Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games

Posted by YesBox 4 days ago

Comments

Comment by LarsDu88 1 day ago

I started building a VR game during COVID and released it 2024. When it released, I was using GPT and Copilot to add a lot of quality-of-life stuff (like visual juice) faster.

Yesterday, I finally got around to setting Opus 4.8 on the codebase. It was able to find and correct numerous subtle performance issues.

Features I could no longer spend time implementing, it could one-shot in roughly 10 minutes (not without issues). I could also fan out agents to work on multiple things at once.

One thing I found is that the knowledge I gained from doing things by hand greatly helped reject bad AI generated ideas. For example, my game is a starfighter flight sim and one idea was to tick AI collision detection checks lower the further AI ships were away from the player, which for a flight simulator leads to a lot of crashing into the terrain. A great idea for an FPS, but a terrible idea for a flight sim where enemy ships are often very close to the terrain.

My takeaway is that we are in a golden era where we currently have projects that are half human coded, where AI can pickup the slack. But soon we will be in the Dark Ages where AI generates all the code, and the end result will be much worse as the devs begin to lose an understanding of what they are creating.

Comment by Zarathruster 1 day ago

I recently tried to learn gamedev with Claude as a tutor of sorts. It didn't end well. Claude confidently led me off a cliff and I had throw the whole thing in the trash. It seems there's just no shortcut around learning stuff the hard way. When I've got enough reps in to be able to tell smart vs. stupid decisions, I imagine it'll be a lot more useful, but at this point I suspect AI is far from being good enough to get us into your described Dark Ages.

Comment by akoboldfrying 2 days ago

I always enjoy hearing the thoughts of someone who took a slightly different path (indie game development being a favourite), and isn't committed to advancing some thesis -- pressing me to love this or hate that. It feels like it gives my brain a chance to step back from dopamine- or rage-induced habits and just... connect with other people.

I don't know what will happen either. I hope that you and I and other hardworking, basically good people will continue to have a somewhat meaningful, somewhat pleasant existence in the post-AI world, and I think that might be possible, but I just don't know.

Comment by jensmtg 1 day ago

To have this simple comment revealed, alone, five years ago, as a glimmer of a future approaching.

Comment by schnitzelstoat 2 days ago

Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded games? I suppose perhaps they wouldn't disclose that it was vibe-coded but I'm not aware of a single one.

Comment by sarchertech 2 days ago

Look at steam releases. May 2025: 1727. May 2026: 1875

A year over year increase matching the same trend that has existed since 2017. The same pattern holds for every month this year except March (where there was an increase year over year of about 600 games).

If you’ve ever been to a game dev forum, you’ll see that there are at least 10x as many people who want to make a game as there are people who have made a game (it’s probably much higher than 10x).

If games were easy to vibe code, or if AI speed up game dev 10x, I would expect it to almost immediately show up as a flood of games on Steam.

Comment by Cthulhu_ 2 days ago

Thing is, Steam already was flooded with shovelware - I suspect a percentage of new relelases includes plenty of AI usage that was previously made in other ways (e.g. using asset libraries)

Comment by sarchertech 1 day ago

Yeah it was flooded with shovelware. But I’m not talking about people who want to publish asset flips for a quick buck.

I’m talking about all of the people out there who have ever tried to make a game or never got started because it was too hard. In my CS cohort years ago, pretty much everyone there got into programming originally because they wanted to make a game.

Games definitely have the highest ratio of I want to make a game to I have made a game of any type of software. If it was suddenly easy to make “your game”, Steam would explode.

Comment by doctorpangloss 1 day ago

roblox studio has deep generative AI integration, it has absorbed many users both creators and players during the time period you are measuring. steam grew so little despite digital audiences growing so much.

Comment by kelvinjps10 1 day ago

But still how many of these games are successful?

Comment by short_sells_poo 2 days ago

I wonder if there's also another aspect: Games have to be fun for humans and this involves a lot of trial and error with actual humans in the loop.

You can't just spin up a bunch of claude agents to implement a game for you, because implementing a new feature requires that you playtest it with a fairly fine granularity as it's being implemented.

You can save some time implementing various subsystems with llms, but at some point the dev cycle will turn into: tweak things, build, play, rinse and repeat.

I'm sure asset flip and friendslop games will become cheaper to make with ai tooling, but if you want to make a genuinely good game, it will have to involve humans actually playtesting it during development.

Comment by notahacker 1 day ago

Also, game audiences are brutal about games that are flawed, and even more brutal if they think it's shovelware. If you're selling games on Steam, something with "Mostly Negative" reviews isn't serious competition (at least not unless it's part of a long established franchise with a big marketing budget).

