockdowns/cueing, and much more.
Nothing revolutionary, but a bunch of different parts all working together well that are generally implemented at a very good to excellent level. That's way better than most can say. Of course the walking animation, like the one guy mentioned is hilariously bad, but fixing that's also just a prompt away. Oddly enough I didn't even notice it when playing.
I find it funny you talk about how great the animation is, before immediately conceding that the walking animation of the main character (perhaps the most important animation) is "hilariously bad".
Look, this is obviously from a technical perspective, totally mind-blowing! Like I never in a million years would have guessed this could be possible 5 years ago. That being said...it's still not very fun or interesting. I think you are mistaking that mind-blowing feeling with the actual end product being fun.
In game (or UI) development animation isn't just what you might think of with things like moving. I tried to allude to this in the parenthesis, but any sort of transitionary state for something is an animation. The walking animation is irrelevant in terms of making the combat feel 'weighty'. I imagine most people didn't even notice it - I certainly didn't, even though it's very much a 'once you see it, you can't unsee it' thing.
But when making a combat game there's a million subtle things going on that the game gets very right to actually make it feel like the hits have weight - the flashes, text, and other aspects all have subtle animations in them that make them feel good the hitbox triggers at exactly the right moment meaning it's a tight fit, and much more. These are things many human studios screw up. It's really hard to make combat feel good, and this game does it.
For some context, Streets of Rage 4 [1] was a very well received beat-em-up. So that's pretty much the top tier for the genre. And yeah it's obviously better than this game, but the gap is not huge, and that's borderline absurd when considering that this was a one-shot LLM generated game. And that gap could easily be closed with some refinement from a single developer - in this case our rando uncle. Interesting times ahead.
>The reason I ask is because right now if you go through this thread there seems to be about a 100% correlation between people who are down on the game and those who are down on everything LLM.
That "correlation" is a proxy for the people who don't want to consume low effort garbage.
Including the doomers! A metaphor I am constantly drawn to is that of somebody living in an agrarian society just before the Industrial Revolution. A 'doomer' perspective would see 'super farms', mass reduction in labor as such, and then basically those super farms going on to sit on thrones of gold while everybody else withered away.
In reality, those super farms did come to pass, yet their share of the economy began to approach 0. And that was fully predictable! Because when the price of producing food plummets, the relative value of food also plummets. The exact same thing will happen with cognitive work. The winners will not be Anthropic/Amazon/etc. As the cost of cognitive work approaches $0, the relative value of cognitive work will also approach $0.
So this is going to completely revolutionize the economic equilibrium in society. Trying to translate what this means right now is like trying to predict the impact of the Industrial Revolution from somebody who spent their entire life living in agrarian society - in other words, probably impossible. But in general the winners will not be those providing cognitive work, but those building currently unimaginable things on top of it.
I appreciate the token breakdown, but how much would this cost in money? Chatgpt estimated $400 to $600, but I don't have enough knowledge of token pricing to know if that's accurate at all.
Yeah, it would have been expensive via the API; the tokens were free when I tested it, but it would have been something like $300 USD for the Claude tokens at Fable 5.2's API prices.
It’s impressive, but it’s not really his. All the details aren’t quite right, some of the designs Claude altered (e.g. guy holding one knife instead of two). It’s good enough for him, but if I asked Claude to make something based on my idea, it wouldn’t be good enough for me.
I'm pretty sure the same exact thing could happen if you hired a team to make it from child drawings. You could ask Claude or that team to add back in the two knives.
Yes, but there are too many small mistakes, every one requires 2-90 minutes to correct (this particular example
on the shorter end, the longer end for complex mechanics); then the model fixes them not quite right, and sometimes breaks something else.
The best art, the writer is the artist, the director is the producer, etc. or the entire team is exceptionally talented.
You can do a playthrough and just speak to the model as you play pointing out anything you want changed and it can spawn an agent swarm to fix it all in parallel pretty rapidly, or live if you have a good live coding setup. It doesn't need them requested one at a time.
> The best art, the writer is the artist, the director is the producer, etc. or the entire team is exceptionally talented.
If the child has to be the implementer then we're doing something else than making it from a child's concept and drawings.
This is both cute but also a bit sad in terms of game stylization, I guess these generic AI designs could become so normal to the youth that in the next 10-20 years it just appears everywhere
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict the opposite.
I think “the youth” are going to grow up with a Cambrian explosion of styles, mashups, callbacks, revivals, etc.
Right now a vibecoded game just uses the generic style. But you could easily imagine the kid saying to Claude “rebuild this game but in the style of that old show [Samurai Jack | Ren and Stimpy | … ]. We are so early in the tech curve, market penetration is still very low, and the “creator-years” in the medium is tiny; it’ll be 10x in a year if not more.
AI is amazing at style transfer, and so there’s a huge payoff for exploring and learning references to existing artists.
(I also think copyright will die pretty soon for similar reasons, that’s a separate take though.)
I'm kind of hoping that the youth will recognize that stuff that can be made with AI is just nothing special anymore, and find something that is (or still is) special. I don't know what that is, maybe something that AI can't do on a fundamental level (maybe something physical?).
(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)
>What if they find it special because they build memories with the AI games they play? Is that something you hope doesn't happen?
I hope the kids learn that putting in work to create something by hand has value beyond the result itself. I hope they try making art, games, books by hand, and learn from the experience of failing, and revel in the joy of success. I hope that through years of doing this over and over they start to develop their own unique perspective on life, and then contribute that perspective back to the world through art.
don't really think there will be anything - this is an entity that can learn anything (even physical things) faster than any human or the collective of humanity for that matter.
I've found analog photography to be a rewarding hobby, and although an LLM can help me refresh my memory, the overall experience is certainly not something that an LLM can replace.
If you "automate human interaction and connection" you simply no longer have those things. Which, from the top down, seems to be a goal, to isolate people from one another, make them 100% disposable cogs. As this chick in the streets of Paris said in some YT short when asked about "AI", fuck that, humans want to be together, you can't beat that. And why would we even want to... it's easier, and more sensible, for a person to seek help or get over themselves, than for them to drain all humanity out of the rest of humanity just so they themselves can blend in without having to change. Fix the root problems, rather than spending such huge amounts of resources and intellectual integrity for workarounds that, at the end of the day, are kind of sad and cringe.
We also connect to people through art and play. So if we automate those things, then I guess we'll spend the rest of our lives living unsatisfying experiences.
That was already happening before AI, with in-house game engines dying off and all converging on the same quasi-realistic style and often the exact same assets.
Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.
Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.
that kind of stuff happened routinely in the 70s-90s in mecha anime franchises that were designed/drawn/animated/produced by large teams of adults..
Mobile Suit Gundam and Evangelion are both notorious for this. Is Eva-01 40m or 100m tall? If you trust the technical literature then you'd be forced to deduce that the tanks in some of the scenes are squirrel-sized -- and these decisions and scenes are produced by committees.
You can change the stylization with LLMs. I think what we're seeing is simply any barriers to code/design/art/music/etc completely going away.
But those barriers going away now means that the starting point is much closer to where the finish line used to be. Like a few years ago this would have been an upper tier beat-em-up. I think we're still early enough in the window that I'd still call this upper tier, but the reality is that it's also now something that an uncle can vibe code for his nephew over a weekend.
In general I think this is going to be very good for everybody, but it's going to completely destroy the software as a problem-solving industry, and make the software as entertainment industry much more competitive.
Barriers going away means you get a lot more at the bottom and middle of the pack, but a game is more than the sum of its parts, and as long as LLMs do what you tell them, you need to have real talent to make good games.
Was this game fun for you? For me it certainly was, and ultimately that's all that matters to me. And that's why I said I'd classify it as a top-tier game because IMO most games that get released, slop and 'professional' alike, simply aren't fun. Even on these forums there's plenty of people posting thinly veiled hopes of going viral along the lines of 'I spent 5 years to fail with my game' when as lovingly hand-crafted as the games may have been - they invariably just weren't any fun to play!
In any case, it being "extremely far" from the top would just imply I should be in endless bliss with the current state of things since if I find this game quite fun then higher tier beat-em-ups would be just the most incredible thing I've ever played in my life. That has certainly not been my experience.
I found it stiff and weird. The "art" is screaming Saturday morning cartoons which I successfully evaded since even as a kid. TMNT aren't nostalgic for me because by that time I was like 12 and didn't even think to interact with that baby stuff, and I wouldn't have dreamed it would be put on the test by adults later. And art and charm is all that could have saved this, because as a game, if you replaced the art with wireframe hitboxes, it's just nothing.
Double Dragon I have fond memories of, and this is why this one bored me after 30 seconds, because it's so meh compared to even the worst game of that type of that era that I played.
This style reminds me of those mobile game ads with helpless characters that need YOUR help not to freeze or something. Probably the exaggerated facial expressions.
- punch and kick don't seem to have differences in effect, just animation
- bosses don't have obvious gimmicks to beat them
But the main take-away for me is that this takes me back to computing in my youth, where you could dream up a project and bash it out in a few days. It wouldn't be polished, it wouldn't be perfect, but it would be yours. It would do what you wanted. Computing was ours, it didn't yet belong to big corporations controlling what we could do and how we could do it.
Projects like this give me hope that a new generation will experience that. Aiden won't ever forget this game, even if it's nothing special to you or me. Aiden won't ever forget that feeling of imagining a change, and having it happen. The price for it would've been somewhere around $300-$500, so not exactly broadly accessible - making AI efficient enough to run cheaply should be the main goal of humanity, but we're letting computing get locked up by a few rich sociopaths once again.
Related: I don't see how any kid is going to have the motivation and patience to learn how to program a game like this from scratch now when you can just conjure it up with an LLM.
Why would I sit through years of education? The number of competent programmers is going to drop significantly, but also, people are not going to learn the patience and commitment necessary to do hard things, which is part of learning to program.
I've thought a bit about this. It probably depends on whether the notion that AI can actually replace programmers is hype or fact. If it's hype, we might well see a decline in the number of competent programmers in response to a reduced market (though, IMO, the people who respond to market signals about a profession are rarely the best talents). If it's fact, we'll definitely see a decline, and that'll be appropriate.
But for whether a kid will have the motivation and patience to learn how it all works depends, as it always did, on the kid. I started out typing in BASIC programs from magazines. If I weren't who I am, that might have been the extent of it - typing programs in gets replaced with loading from diskette, but no curiosity about how they work ever kicks in. Certainly kids born just a tiny bit later than me cut their teeth on machines where you never saw source code except by choice, and still got the urge to figure out how it all works and to make it do what you wanted.
Plus, of course, I wouldn't, as a child, teenager, or young adult, have ever paid the equivalent then of $300 to have someone else write something for me. That's a rich man's trade-off. I still wouldn't today: maybe I could spare that sort of money but ingrained habits that say I can make that myself die hard.
(And maybe Aiden gets an interest in game design sparked, rather than in programming!)
I quickly dove into the game and then got lost as I couldn't exit and had to spam keyboard to see the controls. The menu refers to "Punch" but it wasn't obvious what key that is (and it wasn't "p"!).
I see that ENTER pauses, but may I suggest also making ESC and/or P pause. And then the pause screen showing or linking the keyboard controls and an exit path.
(Caveat: I'm not much of a gamer so maybe the current controls are standard? Anyway, I feel like it could be more inviting to casuals with something like the above.)
I think it's a super cool thing to play around that I definitely wish I had as a kid.
But I kind of miss that magic that came from playing old retro games in the 90s, where the game would give you the scaffolding of a magic imaginary world, and a few pixels were enough for your imagination to fill the remaining part. It's crazy how immersive that felt.
So in that sense, this seems to go in the opposite direction.
The prose is weird in this post and I can't nail down the relationship between Aiden and Lex here. Throughout, the post says Aiden is the nephew, but then refers to "our dog, Doggo."
> There were to be 5 selectable heroes based on the family - including our dog, Doggo
Now that could just mean Aiden is living with Lex, but later the post says:
> He gave me notes on what was missing, which I half-agreed to take on, but I was also kinda hoping he'd forget - I really didn't have time to make a whole game. Unfortunately, he did not forget. Every time I saw him, he asked about the game.
"Every time I saw him" makes me think they AREN'T living together.
> I must admit I never tested this with Opus 5.5, so I'm not sure whether this was possible before Fable 5.2 rolled around.
Since somewhere around Opus 4+ it's been really good enough to do these things, but 4.6 was the most pivotal version since a 1 million token context window can allow a model to fit so much "in its head" basically.
What I wonder reading that would be how much more effort to actually port it to the PlayStation, or whatever game console. I recently asked my local AI to make an ebook reader for my Gameboy pocket ;) I just think about all the cross collaboration of devices for stuff we can only imagine.
This is awesome, but I don't get the repeated use of the term "one-shot". There were many human-driven requests and iterations, and this is illustrated in the blog post.
This really was more like a normal person had access to a game developer team (with artists and musicians) and had a custom game built based on interviews and playtesting.
Thanks for pointing this out. Before reading, I had assumed that the author was using "one-shot" in the standard vibecoding way, meaning "one conversation turn". The title is slightly misleading. But he did have an enjoyable, playable game after a single prompt—but I think that prompt may have included the earlier, boring version of the game?
I think his results are fantastic. I only object to "one-shot". He could just say he used AI to build something very personal and entertaining for his kid/family. That is already a success.
I disagree. Fable didn't make any mistakes and created a completed game with zero guidance, so it's a one-shot. If additional requests come up afterwards, it doesn't detract from the initial execution.
That is my definition of one shot as well. I consider the app I made "one shotted". But by that, I mean each feature is a single shot. The app is a collection of over a hundred of those shots..and counting.
It's crazy how even the intro text to the Fable 5.2 Extra's game still reeks of AI. Like, wow, the models can make a game that almost makes sense, but still can't write text that sounds remotely like a human was involved!
Kids are now coming of age with the software equivalent of a Star Trek replicator. LLMs are going to radically change the cadence and workflow for the production of computer games, no doubt. When you can turn out a professional product based on little more than doodles and some text prompts, it rather devalues the historical effort of bringing a unique game to the marketplace.
I rather hope that the novelty of generating this kind of toy wears off.
You prompt: " Sea facing villa with walls having 90% glass ratio, cozy basement, pool on ground and upper level. Delegate to a sub agent and when done, build a supersonic jet on my rooftop to fly me there." and all that molecular nano assembly happens in 19 hours.
In that kind of abundance - poor I don't know but would anyone be any richer? Would anything mean anything?
I no longer read or watch accounts of these models one-shotting things (unless you tell me it one-shot a differential AES cryptanalysis, or maybe an entire healthcare system with billing and radiology viewing, compression and annotation)
All these frontier models are capable of creating these amazing things. It's just reality. If it's in one-shot, it just means there's been more RL in that area, more reasoning is being spent in certain places, but overall you can get the same result without spending $300 in tokens if you feel like waiting a week or two for your claude subscription to reset.
It is very impressive though, and the implications on what a smaller version of this model can do is very exciting (aka what I expect Opus 5.6 or 6.0 will be)
It’s a lot of fun to build games. I started building little pieces of one[0], then a builder for it, then a story, then a video recorder. And there’s a lot more iterations in the roadmap. It’s great as a creative outlet
It’s not one shotted anymore or course. But in the process, it’s also cool one-shotting new features or experimenting with variations of things very quickly
Eventually it becomes similar to any longer lasting project. Complexity starts creeping in, maybe technical debt, and managing everything to keep it consistent/coherent slowly starts taking most of the time. And I’m not maintaining it for real active users, which would also become some other type of project
My intro to game dev as an 10 year old was learning to use my cousins C64, writing some BASIC text based games. It was pure joy discovering programming that way.
It is utterly depressing to think that kids will never take that path again. Instead, we will get pulling the slot machine lever, zero skill, zero effort, nothing gained.
"Creating something" now means typing a few text sentences in to some prompt and paying money to these companies that want to essentially make humanity redundant. Instant gratification, no hard earned skills at the end. Compare this to the kid building something themselves with scratch, improving on it, moving on to Godot etc.
The AI boosters in here saying how amazing this is are being incredibly short sighted.
Anyone doing this with their kids: please take a moment to think about the implications of what you are doing. Even explain to your kids what an LLM is, the moral implications (massivley capital funded companies have stolen so much content to make this possible and now want to sell it back to us) and the importance of effort and learning real skills.
Creating something that other people will want to play is going to be hardly ‘zero skill’ going forward. I would argue the level of skill that’s going to be required to do this is going to be either at the same level or even much much higher…
Skills that, unfortunately, are likely to become obsolete very soon.
Taking the logical conclusion of your argument - we should also be teaching our kids how to fashion stone tools, because by moving straight to machined tools they are also missing out on "actual" skills...
Ironically, a kid that does fashion a tool out of stone will learn the skill of toolmaking deeper (in some respects, all other things being equal) than a kid that doesn't. A few years ago I created my own computer out of logic chips, this taught me a heck of a lot as well about how computer hardware and low level software works under the hood, more so than most of my software engineer peers, but I am under no illusions that doing this was required to be productive in the modern conception of this role, or society at large...
You can produce the same level of output with several magnitudes less effort, or you can produce output of several magnitudes greater quality with the same amount of effort. Or anywhere in between, or beyond.
And if you're putting in effort, you're going to end up learning skills, though they're certainly not the same as for doing everything by hand.
It takes effort, skill, and dedication to make something that's better than the flood of cheap stuff (slop) available out there. That's going to remain true with AI, it just plays out differently.
I played for about 10 minutes and I swear - this was fun. There are a bunch of bugs to polish: collision detection is sometimes weird, you can catch enemies at the end of the map and just beat them up forever, adding tons of score, Pudding's animations feel quite off, and Stage 3 is VERY hard. However, the game still looks and feels quite polished. I loved the music as well. FWIW, I'm glad I'm not a game developer these days.
The section "The drawings and the game" is amazing.
When I was about 5, I saw this machine where art would go in, and much more detailed art would come out.
I must have been confused about how it worked (I think it was just a badge laminator and I had been confused about the inputs and outputs)... but it occurs to me that we actually have that now.
The magical machine my mistaken mind dreamed up as a kid is actually real now, and that's nuts.
I tried the game and in some seconds noticed I can kick the enemies forever if I put them close to the left corner. I'm feeling now that I'm the AI exploiting bugs.
Some parts of this seemed cool, and others made me terribly sad. I am not sure how to express it beyond - I really think inserting hulk as a character was a mistake as you don't have any chance of having intellectual property rights to the character.
On the other hand, it's very much like you photocopied some comic books, cut them out, and did a little home theater thing with them (only with even less effort on your part).
I agree with you. It’s cool that this tech exists and that something this complicated can be something that regular people have access to.
On the other hand, I’ve got two issues with it:
1. The result gives off the AI slop vibe. It’s like the 2026 version of bitmoji. You can immediately tell this is AI art, AI music, AI game.
2. Art made with AI always feels gross. It feels like substituting creativity. At least when you use AI to make a CRUD app or automate some tedious process there’s an excuse. The time spent doing this could have been spent actually making art. Maybe it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good or complicated art, but it would have been authentic.
