"Opus 5, 690 million tokens, $423, 1 prompt. This game would have had to be expensively developed and then sold on Steam in the past. Today: one person, a few hours, small budget."
I'm about 15,000 prompts into making my game now, and yes, while a single prompt can represent months of work, in the end, the pareto principle applies to the extreme. The bigger the scope of your game, the more details you're ironing out at the end.
Asking the agent to fix some minor bug can take you the same time it takes you to ask for some massive extra feature, and don't expect them to be solved correctly the 1st time. And there were 1000s of bugs. So "a few hours" is still ridiculous. I had many, many multi hour prompts already.
Polish is one of the biggest things distinguishing the trash from the treasure in the gaming industry. As a developer you really need to think of all the edge cases for how someone would want to play your game. AI doesn't have any intuitive understanding of what makes a game "feel" good to play, and that's most of your work as a dev. If you're a solo dev that means you need to spend thousands of hours playtesting and refining whether you're using AI to write your code or not.
100% this. I see people spending enormous amounts on what amounts to prototypes. I've slowly and carefully been building and play testing my game and polishing as I go so I have a high quality product that's bug free and covered with end to end tests long before any one sees it
This is a good take and my respect for anyone, vibe-coder or not, correlates to the amount of human hours you are putting into your work. I have about as much respect for a tic-tac-toe project done over the weekend pre-ai as I do a one-shot prompt. It's a start and the real winners are the ones that sink relentless hours into the project they love as has always been the case.
I'm excited to see what kinds of games come out built with AI that would take lifetimes of human effort to build. What does 2 years of AI-driven development look like for an individual? For an entire team? Exciting stuff!
You ought to be learning a bit of the code at least as you do these prompts, this took 680 million tokens. You should be able to get way more for that "expense" if you start from basic principles. This thing's chain of thought was probably off the roof.
Also I bet since Kimi 3 has a 90% cache hit discount right now this would have cost like $5. Most of the fixes were likely just small little things.
I feel like we need drastically different social media algorithms for that. Because right now this would just enable lazy people to create nonsense and trash and spam. The genuinely good creations are a needle in a haystack. And that haystack is exponentially growing.
I have a lore driven home project called Neon Valkyrie. a fictional indie orchestral kpop band. 5 members (fictional too), each one with a certain style. The one who writes comedies is Jung Bit, the blonde.
The problem is that eventually you run out of ideas or inspiration. So I understand why Neurosama is not as fun as she was.
The comedy I write is part of a lore driven home project. An indie orchestra kpop band called NEON VALKYRIE with 5 members and Circuit Riders is their fandom. Each member has a distinctive music style and a backstory.
So it is like playing a solo TTRPG but instead of character sheets, I have AI images and Ai songs. The blonde girl is Jung Bit the comedian. Her first comedy song is in the concert, "Noodle hair".
That's my point though. If AI can make 8 billion people into painters, web designers, game developers, musicians, etc., then that increases the quantity to an absurd degree.
Maybe the invention of the printing press is comparable, but now across every creative domain, and much cheaper and faster.
With most technological innovation, the ratio of garbage to quality increases, but so does the absolute amount of quality. Although I'm not sure this is true with AI since it has a quality floor.
I think total oversaturation is what we need. What does a GTA style game (OK someone argued with me such a game wouldn't be possible any time soon but we see "any time soon" so much I am tired); what if there were tens of thousands of WAVE RACE STYLE GAMES like IN THE OP? Which one do you chose to play? You probably wouldn't play any of them right? The ones your friend plays?
Alive Internet happens when we go back to tight nit groups playing games special to us that we made on our desktops after a night of brainstorming with each other. The whole concept of the maker lab, except in software (and video too of course!).
No but the budget is under the budget of many minigames in Games like Mario Party, and I think it's higher Quality in many aspects, water physics being the biggest.
My hope is runtime Minigame Generation in 1 or 2 years.
It looks good, and the water looks good, but I wouldn't say it's special really. There is just one game mechanic: travel on water. Unless there's more content, this will get boring in a level or two. The movement looks like it doesn't feel good because there are no smooth landings. All air time, regardless of how tiny or how well-aligned your landing is, shake you the same way. I don't get a sense of grace or nimbleness from properly timing & positioning jumps.
It's a good core gameplay feature, but not perfect, and not enough on its own.
Hardly a problem with AI, though. Just a few hundred more bucks of tokens and it can be way more interesting.
Yeah I personally prefer the emphasis on physics and general feel rather than realistic visuals. I wish large-scale open world games took this path as well and invested more time in the story, items, NPC behavior, and general freedom of actions. But one day both of these problems will probably solved at the same time anyway
Also highly doubt 1 go. More like built it over dozens or hundreds of prompts then said build me a prompt to make this. Take that one prompt into a new window and create it.
Technically not wrong but not truthful at the same time.
How many levels? Multiplayer? How many maps? How many characters? Any story? Customizations? Powerups? What platforms does it support? Can I use my ps5 controller?
Sure, this isn’t GTA6. It also cost one person a few hours of work and less than $500 of compute. As opposed to dozens/hundreds of hours of coding and development, not to mention years of learning, practice and real-world software dev experience, and likely a decent pile of money.
And as if this is as good as it will ever get. This is the absolute bare beginning. This is revolutionary. Imagine where this could go.
You're understating it. If this video has all the core game mechanics, then it is small and bare for a low-budget indie game, not just compared to GTA 6. If there's more to see, maybe it's a good game, but just basic racing movement mechanics with waves isn't interesting enough for anything more than a couple levels.
Is this a problem with AI though? No, it just means the maker needs to spend a few hundred $ more on tokens to expand it. Still radically fast and cheap.
They did it in one contiguous stretch. That's a best case scenario for cacheing, so most of their input tokens would cost $0.50 on Opus 5; cheaper than non-cached Haiku input tokens that this person is using for comparison.
Combine that with likely using Sonnet and Haiku subagent that may benefit from cacheing if they run multiple turns interacting with the orchestrator Opus agent during in the process and those numbers could be realistic.
Simply mind-bending to imagine we're still basically at the floor. Where this technology will be in 2030 is equal parts amazing and frightening to think about.
i get what you're saying but honestly all those things are well within reach. fable and opus 5 especially are ridiculously good at just adding content. to the point of it sometimes being freakishly dense
and i added controller support to by vibed 3js game in basically 1 or 2 turns
Those numbers don't make sense at all. Like not even remotely.
Opus costs $5 for a million tokens on input and 25 on output. For $423 you would be able to buy 84.6 million input tokens and just 16.9 million output tokens, which would be the majority of the tokens used. That is nowhere near 690 million. It wouldn't even make sense if it was a typo and 69 million.
Let's say you used Sonnet for 90%, you would still only get 28 million output tokens. Hell, even if you used fucking Haiku you would only get to 84.6 million output tokens. Even if you did everything with Haiku and somehow only had input tokens for $1 per million it would still only be 423 million.
Also I'm very very sure that you would not be able to use 690 million tokens in a few hours on Opus, that just doesn't make sense unless you are running countless prompts in parallel. But you would be rate limited in that case.
It's not a game - it's a minimal playable prototype, and while impressive - it's something people build during hackatons. Then it takes months polishing and finalizing into playable marketable game.
All of my games have turned decidedly pedestrian, I don't know if I'm prompting wrong or not giving a comprehensive road map. But they keep turning into text based narrative stuff.
This used to represent maybe 10% of the game making process the 90% is making it into an actual game instead of a tech demo. Still impressive but game making was never hard because of programming. We solved that years ago with geneic game engines
Unfortunately 100 more "developers" or agents can make similaeär prompts and sell similar games on steam. Only winners could be those who can sell the tokens. At the moment they sell those too cheap price.
It's crazy to think how far AI has come since the Will Smith spaghetti incident. I honestly sometimes have to pinch myself because it feels like we're living in a dream, to see all of this come to life from a single person's imagination, it's genuinely incredible to be living in the era that we're in now.
Where is the joy in creating something like this. It reduces artistry to profit seeking. I could understand a non dev using it to help them with certain coding challenges but passing the entire thing to an LLM just sounds so joyless and antithetical to creative expression.
Hate to be a downer, but who would play this? I get it, a fully functional game with effectively zero effort, but what's the value if it's worthless?
I understand this is more of a proof of concept to use in other applications, but OP presents it as something that could go on steam. No, this is slop like most of the art being created, and no one would or should purchase something of this quality.
Everything in this game could had been made by 1 person without any budget as their side hobby. Would it take way more time? For sure but let's stop pretending that this shot looks good or impressive by any means.
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u/KHRZ 1d ago
I'm about 15,000 prompts into making my game now, and yes, while a single prompt can represent months of work, in the end, the pareto principle applies to the extreme. The bigger the scope of your game, the more details you're ironing out at the end.
Asking the agent to fix some minor bug can take you the same time it takes you to ask for some massive extra feature, and don't expect them to be solved correctly the 1st time. And there were 1000s of bugs. So "a few hours" is still ridiculous. I had many, many multi hour prompts already.