60
Big Walk Fixed a Bug With AI (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/games@hexbear.net
61 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Some awards show controversy had House House disclose possibly the lightest possible LLM usage you can imagine. Anyway it's a Bad Game now.

Amongst all the glut of genuinely vibe coded slop, inventive AI reverse engineering and the plain ol' realities of LLM living in modern software development, I get a bit frustrated seeing it all grouped into one essentialized category.

The common understanding of what AI even is, is at an all-time low, imo. People see 'AI code' next to a game title and imagine someone prompting claude for 20 minutes, and these sorts of stories and over-the-top reactions don't help.

The basics of what happened with this story, is that a particularly bad Unity bug plagued the team and the unity support wasn't being a help. LLM fixed the bug. I'm shocked to see that even this usage is considered unacceptable to some people.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 6 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

Can you imagine making a game without debugging?

No art is a straight impression from brain to presentation medium. There is always a technique to it. A dialectic between creator and created, one might say.

In this case it would be more honest if House House had made a "degree of AI usage" declaration where people could know that it was used in the process but not in the design of anything visible to the end user.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 day ago*

    I don't disagree with this approach and especially the last bit, but I'm still not sure on the idea of using AI as a debugger having meaningfully infringed on the art.

    There was once a time - think PS1, N64 - where you could not imagine making a game without accounting for extremely low framerates. Sub 20 FPS, what we might consider unplayable today. It was a technical limitation that bred creativity, as they all do, but it's also a limitation we've moved past and very very few developers would champion the artistic merit of making your audience motion sick. Had they the option, many of them would have pressed the magic 'higher framerate' button at the time.

    Taking this into more of a hypothetical, if a specialized debugging LLM was developed that worked extremely efficiently at eliminating unintended game functions based on a developers prompt, I don't believe many developers would champion the artistic merit of manual debugging, either. And if we are to say that something in the artistic process was still lost at that stage, then I can't see that as anything but having arbitrary reverence for limits in software development.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent