Google Playground: Create and play custom games

168 pointsposted 6 days ago
by acossta
(blog.google)

239 Comments

tavavex

6 days ago

I may just like games too much, but I can't take this seriously in its current form. This feels like one of the old and basic 'build your own game' toolboxes for non-developers, but with AI - not an 'AI game engine'. It shows that even the demos they made for the trailer are all simplistic endless games that remind me of average Flash games with a different coat of paint. When your entire 'game idea' can be expressed in two sentences, it's going to get old fast. There's only so many endless runners, trivia and single screen 'move from point to point' games one can tolerate. I can't see this specific product having any impact on the gaming industry, despite many people here already talking about the industry at large.

jtfrench

6 days ago

That’s the exact vibe it gave. That also extends to most startups focused on making one shot prompt-to-game tools. It shows a lack of understanding or respect for how the best games are actually made, and a focus on low-depth generic games.

Morromist

6 days ago

I'm fine with these games being pumped out endlessly, just like flash games were. If we want to have 10,000 versions of flappy bird I guess that's fine -

But we need a way to sort them that's a bit better. Its getting tough to find quality indy games on steam now, and that's the kind of game I like to play, AAA games being too generic and dull for me usually. I feel like somehow this is just going to make it more difficult and expensive to ship a good indy game, which will result in fewer & worse indy games.

jtfrench

17 hours ago

This is ultimately the core issue with the games industry right now. We still haven't cracked game discovery at scale. What are the current approaches currently missing?

augment_me

6 days ago

You are just in the minority/subset of the mobile audience. Walk through a train on a morning commute and look what people are playing. 90% candy crush, subway surfers, temple-run-esque stuff.

Most people want this kind of game

tclancy

6 days ago

Even then games are so hard to make. Walk through that morning commute and imagine the whole wild ecosystem of games that didn’t make it because they thought ideas were enough and ux and balance and a fun leveling didn’t matter.

Just kidding, here’s some prompts for ya!

- Yars Revenge but in 8k

- Custer’s Revenge but in 8k

- Leather Goddesses of Phobos but you can see everything except it’s only in like 4 bit except if you wind up in the cage with the gorilla and then it’s 8k

- Zork I-III but every room has a sign in it telling me what to do so I feel smart for once.

- M.U.L.E but it stands for “Mules, unlimited empathy” and you just rap with the mules

augment_me

6 days ago

You're probably right, the slop is not addictive enough because its not completely tuned to your data and your reward system. Will probably just be short-form content then

tclancy

6 days ago

That’s Betamax thinking son. I need VHS men!

chrisjj

5 days ago

> When your entire 'game idea' can be expressed in two sentences, it's going to get old fast

I think the idea is, that's fine because after it, you get 1000 more.

Mobile game stores now have serious competition! :)

smrtinsert

6 days ago

I can't take it seriously at all. Whats the community sell? Make AI slop games? Were game developers wondering "gee, how can I make even LESS money". Not all possible marketplaces or services have to exist.

yolp5

6 days ago

> average Flash games with a different coat of paint.

Flash games had some soul at least. Im not sure what if was, but after flash died and we got all these fancy web graphics technologies web games felt technically impressive, but sterile and empty.

pjmlp

6 days ago

It helps that none of them are as easy to use as Flash Studio, also while you had the guarantee if the Flash plugin would work, your game did as well, it is a hit-and-miss with browser support for 3D APIs, with device drivers black list.

Here for example for Chrome, chrome://gpu, see the amount of disabled features across your devices.

This information isn't available to games, like in native code, thus it is not possible to work around issues preventing the rendering to work as expected.