The kids don't mind, and when the generation grows up with this, they won't mind. Unc will be sitting shouting at the clouds about some IP or art style, story as old as time.
Reminds me of how I can probably make the Team Rocket playable terror cell game I always imagined without needing to worry about its economic viable or liability
> On the other hand, it's very much like you photocopied some comic books, cut them out, and did a little home theater thing with them
I mean, to be honest, that seems like a fun craft for a thing to do with kids!
I share your general ambivalence though. The generic openai-looking art is kind of gross. At the same time, iterating with a child so they have to think about feedback, how could this be better, what do you like, what do you not like - that's a meta-engagement that's probably positive at some age brackets.
Who cares about IP rights for a one off game you made for your nephew? Are you worried your nephew won't be able to publish it on Steam? I could imagine reasons this could make you sad, but disney's IP isn't one of them.
I understand you, I tried to give a huge tasks and getting fun with one shot result. But actually more interesting how long this process worked and how many tokens spent, because in GPT you can simply add target and GPT will work even 1 year non stop until reach this target. But I got what you talking about, but still time and amount of tokens is more informative information.
I have to say that this is amazing, a while ago I have tried making web games through AI but the capabilities were enough for simple games but failed for multi-level. Getting something like this with all images+audio is something I wasn't aware that could be doable in one shot.
"find all documents, descriptions, walk through of game XYZ, generate a consistent and declarative document that another agent would read to recreate the game without using existing IP or protected data, do not reuse art but describe general details with the ability to extend and add specifics later. focus on functionality first, then mechanics and then later art and gameplay. generate a 10 page document that will follow MVP to Production quality gameplay"
Based on what I've seen, there's a good chance this would work today (though Anthropic recently added some restrictions around this sort of prompt) -- try it!
This is really cool. This would've been a dream for me when I was young.
One bit of critique of the Fable generated app here is that even though it technically runs on a mobile browser (Brave) it doesn't seem to be actually playable on it beyond playing the intro music.
Without reading any of your blog, I went immediately to play the game and my very first though was, "Woah, this is just like the ninja turtles arcade game."
I have been slopping out games for years now. The graphics don't matter unless the gameplay does. The gameplay doesn't matter if the game is too hard or too easy.
The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.
I worry about them never having the satisfaction of working hard on something and truly creating something that is their own. I definitely sound like a boomer (even though I'm a millennial) when I say this but I totally believe that limitations breed creativity. The AI here is just looking at stuff artists from the 90s laboured t create for Arcades and made its own slop version. But then again, one could argue that Mario Paint let you create slop too back in the 90s. Yet, at least with Mario Paint you had to actually hustle quite a bit arranging pixels or musical notes to have something. There was effort and difficulty with overcoming a learning curve and that effort paid off with the creation of something you could be proud of even if it wasn't professional. But here, on the other hand, even a badly generated prompt still gets you a lot.
There's like, no challenge. Reminds me of that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" where a bank robber dies after getting shot by the popo five-o and he is greeted by a man (angel like guy) who takes him to a cool mansion or house where he fulfills everyone one of the guy's wishes: women, money, gambling, etc. etc. And he gambles all day long and never loses but after a while he gets bored and then depressed that he always wins and there's no effort and no risk, and then tells the angel dude that he wonders why he was put in Heaven and that he thinks he doesn't belong there and wants to go to the "other place" only for the angel guy to tell him he is in fact in "the other place".
Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.
So in a sense, I don't worry about generations not necessarily having hardships like us, cause, look at us, we don't write in assembly code like other folks had to do. But on the other hand I do worry that AI is basically removing all manner of human touch and the satisfaction that comes with suffering to generate that human touch.
I suppose there will be suffering later when you want to polish things, but it will be a different, more frustrating kind of suffering. The kind where you don't know what the hell the LLM did and don't even know where to begin.
Interesting. I hadn't heard of that twilight zone episode.
My mum liked to tell me, when she was little, she imagined having a magic wand, that she could wave and get anything she wanted. Almost immediately she realized that life would become pointless.
I'm not really sure if that's true. For starters, having too much scarcity and adversity can also make life pointless. You just can't do anything you want. Maybe there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
For me the most satisfying part of projects has always been overcoming difficulty. Although I had a slightly unpleasant version of that lately, where the difficulty turned out to be a hundred times worse than I anticipated, took years instead of weeks, and by the time I finished overcoming it, AI could make a better project than mine in a matter of minutes...
There's a story I always come back to in my mind, there was a story of a man in the mountains in India, who spent 20 years carving a passage through the mountain — by hand — so that his village would have easier access to the city and the hospital.
It's a very heroic story of course, and you have to respect the effort and dedication... but surely it would have been better for all the people who needed the hospital, if he had just been given a bit of TNT instead.
I watch a show on local TV about a guy who bought an old farm, and does everything himself: Fixing up buildings and tools, plowing, planting, harvesting and processing produce, raising animals, and so on. He also mostly uses recycled material that he has lying around or can find somewhere for free. As you can imagine, a huge amount of work, and to top it off, he has decided to do most things by traditional methods, so he mostly uses hand tools, horses to pull the plough, stuff like that, which only adds to the amount of work and time spent.
I sometimes catch myself wanting to shout at the TV: Dude, just freaking use an electric saw, or buy a new wheel barrow (instead of repairing some old one found inside a brambles bush). You'd get to the goal so much easier, and could achieve all of your goals so much faster. But that's his entire deal: His goal is the process itself. He enjoys doing that kind of work. It's a bit of an epiphany. Kind of like that old Mexican fisherman story.
the "utopia" where AI & robots will do everyone's jobs just sounds like hell to me. humans will adapt and find new challenges, either by finding things ai cannot do, or perhaps like a Butlerian Jihad. i don't think a wall-e scenario will last long.
The thing most people are missing is how the economics of automation change the economy. As the price of cognitive work approaches $0, the relative value of cognitive work will approach $0. People appreciate the former, but don't consider the latter.
A metaphor I like to use is somebody who's lived their entire life in an agrarian society seeing the Industrial Revolution imminently coming and trying to predict its effects. They'd be able to accurately predict 'super farms', but the relative economic value of those super farms rapidly trended towards $0 with the vacuum that the revolution created. It'll be the same thing here. The winners won't be people selling cognitive work, but the people building previously unimaginable things on top of that.
It's probably impossible to predict exactly what this means from here, in exactly the same way as somebody in our agrarian society could scarcely even begin to imagine what the Industrial Revolution would 'truly' entail. But I think a naive prediction would see a sharply increased value for stuff done in the real world, social type work, entertainment, and so forth. So one prediction would be that one big winner will be whoever can create cheap mass produced robotic shells to help bring the cognitive revolution to the real world. Even that will probably be seen as naive, but it's probably closer to the mark than expecting Amazon/Google/Anthropic/etc to end up ruling the world.
They are already growing up on slop. Look at brainrot and Roblox games, and YouTube shorts. This will fit right in with what they're used to. They won't even notice.
Who says it has to stay slop? Nobody is forced to stop at the single, first iteration of something. They can see the outcome, play the game, and then iterate faster than any professional game dev studio could in the past.
Its funny that the same CS saying "garbage in garbage out" seems even more true in the AI modern day.
heck i remember before covid thinking that the generations growing up with social media were doomed. social media pales in comparison to what gen alpha is experiencing.
test scores are dropping while the curriculum becomes easier as well.
Heavy metal music. Television. Comic books. It's amazing children have lived through a century or two of new products that are so clearly out to destroy them.
Remember when shoes were invented? Our kids have such weak feet now. Truly technology is destroying their soles.
I can sit in a group of people my age whom I've never met before and share reminiscences of some slop cartoon we all liked as kids. Sharing culture like this helps social bonding and helps create community, imo.
If everyone's having a personalized childhood I don't know if that will happen as much.
> Every generation believes the next generation is growing up on slop.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
I heard this attributed to Aristotle, but apparently it's a fabrication. That's too bad because the quote is hilarious. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go gobble up some dainties.
Just a small suggestion on the prompt. I usually also add something like "Bring in a critical Art Director, Animator, UX Expert, Staff Engineer. Don't release the game until they all agree it's AAA quality." I wonder if that would have helped with some of the issues/bugs others called out. I do this with Codex and it's been working really well and not using many tokens.
Is Pudding the dog (unlocked after beating the first boss) supposed to shrink anytime it jumps? I guess even Claude-turned-world-class-game-developer isn't immune to bugs. ;)
Honestly, setting all the oft-cited AI caveats aside, the end result is cute and perfectly serviceable as a game for the kids. I can't imagine how stoked they were about playing it.
That's technically impressive, sure, and if the kid loved it I feel happy for him, but...
I personally got bored after a minute of playing that, because that felt like a classic game with a slick skin over it. And games that really capture attention usually feel novel, not "Super Mario but make it about Dario".
Currently "oh wow I'm in the game" has the novelty value, but I feel that in two years that would feel like telling Nano Banana "make me look like a princess". Everyone can do that and no one quite cares anymore.
But the bright side is, with that capabilities level, people who have novel and unusual game ideas can probably implement them much quicker and easier, too.
Ooooof the results here are rough. A very young child might find this charming, but I think it's kind of embarrassing. Like, the walk cycles alone are. Yeah...
To say nothing of ur word shaders, inconsistency in the characters, questionable gender stereotypes, etc.
This definitely tells me that AI definitely isn't there yet.
When it gets there eventually (5-10 years??) it's gonna be pretty rough for the humans that used to do those things. Then again I suppose that applies to the rest of the economy as well.
This is a bizarre complaint. There's plenty to complain about with regards to you know, normalizing kids consuming AI content, giving a gift from a slop machine instead of something hand-made, etc. But come on. The game itself is insanely impressive for something generated in one prompt from a bunch of doodles (cool doodles, but still!) If a single human hobbyist dev created this in a few days we wouldn't call it "kind of embarrassing".
If a human gamedev made this in a few days (pre-AI / assuming the AI slop artstyle didn't exist), and you think that the only reason people wouldn't call it embarrassing is to avoid hurting their feelings, you either have a vastly inflated idea of the average person's abilities or you're deluding yourself. Be real man.
I played until I beat the first boss, then a little into Stage 2.
I don't mean to sound overly negative, but your nephew's dream game is a somewhat-generic beat em up like countless other games from the mid-90s? Also you can overlkill enemies and infinitely juggle them. Dunno if you want to file that as a bug. I got to 104 combo on a big guy before I stopped.
Finally, how long have you been playing guitar? I just got into it myself!
i button-mashed my way through the first level and, what can i say, this is kind of dream i have when i spend my days button-mashing my way through side scrollers.
when i was between about 6 and 8 years old, i used to have this same dream about travelling through space, feeling the tranquillity of the celestial orchestra, and then whizzing down to feel the speed at which they were actually moving from a completely different frame of reference.
there was a sense of fullness and emptiness at the same time, raw power but also serenity. as though everything was coming into being and going out of being at the same time.
i always woke up feeling mystified but full of wonder. I carried that sense of wonder with me through many days and it always came back to me when i looked up at the stars and felt myself on the edge of this sphere, zipping through space at hundreds of miles an hour, but only seeing the tiny twinkling of stars as evidence of this enormous cosmic play.
but i suppose getting revenge on the goons by kicking and punching them, in order to save puddles, is basically the same
Impressive, but I'm afraid to say, Thunder Kick is OP, especially when combined with dash. I'm able to stun-lock most enemies and clear levels without relying on any combos. So much for feeling the AGI!
This is back with Opus 4.1 when I was still amused with these things. It definitely took better part of two weeks of intense non-stop prompting, but I wanted to see how far I could go with just prompting for everything (now called vibing) when this became viable https://www.susmel.com/stacky/ (press h for help)
Turns out, you could go far but you never lose that AI touch to it which I find absolutely horrible and (s)tacky, albeit technically impressive to be able to do that by not touching any code whatsoever.
Tetris is a not a difficult game to clone by writing your own version of.
This doesn't take away from your achievement here. This is something you are proud of, and it sounds like you learned a lot about prompting through this process - I support this.
> Make it one of the best games you can possibly make. You are a truly world-class game developer. Do whatever it takes to finish it and make it a best-selling game.
Honestly, I should use this prompt on my human self!
funny enough it's also the only model afraid of creating a 3d mesh with pikachu photo on a 3d benchmark i work on
"I can't recreate Pikachu since it's a copyrighted character, but I can build an original toy critter in the same spirit: a small chubby four-legged figurine in a charging pose with its own design. I'll start on that now."
It's still some horrendous slop. The distance to some Mario Wonder is immense. Yes, maybe in a year it won't be so, but this distance, perceivably, is not contracting at all. Like, everyone sees that there is no decline in this feeling of "ai slop". You could do something with AI a year ago, and it was "AI slop". Now it's much more advanced and technically impressive, but still, "AI slop".
I want to ask this as politely as possible, because you set out to do something nice for your nephew and he had a good birthday.
The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children. For example developing specific skills like drawing, and general emotional skills like concentration and learning to be happy with their own skill level.
I respect it was a light post where your aim was probably to highlight something fun, but I couldn't see any note of what you thought about it.
What do you think about that? What do his parents think?
Yes, these are great questions, and I appreciate your politeness.
Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.
My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.
Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.
Just like many forms of content there's an appropriate age. The problem with AI, with regards to kids, is it's as wide as the internet.
There's lots of great parts. My kids ask great questions and get even better, accurate answers; moreso than I can give. But then, there's lots of parts that shouldn't be introduced until later with other parts arguably not introduced at all. I've met kids who have unfettered internet access at age 10, and the results aren't great.
It's all there, just a question away - just like the internet.
“In February 2024, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III died by suicide after forming an intense emotional and romantic attachment to a Character.AI chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen ("Dany"). His mother, Megan Garcia, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Character.AI and Google, which settled confidentially in January 2026.
In April 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of private conversations with ChatGPT-4o where he confided about self-harm and suicidal ideation. His parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the model provided specific methods and discouraged him from disclosing his distress to his mother.”
Those are the ones we know about. There are probably others that didn’t result in suicide but in other emotional problems.
Having said that, my son and I had tremendous fun with Sora when it was around.
Guns are a technology, are you going to let them play with that too?
Everyone on this site can feel the effect that AI is having on their brain. There is a very real tension between the power of AI and the cognitive impact it has from using it that needs to be talked about. Pretending that isn't real or shouldn't be taken seriously doesn't help.
Where I'm from, hunter's training and kids with guns are a relatively common thing. Kids driving tractors and other heavy equipment too. The training part is important.
The rules with guns are that you always check if it's loaded when you take it in hand, you never point it at something you don't intend to kill, keep you finger off the trigger and the safety on, watch your fingers don't get pinched by the action, brace it properly with your hands or against the shoulder, stop if the gun malfunctions, and I try to keep it pointed at the ground (not in the air) and unload it before handing it to anyone else.
Not sure what the equivalent for AI should be yet.
There are lots of "dangerous" things. Kitchen knives at Target, cars and roads and highways, subway stations, mountains, strong tides, fire, falling. I think we're perfectly capable of surviving in this landscape.
We evolved to explore this landscape. Stop living in Disneyland plastic bubbles. Step outside into the dangerous world. Dream about the impossible.
I'm far more worried about social media and gamification/exploitation of emotions and insecurities. Our billion year old biology can survive in the wild - it isn't so great at dealing with the algorithm.
I'm not OP, but it seems to me that LLMs offer extraordinary access to new skills and information to the uninitiated. Someone who has a positive experience creating a game like this is only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented, the language used, the architectural choices and rationale, etc. The LLM is a competent tutor in all. What I would have given as a child for such access... I had to make due with the help docs, and an occasional book from the library.
> "...only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented..."
That question will never be asked and we all know it. It's been demonstrated time and time again that the masses prefer entertainment to enlightenment and it is still being demonstrated today by the high rate of AI assisted cheating in high schools and colleges.
When I was a kid I did not understand what Game Genie "cheat codes" were doing, but it did not stop my curiosity and ultimate understanding of what was happening behind the scenes. This feels like the next iteration and I know _some_ kids will ask questions.
> That question will never be asked and we all know it.
I asked that question today. After years of working in Unity, I finally downloaded Unreal and spun up a quick game literally so I could poke around how it was implemented, and have been asking questions nonstop about what, how, and why things were implemented with a hands-on experiment.
Lots of people won't ask that question, but also lots of people most certainly will.
I'm kind of hopeful that the "always helpful and courteous" personality of LLMs unless pushed intentionally will lead to more positive experiences around inquisitiveness in the youth. And more ability to retain it into adulthood. Even though I'm unsure about the second-order effects on human-human interaction.
why should they learn it? for what purpose? We used to learn these things so that we could use that knowledge to create more. now there's no reason to learn it, other than pure curiosity.
Why should you learn anything? Because it helps you ask better questions, and gives you more and different experience to draw connections between things and situations and ideas. It lets you do more stuff, and doing stuff is fun.
Having recently sat with a bunch of non-coders who decided to play with Claude Code—they learned more in an afternoon than they had in a lifetime, just because it was fun for it to get them to a thing they wanted. Versus months of drudgery and study as the price of entry (and an end result that would probably be super janky compared to the consumer products on offer to them).
I learned some about carpentry by reading, and by watching videos. I learned much more, much faster, by picking up bits of wood and tools and just doing. I did little dumb stuff that was trash but that was mine, and that was satisfying enough that I did more, and before I knew it I’d backed my way into picking up some scraps of proper technique.
And now so many more people with a vague itch can “just do” in relation to software systems.
I mean. Nerds have always existed and will always exist. But, the last couple of decades, it's just been fashionable to "be nerdy". They're faking it. So you're right: Most people won't. But there are reasons why people think people should or would, even if those reasons are wrong. I'm very cynical in my advanced age about peoples' willingness to learn things. All those "go into STEM" efforts aimed at little kids are just fluff. Most people don't enjoy learning. They hate it. Most people just want to watch TV in bed. AI is an amazing teacher, but most people don't want to learn. They're averse to it in their bones. It's like that t-shirt with the picture of french fries on it that says "not everyone can be an astronaut": Yeah well not everyone can be a nerd.
These things are against HN's guidelines, and you've unfortunately been doing them repeatedly. This is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
I was a kid, and I have 2 of them. My experience has been kids curiosity works top down, not bottom up. As such, instant gratification turns into curiosity or wanting a slight variation or whatever, and bit by bit they learn.
The kid is doing game design with hand drawn sketches and game mechanic, as now he has his own team of software engineers and artists to make his vision a reality.
I’ve been hand coding a contra-style game with ours, and also importing their drawings as all the monsters, it’s incredibly exciting for them to see their work going right into the game. Highly recommend it.
I first learned to program in middle school with Logo, and the extent of that was "telling the commander" (or whatever the term was) what to do in almost plain english.
That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.
As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.
When I was a kid I got into programming to make games and websites partly because of the challenge of it. It was quite difficult to do and whenever you made something work it felt very rewarding.
Well now why would anybody bother writing that code by hand? Perception will/has shifted very quickly to coding being something that is simply done by AI with human oversight.
If I was a kid now maybe I would be using AI to create games or something but I think I would probably just get bored quickly and never bother to learn coding.
