itch.io

More production means more slop and more quality stuff, even if it favors the former.

And companies will lower their prices once similar games are made by indie devs who will lower their prices or offer higher quality games for free once beginner hobbyists can create, due to the assistance of AI, what was previously reserved for experienced hobbyists. It's just market saturation at the lowest level that bubbles up the hierarchy. It's just market saturation; exactly the same as what's happening to wages, only that it will affect sales, which is financially bad for everyone but marketers and consumers.

"What genre?" Why would that matter? It's common because it's very easy to create games in, due to certain engines that specialize on that genre, which leads to many similar-looking and usually low-quality games; exactly what you complained about with AI. My argument is that AI is like these engines; it eases creation, which leads to a lot more games being made of that genre and to the entry barrier being lowered to a point where any random dumb idea can be created. But those engines are capable of producing incredibly high-quality games, too, same as AI, if used appropriately. All I wanted to say with that was that using AI, or those engines, does not inherently produce slop, so which genre specifically does not really matter. And I'd rather avoid going into details on which genre I meant.

"I never said it [this platform] did [have to uphold my standards]." Sure, you only said that "quality > quantity", which I just take as meaning "Fewer high-quality games is better than more low-quality games," that your standards for high-quality constitute "doing something properly", whereby "properly" is subjective to your standards (see previous reply), and "if it's made with AI it isn't done properly," which, alongside "I don't want stuff made faster" and "this website has gone to complete shit," made me *somehow* come to the abstruse conclusion that "you don't want more games made with AI, you want games without AI, even if it means fewer, and that this website [platform] does that wrong." So yes, you never said it did have to uphold your standards, only that it's shit for not doing so...

And I specifically highlighted the "because" using asterisks to emphasize that what you said means that you believe people to be using AI specifically for its ability to produce lower quality results compared to other tools. That's the meaning of what you said and, I assume, was likely not intentional, was it?

And yes, criticizing a gift is improper. To be fair, it's only so in the cultures I know of, but that includes internet culture, which is the one that should apply, anyway.

Using "please" with confrontational statements like those does not make them any more polite.

And please note that proper English would be "speak in English" and "[not] the whole world does not consist[s] of", if you already insist on it being used.

It's possible to be more friendly in requesting support for English, while still conveying the fundamental nature of it, e.g., "Please at least add pictograms if you struggle with English." No need to go further.

I'll skip some of those paragraphs, since I don't want to further this discussion in any direction that prompts more opinions on the result of AI usage, seeing as you're "the type of person" who's intent on prejudicially discriminating against usage of a tool in general, the people behind it, and declares their opinion the standard. I have disagreed with any statements of those kinds you made so far, and this didn't change yet, so let's leave it at that. No need to repeat ourselves.

However, I'll address a few other statements.

Using AI does not inherently train it. Some regions have consumer protection laws which prohibit that (e.g. the EU). But I'm sure you accurately decided the place of origin of this creator on your own.

And an incredibly far-fetched example of a product having been advertised as having more effort put into it than turned out to be true: any game advertised as non-AI, containing AI... wildly off-topic, I know.

"I don't want stuff made faster" You don't. I do, because it means quality stuff is made faster and more affordable, too. For you, there's still the slow-made stuff, since you prefer that. On the note of subjectivity, "your standards" doesn't preclude "basic English" — this platform still does not require projects to uphold your standards, i.e., "done properly", whereby "properly" is subjective, since it's circularly based solely on your, you guessed it (or not), standards.

Why do you want to take something away from people who have a different opinion? And why do you generalize everything? "Any usage of AI always results in trash, and anybody who uses it doesn't know how to program," to summarize a bit. And, most importantly, do you actually practice what you preach here? You do realize that many modern games used AI in some form to accelerate development, right? Not just triple-A, most of whom cause harm by laying off their work-force in favor of AI, but also a vast plethora of Indie titles did, too, who simply increased their production speed or quality, or lowered the investment risk.

Also, on a side note, when you want to create something, you win once it's been created. If they used AI for that, that's apparently fine with them, so why would it not be a win for them? If they ever decide that's not up to their standards, they'll certainly improve upon or redo it, if they have the time, or remove it, if they find it unpleasant enough.

And I cannot agree that the website has "gone" to complete shit; it looks the same as ever, to me. How one classifies that is another matter. You have to scroll past AI stuff? Well, that's because you don't like it. I absolutely cannot stand a specific genre that floods the lists here, but never has it crossed my mind to complain about people publishing works of it's kind, as low-effort compared to other genres as I regard their production to be, which it is and which is why it's so common. 

"It's both" You believe people use AI *because* it produces low quality? That's a hot take right there...

"I can also criticise it." "One can do anything that may become a man; who will do more is none", to paraphrase some random guy. I.e., you can, but it's improper.

