Around 2 years ago I had to clean up a mess because someone who doesn't really know what they're doing designed an instancing system for a game. They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "acceptable" level and it was still awful as the whole design was simply flawed.
Fast forward to today: different company, same person, SAME issues with an AI that is 'allegedly' much better than it was. This time I only heard about these issues and wasn't the one who had to deal with it so I just had a really good laugh.
AI is only as good as the person using it, that's why we have such vast range of what people "claim" AI can do and why everyone has way different opinions of it.
Banger statement.
> Banger statement.
True, but it's even a bit more removed than that.
For a version 0.9 prototype, AI can produce pretty awesome-feeling output even in the hands of the most incompetent. So it looks like a miracle that does it all, with zero effort.
It's later down the road that it starts hitting walls that need a competent architect in charge.
What is terrifying is that those that claim 100x increased productivity are those with the least wisdom to tell good code from bad. They are the ones inundating the world with utter slop.
Presumably that's better than no game at all.
> It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "acceptable" level and it was still awful as the whole design was simply flawed.
Doing 2 weeks of fixing might have been hell, but this sounds like it was overall still a great deal for the company.
You're not really selling the "AI is useless story". It might be, but your anecdote seems like just another case of AI being worth it, though obviously flawed.
At the 2nd company it wasted thousands of dollars of advertisement because the server could not withstand the load and obviously data loss issues tained the image forever and will likely end up the same way.
Also please don't take this as "AI is useless". I use AI and I use it a lot. It's great and I love it. However, without a good understanding of architecture and general development structure you end up with things that can't scale and fail.
The other way to look at this is, thank goodness we didn't waste months or years on a failed game concept. Instead we got to market and validated (or invalidated) the concept fast.
You should've led with that then.
The company is likely to disagree and think it failed for a number of reasons, that only being one of them, and still depending on the cost may be very happy with their decision.
For one, even if it was a complete dumpster fire disaster, that is at least potentially a learning opportunity.
Whether they saw it as one is a different thing entirely.
If they think they can make games for 1/10th the engineering price, they are likely going to try until proven otherwise.
It's harder to convince them, no, it can't be done, just trust me, bro, I know from experience of never even trying.
Wrong.
A bad game can absolutely tank a studio. Shipping a game that has awful reviews will absolutely affect negatively your sales for future games.
Unless it’s a mega establishment product people move on and don’t stick with buggy crashing products
This wouldn’t be acceptable for a car safety, well I could like a whole bunch but you should get the idea
Nailed it.
That said, it couldn't have possibly been that bad if you got it to "acceptable" in 2 weeks.
I think it might be even worse than that. It seems to be a multiplier for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Possibly because being trained to exhibit positive demeanor means that it will always tell you you're the best, no matter what.
This is also why I think the "boycott AI" movement is misguided. AI doesn't produce slop: unskilled AI operators do.
Heck just the other day I saw a headline about a Nobel literature laureate apparently using AI, with some "expert" confidently claiming the winning novel was 100% generated. AI output quality ranges from slop to Nobel price worthy, depending on who uses it. Which seems to support the notion that it's a tool, much like any other.
Normally instances are random within the same region, but usually there's a system in place so you can join the same one as your friend.
He spent 3 weeks (which for him likely means 60+ hours a week) only iterating on the design with different models and not writing a single line of code.