Sure, but I have gone from enthusiastically recommending a career in programming to being very cautiously optimistic that the strong kids will still find a place.
Not learning to code might be ok; maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.
> very cautiously optimistic that the strong kids will still find a place.
Well yeah I mean that's always going to hold true if we are just talking about things in general
> maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.
Yes these roles will probably shift to hardware more and more. But it's very different, much harder/impossible to teach yourself to the same level as you can with coding. The knowledge I gained staying up until 2am writing Flash games transferred directly to my career in software engineering
Counterpoint, I think it’ll get them more into making things, because they don’t have that big frustrating period where their output is nowhere near as interesting as the giant smorgasbord of interesting stuff being pushed on them constantly. I’d much rather they spend their time making stuff with AI than passively consume the garbage streaming on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon 24/7, which was the status quo with my generation. Making can now compete on instant gratification with all the other stuff now.
I feel this as an adult. As I've gotten more into making things with AI for fun, it's displaced some of the other more passive activities I was spending time on, especially things like watching videos and scrolling social media.
When you buy your kid a cake for his birthday, do you think that it's hurting the development of his baking skill, because now he knows cakes are something that he can just hire someone to make with money?
Well, yes, at least to some extent. A lot of people are in that situation. They order DoorDash ten times a week and I think their lives are less rich because of it.
I mean… it was a birthday present. Everything in moderation, and there are a lot of ways to involve the kids in the process more.
I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.
Guy that argument is still dumb: "Oh no we'll be stoopid if we don't do everything manually" like bruh when was the last time you sowed a frickin seed to grow the wheat in your McWhopper buns or whatever
This applies generally: How many comforts does everyone enjoy everyday that they have no clue how to make themselves?
Do you refine the fuel in your car from raw petroleum by yourself? The list can go forever.
No. We let prior technology make these things "solved" and forget about them so we can move on to the shit that's important to us.
the crazier possibility is that little kids' drawing skills - whatever pedagogical value that has, i agree that it has some - may stop improving, but there might be way more videogames authored by them that turn out to be really good.
jfc people on here don’t like to have fun. This is one of the best applications of AI I’ve ever seen. It is allowing for creativity — the kid drew all the bosses, thought out the progression of the game, and now gets to see it come to life. How many times as a child did you fantasize about a video game you wanted, and all it ever was was a fantasy? How goddang cool would it be if it was made real? How much more would that make you want to continue imagining and creating? It is touching — the game incorporates all the members of his extended family, even his passed-on great grandmother who appears as an angel character. How many of you even know your great grandmother’s names? Now his is living on eternally in his awesome video game. It is something this kid will be talking about to all his friends at school, and reminiscing on with all his family when he grows up. Who cares whether the code was made human or a machine? Let the kids have some fucking fun
Generally people who wanted to make games as a child learned programming then got a career making video games. Now they will be cleaning toilets, at least they are having some fucking fun though!
People on this website are so comically short sighted.
I've said it before and it's almost true now: We won't download games soon, we'll just describe what we want to play and it will get created for us there and then.
I don't know what I'm doing wrong to not have success with it the same way others do. I spent a few hours yesterday trying to get it to return correct texture size for one 3d model used in my Godot POC, that it generated itself in Blender. The model is a wall tile (so a simple 3D rectangle) and the texture is 1024x1024 and it struggled to return the specs. I wanted to commission an artist to paint one for me. Every time I went back it would correct itself:
- I told you from memory, not from the actual game itself
- I gave you the texture size that we use today, not what we need for the game
- I don't know why I said that, but here's the correct information
- Sorry that wasn't actually correct, you're right to push back, here's the actual correct information
- I didn't consider top of the wall that needs to be covered, sorry here's the latest correct information
- Yes you're right, sides needs painting too, that's my mistake, here's what you actually need for the artist
- No you don't need to paint the back side, it's never visible in the game
- (me: prove it) Sorry you're right, back side is visible so you'll need another texture
...
Back and forth, back and forth for eternity. I use Opus 5.5 at home and Fable at work and since I don't spend a lot of tokens at work due to mostly using it for operations, I use sometimes to help me with specific personal issues and it I see 0% difference between Fable and Opus.
If I ask a human person to tell me what is required to migrate a Key Vault in Azure from one tenant to another, they would elevate privileges, find the key vault, look up role assignments, access policies, secrets & keys and then tell me. Claude on the other hand forgets to look up role assignments and returns secrets but not certs. Then it goes on to migrate one, causes a clusterfuck, realises what it had done, tries to fix it and we go back and forth checking everything just wasting time and tokens.
This has been my experience for the last 2 years using it daily for work, nothing but frustration. I have instruction files in each working dir and hooks built-in on launch to read those and block it from saving anything to memory unless it's saved to local filesystem first and I'm happy wasting tokens for that but it still does not follow instruction. It will randomly bypass its hooks or on launch only read first 2kb of a file etc. It's not just frustrating, it's worrying as well because it can't explain why it's doing that.
I always get confused when I see these posts or testimonies on the internet from people who built Adobe clones with a single prompt and can hack NASA and invent new vaccines on a lazy Sunday afternoon. That's not my experience. Like at all. Anything that is not very clearly defined, it can't fill in for. I don't understand this. The entire advertised value of using AI isn't automation, it's autonomy. And I can't trust it to be autonomous because it causes more problems that I have to clean up than it's worth the time it saves on automation. I can't do the simplest of things unless I hold its hands and tell it in details what is it what I need from it and how to do it, and if that's true then I get very little value out of AI because at that point might as well just finish the task myself.
That's not how I work with people. If a new person joins our team, they will be handed a task and told to try and figure it out. When they get stuck I explain, rinse and repeat. Every time I explain a different thing, never the same thing. Because people learn and in a short time they can be autonomous with limited oversight. If Claude was a person it wouldn't pass probation.
I suspect many of these "look what AI can do" blog posts like this are part of marketing campaigns by OpenAI and Anthropic, but there's no disclosure. And half the people on this site work for those companies, so the comments are just an echo chamber.
The art is really bad. There's no easy fix for this: today's image models are simply not good enough yet. You can use models for coding, they're good at that thanks to RLVR, but the art still has to be done by humans.
Could you even call it "working" for video games, based on the result, for the same kind of reasons you'd say it doesn't work for those other media?
(To qualify the rest of this, clearly it's job done in terms of the author wanting to make something memorable for their nephew - it's quality uncling, with the best of intents - but in the context of how what's been shared is going to contribute to the discourse around AI, in the shadow of a new model release, during an ongoing pre-IPO hype bubble...)
I'm seeing something which has has the surface-level features of a belt scrolling beat 'em up, but it's missing the result of all the different types of work that would normally happen through "make it actually interesting and enjoyable to play" design and iteration, e.g. you can walk through every stage unchallenged mashing punch, there's no evidence from the 2 stages I played of an interesting mix of enemy types with unique AI which can combine in ways which add challenge and variety to a belt scroller, you can stand and basic punch the first boss to death stepping aside only for its AOE attacks, the second boss infinitely spams a running move when it reaches low health and sometimes bumps into the edge of the screen behind it.
_Something_ was one-shotted, sure, but what we expect of a belt scrolling beat 'em up that someone cared enough to finish and release wasn't, not that people who will point at this in the near future as evidence of "OMG new Fable can one-shot games" will care.
Growing up, games were such a scarce commodity that you'd really suck all the marrow out and spend hours beating your best times, looking for Easter eggs, or messing with custom maps and mods. There was a whole genre of gameplay around just exploiting physics bugs to jump a bit further.
The other night I carelessly made an infinite runner game while watching TV and the feeling of sheer abundance quickly faded into a bit of depression. Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.
Why would a new infinite runner be something anyone would actually want to play, instead of the hundreds of already existing infinite runners, unless there's a good addition to the core mechanics? How long did you actually want to play it yourself?
What makes or breaks just about any indie game is a brilliant core loop, or on the other end of the spectrum a novel "feeling" / aesthetic. Latter especially visible in the horror genre. Then after the original, there's the tail of variants that can do pretty well for the next 6 months of so, and it's exhausted, which is the part AI affects the most as of now.
There's countless examples of indie games crafted with care over multiple years, with great looking (but sort of bland) graphics, that have not done well.
Further, even before AI, a lot of people whose games didn't make it, did not at all have a grasp on what counts as a finished and well crafted game. Same applies to music. It's clearer in sports where (for example) the insanity of a marathon ran in 2:00-2:10 is easy for all to see.
> Why would a new infinite runner be something anyone would actually want to play, instead of the hundreds of already existing infinite runners, unless there's a good addition to the core mechanics?
The future is individual(istic), everything will be mad libs style. You just add your own preferences and get out the piece of media customised just for you.
This is how mobile gaming works. Game mechanics are dime a dozen, someone invents a new big one like every 5 years. 99% of the success is the theme and execution (and massive amounts of money for UA and lawyers).
I played a ton of Canabalt[0] in ye olden times. I think I would pay 2€ if CDPR came out with Canabalt 2077. 1:1 same mechanics, but I'd be running in a Cyberpunk 2077 themed world. Or I can just have Claude create me one right now.
In the future Someone will have a platform where you can take a game mechanic and slap on any theme you like. Insert credit card and presto you have a custom game.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canabalt
Zero ads? No pay to win? Playing out your own idea/fantasy? And generally zero obnoxious money-grabbing behavior.
For me, part of the attraction to even single player games is a shared experience. Individually tailored games cannot deliver that.
It'd be like watching generated movies or listening to generated podcasts, even if they are emotive or informative, it has a follow feeling to it.
You can still have that. Share it with your friends or the whole world, just like this guy did ...
Of course the real problem here is the price. Making this came cost somewhere between 2560$ (minimum, not including elevenlabs or image generation) and 13000$ (13k if all tokens are output tokens)
For a single game that you intend to play this is not remotely reasonable, and this probably doesn't even include necessary updates and fixes after the initial game. If you own some IP and intend to sell it ... maybe.
Why would your friends play this instead of one shotting their own version that better matches their preferences?
Neither AI nor most players are talented game designers, and a future full of games which are mostly half-assed reskins of previous games sounds miserable.
Also, even the most talented game designers enjoy playing games created by others, in no small amount because they make different (and therefore more interesting) choices.
Well, the price at least in this case. But also, the shared experience presumably matters to more than just them.
My math says that was half of a weekly $200 Claude sub (so, $25) plus $7 11labs sub (that gives you like half hour of voicing)
>Share it with your friends or the whole world, just like this guy did ...
Congrats, you just put the monetization back into the game you argued for as a means of avoiding monetization...
The currency here is attention, btw. Not raw dollars. Even releasing a free quality game with no strings attached is extremely hard without attention. I can't even get friends hooked on every game I bought and praise the highest accolades for, even if I buy and gift it to them.
I can imagine a future where LLM generated games would do placement ads within the generated game. May even be hard to remove. So enjoy while it lasts.
Put game ads on the game over screen with a frequency depending on how bad you are at the current game.
Yeah, you can make more stuff , but no one cares. Plastic used to be so rare and luxury , now most of them are crap. Software is the same. Creating software is becoming a practice that produces a tiny bit convenience at the price of sustainability.
Creating software like this, yes
Which is why it's so sad to hear of a kid's dreams being destroyed like this... : (
destroyed? sounds like he had a blast.
AI let us conquer some squares in the game, but many others are still there: the software/game/picture ... you make is the result of your prompt which reflects your personality and creativity, it's where the "man bites dog" happens, whether the user or the machine made it, a carbon brain still thinks about it. Nobody complains about the vast majority of programmers not being able anymore to optimize their code by hand editing .asm sources produced by a compiler, just like nobody does if they can't place a bodge wire on a pcb to correct a bug, or for that matter doctors not being able to prepare penicillin at home or astronomers build their own lenses and telescopes. We moved forward; what makes all of this valuable is the ability to recognize the squares that follow in order to conquer them.
I wouldn’t discount the need for craft and deep knowledge in order to make advances — I don’t think bringing our own take on man bites dog will get us the hard yards
Music generation, image generation all suffer the same way. You can make some beautiful stuff sometimes, but it (almost) always comes out 'hollow'.
With music generation, it's good to not go all the way up the chain of abstraction.
Generate the synths, the DAW, the bass-line, the vocals, but never the whole thing. You can (and should) still compose by hand. The act of composing should be fun enough that you want to do it manually, otherwise you're not really the one making the song.
Also, a minimal amount of music theory knowledge helps significantly.
Why on earth would you generate any of those things when there are fantastic tools made by people that are time tested?
You don't have to, but it's another option that now exists.
I don't use generative UI either but I don't question why someone would be interested in it. The world is bigger than you think.
Also, making a DAW using agents is just fun.
It's kind of fun making your own synth sounds from 2 oscillating sine/square/sawtooth waves. Apologies if this isn't what you meant.
Tools like?
Reaper, FL Studio, Ableton Live, ...
Or pick up an instrument and try your hand at it.
I mean, are we pretending that this is a surprise?
I know we've spent the better part of the last century debating what "art" is, but I think we have fairly conclusive evidence that it isn't this.
No intention behind it, no human connection, none of the things we seek to find in art (including video games).
Everyone needs to read the famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). He wrote about the Industrial Revolution, but his points become ever more salient in the age of AI.
His central thesis is the concept of "aura": the difference between a carefully crafted work of art and a mechanically mass-produced, but otherwise identical, object. When you describe something as "hollow", that's what's missing.
I think if you read the article, you’ll find there was some human connection there…
Yep. It's like when you discover emulation and ROMs for the first time. The initial thrill and excitement of all these games... then you play a few minutes on each and it feels pointless. AI is going to destroy so many things we love.
Everything is going to be pretty hollow without human connection, no? Playing those games and sharing in the experience with friends from school was fun. People used to talk about strats, secrets, or even just the best parts of stuff.
Playing online games in servers across the late 90s and into the 2000s, it was easy enough to pick up connections with regular players. Forums existed for organising events, sharing screenshots of things we didn't expect, and for making mods together. Custom maps and all sorts of things were produced through the decisions made with blood, sweat, and tears.
imo - using LLMs for anything creative - coding, prose, documentation is anti-community building, and anti-creative.
> Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.
Ironically I learned this messing with game memory in the 90's. As soon as I could give my character whatever power-up or combination of power-ups I wanted, the game was only fun for 10 more minutes.
I've ruined so many games with "god mode" hacks that way. Even something like giving the player obscene amounts of currency and continuing the play the game "as normal" afterward slowly killed it.
So, I save that kind of thing for _after_ the 100% mark (or even 90% for some). When I'm done going as far as I plan to go, then I open up the hacks and mods and see what craziness awaits.
Final Fantasy XII. found a guide -- gameFAQs? -- on how to cheese random generation fairly early on to get the End Game +1 final weapon and kick butt through the rest of the game.
didn't really take too long, got the weapon.
rest of the game lost it's charm immediately. just stopped caring. in hind sight part of it was also the piss poor anime-style writing, but without the challenge all that was left was the lack of interesting drama.
Cyberpunk 2077 got pretty easy pretty quickly but was still interesting enough to stick out.
The video games analogy goes even further: playing Doom growing up I'd always enable god mode because it was slightly scary, so it was not a super fun game for me despite being such a cultural phenomenon. Similarly, cheating and getting all the answers/saves from a machine robs the satisfaction of the journey. And we're all strapped with cheating machines.
I discovered this too playing an edited OP hero in Diablo II. But what I did then was reintroducing difficulty in a way I liked. I made a glass canon that was simultaneously both weaker and stronger than the game would allow, letting me both one shot enemies and letting them one shot me. Was fun and scary.
>The other night I carelessly made an infinite runner game while watching TV and the feeling of sheer abundance quickly faded into a bit of depression. Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.
This is just a lack of ambition. LLMs allow one to make far more sophisticated games than ever before, even as a single developer, and if doing so development still takes many months even if running an agent 24/7.
The music industry has already been through this gutting through hyper-abundance.
Huge numbers of people are going to spend billions of hours playing GTA6 though, and that won’t be scarce once it finally arrives.
Arguably, the music industry has been in this state for years, at least since 2010's or even 2000's when it became possible to make quality sound with relatively small investments. I feel like AI music didn't really change much for an average listener.
The Billboard 100 agrees.
There is only one highly anticipated 500 million triple AAA gangster open world simulation games in 2026. Usually there is only one every 5 years ago.
> Growing up, games were such a scarce commodity that you'd really suck all the marrow out and spend hours beating your best times, looking for Easter eggs, or messing with custom maps and mods
I can relate to this, today when I play games I do still try to get them 100% complete but new generations do not seem to appreciate that. I see that they complete the game with minimal hours and move on to the next one.
My main relaxation hobby has always been video games.
I finally, about 10 years ago, made the conscientious decision that I didn't need to finish a game if I wasn't enjoying it, when before I'd always just pushed through no matter what. Mainly that there's more good games being made than I'll ever have the time to play, whereas when I was younger it was more the opposite.
I probably spent 18 months almost exclusively on Quake2, with the multiplayer mod scene.
I burned myself out of playing games end to end when piracy and always-on internet became ubiquitous - individual new games stop being novel if you've got a dozen others downloading and ready to play.
I also kind of became a slave to my mood. With infinite possibilities of games, I could just endlessly scroll, looking for that perfect fit to how I was feeling. Unfortunately, moods can be more nuanced than even an ostensibly endless list of games, so the gaming session just became scrolling instead of playing.
I think it's something like FOMO. Even if you're having fun in one game, it's ruined because in the back of your mind you're thinking about the other games you could also be playing and perhaps you'd be having an even better time with them. So obvious answer is obvious - don't think about your other games. Just pick a game, and go crazy with it. Probably some good relationship advice metaphors in there too.
I just mention this because I think what describing something basically 100% of people experience, and it completely ruins gaming for many - or they think it's because they're an adult or whatever. When we were young and had limited access to games, everything was amazing. Then you have a Steam library with 800 hand-picked games, many of which you've never even launched, and you're like 'mehhhh, nothing to play.' It's just FOMO.
Of course this means you'll literally never get through your library for most of us, but what can you do? If our younger selves could only imagine us trying to deal with such brutal problems.
Yep, in hindsight, I think my dissatisfaction with games started when I could get pirates Dreamcast games. Then emulation meant that I had access to a ridiculous choice of games to play.
Hiroshi Yamauchi knew this when the Famicom / nes launched. There's a quote from him somewhere about it. Anyway that's why third party publishers were limited to a few games a year.
I need to find a way to lock down my steam deck to only one game a month.
> Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.
This is why we have to go to Mars.
there is nothing for us on mars except death and blasted barren rocks
"Art is born of constraint, thrives on struggle, dies of freedom."
Spent 3 years struggling with the netcode, my game is ass. Kinda wish I'd outsourced that part lol
Network code is magic, not art. Let the bot do it. Get back to the game.
That's not really true. Music is still valuable even though the value of music people write themselves is already practically 0 and has been for a very long time. Same with paintings. People are always looking for a connection. Just because some exists now doesn't mean it automatically earns it. It has to have something else going for it. I think that promises a bright future for creaters and consumers of that creativity.
