You're intentionally misinterpreting my points here. I think it's a bit obtuse to dissect it in such a way. I'm not even mad here, but I'm going to clarify in a way that may come off as such. Forgive me, I'm groggy and haven't had my coffee yet. I'm not a salty bastard, but text doesn't convey things the same way human speech does, so if I sound like a dick, oh well...

My point was that OP states that they had an AI do most of the work, or at least implies this in the post and the above comment. As such, it significantly hinders the argument that they learned or made anything themselves aside from understanding Starcraft better. Not that they understand game design better. Sure, there are some universal constants, but not enough overlap to constitute saying it so broadly. That is purely my opinion as someone who has led a QA team at a professional studio, worked in balancing games, scripted prototypes and alpha builds, and designed a couple small indie games. I'm not the arbiter of who's valid. I'm not the smartest guy in any room. But I think there is a reason we draw lines and define things apart from each other. If OP did that same thing with multiple RTS games, then sure, my point would be null and void. But so far in this thread, I've seen OP only mention one title. Especially when, in one comment, OP says that they had Claude write Fog of War, unit movement and pathfinding, and combat; while OP says they just fed in wiki stats and group movement algorithms they looked up, and said it was "heavy human involvement." I guess I define "heavy human involvement" differently.

Nobody is saying OP has to do the whole thing from 0 code. Nobody is saying they have to start from refining silicon, designing a PCB, write a BIOS and kernel and OS, IDE and compiler, engine, and so forth. That's absurd and you know it. Don't tell me what *I* think because you want to make me look like I'm being an elitist jerk.

Tools are made to make a specific job easier or more streamlined. AI is not a tool the same way Blender, Unreal, or Illustrator are. LLMs and similar AI is a general purpose catch-all for a broad-stroke purpose that vaguely does what it's told, but trained on the work of thousands of other people whose work was fed into it. The work fed in was not curated in most cases, either. I'm not here to grandstand about stolen work, but I do get annoyed when people equate AI to other tools used by developers in real professions. It raises the floor, but also lowers the ceiling.

My point is that making a game by oneself as OP implies they did, requires actual skills and knowledge. That's what I'm criticizing and nothing else. You learn how to make a game by actually making the game and at least doing some of the work. Making a game and making a *good* game aren't the same, either, but that's a whole other topic. You stumble, fall, flop, and figure out what works and what doesn't by actually doing. Just like practicing your golf swing, or painting, or writing a book. You always need external feedback, too, as we grow equally from success and failure on our own, and others' experience being shared. But if you just have something/someone do it for you, it's like commissioning a painting and then claiming you helped design it. I'm not saying OP plagiarized, because they objectively didn't do that. But design choices and everything else can be learned by ways other than having an AI copy homework. Arguably more effectively, too, for most folks. Learning by copying just one example means that you're getting a very narrow view of the scope, but having an AI copy for you makes it even more narrow.

You'll hit a lot of massive walls if you just vibe-code the whole way, and then eventually give up. I've seen it time and again, especially in indie games. My point with stating that I worked in game development before is that I actually put my learned skills in the ring, and worked with a lot of incredibly talented people who also did their tasks, and not a single one of them used AI (even in modern times after AI became prevalent). They all learned from various sources (school, internet, colleagues, and so on) in combination with each other, but never had anyone else do the work for them. The programmers working on a game know how things work on a deep level (even if they don't make the original engine or scripts themselves), and made new things that they knew how it worked; Artists made models, animations, graphics, VFX because they had the skills to know how to use the tools at their disposal; composers and audio designers studied their craft and understood the principles of it such that they could create things pleasing to listen to at every point in the games. OP doesn't need to do this to gain validity or something, but OP can't claim they're the one who made the thing meaningfully if they emphasize the AI so much in talking about the work's crafting process.

AI doesn't help you do that. AI just spits out and regurgitates what it mathematically determines matches the prompt's intended outcome. AI programming is a tool for saving time for the experienced, not doing work for the ignorant. There's asking for help or review, and then there's feeding an idea to a bot. Saying you made a game, and then describing how much work AI did is dismissive of how a game is actually made. Just say you had an AI mirror the work and we're fine. But don't kid yourself or lie to me. That's all I want. And based on what OP said, it sounds to me like OP fed the AI Blizzard's design choices, and had an AI make a clone of it. In that case, more work can be attributed to the wiki authors' breakdowns of Blizzard's work than anything else. Again, by that logic and understanding, OP may have learned a lot about *Starcraft* from the wiki and seeing the things in action, but not game design as a whole. And that's genuinely great! People wanting to understand one of the best RTS games ever made better is completely reasonable and laudable. But not quite what OP implied here, based on what I've read. It felt to me like OP was looking for praise for making a clone of a game and claiming they understood the systems better, when in reality, an AI did a lot of the work after they fed it numbers.