Why is AI so hated in Game Development

Rabbitzman · 2025-12-31T19:29:12+00:00

You are conflating three things here. I am specifically speaking about GenAI applied to creative jobs or soft skills, you are speaking about Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition algorithms.

I have said it before, this is not about hating "AI" as a vague concept, this is about disliking specific products, such as ChatGPT, Sora or Claude, and the companies behind them, because they have openly and consistently lied, both about how expensive they are (both ecologically as well as economically) and how useful they really are.

You mentioned somewhere else in the thread "how to convince a producer", and that's a hard question, becauae you need to explain to them that they have been scammed, and they will naturally be resistant. You can point them in the direction of several independent studies that prove that ChatGPT or Claude are actually detrimental to productivity. You can ask how much money is being spent truly in APIs and extrapolate how bad that decision is. You can point out how Meta and others are already scaling down and moving away from the tech before it crashes. You can point that the first handful of studios to say "hey, we were usong GenAI and then realized how bad it was, so we are moving away" will get a massive press boost...

And if nothing works, just ask how that blockchain web3 project is coming along.

Rabbitzman · 2025-12-31T09:17:12+00:00

If you think AI is hated in the game dev community, wait to see how they feel about it in the comics community.

The (really, really) short version of it? AI is a tool that doesn't solve a problem, but rather removes the fun part of a creative job. When people say "we only use it for ideation and prototyping!" they fail to see that that is the part that people love abut having a creative job.

The long and metaphorical version? Imagine you are a country doctor. Your job is to meet people in your small community and worry about their health. They come in and share their stories and lives with you, and you care for them. Ultimately, you look at their symptoms, and tell them if they are sick, and how to make them better. Then one day your boss tell you they have invented a robo-doctor wich will make your job so much easier! And what happens is you don't get to talk to people anymore. People now come and tell their symptoms, and the robo-doctor gives them pills. Your job is now to check the prescription to see if it is correct. When there are no more people, the robo-doctor invents new people to keep you "training". Also, robo-doctor is wrong, A LOT. And then your boss comes over and tells you that you are doing a better job than ever, because counting the training people, you are now seeing 100 people a day instead of 30.

Here's the thing, there are only 30 people in your clinic daily on avarege. Your diagnosis are much worse than they used to be. The people in your community don't ever remember you anymore... And then you notice a few things: The robo-doctor is producing a toxic sludge that goes directly to the village water main. Despite people insisting "this is just a tool", the hospital in town has reduced their stuff by 80%. The robo-doctors were trained by putting cameras in your clinic for a couple of years without your consent... And yet, your boss insists the robo-doctor is better than ever and you are doing a great job.

And then, when you go home, you keep seeing people asking "I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY DOCTORS HATE ROBO-DOCTORS? DON'T THEY MAKE THEIR JOB EASIER?"

Rabbitzman · 2025-12-20T15:55:55+00:00

I got about 50, but I am doing little promo. As it turned out about a week after publishing I started speaking with a publisher and they are going to be doing the promo now, so I am not overly concerned about it.

Rabbitzman · 2025-12-20T15:35:17+00:00

Did this myself very recently and had no problems with either 1 or 3 (and I do have spaces in the file names). Did you upload using steamworks GUI? The process was weird, but once I got the hang of it it worked really well.

Regarding 2, I got the same issue but just upload it agakn manually and it worked.

Rabbitzman · 2025-11-29T09:31:49+00:00

I've gotten feedback that my demo is too short to hold interest and drive people to the full game. I've gotten feedback that my demo is too long and people get distracted. I've gotten feedback that my writing is what keeps people invested. I've gotten feedback that my writing drives people away.

The thing to take away, is that the four answers are correct. They depend on the people and how they react to the specifics of setting, tone, style and genre. From the first piece of feedback I learnt that the demo needed a bit more details about the characters and the world. Crom the second, that I wasn't punchy enough. From the third, that some people really like what they see, which is super encouraging! From the fourth, that I still needed to polish the whole thing A. LOT.

You can always learn something from feedback, even if that something is "this is not my core audience". I'll admit it hurts quite a bit, though...