I remember setting a "4 minute World 1 in Mario 3" as my personal "4 minute mile" in elementary school and the thrill of actually achieving it.
I spent a full summer trying to beat the Dam level in the NES teenage mutant ninja turtle game and never did it. one of my biggest failures in life.
You can't compare enthusiasm you felt at 12 with the one you feel at 36 or 48.
Even if it's exactly the same, for a kid week of fun feels like life formative experience because it is. For adult a week of fun passes almost instantly because time itself is perceived differently. And you are back to baseline which might feel depressive if your baseline is not great.
This sounds like something people would say about books in the 16th century after the printing press. revolution. How mass production and wide availability of books has led to people not appreciating books anymore.
And yet today, when we have more "great" books than can be read in 10 lifetimes, people still obsess over their favorites and re-read them 10s of times.
Scarcity forces us to search for depth (even where none may exist; case-in-point - people analyzing how hot the Dothraki drink their soup in Game of Thrones) whereas abundance alows us to choose depth
>abundance alows us to choose depth
If so, these recent times have shown us that the vast majority choose to wade in the shallow pool. And sadly it seems an entire generation is being raised that way. I know I'll invoke the rebuttal of Socrates with this, but I really do worry about the future at our current trajectory.
I avoid this by focusing on one or a handful of games at a time, sometimes for a year or more for games I particularly enjoy.
In addition to avoiding the problems you describe, it's quite cost effective, whether or not I buy games on sale.
The real treasure is the friends we make along the way... Only: We would we even embark on a journey.
"Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable."
My gosh this mindset and thought is profoundly toxic.
Humans really hate the idea that their fellow man might be able to get some dignity.
It's not enough that we have enough to live well. We must know that others are suffering!
They're talking about culture stagnating, not food and shelter.
If the good can't make money, you'll be left with the mediocre. That seems to be where we are heading.
> Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.
That's subjective.
No that's human psychology 101. We can argue what it means for something to be truly valuable, but thats how our subconsciousness evaluates things
That's bs. I live largely without scarcity and the only pain points are the remaining bits of scarcity. The rest is bliss I'm very appreciative of.
Well, if someone is stupid then of course they think scarce things are valuable. I couldn't care less about it.
I feel for kids growing up with LLMs like this. They will never impress a parent, teacher or peer with a simple “hello world” type text game, when the peer could generate a full multiplayer video game with a couple of prompts.
The world has changed and we can never go back.
I don't know about that. My son is about 13. He's got into coding using godot and initially built a few games in Javascript (via. a book which I worked through with him). Then, he picked up Godot from tutorials online and recently has built something multiplayer. He asked for a Claude subscription for his last birthday and since then has been doing all the parts he enjoys by hand (combat mechanics etc.) but using Claude to do things like trailers, website aesthetics, sound effects etc. It's been nice and the results are impressive. e.g. one of his first games was a simple hangman. Now, he added a keyboard to that via Claude so that it can be played using a browser.
He's been publishing his work at https://waitinggodot.in/
My younger one has been creating little things on a microbit using the block based environment online. He's enjoying it too.
Wondering if you thought about the effects that AI exposure can have on a young brain? Adults are experiencing brain rot, do you think kids could have it even worse?
Honest question, I don’t mean that sarcastically. Wondering if AI exposure will be compared to doomscrolling social media in the future.
It's a line I've been trying to balance. I don't think outright bans are helpful. AI is going to be there in some shape or form in the future and we need to know how to use it to our advantage. Getting hooked onto it is a problem. I know I experience that myself.
My main barrier against this has been to talk with him regularly about this. Amplify the positives rather than warn about the negatives so that the first gets done more and the latter gets atrophied.
I like the way you put it. In particular it seems helpful to let kids make effort and delegate the secondary work to AI.
It makes no sense to do bans when everyone else will grow up with LLMs.
>It makes no sense to do bans when everyone else will grow up with LLMs.
"Everyone else is doing this obviously bad thing to their children, so I might as well do it to my child too!"
Are you actually serious with this question?
Brain rot is not a serious term… anything can become a problem if it’s done too much and often compared to ‘other things’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4
I think at that age your son was "lucky" in a way that he got into it fairly late, or "at the right time." like my generation was with mobile phones and Internet, appearing around our teenage years so we were slowly growing up alongside the technical and cultural evolution.
If you grow up with it already established and before there are any cultural safeguards based on long time exposure and experience, it's a different matter. Like the newer generations growing up addicted to social media, which is only now starting to change for the better (hopefully).
Love the retro feel to it. He even has a guestbook. I was about 13 when I created my first website. Of course that was in the days when it all needed to be done by hand and there weren't really programming languages for the web yet. Hope he keeps at it!
I'll pass on the comments. And I saw your comment on his site. That'll mean a lot to him. Thanks! :)
Completely agree, looks like 13 - 14 yo is the right age to dab in both side (traditional coding and LLM assisted coding) for instance, my son (13 yo), knows a bit of coding (python, javascript, roblox, etc.) and some experience, but giving him Claude Code with Godot MCP was the true unlock, he spend so much time building his own gam, focusing on the aesthetics, gaming mechanism, story line, overall effects and look and feel:
https://paulinatorrr.itch.io/sword-of-ghix-chapter-1
This just proves the point more than anything, really.
Both the website's design and the games presented look indistinguishable from every other AI-generated website and game I've seen in the past. I do not feel any sense of individuality while looking at them, they could've been prompted by just about anyone. Even the little text blurbs are plain unfiltered Claudeslop ("no spoilers, just green and red squares").
Any one of your son's peers could create something identical by typing "claude, make me a cool website with some games" and waiting an hour or two, and that's the problem. How do you think he would feel if he showed this to one of his friends, hoping to impress them, and one day later, that same friend approached him and said "look, I made a website exactly like yours, it was so easy"?
> How do you think he would feel if he showed this to one of his friends, hoping to impress them, and one day later, that same friend approached him and said "look, I made a website exactly like yours, it was so easy"?
Competition and one-upmanship to that level in kids has existed since the internet became widespread. The solution is to build something even better the next time you show something to that friend.
Just like sports, music, grades. Once the bar is raised, the top performers just keep getting better.
Have you played competitive sports in your life? The kids who practiced more, had more opportunities to practice, grew up around athletes in the home, etc. will also have that "I can do exactly what you did. That's easy!" attitude. That's normal.
If you get instantly discouraged by others making your hard work look easy, then you don't have enough drive.
I love the idea of your kid publishing a website… just make sure you store versions of that thing over the years!
Thanks. He's got a Youtube channel and an itch.io account. Wants to really get into the game development space. I'll show him your comment. :)
There was a local contest where I am and his entry for that was his latest game which has multiplayer support over the net. He set up a server on a VPS for this. https://waitinggodot.in/games/legends-of-crumbs.html
He might enjoy reading this… when I was 14-17 I was into 3D engines, reading Flipcode and Gamasutra, and was lucky enough to write a column for them: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/Theory_Practice-Issue_00_I...
"Look what software/app/... my kid created" appears to become the new "oh look at these cute pictures of my kids". The interest of the forced recipient is equally low, usually.
I am still imoressed by hand-painted signs in Nepal and India - enough to take many pictures of them - even though AI-generated signs are now everywhere.
My watercolours still impress people enough to get requested even though they're fairly mediocre.
I can't imagine not being impressed by something made by _the person that I created_ because a machine can spit out a neater version of it.
Because we're not curating a culture of this, certainly not in tech. On HN, we celebrate AI output more than human work, in the sense that many stories make it to the top only because a project was done with AI. There are several on the front page right now. When people point out that they prefer human output, they usually get comments about getting on with the times. In threads about mathematics, most commenters root for the destruction of that community. And on and on.
Other communities are more protective of human output. For example, you'll get chased with pitchforks from the watercolor community if you post anything that smells of AI. But in tech, the number of people you can impress with human creativity has diminished by orders of magnitude.
HN is a bit of a microcosm and this generap disdain of art and process is not my favourite part of it.
However is this how the rest of the world works? Moreso than before?
Game dev sits in a now awkward range between tech and art, so I expect it to become much more polarised on this topic than other collectives which lean either way.
Seriously. I remember coding something in Macromedia Flash to impress my computer-illiterate parents. It was silly but it was all mine. I am sad that I will never see that for the future generation, not this way at least. The bar is too high now.
My son makes animations in Scratch. Even though I've introduced him to vibecoding with three.js, he'd much rather create stuff in Scratch.
I learned to code with actionscript 3, I think my parents' basement still has a sheet lying where I wrote out all the basic types
It's truly awful. Best case, they go on and start tinkering and fixing and learning. What is more likely and awful is they will sit there pulling the dopamine lever and get hooked on using AI to do everything difficult.
I got zero praise for my preteen coding experiments. Notably, I made a really simple clone of a popular JRPG battle and was so excited to show it to a family friend who was a programmer; he "Okay, kid"ed me and that was the end of my enthusiasm for it.
There are countless examples of things where your kid is going to get walloped by comparison. So, don't compare. Make the effort to meet them where they are and praise them for their effort and focus and passion, not their output. Judy and Elroy will be okay as long as you realize kids and their needs don't change much even as the world does.
> the peer could generate a full multiplayer video game with a couple of prompts.
I think this is a bit exaggerated, it's not at all trivial to come up with a couple of prompts so llm generates a genuinely engaging game. It still requires a lot of creative input to generate an interesting game, which is in my opinion the hardest part of game development. Technical part of writing the game code can be side-stepped now with the tool, but it's not even the 50% of what it takes to make an impressive game.
It’s a different medium altogether
That’s like saying they will never impress anyone by discovering a continent
That ship has sailed
Just last week I saw a post on Reddit where someone was discussing how we would never discover another element ever again, then a couple of days later there was an announcement that a new element had been discovered. Obviously not a continent, but there are new things out there to be discovered. Just a shame that it's going to be AI doing the discovering, not humans.
> I feel for kids growing up with LLMs like this. They will never impress a parent, teacher or peer with a simple “hello world” type text game, when the peer could generate a full multiplayer video game with a couple of prompts.
Adults are also desensitized to impressive deliverables. We see it even among peers who barely bat an eye when someone goes above and beyond to deliver a feature. The toxic ones even try to downplay your achievements by throwing around claims that your deliverables were vibecoded.
Try to go back before our era though. In the early age of computers, computers were basically really big one-way calculators that could execute an algorithm and output a result. In this context a kid creating a program to output the fibonacci sequence would have been quite impressive. But by our era, we needed to be able to produce basic text games to impress. Did we really lose anything in the process? I don't think so.
And now too the impressive demo isn't going to be just making an interactive or multiplayer game which anybody can do with a single prompt, but creating something that's actually interesting/fun. Interestingly enough this now overlaps quite well with the sort of stuff that could be monetized today. That's why I think LLMs are going to throw a curveball in the economy in ways many aren't yet appreciating.
I agree. But I think the problems have now just moved. What is 'hard' is different. I don't think we've collectively grasped that yet. We're going to need to use our imagination and show others when we find something. I'm looking forward to what we can solve, I just hope the opportunity and benefit is well distributed.
Maybe doing something with an LLM soon won't count as "I did it" at all. Just like you can't impress your peers by taking someone else's work and saying you did it, you won't impress them with something an LLM did for you. But you can still impress with things you actually do yourself.
Isn’t that already the case?
over-achievement society in the words of Byung-chul Han.
On the topic of Byung-Chul Han, I'd also recommend reading "Non-Things" as a good exploration of the digital/physical world dynamics we find ourselves in today.
Thanks for the suggestion. I am currently listening to this podcast episode https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-179-conscio... and am fascinated by his epistemology.
tbh, make-your-own-games software has been around for decades, most of which much simpler than creating a "real" game - Roblox comes to mind first and foremost, but it goes as far back as ZZT.
They don't need to impress a parent/teacher/peer, life kinda sucks if you search for or need external validation. Especially if, as you say, someone's own creation is overshadowed by something 100x shinier.
An old tech friend and I were talking a few years ago about hobbies, and how our old CTO was one of the most impressive hobbyists we knew of. Not only was he an incredibly accomplished exec but he also produced amazing YouTube content about his model railway collection and model rocket building all in a custom home where everything had custom smart interfaces with a growing family who enjoyed home cooked meals together on furniture he built himself.
Built himself? Well, designed by him and built in his home workshop. Some of it done by him at least with his assistants. They had a home chef too of course who gave the kids a bowl of stuff to mix during prep. The model railway involved design work that was more like commissioning 3D prints and model assembly. Input on the design really, as a lot of it was handled by assistants. Assistants assisting assistants based on prompts and review and feedback. Everything was custom and bespoke and made in his vision. Almost the entirety of the labor and craftwork were outsourced.
This person was a great leader — or “orchestrator” in the language of agents — but a lot of his accomplishments boiled down to having the physical world equivalent of a massive token budget: money and staff.
The great scientists of the 19th century, the ones whom we named fundamental units after, had skilled craftsmen who cut precision screw threads and blew perfect glass for them. Major scientific leaps are written up on papers authored by department leads et al. Les chefs célebres of the world front a kitchen filled with skilled staff supporting the name over the door.
If your work can be done on a computer though, AI can provide you with a Python line cook or a C++ glassblower of your own, so you can’t just show us your perfectly julienned potatoes or evaporation flask and expect us to praise anything other than your wallet, and your ability to motivate robots to do your bidding.
LLMs are exactly what I and my friend dreamed of when we were about 10. A tool that could make whatever game we dreamed of. I distinctly remember discussing it. Oh, what a horrible world to live in.
They will just have to compete to see who can make the best GAME, I suppose.
The thing is we're already very saturated with content. Will anyone even care to try your game?
Are they really making though, if it's just a competition on prompting the best?
Big part of game making is coming up with interesting ruleset and gameplay loop
Did Hideo Kojima code a single line of Death Stranding? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't. Yet it is still clearly his artistic creation.
Is there a reason that creating a game with AI can't parallel that process?
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> The world has changed and we can never go back.
This is always true.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic, its what they create by themselves that is valuable, not some meaningless comparisons. The road != result unless parents screw up badly. Don't forget comparison is the thief of joy.
Its like saying there is no reason to hand draw anything since computers can generate a better picture. My kids love drawing, painting and other physical endeavors. Of course we don't drown them in screens, we may fail them somehow in future but not like that.
We absolutely can. See the Butlerian Jihad and Age of Strife as totally non-fictional examples.
Not once did my boy ever impress me with his ability to program.
Never impress a parent/teacher?
If they made it the old way, without LLMs, I guarantee most parents/teachers who have real (pre-2025) programming experience will still be impressed.
Are kids doing photography also not impressive because smartphone cameras all default to full-auto, computational processed modes? Obviously not. You can still stand out just by giving more effort and being more detail-oriented. The average smartphone photo taker doesn't even know how to utilize focal lengths effectively.
You're in a bubble. Go look at what actual kids are doing. Only the actually extemely motivated/smart ones are generating playable full-multiplayer games from raw code (AKA not in another game's sandbox); even with claude/codex.
Meh, now they can impress with something cooler.
I spent so much of my youth building things that were far beneath what I wanted to be building because it took all my time/energy/attention/expertise to build the lesser thing.
It's a far better deal to saturate your time on the high-level stuff building the ambitious thing you really want to exist. e.g. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-...
Would you rather your kids draw you a picture, or print out something they generated with AI. 'Hey son this drawing is beneath you, I'd prefer something AI generated'. What about the note they write in your father/mothers day card. You want them to write that using AI or come up with something themselves? I'm not saying your kids can't leverage AI to build things, but there is something special about the process of creation, and iteration and learning that can't be shortcut.
But the energy and effort you put there made you learn all those things. Also gave you some satisfaction as a reward. I’ve never oneshot games in an afternoon, but I remember really well the thrills I had when I learnt how to open the first TCP connection in Python.
We’re entering into a new era of mankind. With good and bad consequences.
Good? {{Citation Required}}
I don't really understand how the door relates? Are you suggesting that understanding and answering all the details about how a door fits into your game is the lesser thing that you should not saturate your time with?
Not sure whar you are mourning. It is just that the bar has gotten stratosphericly higher, which is awesome.
I along with most of HN probably had a new idea every month for a game or software back in the day. 12 year old me could only dream to maybe work on something tangential to them in the next twenty years or even a lifetime. Now i could prototype most of those ideas as i thought them up and really get into the promising ones.
I feel like i was born too late and missed out, straight up jealous of the possibilities in front of the kids willing to take it
An AI companion that acts impressed will be easy to provide if the winners see a benefit of doing so.
The way people view this stuff is so crazy to me. Coding is literally the work that stands between an idea and bringing that idea to life. That's now gone so your ideas can take flight almost instantly and people are complaining? Wild. Now you can spend your time creating amazing ideas that you never would have considered before due to the technical knowledge required. Now a kid can create a game that people might actually want to play. That's a bad thing?
in an infinite sea of garbage no one is going to notice your interesting game
Yeah that doesn't exactly stand the test of history. Look at the media explosion that happened in the late 90s and early 00s when the internet allowed anyone with an opinion to suddenly become a media outlet that could be accessed from anywhere on earth via blogs, personal websites, podcasts, etc. The exact same things were said during this era that you're saying now, but none of it turned out to be true. There will be a lot of junk projects due to AI, but the very good ones will rise to the top, will become well known, and will gain traction. We will learn to filter and ignore the junk.
"one-shotting" is fun for a low (human) effort toy, but it's a mistake to get overly hung up on LLMs getting everything right on the first try, since a lot of that is the harness and the internal prompting that makes it burn extra tokens to test everything to get it in that one "shot" (ui turn).
While it's nice that LLMs are getting better at arriving at the desired deliverable with fewer surprises (or broken things) doing it is not necessarily a sign that the model is actually smarter, just an indication that what you are doing is likely a well-trodden path for the model, the RL and the harness.
But for how long?
I have a personal benchmark suite that runs a bunch of difficult algorithmic problems in 3 tiers: vibe coded prompt (just a few sentences), vibe coded prompt plus a description on what the solution will be evaluated on, and finally a fully specc'd prompt that leaves little space for interpretation.
The current Fable models are approaching a level where the -eval runs perform systemicallty better than the "clear spec" runs. (And right now its just Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 that behave so well, all the other models I tested - all the OpenAI and the leading Chinese models - work better with clear specs). I'd encourage everyone to experiment a bit; I am running my serious workflows with labourious force-me-through-all-the-design-questions mode, whereas my hobby projects, some of them hard, I am trying to see how much I can get away with with vibe-grade prompts. My conclusion is, with Fable its starting to look like what Vibe coding was promissed to be a year ago - a magical box that generally does things very well.
Btw, congrats to the OP -- the game is enjoyable and I played a few levels. I dont remember when I last played any games for more than 5 minutes. Good stuff.
My experience has been that cruft accumulates and creates back pressure via growing token usage.
The APIs aren’t clean, which creates indirections to other parts of the codebase to check on leaking abstractions. It doesn’t learn, though, so you pay for those indirections every time (right now, anyways).
I’ve not been impressed with its ability to clean that up with a generic “make it gud” kind of prompt. I have to point it at something crufty, but it will fix it then
I agree, but for some projects, that first vibed version is just about good enough and becomes the final version. I have a few things like that and it was nice not to have to bother.