And sports management sims are one of the most brutal of the lot. Slop might get you something that superficially looks like a sports sim (a decent third party UI library would get you quite some way in the past), but what fans actually care about is perceived realism, game mechanics, balance/challenge etc (and in real world sims, "how has my team been represented?") and that's a design decision, play testing, parameter tweaking and user engagement exercise, not a feature-adding one.

Comment by jimmypk 1 day ago

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Comment by yoz-y 2 days ago

Turns out making a game, even with full help of the LLM power is still a massive effort most people won’t go through.

Even simpler but non-trivial programs require a lot of back and forth. So in the end it will be the same kind of motivated people that will be able to produce something good. We’re nowhere near “Claude, build me GTA6”

Comment by uludag 1 day ago

Here's an example of this regarding the recent indie hit "Mina the Hollower." They were recently interviewed and asked the question "What is Yacht Club's stance on AI and has AI been used in the production of Mina the Hollower at all?" to which their reply was "We all got caught up in AI fever like the rest of the world, but we didn't find it was very effective for what we're doing. Maybe our work just isn't that generic! We've found some ways it can help... like Google or a thesaurus, but it hasn't affected what's in our game." [1]

It's hard to immagine that even the best AI model would result in anything better than a marginal reduction in release timeline. Like maybe for such projects one could spend $X00,000 worth of tokens for maybe like a %single-digit-percent reduction in time to release. Marginally good, maybe even project saving, but not any larger a paradigm shift than Unity was.

[1] https://www.gamereactor.eu/mina-the-hollower-interview-discu...

Comment by Zarathruster 1 day ago

The conversation around AI in games is such a polluted mess of confusion and bad faith. I would hate to have to answer such an interview question.

Recently I came across a game on Steam that was getting review-bombed because the devs admitted to using AI on an entirely different game. By "using AI" I mean they admitted to using Cursor of all things. Not assets, just a coding assistant.

If we're going to get backlash for stuff as stupid as this, it's probably best to just keep one's entirely mouth shut about all things AI.

Comment by clates 1 day ago

> "What is Yacht Club's stance on AI and has AI been used in the production of Mina the Hollower at all?" to which their reply was "We all got caught up in AI fever like the rest of the world, but we didn't find it was very effective for what we're doing. Maybe our work just isn't that generic! We've found some ways it can help... like Google or a thesaurus, but it hasn't affected what's in our game." [1]

Can you see how this intentionally coy and evasive answer was made specifically to not say "No, we didn't use AI." but still sound like "No, we didn't use AI." so that people wouldn't immeidately bust out pitchforks and start review bombing their game before it takes off?

Comment by uludag 17 hours ago

Yeah, I get all forms of media are avoiding the appearance of using AI like the plague. I still think that what they're saying can still be taken at face value. Like if the game has a 3D sequel I don't immagine the time to release or quality would be outside the distribution of how long similar games take pre-AI.

Comment by AndrewOMartin 2 days ago

We might get a powerful enough model to run "Claude, build me GTA6" before GTA6.

Comment by tripledry 2 days ago

Highly doubt it.

Comment by adornKey 2 days ago

Hm. Nowadays a lot of games look alike. They use some 3D-Engine and most of the work is in the 3D-modelling and writing some interesting scripts.

For modelling and scripting I think we're not far away. A lot of games just reused old historical stories or fiction and a lot of stories feel like cheap soap operas. As soon as an AI can separate the good from the bad scrips it'll be mostly done.

Comment by Cthulhu_ 2 days ago

I'm sure AI will be used in asset generation but it'll be in deployed similarly as procedural generation of mass assets like trees and npcs.

I don't yet see it used for characters as they quickly become kind of generic / predictable.

Comment by kakacik 2 days ago

Clearly you don't work in game development, this comment put a smile on my face. Although I expected a bit more from hacker news crowd

Comment by whizzter 2 days ago

You overvalue the HN crowd (or undervalue the AI hype-machine) considering you're downvoted and GP is upvoted (Another gamedev here smiling at GP's comment).

Comment by gafferongames 2 days ago

Yet another classic unskilled but unaware of it from the hacker news crowd (another professional gamedev here).

Comment by inigyou 2 days ago

It's not hard if you just imagine a slop re-skin of any other GTA of similar game.

Comment by kobalsky 1 day ago

Did you miss the sarcasm or has GTA6 become some sort of anomalous memetic agent that makes anyone who tries to work on it not be able to finish it regardless if it's human or AI?