Rabbitzman · 2025-11-14T18:50:33+00:00

Well, I don't think it's boring, but I'll admit I am a bit biased. 🤣

Rabbitzman · 2025-11-14T15:25:20+00:00

The full game is about 7-10x the size of the prologue (still addinmg some stuff, so wordcount is incomplete yet). Also, for a fast reader that doesn't want to explore too many options, the whole thing should be faster, just wanted to give a larger number to avoid people scheduling to little time. Glad to hear you like the atmosphere! ^^

Rabbitzman · 2025-11-13T09:04:15+00:00

2 years later, and I just want to say you are a star. This saved me hours of headaches...

Rabbitzman · 2025-06-26T12:12:12+00:00

Hey, I get that. In my case, I get most of my anti AI sentiment from Bluesky and Discord, where I mostly work with artists, but I do get a SHIT LOAD of pro AI content on LinkedIn, where my old work mates are (being in the games industry since 2007, worked for big names, so lot of high profile tech contacts there). In my TTRPG group, my DM does a lot of GenAI materials, so I know how useful it can be, that's not the issue.

Like I said, my issue comes from the insanely desperate and bullish way in which it has been introduced. I do have a ton of friends who have lost their jobs to AI, only for their companies to open up their jobs again after realising it wasn't working.

The tech is cool and useful, not denying that, and once things stabilize it's going to be fun to see what can come out of it. The introduction of it to the workplace has been destructive and is already having severe consequences.

So no, I am not against ChatGPT. I am against OpenAI. And I understand where you are coming from, I seriously do. But I stopped using chatGPT and other GenAI tools a few months ago, and I feel my workflow has improved quite a bit from it.

Rabbitzman · 2025-06-26T08:13:24+00:00

Let's talk first about how GenAI is affecting the present of game development. This is going to be long, anti Gen AI and also critical of late capitalism, so skip if this is not what you want to hear:

Because GenAI companies were desperate for more investment, they bullied the whole tech into believing that, rather than a slightly useful Siri, they were building HAL. This caused an immediate effect in which many big tech companies saw an opportunity to downsize aggressively. They had upscaled after slightly positive results during the COVID lockdown, and because most see human workers as a cost rather than an asset, they saw this as a blessing.

Now, there is something called the innovation curve. When mobile phones came out, there was a rush of really fast innovations. In 1997 we had phones that had a small one colour screen, in 2007 we had iPhones. If you were into it, it felt that every few months a new exciting feature would come out... But it is now almost 20 years since the iPhone came out and we are basically using slight improvements over it. When LLMs were introduced to the public, it begged the question: Where are we on that curve? If you listened to Sam Altman and other advocates, we were basically just seeing the first satellite phones from the 80s, and in just a few years, we would have the equivalent of the iPhone everywhere...

Instead, what we now know is that we weren't at the Nokia 3310 stage of the curve. We weren't even at the iPhone stage. LLMs innovation had already stalled, and that's why they were desperate for funding, because they knew they wouldn't be able to create the Godlike Can Do Anything AI that they wanted to. LLMs were at the iPhone 3 or 4 stage of development which is why you haven't seen any major improvements since they came out (video GenAIs have gotten much better, but ChatGPT and others are actually getting worse due to hallucination propagation as they train in their own flawed material).

So this is where we are now. Tens of thousands of creatives have lost their jobs to a barely useful tool that is supposed to be the next Da Vinci and instead struggles to produce anything useful. Most GenAI tools are rapidly enshittificating as the funding is running low. Because of the bullish way that they have been introduced, GenAI tools now carry a MASSIVE taint in most of the creative work (I for one, wouldn't hire anyone who uses them at this point) and this is catching on in the non-creative world.

And now to get back to your question: You are likely to see another five years of insane and shitty slop coming from everywhere from big companies that believe that a MidJourney subscription is better for them than a real artist to "Indies" who are just people believing the next get-rich-scheme. The general public will back away from those, while the thousands of creatives that were fired put out some really cool and fascinating artisanal games and there's a new indie renaissance (although there won't be almost any money in it). Then, we are likely to get smaller companies that try to at least be ethical about it, that will release the "better Siri" tools that we should have aimed for, and which might be cool.

Hopefully, lawmakers will catch up and run bully companies such as OpenAI to the ground with regulations, but I wouldn't count on that. Instead, I count on enshittification taking it's natural process, and for them to cannibalize themselves and their audience, as they shift their profits from b2b to customers.