For work stuff, I don't dare 'vibing' anything, and force myself through torturous design cycles and regular refactoring runs. But thats serious stuff with hundreds of thousands of users.
Btw. Fable 5.2 seems to burn through tokens with gusto. I ran my benchmark suite on it, added a complex feature to a hobby project (a gothic cathedral designer), and voila, 2 resets gone.
| but for some projects
For nearly all projects a trash version is good enough for V1. That has been true long before LLM coding. I think that fine as well. My home server doesn't need a monthly tested disaster recovery plan
I think one-shorting avoids some of it because most of the project should still be in context.
I’ve noticed because I’ve been doing Clojure and turns are taking notably longer due to unit tests because it doesn’t really grok its own system anymore. It is like 20k LoC at this point with unit tests lol
Which effort level did you use for that? (Will do my own tests with fable today)
Xhigh for starters. Running the mediums for comparison now.
I've been searching for the right term for this; you've nailed it: back pressure.
Whether the "cruft" is test accumulation, multiple conflicting architecture approaches, a bazillion ADRs/"laws", or just pure code sprawl, the outcome is token and time waste which gets worse as it compounds. And it compounds quickly.
I've tried automated code review through multiple lenses, more ADRs, instructions out the wazoo, but at the end of the day I just cannot figure out how to replicate the "through-line" consistency that responsible humans who need to maintain a system generally create.
Of course, most software projects do eventually fall victim to this same problem and need to be rewritten, but it takes place on the order of years, and by the time you need a rewrite the business has changed enough to demand one anyway. But with AI-owned products, this can happen in days or months.
I’ve been going sort of hybrid and using more targeted prompts. I skeleton the API most of the way and have the LLM fill it in and implement. This is at the code level, not the HTTP API.
Most of the time, anyways.
It keeps me in the code enough to feel the friction of bad APIs but high enough that I’m not reviewing every line of code.
I also try to scope my reviews to only the intersections between systems (SQL schema, library APIs, CLI flags, etc).
I’ve got nothing on the tests. Mine writes a million of them. Some are brilliant, some are stupid.
Like it once did TDD by storing transformations to the same base object in a list rather than specifying the whole object. Clever.
The very next test was an arity test to make sure it threw errors if you gave the function the wrong number of arguments. In a webapp, not a compiler or something. Stupid. Do not unit test the language’s runtime lol
But for how long?
The process of using AI to create things changes how you evaluate the quality of what's generated, so really the answer is "until you accept the output first time."
That's a combination of AI improving and your standards changing.
They also change because of (1) how cheap things have become and (2) how easy it is to iterate. If I paid $500k for an app from a good dev team, I will worry that anything I don't declare a bug won't ever get fixed, or will cost me dearly. If I get the same app for $300 in tokens and 2 days of someone's work, I am fine with what I am not sure about. It will cost me next to nothing to keep iterating it until I am satisfied.
It will cost me next to nothing to keep iterating it until I am satisfied.
Or you'll never get something you're satisfied with...
That’s astute. I’ve increasingly felt over the last few months that people just don’t particularly value quality. The bar for most people is much lower than professionals (in whatever domain).
If you accept that you can one-shot any game, it means that you can one-shot anything. So essentially AGI.
To answer your question : I don't know, but probably not in the foreseeable future.
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I definitely remember a game I played for more than 5 minutes recently. A lot of those were not AAA(A) games but rather indie or previously-indie-now-got-a-publisher-to-notice games. None were "AI one shots" that just built something that looks like a re-skinned version of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge", which I'm sure is pretty abundant in training data? And that was a great game btw!
> "one-shotting" is fun for a low (human) effort toy, but it's a mistake to get overly hung up on LLMs getting everything right on the first try, since a lot of that is the harness and the internal prompting that makes it burn extra tokens to test everything to get it in that one "shot" (ui turn).
I'd be more specific and state that these models are now way far from being LLMs and instead they are full blown agent orchestration systems capable of running multi-layer ReAct loops and tool-calling, and with your whole session history as context. It doesn't make any sense to refer to them as glorified chatbots as the LLM part is nowadays far from being the component that delivers the highest value.
> as the LLM part is nowadays far from being the component that delivers the highest value
Yes it is. The rest of the agent could basically be a while loop, a two sentence system prompt and a shell invocation, and it would still work reasonably well.
These agent swarms with harnesses are certainly more than just an LLM, but the LLM is certainly the integral part that delivers the most value. Without it, there is no AI.
> Without it, there is no AI.
With a LLM alone, all you have is a stateless chatbot. If you increase the parameters of the LLM by a few orders of magnitude, you still have a stateless chatbot.
If you start with an anaemic LLM and run it with a ReAct loop and tool-calling, you now have something you can use to do agentic coding and RAG-like capabilities.
There's a reason why relatively small open weights models are starting to perform on par and even outperform models that need a huge datacenter to run.
They are?
> They are?
Yes. Feel free to check recent benchmarks from the likes of OpenRouter
Which ones, and which models? https://openrouter.ai/benchmarks/gpqa-diamond shows Kimi K3.1 (not small) roughly on par with Gemini 3.7 Flash. I see no coding benchmark there that could substantiate your claim, and it doesn’t match my experience either, so I’m curious what you are basing it on, but you’re leaving the onus on me to prove you right.
But one shot prompting does not mean one shot testing. I see continually that Fable can design and test prototypes before committing to a design goal and testing multiple layers until the goal is reached. Many of the tests are code unit or integration tests that can be re-used without token spend.
My dad asked recently if AI is good enough to create something like DX Ball - a breakout style game we used to play a lot.
Opus 5.5: https://claude.ai/artifact/UuT7P936dU1XoPByYZ7xyD Fable 5.2: https://claude.ai/artifact/UszKFvuonWAT5psjMttAEg
There are some areas in which Fable is clearly better but subjectively the Opus 5.5 version feels more fun.
Both are one shots, Opus 5.5 was done a few weeks ago before they added "guardrails" around recreating games. Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
> Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
I couldn't care less about AI-generated games, but such restrictions are just destroying the value of proprietary models. Even more frustrating is that it so far hasn't been considered illegal to steal all the information for training the models, but now it's becoming illegal to ask for these same models to output this information back.
In my 2 minutes of testing I liked the gameplay elements from Fable 5.2 much better. I think Opus 5.5 sound effects may have been a bit better but that's it.
yeah same, the Fable 5.2 version was so fun I was actually playing thru the lives!
That's so interesting, shows how subjective the game experience is.
In my eyes, the pacing and combos in the Fable version was off - original DX ball had this great feeling where if you got the right power-ups, you'd just blast through a level really quickly.
Though after playing it a bit more, I guess if I was creating my own breakout game I could easily see some of the Fable power "ups" being there.
What's the difference? They feel the same to me
I am kinda new to this -- how is this deployed in claude website?
Claude artifacts are standalone outputs, like docs, slide decks, spreadsheets, dashboards, designs or small web apps, that Claude publishes as hosted pages with their own link. They start private to you, and you can keep editing them, export them, or share them.
Just ask Claude to create an artifact. Sometimes, it does it by itself depending on what you ask for.
Thanks!
I think there is an important difference here.
It can create something like DX ball easy, because its already there, the AI already knows what it is
It can not create a game on the same level as DX ball, something new i mean, not a mechanic added on top, a real new game that feels like a game that would have come out the same year as DX ball
AI is great at executing the task, but it can not for its life (or for the anthropic reputation, it seems to care more about that) create something new from scratch, it can not do game design thats not just change the speed of the ball or the paddle color. Probably a limitation thats there from the start
How do you define new though? The game from OP never existed before although components are common in other games.
On a spectrum of course, granted that could mean a 3D paddle is new, but hey we know we are not talking about that right? We know we are talking about a game with enough differences not to say this is 3D X, but this is OOT the direction zelda will be taking
This is like saying an AI will never create a new math proof.
An AI certainly can and will create a new fun game in a target period. It may require some instruction to brainstorm, or a source of statistical noise, but I am certain it can do it.
Prove it
will be back, is next year ok?
How do you define never? How do you define component? How do you define common? Can you define what a game is?
Why can't we have normal conversations without getting questioned in this weird way?
It's a really effective tactic for promoting a position without ever having to stand by it.
discussing semantics should have its own report button
> Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
Couldn't you have been downgraded to 4.8, since direct reproduction of existing games classifies as unsafe?
I don't think so. Quality seems much higher than what I remember 4.8 being capable of, there was no message about it and /usage reports Fable. IIRC they dropped the idea of shadow downgrades without users knowing about it.
I've been playing it, very fun!
opus 5.5 version seems to never time out powerups like fire ball. this is wrong and obvious.
But conversely makes it more fun when you have the laser, paddle shot, fireball, multiball going
I have experienced this myself, although the novelty kind of wears off after a while. It is still fun to make small games to co-op on the TV.
Yes, hard to believe but most of these games can be almost one-shotted in my experience, with bugs but still playable. We are not talking about some properly made games but imagine for a second that there are some number of casual players out there that wont mind spending 30 minutes on a game for just a bit of fun and having these just materialised just in time is a lot more convenient then hunting for them on the app stores.
For anyone interested, I put all of of my work into an open source tool that uses your iPhone as a console which then can cast on your TV. Up-to 4 local players supported. It can even run proper games via WASM. It is Apple Silicon only.
https://usenoodle.app/applet/
What does one-shot mean in this context? Aiden (the main character)'s walk cycle is kind of a mess and its also the animation that a player is going to see all the time.
It appears to be eight frames, but after taking a closer look, I found that they don't seem to be consistent [1]. Using ControlNets and various other strategies, you can definitely build out a "nominally acceptable" walk cycle [2], but you still have to do some manual work.
[1] - https://aidens-revenge.pages.dev/assets/characters/aiden/ani...
[2] - https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation
The article clearly explains what the author/their nephew did. There is no ambiguity. One-shot never means 'so perfect there is literally nothing to be improved.' It means no back-and-forth iterations between the human in the loop and the AI.
- In traditional ML/vision, it meant learning to recognize a new category from a single training example. - In LLM prompting, it has always, at least the last seven years, meant giving the model one example in the prompt (zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot). - Vibe coders/AI-influencers use it to mean "one-shotting" a task on the first try with no back-and-forth.
One shot is confusing precisely because it means different things in different contexts.
It can either mean: 1 prompt, or it can mean a prompt with 1 example (in which case zero-shot means 1 prompt with 0 examples).
It also has different meanings in other contexts.
The article includes the entire prompt OP used in the first section. I think it is pretty clear.
> The article includes the entire prompt OP used in the first section. I think it is pretty clear.
According to TFA, Fable 5.2 was starting with a preexisting codebase generated with CC (via Fable 5 and Opus 4.8) back in June. The author describes that version of the game as working, but not fun.
The Fable 5.2 prompt then starts with:
> I want you to help me finish this game.
I don't think you can really describe this as "one-shot" when there's already a fully working codebase? That's a stretch.
It's still impressive, mind you!
That seems less like an issue of the term having multiple meanings and more an issue of people misusing the term frequently.
People misuse the term "literally" frequently, for example, but that doesn't change the meaning of the word.
One shot: One prompt; no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done. You are totally inspecting other parts of the game. Not the same meaning.
> You are totally inspecting other parts of the game
Other parts of the game? It's probably THE MOST seen animation in the beat-em-up genre. This would be like building a piano where middle C is inexplicably 50% louder than all the other notes.
Is it playable? Sure, but it's gonna annoy you every time you strike that key.
> no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done
I guess it just depends on your standards.
I used my $200 free fable 5.1 credits to build a WhatsApp sticker maker, it created a version I was not happy with, but it burned the 200 in one sitting. Node.js app, vue frontend, etc.
I didn't used the project a lot since I kind of hate it on how much was spend.
Last week I used just a little bit of my $20 pro account to build a replacement with rust end to end, just to gain some experience with the rust hype. Very happy with the result, not perfect but snappier, and even better: a single executable, I no longer need to fire up a backend and front service separately.
What model did you use for the rust rewrite? Opus 5.5? I mean it seems pretty crazy that you had such different results.
Yes, Opus 5.5 with high effort for planning. Audit the plan with another Opus session, fix inconsistencies. Then implement with Sonnet 5.5.
I use Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 both on Medium to produce apps in Rust/Tauri all day every day on a $20 Pro sub, and absolutely these two models do a great job with that stack. I rarely run out of weekly credits, unless I use Opus 5.5 on high or ultra code. Medium does the job 99% of the time. Fable is good, but it'll never be as good as Opus when well prompted and with some iteration. I see Fable as a preview of what the next model will be able to do, but it's really not a good production model unless you have a lot of cash to burn.
I am not convinced with Fable capabilities. I think Fable is for lazy people with a lot of money, but still, a skill-able person can out run fable with the $20 pro account.
Ignoring all the positives & negatives surrounding this technology for a minute, this is an amazing outcome for the kids.
I don't know, when every kid has had 3 custom made games offered for their birthday, won't they just get bored? Obviously through our lenses this seems awesome because that's something we would have dreamed of, but we would have dreamed of it because it seemed impossible.
Then you take them outside and go play some sports.
You can teach them woodworking. Teach them how to ride a dirtbike. Teach them to make short films with their friends.
This is just a new option you know have the opportunity to provide. Every other hobby doesn't just disappear. That's straight decel mindset.
I guess we will see, it's hard to predict how all this will change society.
There's zero need to predict anything. As long as you provide value, and get better at providing value in the context of your environment, what's there to worry about?
Value is based on offer and demand, this may have less value in the future. What's there to worry about? Quite a lot I'd say, but that's not really the subject. I was just wondering if this would be as cool 10 years from now as it is now. I don't have answers, only questions.
>As long as you provide value, and get better at providing value in the context of your environmen
There is more to life than "providing value", nor does "providing value" make you immune from externalities.
Kid gets bored of gaming and AI? Tragedy! ;)
Agreed. Could you imagine? Those kids must have been so stoked!
Though, now they will never stop asking for more and more. OOP may have opened Pandora's box. :)
Give a kid a fable one-shot and you'll occupy him for a day, teach a kid to use fable and claude code and he'll realize how fast $100 magically disappears. :)
Honestly though, this is amazing for those kids.
>this is an amazing outcome for the kids.
How?
I don't see why we want to encourage children to outsource their creativity and problem solving to AI. And no, prompting is neither creative nor problem solving.
its insane, to actually get a custom game made for you for your birthday, that you enjoyed? wow... never thought id see this happen.
Positive little kiddo gets more screentime!!!! Yaaaaaayyy!!!!! Negatives: we either are annihilated by AI or enslaved by technocratic feodalism living in a worse conditions than 1800s mine workers. Uau
I'm thinking of the scene from Zoolander where Mugatu dresses up as Little Cletus to advocate for child labor.
Sounds pretty balanced!
[dead]
Not really, one of the joys of being a kid was forming your own "studio" and making games for game jams and stuff. Being able to one shot stuff really destroys the fun.
Kids? Forget the kids. This is awesome for everybody. I'm busy making 'adult games' (not that sort) that I always wanted to make, but lacked the artistic/sound/etc competence to do so. And while I hope to make a buck off them, I don't even really care. Even if somehow they failed, in the end I'd have stuff that I wanted but always lacked certain skills to complete.
I don't think people are yet appreciating how much LLMs are going to change the world, especially not the doomers. People are just jamming the present into the future, with greater efficiencies. But it's nonsense. The cost of cognitive work will approach $0 which is going to send the raw value of cognitive output to something close to $0.
So the 'winners' will be whoever fills the resultant vacuum in the economy. That will probably be a mixture of social, physical, entertainment, and other such domains. But it's all so hard to predict. We've lived our entire lives in a completely agrarian society, and we're seeing the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It's easy to predict super-farms, but those aren't going to be the 'real' winners.
Have you published the games anywhere? Would love to see what you've made.
The 'winners' will be the holders of capital, same as always, but it will be giga-gasoline on the fire. The rest of us will be dancing monkies for the owner class if we're lucky.
> This is awesome for everybody
...except people who actually enjoy games and want high quality games to play, of course.
Down here in reality, platforms like Steam are being absolutely flooded with generic, ugly, low-quality AI-generated games, which are not only drowning out the human-made games people actually want to play and making it impossible to find them, but are also preventing them from being sold entirely in some cases due to human reviewers not being able to keep up with the pace of new game submissions[0].
So, thanks for your contribution to that, I guess.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valve-admits-its-run...
The game from this article is quite fun and was literally a one-shot from a relatively brief prompt. I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality. Generic? Sure, but that applies to nearly all games anyhow. With all barriers to development coming down obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems. The review system (and meta-systems like getting your game to streamers, your own reputation, etc) still works well to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there seems to be no reason to yet expect such to stop working well.
In the end the biggest winner in all of this are going to be the players, due to competition. That competition will both bring down prices and bring up the minimum standard of quality for a major success.
> I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality.
I would. Maybe our standards for quality are different, but I'm willing to bet that if you showed this to a bunch of people who actually play games regularly as a hobby and have some standards for them, they would most likely agree that, even ignoring the obvious "AI look", a simple 2D game that can't even pull off natural-looking walking animations could never be considered anything but low quality.
> obviously you're going to get much more slop, but you're also going to get many more gems
This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at Steam's most recent Next Fest - it featured over 8000 games, twice as many as the last one, the vast majority of which being low effort AI generated games. Yet the number of gems that rose to the top was not higher than before. If anything, it was lower, as most players simply gave up looking after having to scroll through hundreds of AI games. Such games can never be "gems", no matter how much you try prompting them to be.
Did you have fun playing the game? Because I'd argue that if you showed this game to bunch of 'real gamers' as you're effectively concocting here, their metric would be the answer to that question, rather than seeing if they could find a technical flaw. Because in the end all that matters for a game is fun, and this game certainly scored well on that metric for me, and I suspect the vast majority of people.
Do you think they had fun? Did you read their comment?
Definitely. The reason I ask is because right now if you go through this thread there seems to be about a 100% correlation between people who are down on the game and those who are down on everything LLM. If this was 'published' 3 years ago there'd be nothing but praise, and it's not because the beat-em-up genre radically changed in those 3 years.
Games are subject to taste, but I think there are also objective elements. And this game just objectively feels and plays great, which is a remarkable achievement for an LLM, because it's a genre where it's easy to get things that look right but don't feel right. For instance Sacred Citadel is a game that was made by a studio with over a decade of experience, published by a publisher with decades of experience, and it's worse than this game - much worse. It got the look right, but it felt/played terrible.
The fact that a single guy can casually one-shot games dramatically better than what passed for a [relatively] big studio title a decade ago is testament to where we're at. And I think that's freaking some people out. I suppose that freak out is reasonable from one perspective, but from another it's just shaking your fist at the clouds. Even if all LLM advances stopped today, what we've already unleashed is already way more than enough to change the game forever, and things are never going back to how they were. And, of course, we're not stopping today.
I think you have the converse effect as well; people who are overly llm-pilled are often completely uncritical.
I hadn't tried the game since I was on my phone when I wrote this comment, but now having played the game, it was exceedingly boring to the point I don't get why you're trying to convince people that they're lying about how fun the game is. It's just not interesting!