I doubt I'll agree with telling anyone not to use something for a personal project, as long as it doesn't harm others, so that's it from me trying to convince you to let them use the tools they like. Should itch introduce a no-AI policy and anyone infringes, even slightly, I'd be fully with you. But that isn't the case; it's not some unfair advantage, it's not defrauding anyone, it's not hindering others, it's nothing. Or is it any of those, or something I missed, to you or anyone else?

"If it's made with AI it isn't done properly." If by "properly" you mean the way you like, sure. If you mean with effort and aiming for high-quality, then the usage of AI is not the limiting factor. On the contrary, AI allows developers to focus on the qualitative parts of their game, i.e. the content instead of the code.

How do you know they'll never fix them? Did they tell you? And if one, even if the majority did that, what's that got to do with AI? That's on the devs, not on AI-usage.

I'd say I explained what I meant by "using AI as a tool", but to clarify:

• - Prompting "Make me a game" is bad, lazy, and anything you said until now, but it also will *not* result in anything remotely playable.
• - Prompting "Refactor function x to use bubble sort." is using it as a tool. And there's hardly any difference to copy-pasting from StackOverflow.

You can judge as in "have an opinion", not as in "decide what is right".

It's free. You don't like it, I got that. But it's still a "gift horse". You can take it or leave it, but you can't tell the other party you want something better. That's the meaning of that phrase and it applies to anything that is free, even to AI slop, even to any other kind of slop.

Again, AI alone cannot (yet) make a fully functioning game like this. Try to get any AI to make this same game and tell me how it went. It's gotten quite far, and it's capable of making small apps on its own, but a game is still a tab bit too complex. Maybe next year, it will be fully autonomous, but until then, there's at least some understanding of programming required to make a game (that isn't pong or tetris).

"There's no rush to publish"? Of course there is. When you work on something as a hobby that is meant to entertain others, you want that out as soon as possible, that's the same for any kind of art, be it games, stories, songs, or anything else.

"What would we do without the 100th awful AI game published this week"? Nothing different, I supposed. But what "we" do wasn't the point of the statement you quoted there, was it? They got a game published, that's a win for them. We weren't negatively affected (in any meaningful quantity). As you said, one more AI doesn't make a difference to us.

""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." So they use AI, accept it. Seriously, what kind of reply was that? Why would you accept not being able to complete a project if you *can* actually complete it. A lot of (negative) things are normal parts of life and could be accepted, but we can also just do something about some of them.

"AI is a negative though." I think you misunderstood that sentence. The point was that putting a qualifier only on the part of a comparison that you regard as "the negative one" does not turn the qualifier itself into a negative factor. 

"Hence why I never said otherwise. Creating a "half-finished product due to lack of time" doesn't constitute "doing something properly"." So people are not allowed to publish anything that is not up to your standards? Not AI-slop, not prototype stage games, only fully finished products can be served for free.

"And do you think AI will increase the amount of spam or decrease it?" Definitely increase it. And do you think that's because AI produces low quality or because AI eases development? I'd wager the latter.

"It's not an assumption, the quality of the game shows it clearly." That's based on the assumption that game quality reflects code quality. It does not, by the way. There are more than enough examples of splendid games with terrible code and vice versa.

"I haven't made any demands, but you're not entitled to do that even if you paid for the game."? Was it not you who complained about AI-slop being published on the platform they frequent? Within that same reply, may I add. That aside, you are entitled to file a complaint if you paid for a product that was advertised as having had more effort put into than is true. It's part of the consumer protection sections of most legal codes, a.k.a. "False Advertisement".

I get it. It's annoying to waste time on bad games. And AI lowers the barrier for that, so more bad games appear. But that's also what enables those who make good games to produce them much faster or to add much more content. AI lowers the requirements, and saves quite some time, when used correctly.

I don't see how that can be bad for anyone who can decide for themselves what games they play, so why complain to them about the tools they used?

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.

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?

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?

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.

That works for Firefox, but Chrome automatically blocks background activity for performance reasons and the way to disable that is to set internal flags, which is not very user friendly.

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?

That answer is pretty contradictory, don't you think?

"Low to no effort [...] that requires to have a concept and know how to code to even get [it] right".

This very contradiction was precisely the reason for my comment. They're putting in effort, as per your own statements, for something that is freely available.

They surely could put in more effort... but why? Do you go to work on a unicycle cause the car is too low effort? And is what he's doing in any way different from copy/pasting the code in Stackoverflow comments?

Maybe explain, why you chose to complain about AI usage on multiple games you played for free? Thanks.

Why do you look through the source code of games to sniff out AI usage? Don't say you didn't because this it the third game you're commenting this on. Thanks for your answer.

You should've continued, cause there is no 104.

This happened right after LVL 103.

The items show cost and amount when they're already maxed. You may want to consider using "MAX" instead of 1/1 and displaying "Bought" instead of the price once something has been bought. Though you may want to leave the actual max amount in for elements that have more than 1 upgrade stage.

Other than that, great progression! It's much more fun when you don't have to wait for hours. Although filling the first two stars might be a bit too slow for my taste, since you're only waiting for it to fill without any way to speed that up substantially.