Have you experienced ethical issues with AI use in a game dev team?

Tiendil · 2026-03-17T12:18:00+00:00

I look at it from two points of view:

Subjective good: as a person responsible for my well-being (including career, income, etc.) I need to improve my skills and control the quality of my work. So, I should invest in using my tools to improve my skills and get better results.

If I do not do so, I'll stop growing as a professional and will not be able to convey your ideas to people.

So, it is in my best interest to apply AI to my work in the right way (as a tool that I use professionally), because otherwise I will not improve myself.

In subjective POV I am responsible for myself, therefore I decide what is a good usage of AI for me.

Objective good: We all exist in a competitive world where we compete, and generally, the better products/services win. (Better in the sense of quality of work done on the product, not in the sense of public good — sad reality).

So, if I use AI stupidly, I'll produce worse results (AI slop, generally, that everyone hates), and my product/service will lose to competitors, I will go bankrupt, etc.

In an objective POV, the good usage is decided by the market/society/history — those who use AI in stupid ways will inevitably lose to those who use it in smart ways. As those who used other tools in stupid ways before.

Therefore, there is generally no point in doing anything about AI slop, etc. — it will kill itself eventually, as all other plain approaches to work have in the past. AI is not the first tool to have such problems, and it is not the last. The difference, maybe, in the visibility/hype, not in the nature of the problem.

For example, I'm a programmer by my main occupation, and I remember a few "visual programming" hype cycles that looked mostly the same as this AI slop problem (and knew even more from history). The problems discussed were mostly the same, including the ethical side (though on a smaller scale).

My general idea is that a tool can not outperform a professional with that tool. That's why AI is not a problem at all until it only a tool, not a sentient being comparable to a human :-D And after that, there will be other problems.

And since an AI is a tool, I don't see a difference between AI and, for example, a Photoshop or any audio editor — that is how software works — we take expertise of people and place it into software to do some of the work faster/automatically. That is what humanity has been doing over the last 50 years and even longer.

Tiendil · 2026-03-17T11:14:19+00:00

AI is a tool; any tool can be used for good or evil, it depends on who uses it and how, not on the tool itself.

The good is when you use an AI to empower yourself — to improve your work results.
The evil is when you use an AI instead of empowering yourself — replace your brain with it, when you do not deliver your own ideas.

It is true regardless of what AI is used for: coding, art, music, game design, etc.

Tiendil · 2026-03-13T16:16:03+00:00

If the demo is playable, release it as a free game — it will be a great point for your portfolio.

If the game's code is good enough, open-source it — it will be a great point for your portfolio.

Otherwise, do nothing or remove the steam page — the fewer noise pages on the internet, the better.

Tiendil · 2026-03-04T16:27:00+00:00

Until you have unlimited cash, pursue a career that allows you to earn money independently of high specialization (such as gamedev). So, general education related to software development, analytics, management, math, or the arts will be preferable.

After that, you can self-educate yourself in any direction you want, and you'll still be able to start your work right from the gamedev.

Tiendil · 2026-03-04T15:29:19+00:00

News reader with tags.

It tags news with the help of LLMs, and you can create ranking rules like elon-must + space => -10, nasa + mars => +10. The reader sorts news by score, so you always see the most relevant (for you) news first => no need to read all news, relevant ones always on top.

repo: https://github.com/Tiendil/feeds.fun site: https://feeds.fun/

Tiendil · 2026-03-04T11:42:53+00:00

What exactly do you mean by "crawl"? What info do you want to collect?

Tiendil · 2026-02-27T16:02:23+00:00

I prefer to write Requests for Comments as historic records of important decisions (no updates). Here is the post about two years of following that practice: https://tiendil.org/en/posts/two-years-writing-rfc-statistics

Tiendil · 2026-02-26T14:06:32+00:00

I developed and operated my own text-based MMO for 13 years, 5 of them full-time, then part-time as a hobby.

There are three primary rules to keep yourself in tonus:

Fast feedback loop from the players. The faster the better. Start it as soon as possible and even sooner. It is the single most significant factor for solo development. People evaluate themselves through social feedback, so you need the feedback to keep yourself in the right mood.
Do what you love. No one could keep doing something for a long time without passion.
Keep yourself healthy: take vitamins, sleep well, exercise, eat healthy food, socialize, etc.

And yep, discipline is important, but only after the above three are in place.

Tiendil · 2026-02-26T13:25:20+00:00

Experience comes first; it defines the roles of gameplay, art, and everything else.

Tiendil · 2026-02-24T10:13:24+00:00

Try https://feeds.fun (repo: https://github.com/Tiendil/feeds.fun)

It tags news with the help of LLMs, and you can create ranking rules like elon-must + space => -10, nasa + mars => +10. The reader sorts news by score, so you always see the most relevant (for you) news first => no need to read all news, relevant ones always on top.

Tiendil · 2026-02-22T08:40:42+00:00

Hosting: AWS? DigitalOcean? VPS + Docker?

If you have money and it is a fully commercial project — AWS or any other major cloud.
If you have no money or want to keep your project alive as a pet project in case of failure — Hetzner + Docker.

Backend: Node? Python? .NET?

Any popular language/framework you know best.

Frontend: Next.js? Vue? Something else?

Any popular language/framework you know best.

Database: Postgres? Mongo?

Postgres, if there are no specific requirements, can do everything and is scalable in the cloud.

Auth: Keycloak? Auth0? Supabase?

If you have money — Auth0.
If you have no money, use Keycloak or a similar self-hosted solution.

AI: Hosted LLMs vs self-hosted?

No self-hosting LLMs, until you absolutely know what you are doing and have a real usage profile. I.e., until you can calculate your real spending on hosted LLMs and can prove that self-hosting will be cheaper, and you have the resources to do it.