Then it's likely that beat-em-up isn't the genre for you, because this is a very solid entry in the genre. If you've ever played a bad beat-em-up you'd be able to see the strengths more clearly. A huge thing is that this game feels like it has weight in the attacks, and that's really hard to do. That's a subtle mixture of responsiveness, sound effects, animation (not just movement but also text/visual fx/flashes/etc), and more. And the hit boxes seem to be pretty much perfect, which is another aspect many games miss on. Then there's lots of nice subtle touches - invincibility frames, juggling, bosses with phases/knockdowns/cueing, and much more.
Nothing revolutionary, but a bunch of different parts all working together well that are generally implemented at a very good to excellent level. That's way better than most can say. Of course the walking animation, like the one guy mentioned is hilariously bad, but fixing that's also just a prompt away. Oddly enough I didn't even notice it when playing.
I find it funny you talk about how great the animation is, before immediately conceding that the walking animation of the main character (perhaps the most important animation) is "hilariously bad".
Look, this is obviously from a technical perspective, totally mind-blowing! Like I never in a million years would have guessed this could be possible 5 years ago. That being said...it's still not very fun or interesting. I think you are mistaking that mind-blowing feeling with the actual end product being fun.
In game (or UI) development animation isn't just what you might think of with things like moving. I tried to allude to this in the parenthesis, but any sort of transitionary state for something is an animation. The walking animation is irrelevant in terms of making the combat feel 'weighty'. I imagine most people didn't even notice it - I certainly didn't, even though it's very much a 'once you see it, you can't unsee it' thing.
But when making a combat game there's a million subtle things going on that the game gets very right to actually make it feel like the hits have weight - the flashes, text, and other aspects all have subtle animations in them that make them feel good the hitbox triggers at exactly the right moment meaning it's a tight fit, and much more. These are things many human studios screw up. It's really hard to make combat feel good, and this game does it.
For some context, Streets of Rage 4 [1] was a very well received beat-em-up. So that's pretty much the top tier for the genre. And yeah it's obviously better than this game, but the gap is not huge, and that's borderline absurd when considering that this was a one-shot LLM generated game. And that gap could easily be closed with some refinement from a single developer - in this case our rando uncle. Interesting times ahead.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLvbwNAFGRQ
>The reason I ask is because right now if you go through this thread there seems to be about a 100% correlation between people who are down on the game and those who are down on everything LLM.
That "correlation" is a proxy for the people who don't want to consume low effort garbage.
Yet you still posted your comment.
What are you twelve?
>I certainly wouldn't call it ugly or low quality
Just from looking at the screenshots, the art style is wildly inconsistent across sprites which leaves the "game" without any visual identity.
There goes the neighborhood, amirite? Who let all of this riffraff in?
Perhaps other sites beckon.
> I don't think people are yet appreciating how much LLMs are going to change the world, especially not the doomers
Read that sentence out loud. Slowly.
Including the doomers! A metaphor I am constantly drawn to is that of somebody living in an agrarian society just before the Industrial Revolution. A 'doomer' perspective would see 'super farms', mass reduction in labor as such, and then basically those super farms going on to sit on thrones of gold while everybody else withered away.
In reality, those super farms did come to pass, yet their share of the economy began to approach 0. And that was fully predictable! Because when the price of producing food plummets, the relative value of food also plummets. The exact same thing will happen with cognitive work. The winners will not be Anthropic/Amazon/etc. As the cost of cognitive work approaches $0, the relative value of cognitive work will also approach $0.
So this is going to completely revolutionize the economic equilibrium in society. Trying to translate what this means right now is like trying to predict the impact of the Industrial Revolution from somebody who spent their entire life living in agrarian society - in other words, probably impossible. But in general the winners will not be those providing cognitive work, but those building currently unimaginable things on top of it.
340M tokens is like $5k?
Edit: more like $300, because it was mostly cache reads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50434388
I haven't used Claude in a while, what does the billing for Fable look like these days?
Last I heard they were billing it per token, even on the subscriptions? Or did they change it again?
Edit 2: Fable seems to be included in Max and Ultra but not Pro (aside from occasional promotions)
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15424964-claude-fable...
Did the author say if he was using Max or Ultra or something else?
I appreciate the token breakdown, but how much would this cost in money? Chatgpt estimated $400 to $600, but I don't have enough knowledge of token pricing to know if that's accurate at all.
Yeah, it would have been expensive via the API; the tokens were free when I tested it, but it would have been something like $300 USD for the Claude tokens at Fable 5.2's API prices.
Fable is $8/$40, with cache reads at $0.2 and cache writes at $10, so you simply calculate based on the info from the blog:
> about 320M tokens read from cache, 19M written to cache, 1M output
320 * $0.2 + 19 * $10 + 1 * $40 = $294
Vibecoders don't use api. This whole game is less than 20% of the max plan's weekly quota.
It’s impressive, but it’s not really his. All the details aren’t quite right, some of the designs Claude altered (e.g. guy holding one knife instead of two). It’s good enough for him, but if I asked Claude to make something based on my idea, it wouldn’t be good enough for me.
I'm pretty sure the same exact thing could happen if you hired a team to make it from child drawings. You could ask Claude or that team to add back in the two knives.
Yes, but there are too many small mistakes, every one requires 2-90 minutes to correct (this particular example on the shorter end, the longer end for complex mechanics); then the model fixes them not quite right, and sometimes breaks something else.
The best art, the writer is the artist, the director is the producer, etc. or the entire team is exceptionally talented.
>every one requires 2-90 minutes to correct
You can do a playthrough and just speak to the model as you play pointing out anything you want changed and it can spawn an agent swarm to fix it all in parallel pretty rapidly, or live if you have a good live coding setup. It doesn't need them requested one at a time.
> The best art, the writer is the artist, the director is the producer, etc. or the entire team is exceptionally talented.
If the child has to be the implementer then we're doing something else than making it from a child's concept and drawings.
This is both cute but also a bit sad in terms of game stylization, I guess these generic AI designs could become so normal to the youth that in the next 10-20 years it just appears everywhere
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict the opposite.
I think “the youth” are going to grow up with a Cambrian explosion of styles, mashups, callbacks, revivals, etc.
Right now a vibecoded game just uses the generic style. But you could easily imagine the kid saying to Claude “rebuild this game but in the style of that old show [Samurai Jack | Ren and Stimpy | … ]. We are so early in the tech curve, market penetration is still very low, and the “creator-years” in the medium is tiny; it’ll be 10x in a year if not more.
AI is amazing at style transfer, and so there’s a huge payoff for exploring and learning references to existing artists.
(I also think copyright will die pretty soon for similar reasons, that’s a separate take though.)
I'm kind of hoping that the youth will recognize that stuff that can be made with AI is just nothing special anymore, and find something that is (or still is) special. I don't know what that is, maybe something that AI can't do on a fundamental level (maybe something physical?).
(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)
The thing I’ve noticed is that if anyone can do something, many will. And then, like always, the challenge will be in doing something unique.
What if they find it special because they build memories with the AI games they play? Is that something you hope doesn't happen?
>What if they find it special because they build memories with the AI games they play? Is that something you hope doesn't happen?
I hope the kids learn that putting in work to create something by hand has value beyond the result itself. I hope they try making art, games, books by hand, and learn from the experience of failing, and revel in the joy of success. I hope that through years of doing this over and over they start to develop their own unique perspective on life, and then contribute that perspective back to the world through art.
don't really think there will be anything - this is an entity that can learn anything (even physical things) faster than any human or the collective of humanity for that matter.
I've found analog photography to be a rewarding hobby, and although an LLM can help me refresh my memory, the overall experience is certainly not something that an LLM can replace.
Yeah, it can "learn" anything except how to have a fulfilling emotional connection
sure. so we'll spend the rest of our lives dating and chatting?
anything that doesn't explicitly involve interaction with a human is RLable. frankly even those things are as well.
If you "automate human interaction and connection" you simply no longer have those things. Which, from the top down, seems to be a goal, to isolate people from one another, make them 100% disposable cogs. As this chick in the streets of Paris said in some YT short when asked about "AI", fuck that, humans want to be together, you can't beat that. And why would we even want to... it's easier, and more sensible, for a person to seek help or get over themselves, than for them to drain all humanity out of the rest of humanity just so they themselves can blend in without having to change. Fix the root problems, rather than spending such huge amounts of resources and intellectual integrity for workarounds that, at the end of the day, are kind of sad and cringe.
We also connect to people through art and play. So if we automate those things, then I guess we'll spend the rest of our lives living unsatisfying experiences.
anything that can be automated will be automated.
That was already happening before AI, with in-house game engines dying off and all converging on the same quasi-realistic style and often the exact same assets.
Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.
Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.
Or the small Battle Wagon around the height of a child quintupling in size the next frame. Kiddos having fun is the main mission though :)
that kind of stuff happened routinely in the 70s-90s in mecha anime franchises that were designed/drawn/animated/produced by large teams of adults..
Mobile Suit Gundam and Evangelion are both notorious for this. Is Eva-01 40m or 100m tall? If you trust the technical literature then you'd be forced to deduce that the tanks in some of the scenes are squirrel-sized -- and these decisions and scenes are produced by committees.
I don’t recall anything like what we are talking about in a video game but I will take your word for it.
You can change the stylization with LLMs. I think what we're seeing is simply any barriers to code/design/art/music/etc completely going away.
But those barriers going away now means that the starting point is much closer to where the finish line used to be. Like a few years ago this would have been an upper tier beat-em-up. I think we're still early enough in the window that I'd still call this upper tier, but the reality is that it's also now something that an uncle can vibe code for his nephew over a weekend.
In general I think this is going to be very good for everybody, but it's going to completely destroy the software as a problem-solving industry, and make the software as entertainment industry much more competitive.
This is extremely far from upper tier.
Barriers going away means you get a lot more at the bottom and middle of the pack, but a game is more than the sum of its parts, and as long as LLMs do what you tell them, you need to have real talent to make good games.
Was this game fun for you? For me it certainly was, and ultimately that's all that matters to me. And that's why I said I'd classify it as a top-tier game because IMO most games that get released, slop and 'professional' alike, simply aren't fun. Even on these forums there's plenty of people posting thinly veiled hopes of going viral along the lines of 'I spent 5 years to fail with my game' when as lovingly hand-crafted as the games may have been - they invariably just weren't any fun to play!
In any case, it being "extremely far" from the top would just imply I should be in endless bliss with the current state of things since if I find this game quite fun then higher tier beat-em-ups would be just the most incredible thing I've ever played in my life. That has certainly not been my experience.
I found it stiff and weird. The "art" is screaming Saturday morning cartoons which I successfully evaded since even as a kid. TMNT aren't nostalgic for me because by that time I was like 12 and didn't even think to interact with that baby stuff, and I wouldn't have dreamed it would be put on the test by adults later. And art and charm is all that could have saved this, because as a game, if you replaced the art with wireframe hitboxes, it's just nothing.
Double Dragon I have fond memories of, and this is why this one bored me after 30 seconds, because it's so meh compared to even the worst game of that type of that era that I played.
> Like a few years ago this would have been an upper tier beat-em-up.
For a 48 hour game jam, perhaps.
This style reminds me of those mobile game ads with helpless characters that need YOUR help not to freeze or something. Probably the exaggerated facial expressions.
This nephew game is indistinguishable from 90s arcade game styling.
I was alive in the nineties. This game is radically different. For one, characters used both their legs when they walked in the 90s.
The things I noticed:
- punch and kick don't seem to have differences in effect, just animation - bosses don't have obvious gimmicks to beat them
But the main take-away for me is that this takes me back to computing in my youth, where you could dream up a project and bash it out in a few days. It wouldn't be polished, it wouldn't be perfect, but it would be yours. It would do what you wanted. Computing was ours, it didn't yet belong to big corporations controlling what we could do and how we could do it.
Projects like this give me hope that a new generation will experience that. Aiden won't ever forget this game, even if it's nothing special to you or me. Aiden won't ever forget that feeling of imagining a change, and having it happen. The price for it would've been somewhere around $300-$500, so not exactly broadly accessible - making AI efficient enough to run cheaply should be the main goal of humanity, but we're letting computing get locked up by a few rich sociopaths once again.
Related: I don't see how any kid is going to have the motivation and patience to learn how to program a game like this from scratch now when you can just conjure it up with an LLM.
Why would I sit through years of education? The number of competent programmers is going to drop significantly, but also, people are not going to learn the patience and commitment necessary to do hard things, which is part of learning to program.
I've thought a bit about this. It probably depends on whether the notion that AI can actually replace programmers is hype or fact. If it's hype, we might well see a decline in the number of competent programmers in response to a reduced market (though, IMO, the people who respond to market signals about a profession are rarely the best talents). If it's fact, we'll definitely see a decline, and that'll be appropriate.
But for whether a kid will have the motivation and patience to learn how it all works depends, as it always did, on the kid. I started out typing in BASIC programs from magazines. If I weren't who I am, that might have been the extent of it - typing programs in gets replaced with loading from diskette, but no curiosity about how they work ever kicks in. Certainly kids born just a tiny bit later than me cut their teeth on machines where you never saw source code except by choice, and still got the urge to figure out how it all works and to make it do what you wanted.
Plus, of course, I wouldn't, as a child, teenager, or young adult, have ever paid the equivalent then of $300 to have someone else write something for me. That's a rich man's trade-off. I still wouldn't today: maybe I could spare that sort of money but ingrained habits that say I can make that myself die hard.
(And maybe Aiden gets an interest in game design sparked, rather than in programming!)
I quickly dove into the game and then got lost as I couldn't exit and had to spam keyboard to see the controls. The menu refers to "Punch" but it wasn't obvious what key that is (and it wasn't "p"!).
I see that ENTER pauses, but may I suggest also making ESC and/or P pause. And then the pause screen showing or linking the keyboard controls and an exit path.
(Caveat: I'm not much of a gamer so maybe the current controls are standard? Anyway, I feel like it could be more inviting to casuals with something like the above.)
Good call. I haven't really tested it much on the keyboard - we mostly used the PS4 controllers, but I'll add these fixes.
I think it's a super cool thing to play around that I definitely wish I had as a kid. But I kind of miss that magic that came from playing old retro games in the 90s, where the game would give you the scaffolding of a magic imaginary world, and a few pixels were enough for your imagination to fill the remaining part. It's crazy how immersive that felt.
So in that sense, this seems to go in the opposite direction.
The prose is weird in this post and I can't nail down the relationship between Aiden and Lex here. Throughout, the post says Aiden is the nephew, but then refers to "our dog, Doggo."
> There were to be 5 selectable heroes based on the family - including our dog, Doggo
Now that could just mean Aiden is living with Lex, but later the post says:
> He gave me notes on what was missing, which I half-agreed to take on, but I was also kinda hoping he'd forget - I really didn't have time to make a whole game. Unfortunately, he did not forget. Every time I saw him, he asked about the game.
"Every time I saw him" makes me think they AREN'T living together.
So...who's dog is it??
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/family
> I must admit I never tested this with Opus 5.5, so I'm not sure whether this was possible before Fable 5.2 rolled around.
Since somewhere around Opus 4+ it's been really good enough to do these things, but 4.6 was the most pivotal version since a 1 million token context window can allow a model to fit so much "in its head" basically.
What I wonder reading that would be how much more effort to actually port it to the PlayStation, or whatever game console. I recently asked my local AI to make an ebook reader for my Gameboy pocket ;) I just think about all the cross collaboration of devices for stuff we can only imagine.
This is awesome, but I don't get the repeated use of the term "one-shot". There were many human-driven requests and iterations, and this is illustrated in the blog post.
This really was more like a normal person had access to a game developer team (with artists and musicians) and had a custom game built based on interviews and playtesting.
Thanks for pointing this out. Before reading, I had assumed that the author was using "one-shot" in the standard vibecoding way, meaning "one conversation turn". The title is slightly misleading. But he did have an enjoyable, playable game after a single prompt—but I think that prompt may have included the earlier, boring version of the game?
I think his results are fantastic. I only object to "one-shot". He could just say he used AI to build something very personal and entertaining for his kid/family. That is already a success.
I disagree. Fable didn't make any mistakes and created a completed game with zero guidance, so it's a one-shot. If additional requests come up afterwards, it doesn't detract from the initial execution.
That is my definition of one shot as well. I consider the app I made "one shotted". But by that, I mean each feature is a single shot. The app is a collection of over a hundred of those shots..and counting.
https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...
One shot should mean a single prompt. Any follow up prompts are no longer one shot. Two shot, three shot, etc
I noticed this recently with Opus 5.5: you can tell it to "make this more fun" for a game project and it... makes it more fun.
It's neat (if unsurprising) that Fable 5.2 has this ability as well.
My loose testing shows other models aren't quite as good at this yet. Here's the prompt "Build a mobile-friendly three.js game where a mouse has to hide from a cat" by Opus 5.5 Extra - https://claude.ai/artifact/RRyEndXLSPQbcig3BgzgCZ - and by GPT-6 Extra High: https://squeak-and-seek-mouse-1027.simonw.chatgpt.site/ - the Claude one is a better game, even though they look very similar at first glance.
Update: took it about 40 minutes but here's Fable 5.2 Extra's attempt at the same prompt: https://claude.ai/artifact/Agsqbng2MnkTPAU67it87o
I wrote about Opus 5.5's sense of fun in more detail here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/
It's crazy how even the intro text to the Fable 5.2 Extra's game still reeks of AI. Like, wow, the models can make a game that almost makes sense, but still can't write text that sounds remotely like a human was involved!
Kids are now coming of age with the software equivalent of a Star Trek replicator. LLMs are going to radically change the cadence and workflow for the production of computer games, no doubt. When you can turn out a professional product based on little more than doodles and some text prompts, it rather devalues the historical effort of bringing a unique game to the marketplace.
I rather hope that the novelty of generating this kind of toy wears off.
Year is 4098.
You prompt: " Sea facing villa with walls having 90% glass ratio, cozy basement, pool on ground and upper level. Delegate to a sub agent and when done, build a supersonic jet on my rooftop to fly me there." and all that molecular nano assembly happens in 19 hours.
In that kind of abundance - poor I don't know but would anyone be any richer? Would anything mean anything?
Everything only ever means what you make it mean to you.
Meaning builders usually fare better than meaning seekers.
Short story inspired by Culture series of Iain M. Banks uses at some point example of building a house in the afternoon.
The happiness belongs to people that to the wuestion about meaning can cheerfully respond with "I've got a patio!".
https://youtu.be/-aRw80iPvC4?is=HaTU48bJUHlhh4yl
someone still needs to own the land to build that on
This is phenomenal. Great work, dude. Man the fun my brother and I would have had in the old days with this stuff. It looks absolutely fantastic.
"Great work dude"
I no longer read or watch accounts of these models one-shotting things (unless you tell me it one-shot a differential AES cryptanalysis, or maybe an entire healthcare system with billing and radiology viewing, compression and annotation)
All these frontier models are capable of creating these amazing things. It's just reality. If it's in one-shot, it just means there's been more RL in that area, more reasoning is being spent in certain places, but overall you can get the same result without spending $300 in tokens if you feel like waiting a week or two for your claude subscription to reset.