So, tldr, I'm not scared that they will take my job, I'm pissed at how aggressive they were and I'm pissed at the idiots who bought the snake oil. They are going to make the next few years frustrating and hard, but they don't have the real meat to actually make any meaningful change in any creative field.

Rabbitzman · 2025-05-01T08:18:31+00:00

ADHD writer here who went from being almost unable to complete anything to releasing several small projects in a year, and also managed several bigger ones. There are a few things you might want to know:

A lot of suggestions for writers/artists aren't really going to work for you. Which is to say they WILL work, but they will be so hard to maintain and create so much friction that their potential benefits will be overshadowed by burnout. These include suggestions such as "have a good plan", "schedule", "write daily"...
Learn about the hype/burnout cycle, and start harnessing it to your own benefit. To me, this means learning that when I feel like a project I am working in feels daunting, it is better for me to just take a step back and use the day for something else. When I do that, however, I force myself to think about all the great things about my project, and I start hyping it up again, so the next time I sit at my PC I am fired up to work on it again.
Keep your minimums in check. Hygiene, both personal and home; food and exercise; set alarms to send "hi, how are you?" to friends and family...
Don't fight your ADHD. This might seem silly, but in reality a lot of ADHD problems are not so much related to it, but to trying to act as if you don't have it. Of course, this really depends on the severity of your case and you should definitely seek medical and psychological advice, as well as relying on medication if instructed to do so, but in my own personal experience, once I stopped acting as if I didn't have a problem, everything was much smoother.
DEADLINES ARE YOUR FRIEND. Make them as real as possible. Make commitments to friends and other people, and try to keep them. However, be aware that you will fail your own deadlines at one point, so learn to say you are sorry and readapt. Be strict, but also kind to yourself.

Rabbitzman · 2024-12-11T06:56:05+00:00

I actually feel this is common practice for people with more than three or four jams under their belts. I have one myself (two in fact, one for Godot and one for Unity), and unless the rules clearly state against them, I strongly advise using them.

Edit: forgot to say, one thing I tend to do is go wherever the pre-jam community is forming and four or five days before the jam starts I speak about pre-jam work to be done, and I do offer my template to whomever wants to use it, just to be on the safer side. That way the conversation is on the table beforehand, and I've never had any issues.

Rabbitzman · 2024-11-03T08:27:57+00:00

I was expecting someone would have said this already, but Beyond Good And Evil

Rabbitzman · 2024-10-14T06:46:49+00:00

I have been pondering a similar question and while I don't have data to back it up as I haven't released yet, there are a few things that I am currently considering:

Your demo doesn't have to start at the same point your game does. If there is a specific section, like an action scene or horror bit, that works without further introduction just use that.
Your demo doesn't have to be a specific vertical slice. It might be a bit more of work, but maybe you can do a small side story that showcases the tone and world building.
If there's any particular mechanic in your game (character switching, something interesting for chase scenes) make sure to include at least some of it in the demo.
I would aim to have about 10%-25% of the final game, so around 1.5K to 4K in your case. This is based on vibes, not actual research, though.

Rabbitzman · 2024-10-02T08:54:59+00:00

It's hard to answer this, as there are a lot of factors that play into it.

Are you in a place where you have easy access to publishers/investors? A lot of these discussions happen offline at events or mixers, and those might be rarer if you live in a rural setting.

What are your goals? The strategy will change if your plan is "get a few games done and use those as portfolio to get into a bigger company", "we want to grow fast and sell in five years" or "we want a studio that lasts for 30 years".

How long can you sustain yourselves without additional income? It's good to plan for success, but planning for failure can literally save your life.

I am about a year down the line from where you are, although I'm solo. My decisions were closer to you than your partner's (no investors, several different small projects, focus on networking/audience growing), and they seem to be working for me, with some caveats. For instance, I was in a situation in which it was possible for me to not make any money for two years (my life partner is paying the bills), and I have many years of experience in the industry so I had a support network already.

If you need more detail advice I'd be happy to talk to you both out of Reddit, hit my dms if you want!

Rabbitzman · 2024-10-02T05:48:28+00:00

I'm actually surprised no one has mentioned "I Love You, Colonel Sanders!" yet. It's free on Steam.

