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andaiyesterday at 10:30 PM1 replyview on HN

I'd like to hear more about your experience using AI for game development.

I've had a strangely asymmetric experience where frontier models are failing apparently basic tasks like making changes to a Pong clone without breaking it, while the same models are successfully designing and implementing multiplayer servers with rollback netcode!

I think it has to do with what they can and cannot verify (i.e. they can't actually play pong to see if they broke it), but I'm not sure.

(Also happy to hear anyone else's experiences on this matter!)


Replies

arsenidetoday at 12:30 AM

I've been having a bunch of fun working on a couple games on a new platform - everything (platform and games) developed with AI.

quackwave.com

Hasn't really been stress tested yet (this is the first time I'm mentioning it publicly), but it's been fun playing with friends & family and iterating.

Party game platform, think "jackbox but no host screen" - just need a web browser open on phone/tablet/PC.

Your comment matches my experience: it has to do what can and cannot be verified. As an example, it was much easier to have AI write a large e2e test using Playwright (then add test cases and expand) than to assume it'll correctly fix bugs without guidelines like this. Also, the human loop is still important in things like screenshot verification - but the frontier models are getting even better here so I'm not sure for how much longer this will be true. The ratio of test code to production code is a bit over 2:1 right now.