It is very impressive though, and the implications on what a smaller version of this model can do is very exciting (aka what I expect Opus 5.6 or 6.0 will be)
It’s a lot of fun to build games. I started building little pieces of one[0], then a builder for it, then a story, then a video recorder. And there’s a lot more iterations in the roadmap. It’s great as a creative outlet
It’s not one shotted anymore or course. But in the process, it’s also cool one-shotting new features or experimenting with variations of things very quickly
Eventually it becomes similar to any longer lasting project. Complexity starts creeping in, maybe technical debt, and managing everything to keep it consistent/coherent slowly starts taking most of the time. And I’m not maintaining it for real active users, which would also become some other type of project
0: https://id-le.com
Reminds me a bit of Little Fighter 2.
Oh man, that takes me back. My friends and I used to edit the sprites for the game in MSPaint! Fun times.
you can't be serious, the animations are completely off here.
I don’t think many people will play a game if you told it is written by AI.
The duality of man:
- call stuff that isn't AI "AI" to make more money
- call stuff that is AI "not AI" to make more money
My intro to game dev as an 10 year old was learning to use my cousins C64, writing some BASIC text based games. It was pure joy discovering programming that way.
It is utterly depressing to think that kids will never take that path again. Instead, we will get pulling the slot machine lever, zero skill, zero effort, nothing gained.
"Creating something" now means typing a few text sentences in to some prompt and paying money to these companies that want to essentially make humanity redundant. Instant gratification, no hard earned skills at the end. Compare this to the kid building something themselves with scratch, improving on it, moving on to Godot etc.
The AI boosters in here saying how amazing this is are being incredibly short sighted.
Anyone doing this with their kids: please take a moment to think about the implications of what you are doing. Even explain to your kids what an LLM is, the moral implications (massivley capital funded companies have stolen so much content to make this possible and now want to sell it back to us) and the importance of effort and learning real skills.
Creating something that other people will want to play is going to be hardly ‘zero skill’ going forward. I would argue the level of skill that’s going to be required to do this is going to be either at the same level or even much much higher…
Have you ever tried to create a game to the standard of the one featured in the article? There is no way the required level of skill is the same.
And how many people actually want to play games to the standard of the one featured in the article?
The creator's family enjoyed it, and that's great, but it's not going to become an indie hit any time soon.
Anyone who wants their game to be enjoyed by a lot of people is going to need to put in a lot of effort. It's basic competition really.
Not denying that- what Im saying is the effort with AI is several magnitudes less than without AI, and skips the learning of any actual skills.
"Actual" skills?
Skills that, unfortunately, are likely to become obsolete very soon.
Taking the logical conclusion of your argument - we should also be teaching our kids how to fashion stone tools, because by moving straight to machined tools they are also missing out on "actual" skills...
Ironically, a kid that does fashion a tool out of stone will learn the skill of toolmaking deeper (in some respects, all other things being equal) than a kid that doesn't. A few years ago I created my own computer out of logic chips, this taught me a heck of a lot as well about how computer hardware and low level software works under the hood, more so than most of my software engineer peers, but I am under no illusions that doing this was required to be productive in the modern conception of this role, or society at large...
You can produce the same level of output with several magnitudes less effort, or you can produce output of several magnitudes greater quality with the same amount of effort. Or anywhere in between, or beyond.
And if you're putting in effort, you're going to end up learning skills, though they're certainly not the same as for doing everything by hand.
It takes effort, skill, and dedication to make something that's better than the flood of cheap stuff (slop) available out there. That's going to remain true with AI, it just plays out differently.
I played for about 10 minutes and I swear - this was fun. There are a bunch of bugs to polish: collision detection is sometimes weird, you can catch enemies at the end of the map and just beat them up forever, adding tons of score, Pudding's animations feel quite off, and Stage 3 is VERY hard. However, the game still looks and feels quite polished. I loved the music as well. FWIW, I'm glad I'm not a game developer these days.
The section "The drawings and the game" is amazing.
When I was about 5, I saw this machine where art would go in, and much more detailed art would come out.
I must have been confused about how it worked (I think it was just a badge laminator and I had been confused about the inputs and outputs)... but it occurs to me that we actually have that now.
The magical machine my mistaken mind dreamed up as a kid is actually real now, and that's nuts.
I tried the game and in some seconds noticed I can kick the enemies forever if I put them close to the left corner. I'm feeling now that I'm the AI exploiting bugs.
Some parts of this seemed cool, and others made me terribly sad. I am not sure how to express it beyond - I really think inserting hulk as a character was a mistake as you don't have any chance of having intellectual property rights to the character.
On the other hand, it's very much like you photocopied some comic books, cut them out, and did a little home theater thing with them (only with even less effort on your part).
I agree with you. It’s cool that this tech exists and that something this complicated can be something that regular people have access to.
On the other hand, I’ve got two issues with it:
1. The result gives off the AI slop vibe. It’s like the 2026 version of bitmoji. You can immediately tell this is AI art, AI music, AI game.
2. Art made with AI always feels gross. It feels like substituting creativity. At least when you use AI to make a CRUD app or automate some tedious process there’s an excuse. The time spent doing this could have been spent actually making art. Maybe it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good or complicated art, but it would have been authentic.
The kids don't mind, and when the generation grows up with this, they won't mind. Unc will be sitting shouting at the clouds about some IP or art style, story as old as time.
Unc can be right about some things, and sometimes younger generations regret certain aspects of progress.
They won't have time to mind, they'll be too busy performing manual labor in service of their digital feudal lords.
Reminds me of how I can probably make the Team Rocket playable terror cell game I always imagined without needing to worry about its economic viable or liability
Thanks
> On the other hand, it's very much like you photocopied some comic books, cut them out, and did a little home theater thing with them
I mean, to be honest, that seems like a fun craft for a thing to do with kids!
I share your general ambivalence though. The generic openai-looking art is kind of gross. At the same time, iterating with a child so they have to think about feedback, how could this be better, what do you like, what do you not like - that's a meta-engagement that's probably positive at some age brackets.
Who cares about IP rights for a one off game you made for your nephew? Are you worried your nephew won't be able to publish it on Steam? I could imagine reasons this could make you sad, but disney's IP isn't one of them.
I understand you, I tried to give a huge tasks and getting fun with one shot result. But actually more interesting how long this process worked and how many tokens spent, because in GPT you can simply add target and GPT will work even 1 year non stop until reach this target. But I got what you talking about, but still time and amount of tokens is more informative information.
I have to say that this is amazing, a while ago I have tried making web games through AI but the capabilities were enough for simple games but failed for multi-level. Getting something like this with all images+audio is something I wasn't aware that could be doable in one shot.
I definitely need to try this.
I’m waiting until I can give AI a link to a Macintosh garden game and ask it to be reimplemented in the web browser.
"find all documents, descriptions, walk through of game XYZ, generate a consistent and declarative document that another agent would read to recreate the game without using existing IP or protected data, do not reuse art but describe general details with the ability to extend and add specifics later. focus on functionality first, then mechanics and then later art and gameplay. generate a 10 page document that will follow MVP to Production quality gameplay"
give it a link if you want
Based on what I've seen, there's a good chance this would work today (though Anthropic recently added some restrictions around this sort of prompt) -- try it!
I had ChatGPT write a webapp to teach my kids letters. It has profiles, fun interactive games and keeps track of progress in a database.
It crazy how fast you can iterate if the building blocks (db, k8s cluster, authentik) are already present and you know what you want from the model.
You used k8s for a webapp to teach your kids letters?
k8s is the shizz (for a personal CICD pipeline in a home lab)
This is really cool. This would've been a dream for me when I was young.
One bit of critique of the Fable generated app here is that even though it technically runs on a mobile browser (Brave) it doesn't seem to be actually playable on it beyond playing the intro music.
Total cost was around $4k USD?
That’s a lot of fun. I’ve been also designing my own game. Testing fable right now
Without reading any of your blog, I went immediately to play the game and my very first though was, "Woah, this is just like the ninja turtles arcade game."
Then I read, the prompt; well done!
This looks great, and I was more impressed with the drawing to game image section, reminds me of my own childhood drawing.
does anyone else worry about future generations growing up on ai slop? because i wasn't until reading this post. now i'm terrified.
No.
I have been slopping out games for years now. The graphics don't matter unless the gameplay does. The gameplay doesn't matter if the game is too hard or too easy.
The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.
This is a great comment.
I've seen people turn away from interesting games because of the difficulty.
I've also seen people turn away from genuinely fun games because they didn't like the graphics though.
I worry about them never having the satisfaction of working hard on something and truly creating something that is their own. I definitely sound like a boomer (even though I'm a millennial) when I say this but I totally believe that limitations breed creativity. The AI here is just looking at stuff artists from the 90s laboured t create for Arcades and made its own slop version. But then again, one could argue that Mario Paint let you create slop too back in the 90s. Yet, at least with Mario Paint you had to actually hustle quite a bit arranging pixels or musical notes to have something. There was effort and difficulty with overcoming a learning curve and that effort paid off with the creation of something you could be proud of even if it wasn't professional. But here, on the other hand, even a badly generated prompt still gets you a lot.
There's like, no challenge. Reminds me of that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" where a bank robber dies after getting shot by the popo five-o and he is greeted by a man (angel like guy) who takes him to a cool mansion or house where he fulfills everyone one of the guy's wishes: women, money, gambling, etc. etc. And he gambles all day long and never loses but after a while he gets bored and then depressed that he always wins and there's no effort and no risk, and then tells the angel dude that he wonders why he was put in Heaven and that he thinks he doesn't belong there and wants to go to the "other place" only for the angel guy to tell him he is in fact in "the other place".
Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.
So in a sense, I don't worry about generations not necessarily having hardships like us, cause, look at us, we don't write in assembly code like other folks had to do. But on the other hand I do worry that AI is basically removing all manner of human touch and the satisfaction that comes with suffering to generate that human touch.
I suppose there will be suffering later when you want to polish things, but it will be a different, more frustrating kind of suffering. The kind where you don't know what the hell the LLM did and don't even know where to begin.
Interesting. I hadn't heard of that twilight zone episode.
My mum liked to tell me, when she was little, she imagined having a magic wand, that she could wave and get anything she wanted. Almost immediately she realized that life would become pointless.
I'm not really sure if that's true. For starters, having too much scarcity and adversity can also make life pointless. You just can't do anything you want. Maybe there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
For me the most satisfying part of projects has always been overcoming difficulty. Although I had a slightly unpleasant version of that lately, where the difficulty turned out to be a hundred times worse than I anticipated, took years instead of weeks, and by the time I finished overcoming it, AI could make a better project than mine in a matter of minutes...
There's a story I always come back to in my mind, there was a story of a man in the mountains in India, who spent 20 years carving a passage through the mountain — by hand — so that his village would have easier access to the city and the hospital.
It's a very heroic story of course, and you have to respect the effort and dedication... but surely it would have been better for all the people who needed the hospital, if he had just been given a bit of TNT instead.
I watch a show on local TV about a guy who bought an old farm, and does everything himself: Fixing up buildings and tools, plowing, planting, harvesting and processing produce, raising animals, and so on. He also mostly uses recycled material that he has lying around or can find somewhere for free. As you can imagine, a huge amount of work, and to top it off, he has decided to do most things by traditional methods, so he mostly uses hand tools, horses to pull the plough, stuff like that, which only adds to the amount of work and time spent.
I sometimes catch myself wanting to shout at the TV: Dude, just freaking use an electric saw, or buy a new wheel barrow (instead of repairing some old one found inside a brambles bush). You'd get to the goal so much easier, and could achieve all of your goals so much faster. But that's his entire deal: His goal is the process itself. He enjoys doing that kind of work. It's a bit of an epiphany. Kind of like that old Mexican fisherman story.
yeah it's a really interesting Twilight Zone episode.
And yeah there's definitely a sweet spot somewhere.
It's like when good tools make your job easier that's great. But a tool that does the whole job for you is weird if that's your vocation.
life is best with suffering, but not too much
the "utopia" where AI & robots will do everyone's jobs just sounds like hell to me. humans will adapt and find new challenges, either by finding things ai cannot do, or perhaps like a Butlerian Jihad. i don't think a wall-e scenario will last long.
The thing most people are missing is how the economics of automation change the economy. As the price of cognitive work approaches $0, the relative value of cognitive work will approach $0. People appreciate the former, but don't consider the latter.
A metaphor I like to use is somebody who's lived their entire life in an agrarian society seeing the Industrial Revolution imminently coming and trying to predict its effects. They'd be able to accurately predict 'super farms', but the relative economic value of those super farms rapidly trended towards $0 with the vacuum that the revolution created. It'll be the same thing here. The winners won't be people selling cognitive work, but the people building previously unimaginable things on top of that.
It's probably impossible to predict exactly what this means from here, in exactly the same way as somebody in our agrarian society could scarcely even begin to imagine what the Industrial Revolution would 'truly' entail. But I think a naive prediction would see a sharply increased value for stuff done in the real world, social type work, entertainment, and so forth. So one prediction would be that one big winner will be whoever can create cheap mass produced robotic shells to help bring the cognitive revolution to the real world. Even that will probably be seen as naive, but it's probably closer to the mark than expecting Amazon/Google/Anthropic/etc to end up ruling the world.
>The winners won't be people selling cognitive work, but the people building previously unimaginable things on top of that.
You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.
The white collar has had the WALL-E scenario for the past 50 years.
They are already growing up on slop. Look at brainrot and Roblox games, and YouTube shorts. This will fit right in with what they're used to. They won't even notice.
yeah thats true. i should have been terrified earlier.
Who says it has to stay slop? Nobody is forced to stop at the single, first iteration of something. They can see the outcome, play the game, and then iterate faster than any professional game dev studio could in the past.
Its funny that the same CS saying "garbage in garbage out" seems even more true in the AI modern day.
Remember 2025 when we thought future generations growing up on tiktok was going to be bad? Can't wait to see how 2027 will ruin society even more.
heck i remember before covid thinking that the generations growing up with social media were doomed. social media pales in comparison to what gen alpha is experiencing.
test scores are dropping while the curriculum becomes easier as well.
Heavy metal music. Television. Comic books. It's amazing children have lived through a century or two of new products that are so clearly out to destroy them.
Remember when shoes were invented? Our kids have such weak feet now. Truly technology is destroying their soles.
You registered an account called “slopinthebag” 9 months ago, but you weren’t worried about this until you read this post?
Most games and shows for kids have been slop since long before AI.
Every generation believes the next generation is growing up on slop.
There was no generation with AI slop access before.
So they get to make their own slop instead of say, watching three or four toy advertisements disguised as cartoons every Saturday morning.
I'd say they have it better now.
I think personalised AI gen tiktok is worse than saturday morning children's cartoons.
Maybe I'm crazy though idk.
I can sit in a group of people my age whom I've never met before and share reminiscences of some slop cartoon we all liked as kids. Sharing culture like this helps social bonding and helps create community, imo.
If everyone's having a personalized childhood I don't know if that will happen as much.
> Every generation believes the next generation is growing up on slop.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
I heard this attributed to Aristotle, but apparently it's a fabrication. That's too bad because the quote is hilarious. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go gobble up some dainties.
Just a small suggestion on the prompt. I usually also add something like "Bring in a critical Art Director, Animator, UX Expert, Staff Engineer. Don't release the game until they all agree it's AAA quality." I wonder if that would have helped with some of the issues/bugs others called out. I do this with Codex and it's been working really well and not using many tokens.
> Fable 5.2 one-shotted my nephew
:O
> 's dream game
:)
I prefer Aiden's drawings TBH
Would have been more sovl if it had used the original art. Actually, I think the first Spy Kids movie did that. (Had a child doodle in real life.)
> Make it one of the best games you can possibly make. You are a truly world-class game developer.
Top Jobs in 2027:
1. LLM glazer.
AI pixel art still looks awful I see
Is Pudding the dog (unlocked after beating the first boss) supposed to shrink anytime it jumps? I guess even Claude-turned-world-class-game-developer isn't immune to bugs. ;)
Honestly, setting all the oft-cited AI caveats aside, the end result is cute and perfectly serviceable as a game for the kids. I can't imagine how stoked they were about playing it.
speaking in a boring party-killer voice:
That's technically impressive, sure, and if the kid loved it I feel happy for him, but...
I personally got bored after a minute of playing that, because that felt like a classic game with a slick skin over it. And games that really capture attention usually feel novel, not "Super Mario but make it about Dario".
Currently "oh wow I'm in the game" has the novelty value, but I feel that in two years that would feel like telling Nano Banana "make me look like a princess". Everyone can do that and no one quite cares anymore.
But the bright side is, with that capabilities level, people who have novel and unusual game ideas can probably implement them much quicker and easier, too.
Ooooof the results here are rough. A very young child might find this charming, but I think it's kind of embarrassing. Like, the walk cycles alone are. Yeah...
To say nothing of ur word shaders, inconsistency in the characters, questionable gender stereotypes, etc.
This definitely tells me that AI definitely isn't there yet.
It's a one-shot. Iterate and you can make magic happen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiWKfq4niC8
When it gets there eventually (5-10 years??) it's gonna be pretty rough for the humans that used to do those things. Then again I suppose that applies to the rest of the economy as well.
This is a bizarre complaint. There's plenty to complain about with regards to you know, normalizing kids consuming AI content, giving a gift from a slop machine instead of something hand-made, etc. But come on. The game itself is insanely impressive for something generated in one prompt from a bunch of doodles (cool doodles, but still!) If a single human hobbyist dev created this in a few days we wouldn't call it "kind of embarrassing".
Of course we wouldn't. Because the humans have feelings.
If a human gamedev made this in a few days (pre-AI / assuming the AI slop artstyle didn't exist), and you think that the only reason people wouldn't call it embarrassing is to avoid hurting their feelings, you either have a vastly inflated idea of the average person's abilities or you're deluding yourself. Be real man.
It's not as good as Street Hassle on the Commodore 64. AGI.
I Googled it as I had never heard of that game, and it turned out that I knew it as Bop'n Rumble. Great game.
I played until I beat the first boss, then a little into Stage 2.
I don't mean to sound overly negative, but your nephew's dream game is a somewhat-generic beat em up like countless other games from the mid-90s? Also you can overlkill enemies and infinitely juggle them. Dunno if you want to file that as a bug. I got to 104 combo on a big guy before I stopped.
Finally, how long have you been playing guitar? I just got into it myself!
i button-mashed my way through the first level and, what can i say, this is kind of dream i have when i spend my days button-mashing my way through side scrollers.
when i was between about 6 and 8 years old, i used to have this same dream about travelling through space, feeling the tranquillity of the celestial orchestra, and then whizzing down to feel the speed at which they were actually moving from a completely different frame of reference.
there was a sense of fullness and emptiness at the same time, raw power but also serenity. as though everything was coming into being and going out of being at the same time.
i always woke up feeling mystified but full of wonder. I carried that sense of wonder with me through many days and it always came back to me when i looked up at the stars and felt myself on the edge of this sphere, zipping through space at hundreds of miles an hour, but only seeing the tiny twinkling of stars as evidence of this enormous cosmic play.
but i suppose getting revenge on the goons by kicking and punching them, in order to save puddles, is basically the same
Impressive, but I'm afraid to say, Thunder Kick is OP, especially when combined with dash. I'm able to stun-lock most enemies and clear levels without relying on any combos. So much for feeling the AGI!
