Why did you use AI to "make" this game? Don't say you didn't, because the codestyle is 100% AI. Thanks for your answer.
TL;DR: using AI as an addition is great, using it to replace people is not. For solo indie developers without a budget it's always an addition, for AAA it's almost never.
The difference is this:
AI allows this indie game to exist; without, it simply would not. Nobody's loss in having one more game.
AI allows AAA studios to save on/fire a part of the development team required to create the game; without, they would have been hired. That's a loss to the people working in the industry and no gain, since the game would have been developed either way.
That's the same as with artists. Any artist that lost a job to AI will tell you they're not happy about that, while they'll not care about AI usage for projects they wouldn't have been hired for anyway.
Of course, there are AAA studios that handle AI sensibly, so technically it's not strictly related to AAA itself, but the overwhelmingly vast majority just replaces expensive labor with it to save money.
There's a difference between "could" and "would".
This game could exist without AI. This game *would not* exist without AI.
And there's also a difference between "[some] people having made games without" and "[all] people having {been able to] make games without".
People have done many great things. That's no reason to prevent people who need more assistance from doing the same.
Quality > quantity, sure. And I'll just ignore the whole argument I could make about "eye of the beholder" and whatnot and let you be the sole judge of quality, but that still doesn't make this a loss. Is this the worst game in the world? No. Would it be a loss if it was? No. You're not forced to play it. At most you'd have to scroll past it; maybe spend twenty seconds pressing the "play" button. But that's not due to AI, it's about the quality, which can be abysmal with non-AI games, too. So that's no real reason to prevent them from using AI, is it? You don't have to finish every single game in existence, either.
And sure, having a ton of AI slop in the selection list is annoying. But before, I had a ton of annoying "not my cup" stuff in the list, too. And not every game made with AI is by default slop. It's less likely than for handcrafted things, but even those have enough bad stuff mixed in. Some of it is bad precisely because a single dev had no time and was forced to focus on boring boilerplate to get anything running at all, wasting time that could have gone into developing fun features.
If you paid something for the game, sure, you'd be entitled to have a problem with the game being made with less effort than expected compared to what you paid for it. But it's a free game and nobody forced you to play it, right?
This game would exist without AI, all the dev needs to do is finish learning how to code.
Some people doing something properly is better than a bunch of people spamming out worthless AI garbage.
It's not assistance, it's having it done for you.
Every game that's made with AI is awful and uses the same ugly UI, this will never change because these "devs" aren't going to improve their skills since the AI is doing the heavy lifting.
Something being free changes nothing, the issue is the use of AI not the price.
TL;DR:
"Would [...], if [...]" is the meaning of "could". Seriously...
"Some people doing something properly is better than a bunch of people spamming out worthless AI garbage." or "Some people doing something properly with AI is better than a bunch of people spamming out worthless AI garbage." Now, either is an objective statement I can agree with.
If you were a developer, you'd know that using a single prompt — which would be having it done for you — does not get you anything worthwhile. Using it as the tool it is, however, is assistance.
And no, you're not Owner of Humanity and Decider of Fates, Acobham, the Knower-Whats-Best. You have no prerogative to restrict or in any way judge others' use of AI when you have no vested interests in the result, other than to express a personal opinion. "Never look a gift horse in the mouth."
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What? For all you know, the dev might be a senior developer who spent an hour after work over the last months making this as a part time, passion project, precisely because he knew he could use AI to save him a lot of boilerplate and setup work.
He likely would NOT have done so if it had taken up all his time.
A game would not exist without AI just because a dev knows how to code. Just how knowing how to write doesn't mean you have time to write your own memoirs.
Not everyone has the time to spare to dedicate to all the projects they want to see completed.
I could almost agree with your second statement. It would have been perfectly reasonable, had you not felt the need to specify "AI" solely one the side that is perceived as negative.
Some people doing something properly [whether that be with or without AI] is better than a bunch of people spamming out worthless AI [or handcrafted] garbage. As it stands, that does not constitute a point against AI, but rather an opinion. You made my point for me in that. Creating half-finished products that don't have the most basic features because the devs had no time to add those doesn't automatically make them "good because handcrafted". Bad games have been spammed out for decades without AI.
And you're clearly not a developer, nor are you well-versed on AI in development. It's bad at anything other than auto-completing boilerplate code, auto-completing settings for tools and other systems and setting up presets, and auto-completing inline; that's all it can do. And for those, there were tools that handled it before AI; now they use AI. Nothing has changed, other than people hearing AI and going nuts. Anything AI does now, tools did before. Only, those tools required complex setup and handling, so they got replaced.