Additionally there is no quality debugger available, only a few toy extensions when compared to Flash Stage3D tooling, or what is available for native apis.

pjerem

6 days ago

That was the super compressed and repetitive sound effects.

xnx

6 days ago

Just got #2 in the world (for now) on "Steampunk Match". Very impressive what's possible in the browser. No way I would've thought this was AI generated. It was much higher quality than the vibe coded games out of Claude. The best outcome would be for this to enable some new weird games that wouldn't have gotten made otherwise, and also to bankrupt games that basically operate as casinos.

jenniferhooley

6 days ago

No, this is exactly what Claude vibe codes, this is definitely a one-shot Claude style game (assuming it looks up a decent pixel art pack). LLMs are pretty decent these days at making standard game clones like this, you just have to add a system prompt about making it look like a real indie-style pixel art game instead of just letting it make it's standard "web game" style. I assume google has a good background system prompt/harness to do this automatically.

zamadatix

6 days ago

This played waaaay better than a one-shot Claude style game but I'm sure it was not one-shot either.

sporadicallyjoe

6 days ago

Just got #1. The next match will always be highlighted when time is running low. I never ran out of options. The game is fun, but it definitely seems as though there's still room for improvement.

jayd16

6 days ago

Sorry, best I can do is an endless supply of regenerated casino games. Anything unique will be drowned out by instant clones.

aqme28

6 days ago

How long until someone makes a tiktok-style game platform?

Play a little game, then when you're done it generates a new one based on what you've enjoyed. Repeat ad infinitum.

aroman

6 days ago

This very idea has been tried - and venture funded - to the tune of many millions of dollars every 6 months for the past 4 years.

The last few founders I knew working on variations of the idea finally pivoted out over the summer. It’s definitely one of those ideas that sounds great until you try building it and you realize there’s nothing there. Definitely will get funded again before the year is up!

Permik

6 days ago

Technically there is already one, it's called HypeHype, but it's using their in-house graph-style editor. Vendor-lock-in out the whazoo.

Haven't followed them too closely, but wouldn't be surprised if they'd added LLM tools to the platform.

glenstein

6 days ago

>How long until someone makes a tiktok-style game platform?

Well to your point, youtube already has these little mini games that exist in portrait mode. Seems like something is liminally out there pointing in that direction.

Ekaros

6 days ago

I am not sure where the money would be. You could already streamline something like itchio.io like that. Or reminds me of old shareware cds. Still even with how cheap AI makes things I am not sure you can generate enough revenue.

Most revenue now comes by making the game a habit and thus making people invest both time and money. I am not just seeing that happening with too short term throwaway content.

alach11

6 days ago

This is a really neat idea to explore, but I feel like it would be hard to succeed. Games require a very different level of engagement from the audience, with some effort to learn the mechanics or understand what to do next. Short-form video seems like the complete opposite... totally relaxed consumption.

notinboxone

5 days ago

One of the startups that was hot last year was Gizmo doing exactly this, and surprised Meta has launched a new app called Pocket with that team just now.

xnx

6 days ago

Has anyone made a generative version of TikTok yet? I suppose that's already what TikTok is, but with a slow feedback loop and tricky filters against AI generated content.

Analemma_

6 days ago

I suspect TikTok will be the generative version of TikTok as soon as they're confident enough in the video quality that people won't immediately notice and trigger a ferocious backlash.

(Recall that OpenAI said they were going to make essentially this, before the negative reaction made them back down. It will probably be tried again at some point.)

edaemon

6 days ago

Isn't that what Sora was?

augment_me

6 days ago

It's not incentivized for attention. Passive scrolling takes less cognitive energy and is hence a more optimized attention grabber

jayd16

6 days ago

Wario-ware? Or do you think users would actually generate 30 seconds of gameplay for attention/celebrity?

rationalist

6 days ago

Thanks for giving people (or an AI scraping this), the idea :-/

regenschutz

6 days ago

Environmental impact aside, that seems way less harmful than TikTok, though. You'll probably play the average game for longer than you watch the average TikTok video, meaning that your attention span won't be that bad.

You also have to actively use your game for most games, unlike TikTok videos which you can just watch with your brain turned off.

