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I've been vibe coding a game on the side.

It really makes me appreciate how important good game design is. Claude is doing a fine job coding everything I describe, but it doesn't really understand fun, so I need to.

(It's not a great game)

by jayd1638 minutes ago|

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It doesn't need to recreate your game. It can still muddy your marketing and redden the ocean. Especially if someone is in the business of trying to front run an indie game, they don't need to be any where close to a full or good game to attempt to steal any mindshare your project had.

by Retr0id1 hours ago|

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> Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games

The whole problem with LLMs is that you don't need the detail.

by JDups54 minutes ago|

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Details have a huge impact on how fun a game is. So far the vibeslop games I've seen look about as fun as crappy unity assets flips or mobile games. every so often the Instagram algo will show me some post a long the lines of "The game industry is finished!" and there is no way anyone can seriously looks at the games in those posts and say they look fun to play.

And someone trying to vibe copy another person's game is definitely the type who has no idea of value to add. So many of the slop games the whole concepts are so generic that they definitely just asked chatgpt for everything.

In the modding scenes for some games I play I've seen vibe coded mods where the gameplay additions make no sense and have no sense of balance or fun, with these completely new to the community devs having ko-fi links set up from the start.

by Retr0id5 minutes ago|

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If someone makes a cheap copy of my unreleased game and it's bad, that's also bad for me, I think.

by klodolph48 minutes ago|

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What I think of is all the HD remasters out there which look disastrously worse than the original, at least in my eyes. Why does this happen? Are the best artists working on new games instead? Are remasters pushed out with less care, shorter schedules, and less budget? Maybe some combination… and maybe there are some parallels with quick, mostly unsupervised LLM copies of a game.

by klodolph1 hours ago|

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Ok, so let’s get some data points. Are there games being recreated from devlogs? I’d like to see what the recreations look like.

by palmotea1 hours ago|

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> Ok, so let’s get some data points. Are there games being recreated from devlogs? I’d like to see what the recreations look like.

An LLM "recreation" doesn't have to be complete or very good. It just has to steal enough thunder to be profitable.

by klodolph1 hours ago|

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From what I’ve seen, most of the flood of LLM-created games aren’t profitable, just like most of the games people make in devlogs. There’s very little thunder to be stolen in the first place.

by palmotea53 minutes ago|

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> From what I’ve seen, most of the flood of LLM-created games aren’t profitable

It's it possible for an LLM-created game to be profitable but "unsuccessful?"

For instance, if (on average) if it costs $100 in tokens and time to make a crappy LLM-game clone, but you can clear $200 in sales per game on average, you're ahead.

And the economics of slop mean there are a lot of people in 3rd world countries who will make all that effort for a $100 payout (or less).

by klodolph43 minutes ago|

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I’m sure somebody out there is pointing an LLM at things and getting a $200 average payout or better on $100 in tokens, but if your game is getting copied for $100 in tokens, I’m not sold on the idea that you were going to make money in the first place.

by palmotea36 minutes ago|

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> but if your game is getting copied for $100 in tokens

My point is they don't actually have to do a good job, they need to make a pile of shit that looks just good enough to trick a few people into buying it.