when posting the game I was asked if anything was ai I did state that the code was AI. I used ai because I am not proficient enough at coding to be able to make the games i want.
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.
"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 it's made with AI it isn't done properly. All these AI games have the same UI and awful balancing, and the "devs" of these games will never fix these issues because they will never actually learn how to make games due to using AI as a shortcut.
"Using it as the tool it is, however, is assistance" - What does using it as a tool mean exactly and how does it differ from "having it done for you".
"You have no prerogative to restrict or in any way judge others' use of AI" - Obviously I can't stop them from using AI instead of learning how to do something but I can judge them for doing that.
"Never look a gift horse in the mouth" - Doesn't apply to AI slop, it isn't a gift in any sense of the word.
"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" - This isn't the work of someone with experience, you can tell because; the game is awful, it was clearly made using AI and it's the only game made by this "dev". There's no rush to publish work that is done as a hobby so there's no excuse for using AI to save time.
"He likely would NOT have done so if it had taken up all his time. " - Oh no, what would we do without the 100th awful AI "game" published this week.
"Not everyone has the time to spare to dedicate to all the projects they want to see completed." Which is a normal part of life, accept it.
"had you not felt the need to specify "AI" solely one the side that is perceived as negative" - AI is a negative though.
"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" - Hence why I never said otherwise. Creating a "half-finished product due to lack of time" doesn't constitute "doing something properly".
"Bad games have been spammed out for decades without AI" - And do you think AI will increase the amount of spam or decrease it?
"Assuming that a dev doesn't know how to program just because they use AI is nonsensical" - It's not an assumption, the quality of the game shows it clearly.
"Something being free changes everything. You are not entitled to demand anything you see being made according to your opinion" - I haven't made any demands, but you're not entitled to do that even if you paid for the game.
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.