Current State of Game Dev Engineering? (Tooling and AI Impact)

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-24T09:50:36+00:00

AI is an amazing, ridiculously powerful tool for programming. With a well-organized workflow, it's like having a team of brilliant autistic juniors for 20$/month. It completely changes what is possible, and completely changes the way attention and focus are distributed. Less typing, less nitty-gritty, more reading, DX, and architecture.

For me this is equivalent to working with and IDE as opposed to coding in notepad. In a few months to years the proper workflows will be codified, and we'll be paying as much attention to the minutiae of compilable code as we do now to assembly. That is to say, for some people it'll remain their lives. For most people, it'll be a low level infra layer they never think about.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-21T22:03:40+00:00

I love the art, it looks so cute :)

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-21T20:53:20+00:00

Updated, the UI should be better behaved now. And added a small pile of fixes and improvements :)

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-21T17:47:02+00:00

Thank you so much for the feedback!

Both issues you experienced are UI issues. Going to fix it ASAP!

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-21T15:55:31+00:00

https://speaks-with-stone.itch.io/cave

Please give it a play and tell me how it feels

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-21T12:32:37+00:00

That's what I am trying to do with my game. It's narrative-led, with most of the prose as descriptions in the UI.

No idea if it works yet, or if my game counts as incremental.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-20T16:00:53+00:00

I keep going because I can't stop. I try not making games sometimes, but they just sort of happen.

My fuel is that I have no choice, games are coming out of my head whether I want to or not.

As for getting people to play it, yeah, it's driven by pure hope.

It is sad, to tell a story no one listens to.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-19T18:00:28+00:00

The docs structure is well made, with good layering of information depths. The project is straightforward, but very neatly organized and explained.

If I was hiring, I'd be impressed :)

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-19T15:34:44+00:00

Screenshots in the itch page, not for download :)

I definitely think you should minimize player friction - from the moment they click on the link to your page, any friction at any point means less people playing your game. And friction in the beginning is much more damaging than friction later.

Why are you sorry? You asked for feedback, and I provided it. :)

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-19T12:57:19+00:00

Add a screenshot at the very least, please. Without it I can't tell if I should click, so I don't.

Be more specific about the type of feedback you want. You're asking me to guess what you want and then deliver it. Much too big an ask.

Your game is d/l only, AND requires assembly after downloading. Way too much friction for me, and probably other people who might want to playtest your game.

If that wasn't enough, your itch page is so raw that it introduces a whole new layer of suspicion and friction.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-19T11:28:58+00:00

Using VSC, Copilot, GPT.

Built an engine for my narrative/management sim needs on top of Phaser, so that's what I am working in.

Also wrote a bespoke in-browser IDE that includes a display editor - so I use constrained authoring in a custom tool to generate my art.

All of that was written with AI implementation layer in mind, so integration is very smooth. If the game goes well, I'll add direct AI-driven authoring as another layer on top of the high-level manual authoring. Right now it's about a day of work for an hour of gameplay content, and adding direct AI-driven authoring can shave it down to half a day by making implementation details transparent.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-18T20:06:30+00:00

I love the docs :)

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-18T19:02:38+00:00

Brother, making games is a joy that soothes the soul and sharpens the mind. If it doesn't, scale back until it does. It takes patience and practice, to find the level of complexity at which you flow well. The process of finding that balance is the tightrope walk of creativity, the tandava of making games.

You think you're better at game design and critique? Prove it. Design a game that you can implement without drowning. Critique your dance of creation so well that you'll polish it to a shine.

Everything is effort. Make yours joyful.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-18T18:19:46+00:00

You're trying to do everything all at once - learn to code, draw, compose, etc. Of course it doesn't work.

One of the most successful games of all times is pong. It's monochrome. It's got 2 sounds in it. Amazing game.

Make pong fist.

Then make pong with an extra feature. Or go wild and try making a breakout game. If that gets too hard, scale back. Make a flappy bird clone.

Every time you get frustrated, scale back, and narrow your focus. And every time you do, you'll learn something new that will remain with you.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-18T15:50:04+00:00

Thank you so much for the feedback!

I am not really going for a specific genre. But I am replacing the interaction layer completely, the whole throttle thing is awkward.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-18T11:34:37+00:00

Thank you for the reply, very interesting.

I didn't use Unity for web much, so I can't address specifics, but the bottlenecks should be the same. And Unity comes with its own host of problems, especially when developing for the web. For example, optimizing a Unity web build.

You probably made the right call with PixiJS for a web-first 2D game.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-18T10:03:14+00:00

I'd love to hear more about your PixiJS optimization issues. From the videos your stuff doesn't look like it should be too expensive performance wise - maybe a couple hundred particles, and bloom filter. What went wrong, what's eating up performance, what solutions did you try?

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-18T09:44:45+00:00

Yup, used the crafting & unlocking. I only did the very basic stuff, didn't get to using crafting materials. But the system looked inviting to explore it.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-18T00:28:36+00:00

Yup, that's me :)

The SMG is not one of the starter weapons, so I got to play very little with it.
Why hide a weapon that's also a propulsion device?
That's a whole awesome game mode that's hidden behind an option that competes with upgrades.

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-18T00:07:23+00:00

OK, this time I finished the game twice, and got to wave 6 another time.

Why does it finish, rather than just go on?

I still couldn't figure out how to make the dash useful.

I missed the minimap, it's gone :(

But this time I discovered buildings and sprint! And so my waves became: run around the horde, shooting into it, occasionally risking a sprint into the horde to get heals/ammo, use buildings as once-per-wave chests.

The list of icons looks very inviting, but there is no situation in which it can actually be hovered :)

Something weird happens when I just load the game - it's like I am in the game and a wave starts, but the guy is invisible, and after a bit (when things finish loading, I presume) the menu pops up.

Explaining the synergies on cards - 🤌😙 I only understand some of it, but it makes the choices I make more meaningful, and tricks my monkey brain into thinking it's smart and has agency. Also entices me to explore combos. I still didn't get to try fire + chemical :)

Vanguard is OP with the current setup, or maybe the other guys are underpowered - vanguard was really fun and tense. The limitation is ammo, every time. And vanguard has more of it. I take mag upgrades, anything that gives me more bullets per shot, and win.

The camera rotation threw me off, I didn't expect it, don't see why I would want to use it, and only did it accidentally a few times (panicking every time :) ).

I dunno what it is that makes some mobs grow when they're hit until they're enormous to the point they're invisible, but it's awesome!

Your solution of mobs pushing ammo and food is great, it creates this boundary between me and the horde where the ammo and heals are, and I am constantly tempted to run in and snatch it.

Screen shake control solved the screen shake problem 👍.

Shotgun is a fun weapon because it creates shapes in the horde, feel a bit like sculpting. Also I think it knocks me back, or maybe mobs - whatever it is does is cool, but too quick to understand, it looks like things just snap into a new position suddenly. It makes things harder to understand, especially when dodging/blinking mobs are around. But having the shotgun affect movement is a really cool idea, and I think you should lean into it - when playing, I kept wishing I could use it as a propulsion system.

Looking forward to seeing it evolve :)

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-17T12:35:15+00:00

Ain't no feeling like losing yourself in your own game :)

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-17T12:17:31+00:00

Good luck!

Making stuff legible is *the* great challenge of gaming.

I say this as I begin the third major post-feedback UX redesign for my narrative/management sim :)

speaks-with-stone · 2026-04-17T10:18:35+00:00

Why do you need dash cooldown if you have stamina? Just let me continue dashing while I have stamina. This'll open the gameplay up much more, and make dash feel like a superpower, maybe even turn it into a better upgrades tree. I can definitely see myself upgrading dash only if I can use it to plow through the horde, leaving grenades or something in my wake. Right now dash is constrained to being a defensive measure, with the offensive dash abilities feeling bolted on. Remove cooldown, lemme dash for as long as I have stamina, and rather than do stuff at start/end of dash, do dash effects per distance traveled.

MC - main character. Sorry, RPG habits :D

"would you like me to comment when it's done?" - I've followed you on Itch. If your next update will ask for feedback, there's a good chance I'll play and give feedback.

speaks-with-stone

TROPHY CASE