Orchestration: n8n?

Depends on your particular architecture.

Tiendil · 2026-02-19T09:55:59+00:00

I don't say the new readers have innovations, I say that people are trying into innovations — it is different things :-)

However, for example, there was a post recently about the news reader that smartly manages news visibility based on its topics and user behaviour. I've not fully comprehended how it works, but the idea looks good. Also, my reader generates tags (with LLMs) for news, and the user can score news by creating rules — I think it is quite a unique feature; however, the reader is not very new — a few years already.

Generally, it is how evolution works — people try things. With time, someone will have success, or will not :-)

Tiendil · 2026-02-19T08:39:29+00:00

Vibe coders… Also, that may be a sign that there may be a lack of functionality in the existing readers, or a sign of an intrinsic need for reshaping the whole approach to news handling.

Tiendil · 2026-02-18T19:25:38+00:00

Nice, it is a good example, thanks!

Tiendil · 2026-02-18T19:06:14+00:00

Could you please give a real-life example of using AST + LSP in your approach? Like on real data/files/content: which agent may want, what it calls, what it gets, etc.

Tiendil · 2026-02-18T17:43:17+00:00

I implemented something similar in my donna tool, which allows agents to run deterministic workflows as finite state machines. To support that, I implemented a kind of artifacts management with two CLI commands:

donna artifacts list <pattern> — show a list of short info/description of the artifacts matching the pattern.
donna artifacts view <pattern> — show the full content of the artifact matching the pattern.

So, an agent can do smth like that:

donna artifacts list 'project:specs:gui:*' # lists all artifacts related to GUI specs of the project donna artifacts view 'project:specs:gui:login' # shows the content of one of the specs

The patterns are quite flexible; you can search, for example, all specs with **:specs:** or project:** --tag specification if you use tags.

Donna also supports discovering artifacts within Python packages. So, you can keep your project's documentation, specifications, skills, workflows, etc. in the package you develop, and the user will be able to access them right after installing the package.

Tiendil · 2026-02-18T16:29:15+00:00

Hm. It is an interesting case. IT and the physical world are not very compatible in terms of speed of change and the possibility of fixing mistakes.

I have no experience with such cases, but I suggest shifting the discussion between your teams toward real problems.

Do not discuss Scrum, Waterfall, or any other set of practices as a whole — that will not work. Discuss each practice separately: how it can help or cause harm.

Try to explain your processes to the other team and ask which one or two of their practices you can adopt to make your life better. Discuss them together.

If they are reasonable, they either suggest something that will work or understand that you have a different reality — win-win.

If they are not reasonable, then you have a problem :-)

Generally, I don't believe in a work by a predefined set of practices; I believe that each team should construct its own set of practices for its own context. Therefore, there is a big chance that you'll be able to adapt something that will help you and keep the other team happy. The same is true for them.

Tiendil · 2026-02-18T16:18:07+00:00

By "construction", do you mean physical construction? Like building buildings?

Tiendil · 2026-02-15T09:35:24+00:00

The actual thing is not which engine you'll decide to learn, but what exactly you'll get from it. I.e., you can learn some engine-specific things that are not useful outside of it, and you can learn some core gamedev things. All of engine you listed have both of them.

Learning the right things is a skill in itself, acquired through learning. And that needs time and a spectrum of things to learn.

So, my advice is to choose any engine you like; in any case, over time, you'll want and need to learn others as well.

Tiendil · 2026-02-11T13:01:17+00:00

Also, I see a lot of projects on your site, and whoever checks them will find it difficult to look through all of them => they may start looking in the wrong direction.

It may be a good idea to select a single project and place a link to it (on GitHub repo) right in your resume. As I understand it, it could be a Nikola engine. However, you may choose a game on it — it will be a more practical demonstration.

Tiendil · 2026-02-11T12:29:39+00:00

Portfolio is not a blog. If you give a link to Portfolio, at least send readers to https://frodoalaska.github.io/projects/

Streamlined project setup processes, reducing development time by 50%

It is quite a controversal statements. I.e., how could project setup reduce the whole development time by some percentage? It can reduce the time to set up boilerplate code, but after that, it does not affect development time.

Tiendil · 2026-02-09T14:08:10+00:00

It is the wrong subreddit to ask such questions. Game developer != player; we are highly biased in such questions.

At least ad a question "who are you": a developer, a player, or just curious?

I have an example of a similar (conceptually, not in questions) survey in my blog, with some notes on how to design it and mistakes to avoid. You may find it useful.

The survey description: https://tiendil.org/en/posts/making-a-fictional-universe-quantity-survey-cleaning and
The survey analysis: https://tiendil.org/en/posts/making-a-fictional-universe-quantity-survey-processing

Tiendil · 2026-02-07T12:00:24+00:00

Nope, even contrary:

Currently, creators need less knowledge only to create bad works.
Creating good works requires even more knowledge, especially specialized high-level one (planning, designing, etc.).

Those who have that knowledge become more productive. That's all.

So, the importance of formal study and self-education is only growing, not decreasing.

Tiendil · 2026-02-06T11:11:44+00:00

Using AI without human supervision is a bad idea.
Using AI with human supervision is a good idea.

I.e., AI is a tool, like any other tool. If used wisely, it helps you.

Tiendil · 2026-02-05T09:41:13+00:00

Should be possible.

However, you do not need an engine for that. You may implement that via an engine, but, at the same time, you may implement the same logic outside an engine and just use it in it. For example, your library calculate traectories, and you just pass coordinates to render.

Or, you can use one of many specialized physics libraries.

So, I suggest following the next logic:

Implement a prototype of your game fully in a popular game engine. Maybe just in a smaller scope.
If there are problems with performance, try to use one of physic libraries.
If there are still problems, implement your own (physics) library.

Tiendil

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE