Duh, what do you think we were building for the last 10 years? Does anyone with two brain cells think that corporate surveillance wasn't going to be co-opted by authoritarianism?
The only people who didn't understand this were either delusional or being paid not to.
I’m not sure that’s fair, the majority of the American population are pretty dumb due to the poor education system. Most weren’t alive for WW2 so they’ve not come very close to an authoritarian threat in the past either.
last time i tried they asked for an email to link the account to. I don't think they provide anonymous accounts anymore, but you can probably create one with another anonymous email.
Their trajectory was clear the moment they signed a deal with Microsoft if not sooner.
Absolute snakes - if it's more profitable to manipulate you with outputs or steal your work, they will. Every cent and byte of data they're given will be used to support authoritarianism.
"The core mechanics appear to be a weighted scoring function, a minimum threshold clamp, and a pinning list, all wrapped in terminology borrowed from differential geometry, quantum mechanics, and fluid dynamics in ways that don't reflect the actual math of those fields."
>Or is the underlying 'brainrot' actually destructive to creative potential?
Creativity comes from constraints. Writing code hasn't been the hard part since the 90s. Deciding which things make for a good game and are worth spending your limited time on is where fun comes from.
AI makes it easy to spit things out, but it doesn't make things fun or good at all.
Writing code is not the hard part if you're a developer.
Otherwise it's an insurmountable barrier.
I think it's a bit like writing a novel.
Everyone's got a novel in them, but you absolutely need to know how to write to get it out. Unless you can dictate it but then... you could also hire a developer.
Those without the resources to hire a developer, without the years of education and practise to code at any level of proficiency, can now realize some form of their ideas.
I just logically can't see how the increased accessibility and output won't increase the amount of interesting games, even if 99% are slop (so is fan fiction, let them enjoy it).
I don't know, isn't it easier to learn enough programming to make a game, relative to all the other skills involved?
e.g. the programming concepts needed for Pong wouldn't take you more than a dozen hours or so. See how good you are at art or music after the same amount of time!
I've build 10+ games which I am ashamed to show :)
Straight JS/html/css front-end with zero dependencies works well.
Ask for a node.js backend and can be instantly deployed as client/server or straight to html - multiplayer feels trivial.
C# Monogame works well for something heavier.
You can actually edit Unity scenes directly using the LLM as they're a readable text file which works ok, but Unity is bloatware when you can code it all yourself (it's an absolute nightmare of inexplicable bugs, do not use it. After updating to 0.62f from 0.48f my clang compiler now segfaults while building Webgl - luckily my team mate can do the builds)
The key is building exactly and only what you want and need. Make your design lean, suit the game as you are actually building it not a theoretical overengineered masterpiece - refactors are cheap later, but bloat will kill your project.
I've had my own rollercoaster relationship with Unity over the past decade, but telling people to roll their own game engine so that they can finally make a game is almost universally terrible advice.
People who want to build game engines should build game engines; people who want to build games should absolutely use Unity, Unreal or Godot in no particular order.
It's no different than needing to build a web framework so that you can make a website. The people who do it are often not even aware that they are procrastinating.
People who are making a simple 2D web game don't need an engine, with rare exceptions. Chrome's 30 million lines is plenty of bloat to build on ;)
Besides, in this context you're already outsourcing all the code to Claude or Codex or whatever. i.e. a "programmer" who has no problem handling the engine side of things.
That being said, most enginedev is creative procrastination. Randy's recent video on this is very illuminating — "I thought if I made a really good engine, making the game would be the easy part!" So he avoided actually making a game for like ten years...
Most 2D games don't even need an engine: you can just make the game "directly", on top of SDL or Canvas or what have you. (That being said, noob friendly stuff like Processing and Kaboom is great and highly recommended!)
--
Source: made lots of 2D games and a few engines. The engines were a complete waste of time. (Even ready made engines often did more harm than good!)
If I was making 3D games, then I would probably need an engine (but js13k begs to differ!), and it would probably not be a great to roll your own (unless you're going for something 90s themed :)
--
Edit: Most of my games are very "programmer art", or very retro. If I were an artist or working with artists, then an engine would be useful for that, for the visual side of things. Flash was probably unmatched in that regard
That being said, it's not that hard to roll your own level editor, so... ;) even that argument is questionable.
Edit 2: Also the web APIs are unfortunately kind of ass, so using a library (or engine) has the advantage of letting you avoid dealing with them directly for the most part.
Problems I've had with unity in my last 3 installs. All LTS default installations on windows. (I have delivered professional projects in Unity in the past):
1. Inspector for lists/arrays works once, crashes editor, must be restarted each time.
2. Race conditions in the basic animator functionality making animation events useless, killed a project because we couldn't edit the underlying code, didn't have time to redo animator-based functionality which should have worked in theory.
3. Segfaults in compiler -> 6 hours of debugging, gave up, still can't build reliably.
Each of these killed the workflow and therefore the ability to deliver the project dead, and were completely out of my control.
Vibe code your engine, at least you'll die on your own terms.
Unity is also just a fundamentally hostile organization waiting to pull the rug, as evidenced by their past behaviour.
Big plus for html/css/js, mostly Pixi 8 or around (I also have a couple threejs). Vanilla JS. I did this by hand before, but having the LLM tweak around the code and styling while I handle more gameplay related things makes this doable (otherwise I just would not have enough free time)