Comment by tripledry 1 day ago

Both probably, I don't usually understand sarcasm in written text unless it's explicitly stated.

Comment by pennaMan 2 days ago

someday we will have models that can resolve physics to such degree to predict the future with surgical accuracy and when someone says "maybe models will become advanced enough to create a whole other universe from scratch" you will be there saying "highly doubt it"

Comment by owebmaster 2 days ago

This reminds me of a boss I had 20 years ago that said devs were going to be replaced soon.

Maybe he was 20 years early or maybe it's not happening now too.

Comment by pennaMan 1 day ago

Please note that I did not imply devs won't exist in my contrived fantasy.

Who do you think will be operating those mythological tools?:)

Comment by grebc 2 days ago

Someday.

Comment by utopiah 2 days ago

> Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded games?

Fair question... I'd even go as far as broadening the scope :

Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded anything?

And by popular/successful I don't mean bought Github stars from other GenAI/LLMs related project as it's been a demonstrated practice https://awesomeagents.ai/news/github-fake-stars-investigatio... for that specific domain now.

Comment by jvanderbot 2 days ago

At some point in the apparently-impending "software is free" era, s/w stops being a product that has to be "popular" and starts being mostly bespoke. One possible future is that your machine does you want because you have a local agent molding it into the right form all the time.

Bit of a stretch, but possible. I've had agents write 100x more code for me _to be productive at things_ than they do for new projects I want to sell/share.

Comment by microgpt 1 day ago

OpenClaw is popular - or is it? I don't actually know anyone who uses it.

Claude Code is popular, and is vibecoded.

Comment by swiftcoder 1 day ago

If the only successful uses of vibecoding are more tools for vibecoding... Feels a bit like the snake eating its own tail.

That said, I don't think that is actually the case - there is a small and growing percentage of LLM-written code in pretty much every piece of tech I have insight into the internals of.

Though not in the sense of "implement GT6"

Comment by utopiah 1 day ago

Not sure if my last comment was clear but I meant specifically not related to GenAI/LLMs. So no harness, no model tooling, etc. I mean end-user used software. I don't mean that this topic isn't interesting per se, only that (as the article pointed out) it's been "gamed" so much popularity there isn't really meaningful anymore.

Comment by Aperocky 1 day ago

Depend on your definition of vibe coding - if it means code came out from a LLM vs. keyboard, you can bet that most updated software had some of it now.

But if you mean "Built me a GTA6", the answer is zero, because LLMs simply does not have that kind of capability.

Comment by yieldcrv 2 days ago

yes, there are

no, most won’t burn themselves by publicly linking them as vibe coded

there is that ny times article about the peptide guy and lovable showcase by revenue though. I guess next up are even more disqualifiers about the term “successful”, but my outstanding question is who cares? What does convincing you buy, an Anthropic pro subscription at best?

Comment by pennaMan 2 days ago

don't ask how the sausage is made

Comment by alexpotato 1 day ago

I've started trying to make some vibe coded games.

The best analogy to use is AI image generation e.g.

- someone posts a photo made with AI and your reaction is "that's amazing!"

- then you generate an image and it's pretty good but not exactly what you want

- then you try to get the AI to change the image to what you want and it's very difficult/requires a lot of steps

More specifically, you can easily spin up a game and parts of it are great. e.g. I made a game where you run a Soviet tractor factory [0]. The AI came up with some good mechanics and funny scenarios ("inspector comes to visit from Moscow: bribe him" etc). But the game mechanics are "off", the humor doesn't always work, you need to gametest A LOT etc.

0 - https://alexpotato.com/games/tractor47/?l=hn2

Comment by contextfree 1 day ago

I've been experimenting with vibecoding with a 3D game with no engine, all in C++ with DX11, all-procedural modeling. My experience is you can quickly add a lot of features and mechanics that work semi-well but getting any one feature or scenario to work really well ends up "requiring" digging into the code and writing stuff yourself.

"Requiring" in the sense that while it might be technically possible to get the AI to do it, it becomes an incredibly annoying experience to repeatedly try and fail to get it to properly understand and implement what you want. This almost seems less about whether the AI is as smart or smarter than you or a better programmer or whatever, and more about the medium of natural language being worse than the medium of code for this.

Comment by dvh 2 days ago

Games were filled to the brink with asset flops and low effort titles long before LLMs. I've personally contributed 13 or so.