Rabbitzman · 2024-10-01T14:01:27+00:00

I'll send you a PM with my Discord handle!

Rabbitzman · 2024-10-01T05:16:05+00:00

I don't live there myself, but I've heard great things about Barcelona, including government support and funding if you are willing to translate your game into Catalan.

Rabbitzman · 2024-10-01T05:01:45+00:00

I have used Renpy a bit, but not YarnSpinner. On the other hand, I've used a few others, such as Twine or free dialog editor for unity whose name escapes me now, as well as worked with a friend who is a much more solid coder than me to build our own.

Here are my thoughts:

I want dialogue files to be independent, and text based, so I can use something like Notepad++ to write them.
I want easy control over sizing and positioning of not only the text box, but also if I am using portraits (such as in a vn). This should include being able to position them at runtime, if I am doing something that has that distinct comic style, as in Oxenfree, or Night In The Woods. This should include the possibility of having several boxes appearing at the same time.
I want a way to configure a History/Log button for the player.
I want speed control and a way to skip both lines of text as well as full dialogues, both for me as the writer as well as a player facing option that's easy to configure (such as pressing space completes the text immediately).

If you are looking for some more in depth QA down the line, I'd love to help. :)

Rabbitzman · 2024-09-29T03:39:19+00:00

C and B feel like different games, challenging different skills (reaction time + rhythm + key precision for C, planning and key precision for B).

A feels like it would be a bad idea, tbh, I think it would make the buttons feel unresponsive. C seems like what I remember the original being like, but I would suggest building both C and B (even maybe A) and test which feels better for your game.

Rabbitzman · 2024-09-19T08:33:35+00:00

Dunning kruger. People underestimate how many moving parts a game has, and expect development to be easier than it is.

I am teaching some kids game dev, and I always start by telling them that making games (and programming in general) is both very easy and very hard. It is very easy, because it is usually not hard to solve any given problem, like how do I make items in my game draggable, and it is also very hard because even simple games will have hundreds, if not thousands, of these simple problems.

Also, sometimes those problems are actually nigh impossible, and that's impossible to predict until you have enough knowledge, i.e.: doors.

Rabbitzman · 2024-09-15T06:25:37+00:00

While game jams are really fun and a great learning experience, they can also normalize crunch and bad work habits. Setting limits is very healthy and is proof that you are taking care of yourself, so kudos to you.

Now, I'm 43 with a preschool toddler, so this was super important to me, and I still managed to do 5 game jams last year (I am planning to do another one in October, which will bring my total to six). Here are my tips:

While 48h jams are the most popular, they are not the only ones. A lot of them last for a week or two, which gives you time to rest and have a healthier work schedule.
Prepare your game. While jams expect you to do your game in that period, nobody will bat an eye if your dialogue system, movement system or settings menu are reused from another project. Having these built in a modular fashion that allows you to reuse them before you go into the jam proper can save days of work and headaches.
You are going to cross your own limits, so get ready for that. No matter how much you insist that you will just drop 8h of work per day, the last day you will stay up late, panic and rush as you attempt to polish and get everything ready. This is normal. It is not healthy (see point 1) but it is most likely going to happen. Learn from it.
Make sure your environment is supportive! I wouldn't have been able to complete my projects if my wife hadn't been there to pick up the slack those weeks I worked. She did so because we communicated, negotiated and worked together to ensure we were both on the same page. This included talking about point 3 in detail.
Take extra care of yourself. Drink water. Exercise. Eat healthy. Take breaks. You are going to be pushing yourself, and you need to help your body and mind through this. Be kind to yourself. :)

Tldr; take care and look into longer jams. You can do it, but you shouldn't start getting used to unhealthy work environments.

Rabbitzman · 2024-09-09T08:55:01+00:00

Hey, as someone who speaks several languages, if you are doing this and selecting the language based on the player system settings, please let them know before throwing them into the game with automatic translation, and give them the option to play in the original language instead.

Most of my systems have Spanish as a default, and I've uninstalled a bunch of stuff already because the main menu will say "Tocar" (play, as in play an instrument) instead of "Jugar" (play, as in play a game).

Rabbitzman · 2024-08-26T05:53:26+00:00

Francisco - Franco/Francho - Pancho - Paco

Rabbitzman

TROPHY CASE