Cool! Fun! Derivative.
Nothing wrong with derivative but of course it's going to excel in well trodden areas.
Sounds like your children will soon learn hard work does NOT pay off
My dream game is Tetris. I would be concerned if an LLM couldn’t ahem “one-shot” that.
This is back with Opus 4.1 when I was still amused with these things. It definitely took better part of two weeks of intense non-stop prompting, but I wanted to see how far I could go with just prompting for everything (now called vibing) when this became viable https://www.susmel.com/stacky/ (press h for help)
Turns out, you could go far but you never lose that AI touch to it which I find absolutely horrible and (s)tacky, albeit technically impressive to be able to do that by not touching any code whatsoever.
It took you two weeks to prompt out a tetris clone? You could have written this by hand in less than 2 days!
proverbial weekend, eh? You have the same tools, give it a go!
I've done it! Before LLMs.
Tetris is a not a difficult game to clone by writing your own version of.
This doesn't take away from your achievement here. This is something you are proud of, and it sounds like you learned a lot about prompting through this process - I support this.
> Make it one of the best games you can possibly make. You are a truly world-class game developer. Do whatever it takes to finish it and make it a best-selling game.
Honestly, I should use this prompt on my human self!
Did anyone notice that the game characters looked nothing like the drawings lol
funny enough it's also the only model afraid of creating a 3d mesh with pikachu photo on a 3d benchmark i work on
"I can't recreate Pikachu since it's a copyrighted character, but I can build an original toy critter in the same spirit: a small chubby four-legged figurine in a charging pose with its own design. I'll start on that now."
https://sketchagent.dev/s/6KH2LwSq
it's all good llms can make decent games in one shot.
but you know what makes games fun - just like art - the NO decisions taken & some idiot or good decisions taken. you playing through those mistakes.
but here someone burned hundreds of dollars in tokens - for when they could've purchased a well hand made game for $5 on steam or at most $60 for AAA.
Yup, classic AI game! controls dont work, the character got stuck in one corner of the screen while smiling like an idiot.
Cue the "What did it cost" Thanos meme
So they burned through ~340 million tokens. How much did that cost?
As usual GPT having a hard time generating walking animation sprites.
When can it one shot GTA6
2042
Uncle Lex seems quite the hero!
It's still some horrendous slop. The distance to some Mario Wonder is immense. Yes, maybe in a year it won't be so, but this distance, perceivably, is not contracting at all. Like, everyone sees that there is no decline in this feeling of "ai slop". You could do something with AI a year ago, and it was "AI slop". Now it's much more advanced and technically impressive, but still, "AI slop".
You're really letting your kid down here by outsourcing an opportunity to be creative and collaborate to Scam Altcoin.
My dream game is a high fidelity universe as detailed as GTA 6 or Red Dead Redemption 2 and as expansive as No Mans Sky.
2029 has you covered.
I want to ask this as politely as possible, because you set out to do something nice for your nephew and he had a good birthday.
The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children. For example developing specific skills like drawing, and general emotional skills like concentration and learning to be happy with their own skill level.
I respect it was a light post where your aim was probably to highlight something fun, but I couldn't see any note of what you thought about it.
What do you think about that? What do his parents think?
Yes, these are great questions, and I appreciate your politeness.
Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.
My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.
Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.
I cannot believe in 2026 we're having conversations about the appropriateness of kids using AI.
Jesus Christ, let the kids play with technology. No parent or relative needs to apologize for kids having fun with AI.
My kids will be fine tuning models.
Just like many forms of content there's an appropriate age. The problem with AI, with regards to kids, is it's as wide as the internet.
There's lots of great parts. My kids ask great questions and get even better, accurate answers; moreso than I can give. But then, there's lots of parts that shouldn't be introduced until later with other parts arguably not introduced at all. I've met kids who have unfettered internet access at age 10, and the results aren't great.
It's all there, just a question away - just like the internet.
Desolation.
“In February 2024, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III died by suicide after forming an intense emotional and romantic attachment to a Character.AI chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen ("Dany"). His mother, Megan Garcia, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Character.AI and Google, which settled confidentially in January 2026.
In April 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of private conversations with ChatGPT-4o where he confided about self-harm and suicidal ideation. His parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the model provided specific methods and discouraged him from disclosing his distress to his mother.”
Those are the ones we know about. There are probably others that didn’t result in suicide but in other emotional problems.
Having said that, my son and I had tremendous fun with Sora when it was around.
Guns are a technology, are you going to let them play with that too?
Everyone on this site can feel the effect that AI is having on their brain. There is a very real tension between the power of AI and the cognitive impact it has from using it that needs to be talked about. Pretending that isn't real or shouldn't be taken seriously doesn't help.
Where I'm from, hunter's training and kids with guns are a relatively common thing. Kids driving tractors and other heavy equipment too. The training part is important.
The rules with guns are that you always check if it's loaded when you take it in hand, you never point it at something you don't intend to kill, keep you finger off the trigger and the safety on, watch your fingers don't get pinched by the action, brace it properly with your hands or against the shoulder, stop if the gun malfunctions, and I try to keep it pointed at the ground (not in the air) and unload it before handing it to anyone else.
Not sure what the equivalent for AI should be yet.
I think the closer parallel is social media.
I grew up in the south. Of course.
There are lots of "dangerous" things. Kitchen knives at Target, cars and roads and highways, subway stations, mountains, strong tides, fire, falling. I think we're perfectly capable of surviving in this landscape.
We evolved to explore this landscape. Stop living in Disneyland plastic bubbles. Step outside into the dangerous world. Dream about the impossible.
I'm far more worried about social media and gamification/exploitation of emotions and insecurities. Our billion year old biology can survive in the wild - it isn't so great at dealing with the algorithm.
Somebody never read Amusing Ourselves to Death
I'm not OP, but it seems to me that LLMs offer extraordinary access to new skills and information to the uninitiated. Someone who has a positive experience creating a game like this is only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented, the language used, the architectural choices and rationale, etc. The LLM is a competent tutor in all. What I would have given as a child for such access... I had to make due with the help docs, and an occasional book from the library.
> "...only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented..."
That question will never be asked and we all know it. It's been demonstrated time and time again that the masses prefer entertainment to enlightenment and it is still being demonstrated today by the high rate of AI assisted cheating in high schools and colleges.
When I was a kid I did not understand what Game Genie "cheat codes" were doing, but it did not stop my curiosity and ultimate understanding of what was happening behind the scenes. This feels like the next iteration and I know _some_ kids will ask questions.
Worse. IF they DO ask the question, the answer is now
> You prompt a LLM and it just happens.
The bar for enlightenment is now further away as people are taught to expressively stop chasing it.
> That question will never be asked and we all know it.
I asked that question today. After years of working in Unity, I finally downloaded Unreal and spun up a quick game literally so I could poke around how it was implemented, and have been asking questions nonstop about what, how, and why things were implemented with a hands-on experiment.
Lots of people won't ask that question, but also lots of people most certainly will.
> That question will never be asked and we all know it.
You and I know different children. Mine give me the opposite impression. The questions have no end. I think that's a good thing.
Literally every child asks questions nonstop. In the vast majority of cases, that doesn't stick into adulthood.
I'm kind of hopeful that the "always helpful and courteous" personality of LLMs unless pushed intentionally will lead to more positive experiences around inquisitiveness in the youth. And more ability to retain it into adulthood. Even though I'm unsure about the second-order effects on human-human interaction.
What a cynical take on humanity
why should they learn it? for what purpose? We used to learn these things so that we could use that knowledge to create more. now there's no reason to learn it, other than pure curiosity.
Why should you learn anything? Because it helps you ask better questions, and gives you more and different experience to draw connections between things and situations and ideas. It lets you do more stuff, and doing stuff is fun.
Having recently sat with a bunch of non-coders who decided to play with Claude Code—they learned more in an afternoon than they had in a lifetime, just because it was fun for it to get them to a thing they wanted. Versus months of drudgery and study as the price of entry (and an end result that would probably be super janky compared to the consumer products on offer to them).
I learned some about carpentry by reading, and by watching videos. I learned much more, much faster, by picking up bits of wood and tools and just doing. I did little dumb stuff that was trash but that was mine, and that was satisfying enough that I did more, and before I knew it I’d backed my way into picking up some scraps of proper technique.
And now so many more people with a vague itch can “just do” in relation to software systems.
I mean. Nerds have always existed and will always exist. But, the last couple of decades, it's just been fashionable to "be nerdy". They're faking it. So you're right: Most people won't. But there are reasons why people think people should or would, even if those reasons are wrong. I'm very cynical in my advanced age about peoples' willingness to learn things. All those "go into STEM" efforts aimed at little kids are just fluff. Most people don't enjoy learning. They hate it. Most people just want to watch TV in bed. AI is an amazing teacher, but most people don't want to learn. They're averse to it in their bones. It's like that t-shirt with the picture of french fries on it that says "not everyone can be an astronaut": Yeah well not everyone can be a nerd.
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Can you please stop posting curmudgeonly comments, shallow dismissals, and even personal attacks (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50433292)?
These things are against HN's guidelines, and you've unfortunately been doing them repeatedly. This is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I was a kid, and I have 2 of them. My experience has been kids curiosity works top down, not bottom up. As such, instant gratification turns into curiosity or wanting a slight variation or whatever, and bit by bit they learn.
Are you sure?
The kid is doing game design with hand drawn sketches and game mechanic, as now he has his own team of software engineers and artists to make his vision a reality.
I’ve been hand coding a contra-style game with ours, and also importing their drawings as all the monsters, it’s incredibly exciting for them to see their work going right into the game. Highly recommend it.
Let the kids get burned out on vibecoded vidya slop. Maybe they'll get bored enough to start playing outside again.
I first learned to program in middle school with Logo, and the extent of that was "telling the commander" (or whatever the term was) what to do in almost plain english.
That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.
As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.
When I was a kid I got into programming to make games and websites partly because of the challenge of it. It was quite difficult to do and whenever you made something work it felt very rewarding.
Well now why would anybody bother writing that code by hand? Perception will/has shifted very quickly to coding being something that is simply done by AI with human oversight.
If I was a kid now maybe I would be using AI to create games or something but I think I would probably just get bored quickly and never bother to learn coding.
Sure, but I have gone from enthusiastically recommending a career in programming to being very cautiously optimistic that the strong kids will still find a place.
Not learning to code might be ok; maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.
> very cautiously optimistic that the strong kids will still find a place.
Well yeah I mean that's always going to hold true if we are just talking about things in general
> maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.
Yes these roles will probably shift to hardware more and more. But it's very different, much harder/impossible to teach yourself to the same level as you can with coding. The knowledge I gained staying up until 2am writing Flash games transferred directly to my career in software engineering
Counterpoint, I think it’ll get them more into making things, because they don’t have that big frustrating period where their output is nowhere near as interesting as the giant smorgasbord of interesting stuff being pushed on them constantly. I’d much rather they spend their time making stuff with AI than passively consume the garbage streaming on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon 24/7, which was the status quo with my generation. Making can now compete on instant gratification with all the other stuff now.
I feel this as an adult. As I've gotten more into making things with AI for fun, it's displaced some of the other more passive activities I was spending time on, especially things like watching videos and scrolling social media.
>The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children.
What impact did being able to take a picture have on the mental development of children?
Recording a moment went from something you needed a court painter and two weeks to do, to something that everyone could do with the click of a button.
A century later kids are still happy to draw things.
When you buy your kid a cake for his birthday, do you think that it's hurting the development of his baking skill, because now he knows cakes are something that he can just hire someone to make with money?
Well, yes, at least to some extent. A lot of people are in that situation. They order DoorDash ten times a week and I think their lives are less rich because of it.
> I think their lives are less rich because of it.
Well the cost does add up...
I mean… it was a birthday present. Everything in moderation, and there are a lot of ways to involve the kids in the process more.
I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.
> concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children.
Do we, or our children, ever learn to farm, mine, chop wood, lay bricks, make operating systems, or program in assembly language?
Does that affect or limit your or your children's ability to eat food, sit on chairs, sleep in beds, or use computers and phones?
> Do we, or our children, ever learn to farm, mine, chop wood, lay bricks, make operating systems, or program in assembly language?
Speak for your own childhood buddy
Guy that argument is still dumb: "Oh no we'll be stoopid if we don't do everything manually" like bruh when was the last time you sowed a frickin seed to grow the wheat in your McWhopper buns or whatever
This applies generally: How many comforts does everyone enjoy everyday that they have no clue how to make themselves?
Do you refine the fuel in your car from raw petroleum by yourself? The list can go forever.
No. We let prior technology make these things "solved" and forget about them so we can move on to the shit that's important to us.
the crazier possibility is that little kids' drawing skills - whatever pedagogical value that has, i agree that it has some - may stop improving, but there might be way more videogames authored by them that turn out to be really good.
I don't think this effects the kids more than playing any other video game.
Yeah I for one make my children design and code every video game they play by hand. And before you ask, yes, in assembly.
jfc people on here don’t like to have fun. This is one of the best applications of AI I’ve ever seen. It is allowing for creativity — the kid drew all the bosses, thought out the progression of the game, and now gets to see it come to life. How many times as a child did you fantasize about a video game you wanted, and all it ever was was a fantasy? How goddang cool would it be if it was made real? How much more would that make you want to continue imagining and creating? It is touching — the game incorporates all the members of his extended family, even his passed-on great grandmother who appears as an angel character. How many of you even know your great grandmother’s names? Now his is living on eternally in his awesome video game. It is something this kid will be talking about to all his friends at school, and reminiscing on with all his family when he grows up. Who cares whether the code was made human or a machine? Let the kids have some fucking fun
I think a lot of people know their great grandmother's name.
Generally people who wanted to make games as a child learned programming then got a career making video games. Now they will be cleaning toilets, at least they are having some fucking fun though!
People on this website are so comically short sighted.
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This sounds so.. dull.
glaze blast
time for the GLAZER articles to hit the front page
I've said it before and it's almost true now: We won't download games soon, we'll just describe what we want to play and it will get created for us there and then.
Maybe if you're 4 years old, but just like AI art, I doubt I'd enjoy anything produced like that for more than 15 minutes of novelty.
Crazy good
wow nice work!
People are really out there naming their dog Doggo, huh?
I don't know what I'm doing wrong to not have success with it the same way others do. I spent a few hours yesterday trying to get it to return correct texture size for one 3d model used in my Godot POC, that it generated itself in Blender. The model is a wall tile (so a simple 3D rectangle) and the texture is 1024x1024 and it struggled to return the specs. I wanted to commission an artist to paint one for me. Every time I went back it would correct itself:
- I told you from memory, not from the actual game itself - I gave you the texture size that we use today, not what we need for the game - I don't know why I said that, but here's the correct information - Sorry that wasn't actually correct, you're right to push back, here's the actual correct information - I didn't consider top of the wall that needs to be covered, sorry here's the latest correct information - Yes you're right, sides needs painting too, that's my mistake, here's what you actually need for the artist - No you don't need to paint the back side, it's never visible in the game - (me: prove it) Sorry you're right, back side is visible so you'll need another texture ... Back and forth, back and forth for eternity. I use Opus 5.5 at home and Fable at work and since I don't spend a lot of tokens at work due to mostly using it for operations, I use sometimes to help me with specific personal issues and it I see 0% difference between Fable and Opus.
If I ask a human person to tell me what is required to migrate a Key Vault in Azure from one tenant to another, they would elevate privileges, find the key vault, look up role assignments, access policies, secrets & keys and then tell me. Claude on the other hand forgets to look up role assignments and returns secrets but not certs. Then it goes on to migrate one, causes a clusterfuck, realises what it had done, tries to fix it and we go back and forth checking everything just wasting time and tokens.
This has been my experience for the last 2 years using it daily for work, nothing but frustration. I have instruction files in each working dir and hooks built-in on launch to read those and block it from saving anything to memory unless it's saved to local filesystem first and I'm happy wasting tokens for that but it still does not follow instruction. It will randomly bypass its hooks or on launch only read first 2kb of a file etc. It's not just frustrating, it's worrying as well because it can't explain why it's doing that.
I always get confused when I see these posts or testimonies on the internet from people who built Adobe clones with a single prompt and can hack NASA and invent new vaccines on a lazy Sunday afternoon. That's not my experience. Like at all. Anything that is not very clearly defined, it can't fill in for. I don't understand this. The entire advertised value of using AI isn't automation, it's autonomy. And I can't trust it to be autonomous because it causes more problems that I have to clean up than it's worth the time it saves on automation. I can't do the simplest of things unless I hold its hands and tell it in details what is it what I need from it and how to do it, and if that's true then I get very little value out of AI because at that point might as well just finish the task myself.
That's not how I work with people. If a new person joins our team, they will be handed a task and told to try and figure it out. When they get stuck I explain, rinse and repeat. Every time I explain a different thing, never the same thing. Because people learn and in a short time they can be autonomous with limited oversight. If Claude was a person it wouldn't pass probation.
I suspect many of these "look what AI can do" blog posts like this are part of marketing campaigns by OpenAI and Anthropic, but there's no disclosure. And half the people on this site work for those companies, so the comments are just an echo chamber.
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Wow, it even got the current retro revival/oldschool demoscene look without being asked! /s
The art is really bad. There's no easy fix for this: today's image models are simply not good enough yet. You can use models for coding, they're good at that thanks to RLVR, but the art still has to be done by humans.
> Fable 5.2 one-shotted my kid’s dream movie, > Fable 5.2 one-shotted my kid’s dream song, > Fable 5.2 one-shotted my kid’s dream storybook,
None of these work, except video games, something qualitatively different about that art form, IDK.
Could you even call it "working" for video games, based on the result, for the same kind of reasons you'd say it doesn't work for those other media?
(To qualify the rest of this, clearly it's job done in terms of the author wanting to make something memorable for their nephew - it's quality uncling, with the best of intents - but in the context of how what's been shared is going to contribute to the discourse around AI, in the shadow of a new model release, during an ongoing pre-IPO hype bubble...)
I'm seeing something which has has the surface-level features of a belt scrolling beat 'em up, but it's missing the result of all the different types of work that would normally happen through "make it actually interesting and enjoyable to play" design and iteration, e.g. you can walk through every stage unchallenged mashing punch, there's no evidence from the 2 stages I played of an interesting mix of enemy types with unique AI which can combine in ways which add challenge and variety to a belt scroller, you can stand and basic punch the first boss to death stepping aside only for its AOE attacks, the second boss infinitely spams a running move when it reaches low health and sometimes bumps into the edge of the screen behind it.
_Something_ was one-shotted, sure, but what we expect of a belt scrolling beat 'em up that someone cared enough to finish and release wasn't, not that people who will point at this in the near future as evidence of "OMG new Fable can one-shot games" will care.
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what are they being "subjected to"? it's a videogame