You are talking from a perspective of games as a medium for an artist with a certain bias and an audience that is interested in this specific bias.

You say "vision, colors, positioning, etc", yet you have Candy Crush being the most played game on mobile for 13 years which simply employs direct signals and ques from cognition and cognitive neuroscience to achieve this.

The games that you describe are a small subset of what the general public is playing or is interested in.

This can further be pushed into a monoculture by shaping the players expectations about what a game should be. Maybe Skyrim has too much walking and dead-time, it's better to optimize for fast combat and action, like in Fortnite, and mold the playerbase in a way which makes them susceptible to simpler games more tuned to neurophysiology.

> My hunch is when it comes time to polish and fine tune all the moving parts, this process will remain much faster to do by hand. It will be faster to update a specific field or line of code and test/iterate than to prompt your way through that process (the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time)

I think you're mostly right here -- however, I think you've framed prompting as an all-or-nothing (or maybe the OP did, as I only skimmed the article too...). LLMs are great for some things (scaffolding, review, refactoring, etc) but way less efficient at others (tweaking and letting the artist eye shine).

I think the crux is this: you shouldn't be asking an LLM to make these tweaks for you; you should be asking an LLM to build the tools that let you make these tweaks by hand faster or more effectively.

For example, we have probably a hundred tools [0] for quickly making all kinds of changes and tweaks in one of our Steam games, that are of course all done by hand. The tools were built by LLMs based on what would speed up our existing by-hand workflows, and once they're built they're just tools that let our people shine.

1. Do a thing by hand

2. Have LLMs build a tool that makes it easier to do that thing by hand

3. ????

4. An artist with a vision can bring that vision to life faster

[0] https://i.imgur.com/b4nSFjV.png

"My hunch is when it comes time to polish and fine tune all the moving parts, this process will remain much faster to do by hand"

Depends if what you want to do is new, or has been done a thousand times before

"Describing without words: An artist with a vision can only bring that vision to life with body movements. It is not possible to communicate all the details that go into a great piece of art with words. The colors, lines, shapes, positioning, specific emotions, history... is beyond spoken language."

And you absolutely can use sketches, pictures, drawings as input to the AI.

So in general I agree, at least right now it needs a lot of fine tuning. About the future I make no prophecy, I did not see AI coming this way, so why would I be right about AI in the future now.

I am making a novel game right now with heavy help from Fable and it is awesome. Because even though my game is novel - parts of it are not, but standard and I reinvented the wheel way too often before and am glad don't have to do that anymore.

When I'm using an LLM to program these days, I increasingly feel like I'm directing one of those renaissance-era painting schools that were sort of like painting-factories, where some Great Master would direct the output of a dozen or more painting-technicians to construct unreasonably-large and detailed paintings on unreasonably-brief time-scales.

They would still come in at the end of the day to add their brush strokes to pieces of the canvas that they thought needed extra attention. We still refer to those paintings as if they were made by the Great Master, and justly so because their artistic imprint is felt in the final work.

In the same way where if you and I were asked to write the same game with an LLM, they would come out looking pretty distinct from each other. And if we wrote them by hand, they would be distinct from each other and the LLM-assisted ones again. All of them are still art and games, though, it'd be silly to call them anything else.

I agree with you that polish and fine-tuning is faster to do by hand when you are well-appraised of the foundations. I think a lot of the challenge of developing Real Software with LLMs today is maintaining the appropriate proximity to the work, when we are no longer holding the paint brush ourselves, so to speak.

> I dont use LLMs outside of occasional searches > I have a hunch LLMs will not take over game development

Not easy to make statements about things you don't use.

If you're developing software, LLMs will be ubiquitous eventually. They aren't going to tune the turn radius or how long to hold a freeze frame but they will bang out a UI to let you do that quickly with quick turn around times.

So many simple little things that are helpful but not really worth doing will now be worth doing because the implementation cost is a fraction of what it once was.

I honestly didn't except this to get traction on HN so I'm updating the blog post now. I just read some recent post too that was like "mistakes technical blogs make" that I think brought up this same point yet here I am! Thanks for the tip.