Assuming that a dev doesn't know how to program just because they use AI is nonsensical. As explained earlier, it's a useful tool for dozens of mind-numbingly repetitive tasks. Using a single prompt for AI to create a game for you is simple and results in trash. Using AI in development is little more than auto-complete for longer sections; you still need to have the required knowledge, or you'll end up with an unmaintainable mess very quickly.
And even then, being made purely by AI is still not a quality factor, just an indicator.
And lastly: No. Something being free changes everything. You are not entitled to demand anything you see being made according to your opinion. If you paid for it and it turns out that they put in less effort than you thought would have been worth the price at the time of purchase, that's a just complaint. Getting something for free removes that relationship between the price you paid and the (perceived) worth you received in return and renders your demands void.
Man, if your soul is so important to you, go to church. But seriously, the author put a lot of effort into this, and even more time, to make the game he wanted. And feeding the dirty work to AI is actually a good thing, it saves time for creative work.
Moreover, AI simply won't write code until a HUMAN tells it to do so.
I don't use AI at work. Why I know it? I work in the IT at my fairly big company. We grew up with basic, bash, vbscript and powershell. No need for AI here. And no: We are not faster, since we evaluated it. The time we needed to read and bugfix was higher than doing it by hand. And no: Autocompletion in the editor of choice is NOT AI. And it's not bullying either. People don't learn from using AI at the start. They learn from simply starting to script and get errors they have to solve. Lookup Stackoverflow, lookup snippets and rework them so they fit. AI might be useful at some point, but not at the stage of a coding beginner. Might sound harsh, but telling the truth is almost never satisfying.
And if you had made a game with vbscript and then some bully came around hating against you and devs like you, because you are not using linux and C and that's supposedly makes you a worse creator, wouldn't you be annoyed too?
Also I simply don't believe that you aren't using AI at work. I bet when Google provides some AI summary to your search query, you at least glance over it. Additionally the new types of auto-completion rely on machine learning methods, which is as AI as LLMs.
Again: No AI is used in our company. Even every bit of e.g. Copilot is disabled by GPO and altering the WIM-file tio have a clean installation of Windows itself. We also work for a very private sector, so no: No AI.
But to the points: You don't make games in VBS. You can, but you simply won't. For webgames, either HTML + JS + maybe XML (AJAX). If you want multiplayer, then PHP and SQL. And if you want it fancy: UE5, GODOT or Unity.
And Linux and C? You don't have to rely on Linux to code C or C#. This is like saying: You need Linux to code in Python. You simply don't. And really no hate, but it seems you really have no clue about programming at all, do you? Just asking, because so many stereotypes and simply wrong statements are a red flag for me to believe this.
If you really want to understand and learn to code: Start with simple scripts for the browser (Userscripts) to get familiar with JavaScript. HTML later. Start at the backend, then design the frontend to it. Like prepare, then serve. You can't serve without preparation.
"And Linux and C? You don't have to rely on Linux to code C or C#. This is like saying: You need Linux to code in Python. You simply don't."
Yes, exactly. Which is why it would be absolutely asinine (and evil!) if there were people going around bullying creators for using Windows or "the wrong programming language". So, please stop going around bullying creators here, just because they use tools that you personally dislike. Look up statistics of AI use, the vast, vast majority of students are using some sort of AI in school and university. Of course you can be a Luddite till you die and hate against all people for using new tech that you protest for some weird reason, but what is the point of that? Just let people live as they want.
I'm fairly certain they meant that as an example, since that's one of the languages you mentioned, and that with that second statement they were referring to phenomena like the cults behind Linux and C that often believe anything else to be inferior. So neither of those are an indication of inexperience.
That aside, please be aware that it's very patronizing to explain to them the—in your opinion—correct way to get into the trade based on your seemingly unfounded assumption that they are trying to learn. They might be a senior programmer with little time or too many ideas, so they use AI to get it done faster. They might only use this as a prototype, too, which is strongly encouraged by this website to begin with. They might even replace AI code in a full release version, maybe; who knows?
I'm not going to disagree about the description. That could've been easily done by hand.
My point is about the code side of things.
Using AI for that is in no way different to using Stackoverflow. Heck, most of the AI's "knowledge" comes straight from there. And copying a code snipped teaches you as much as asking AI to insert that same feature you googled for to get to the Stackoverflow page. Not to mention that not everyone's goal has to be to learn programming.
As for artwork or other creative content, what harm does it do? Someone's going to lose his job because this person used AI for an indie game? You think they would've paid an artist for the images, or an editor for the texts? No, the game just wouldn't have existed. You can complain about big corporations using AI to replace people, but that's not the case here.
As long as you're open about using AI and don't try to replace paid labor with it, who cares? They're just reducing the amount of time they put into this. That's nobodies loss, is it?