The output is quite impressive. And having spoken to a number of the developers, it does seem like AI has had a massive impact on delivering their ideas.
My kids made similar games with Claude code in js.
Was hoping to see some serious indie games, but these looked pretty terri-bad.
Is anyone building the next SimCity, Civilization, etc.?
Even with that I'd still say 70% of the code was written using LLMs with the opencode agent.
AI is obliterating the barriers to game production for the next generation.
Will this be the next flash revolution? Or is the underlying 'brainrot' actually destructive to creative potential?
I am optimistic about the human spirit in this regard. Making games with AI will be cool when the games are cool, and the only barrier is design.
Creativity comes from constraints. Writing code hasn't been the hard part since the 90s. Deciding which things make for a good game and are worth spending your limited time on is where fun comes from.
AI makes it easy to spit things out, but it doesn't make things fun or good at all.
It's a separate question whether anything actually good will come out of it. It's incredibly unfair to look at any particular project and say: what, another clone of this or that done idea? Very few things are original in any time. Certainly I didn't make anything particularly original all those years ago. But, soon, there should be really something, if there's really something there. If it's not just burning tokens to copy older ideas. And we'll know it when we see it, this amazing thing that would not have existed otherwise.
Straight JS/html/css front-end with zero dependencies works well.
Ask for a node.js backend and can be instantly deployed as client/server or straight to html - multiplayer feels trivial.
C# Monogame works well for something heavier.
You can actually edit Unity scenes directly using the LLM as they're a readable text file which works ok, but Unity is bloatware when you can code it all yourself (it's an absolute nightmare of inexplicable bugs, do not use it. After updating to 0.62f from 0.48f my clang compiler now segfaults while building Webgl - luckily my team mate can do the builds)
The key is building exactly and only what you want and need. Make your design lean, suit the game as you are actually building it not a theoretical overengineered masterpiece - refactors are cheap later, but bloat will kill your project.
Much like AI is great at Boulter plate code like FE, it's probably great at that sort of Unity code.
AI has no training data on complex logic and systems so you gotta do that all yourself.
It definitely doesn't get anything visual right really.
There isn't large amounts of automated testing you can setup ahead of time for a lot of game-play so the AI can't iterate on it to make something work it'll just be hopeless.
The art is also going to all be really derivative plagiarism overly averaged scammy looking stuff. So that's basically an insurmountable hurdle. No unique style.
I have been using Claude Code to develop a game in unreal engine. It is fricking amazing. Its like hiring someone with 10 years experience to work for you. I am really impressed by how it know game patterns.
>It definitely doesn't get anything visual right really. Sometimes it struggles to things things right visually, other times it nails it!
I have been using an MCP from gemini image 1.5 to generate my icons. And once it go my styles down, after 20 experiments, it does really good. Notice: It uses high quality by default which will burn up your credits. But if you turn down the image quality to low, it cost around 3 cents an icon.
>There isn't large amounts of automated testing.
Some things can be easily automated for testing. But other things require play testing.
>The art is also going to all be really derivative plagiarism
I am just using it to generate icons, and it does great. For 3D artwork I either use things from the FAB Store, or I pay a team of artists in Pakistan to do it.
Overall I say it is the equivalent to have a senior dev on your team, for 100 bucks a month
edited for line breaks.
However, if users are trying to do it, it should be a behavior. I'll make a note to change this.
For now, if you'd like to see more posts, you can go to www.tyleo.com and scroll down to the Writing section.
This is a WIP. I hadn't anticipated the popularity my site reached/extent of the blog.