Comment by uludag 1 day ago

I've been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit and testing out the demos people have been sharing, as this would be the place where people most enthusiastic about vibe-coding games post and everything I've seen has been immensely underwhelming. The problem with these games fall into the following categories:

- An utter lack of animation. So many games feature mostly static images.

- AI assets make the game's art style feel horribly incohesive. I played a TCG game where there were high fantasy art, chibi 2d art, anime art, seemingly used haphazardly.

- Bad UX. For example, in the same TCG game, all of the cards had very fancy artwork generated, but the game board itself was far away enough that the made the cards look like blobs on the board.

- Buggy mechanics: There was this guy why shared a platformer generated by fable where you move a lamp to create a shadow path. The character had very awkward movement, would constantly get stuck/unstuck, and would be hard to control.

- Broken mechanics: A lot of games featured exploits that just rendered the game boring to play

- Poor balancing

- Lack of ovararching game structure: no story, no meta-progression, no world-map. These AI games tend to be isolated experiences.

I don't see the masses creating quality, sellable games anytime in the near future. There are so many aesthetic qualities to a game that have direct human bottlenecks. AI can even make games significantly worse as you can seemingly implement many bad mechanics without validating them. Good game devs seem to be relentlessly pruning out the things that down work.

Comment by rvz 2 days ago

We would have heard about one already by now but it appears that we are still waiting.

Or maybe it is not worth the time and tokens spent to vibe code yet another Minecraft / Roblox clone that makes no money.

Comment by adamzbik 2 days ago

S&box is a good example of how the scene might look in the LLM era. They made games easy to make and publish, and while Garry's Mod always had a hacky, rough vibe to the available game modes (Source engine magic + CSS textures), you'd always feel that the games were made by people.

Fast forward to 2026 and the next generation platform is here, and while there are unique, passion projects available, most of the discover screen is filled with vibe coded xp farming games with AI slop thumbnails. The issue is so big Facepunch had to actively derank and punish games that would do this, because the "marketing" content was so detached from the game (despite everything being AI generated pretty much).

Comment by lopis 2 days ago

Like in any other field of Software Engineering, it's not the actual programming part that is hard.

Comment by everyday7732 2 days ago

enclose.horse is somewhat popular and successful, posted here on hacker news a while ago.

Comment by SpaceNoodled 2 days ago

If there truly were, I'm sure we wouldn't hear the end of it. However, the state of the art is all hype and no substance, i.e., slop.

Comment by redsocksfan45 2 days ago

[dead]

Comment by fzeroracer 1 day ago

I certainly can't think of any. I've gone through about 18,000 games on Steam (since I dig for hidden gems and interesting games) and the only time a vibe-coded game stood out to me was when it was so awful I did a double take.

There's so many vibe-coded roguelite deckbuilders out there and all of them look exactly the same. A bunch of shitty art with zero cohesion, mechanics that don't actually work and a UI that's actively offensive to engage with.

Comment by dvh 2 days ago

When I was a boy my father forbade me playing Summer Olympics on our Atari 800XL, he didn't like the crunchy noises coming out of joystick and he didn't want to pay for the repairs.

Comment by RobRivera 1 day ago

I have been building my own game and game engine for a while now, and cannot help but see whats really happening with vibe coded game generation: and investment into the content generation pipeline.

I feel a solid game engine paired with a good content pipeline can ship games at such a rapid clup that the gameslop gets lost as the noise it is.

Comment by ksaun 1 day ago

If you don't mind disclosing, for what type(s) of games is your game engine intended?

(Also: I agree with your assessment. I'm not working on an engine, but I am working on a game, mostly/initially just for my own edification. It's fun to feel empowered to create again! (My personal circumstances had obstructed me until genAI's recent progress.))

Comment by RobRivera 1 day ago

It's generalized to the point where "the only limit is yourself"

In other words, its incredibly modular and lends to configuration flexibility.

Comment by SpaceNoodled 1 day ago

I'm not confident that the bottleneck in quality game development is "content." I can only see this accelerating the slop and drowning out the good games in slop.

Comment by RobRivera 1 day ago

What do you believe is the bottleneck?

Comment by alexpotato 1 day ago

> Why not? I think because it wasn't a good business decision to compete with me.

The owner of Pinboard has a great story about this:

"I ended up buying a competitor. Why? Because his choice of tech stack + server footprint cost more than mine. The consequence of this was that even with each of us charging the same price. I was profitable and he was not.

Do not try to compete against Pinboard"

Comment by tantalor 1 day ago

> old school

> 2012

sigh

Comment by vova4kin 1 day ago

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