Hi! First of all, thank you so much for the video, its super insightfull to see others play it without it being in a "playtest" setting. I watches the whole thing and took a good amount of notes :)
I guess you mostly want me to respond about the use of AI, which i gladly will because for me it's not a secret. The game is build with NextJS without a game engine. Because of my work in software i have a AI coding tools in my development environment, so it "touches" all parts of the game.
One thing i noticed in this project is that because i was building the game to mirror a situation in real life (Being with, and helping, a person struggling with depression), it gave me a very clear feeling i wanted to achieve. Therefor it was easier to convey this feeling to the game in every sense, be it for things produced by AI or by myself.
I dont think there are many things in the current game produced by AI on the first try, a lot of things took 5+ iterations before it was ready. In the end i think as a producer your are still solely responsible for the results, if it sucks you just got to fix it.
The negatives about AI you raise in the video are all completely valid, and it often feels like we are just spectators in this rapidly changing world. As a freelance developer i work and implement a lot of AI for businesses, ofcourse only where i think its ethical. This is ofcourse a really big topic, hell i'll even join you for a video on it while playing through winter if you want ;)
A few positives i noticed with AI helping me:
- It's easier to actually finish a project
- It allowed me to make small changes that would be a lot of coding work without thinking: "is that really worth it?".
- It sometimes kept me on track, where i wanted to make some change and the AI responded with: "That doesn't fit in the design". ofcourse this happens more often the other way around, but it did happen sometimes.
Really like how the game gave you time to get philosophical, because that was one of the main goals in designing the game: giving the player time to process thoughts.
Thank you for the comprehensive response.
I didn't actually realise it was about depression. That makes a startling amount of sense, now I have that perspective.
AI is of course an increasingly complex subject. The two major negative things it's doing to us... providing slop and misinformation, and stealing jobs... are of course major obstacles that get in the way of people seeing the positives that it can provide, so I'd hope that rather well-made projects like yours are a nudge in the right direction.