HighGoldstein

5 days ago

This may look intuitively obvious, but the current shortform video situation probably would've looked like dystopian sci-fi to someone in 2010.

aqme28

6 days ago

I'm not the first one to have this one for sure. I would have started working on this if not for the small problem of finding it unethical to build :(

mrheosuper

6 days ago

you mean Roblox ? Kids have been making game way before the adult figuring out the LLM slop

OsrsNeedsf2P

6 days ago

We've hosted an AI game development platform for a while now and found there's a big difference between "making a game" and "making a fun game". I'd love to see if they are solving the real problem, but the link to try it out is a 403 for me.

CuriouslyC

6 days ago

I don't think AI will ever really solve "making a fun game" because:

1. Games are highly complex systems, so for example adding a fun mechanic from one game to another game can actually make that game less fun, and AI has no way to know, you just have to playtest it.

2. Games are evergreen (people still play and love the original Zelda/Mario/Tetris) and social (you want to share your love of game XYZ with others), so there's literally no reason for anyone to play a purely derivative game, when you can just play the original.

Eventually AI will be able to make perfect assets and all the other stuff AROUND making a fun game, but the game design will always be a human thing. At best, AI will come up with a bunch of game design experiments that a human will need to playtest and provide feedback on.

TomGarden

6 days ago

You may be right, at the same time a lot of "AI will never solve X" takes have aged pretty poorly, and I'm not confident what's fun about existing games cannot be codified and shown statistically somehow. Some genres seem more accessible to AI than others

CuriouslyC

6 days ago

It's hard to say for sure, I think we can at least confidently assert that games are going to be more challenging than other forms of creative expression like Books, Music, Art, etc because people's tolerance for derivative games is lower than their tolerance for derivative movies/music.

dpkirchner

6 days ago

Certainly yours and mine, given we're both (presumably) adults with experience. I'm not sure if the next generation of kids is going to care much given the popularity of platforms like Roblox.

autoexec

6 days ago

It's not that kids actually love the lazy derivative games on Roblox. What they love is the rush they get from feeding the gambling addiction the Roblox Child Casino was carefully designed to develop in them. Cheap games on Google Playground won't be nearly as attractive to kids unless Google also fills it with anti-features like push notifications to nag children into getting another fix when they start having fun outside of Roblox, or adding a ton of limited-time rewards to fill kids with anxiety and make them feel like shit when school, homework, or family gets in the way of earning more Robux.

What Google Playground really needs is their own currency, designed to hide the true cost of every purchase, that children can earn by making popular games. Then Google can profit from child labor the same way Roblox does. https://www.classaction.org/news/roblox-lawsuit-alleges-enti...

TomGarden

6 days ago

Agreed!

And I genuinely hope there will be some categories of games/music/books/art where human input is still needed and preferred. Currently I'm already a handful of bulletpoints down on the list of stuff I thought AI would never be able to do, and it's been kind of destabilizing

vconnor

6 days ago

> a lot of "AI will never solve X" takes have aged pretty poorly

"Make a fun game" or "create good art" is the cognitive equivalent of trying to solve the halting problem. These are some undecidable algorithms that cannot be solved by just throwing more GPUs at it.

Now, if you were to ask an AI to make an "addictive game", I'm sure it will eventually be able to.

jpalawaga

6 days ago

i think the difference here is that humans can't even write down what makes a great game great. we don't know. you have to play it.

if we can't even write it down, how is an llm going to be able to ace it?

TomGarden

6 days ago

I feel like this is true with most media such as music and movies too - generally consumers don't understand exactly what they like.

I imagine AI will be making semi-complex indie-style games before we see an AI movie worth watching

s0ss

6 days ago

I don't think anyone, given better alternatives, would choose games like these. There's a reason low effort output of LLMs has been dubbed Slop... Slop isn't fun or interesting to consume.

icantevenhold

6 days ago

That’s fine though?

I’m having a lot of fun creating an “improved” clone of a very old school game I loved.

It takes lots of back and forth but there is definitely (for me at least) to play this derivative game since it adds a lot of levels and stuff that weren’t available in the original.

Without AI I wouldn’t be able to do anything; but with it it can make some changes, I test them and we iterate on it.

So for me AI solves “making a fun game”. It doesn’t “one shot GTA7” if that is your goal but that also sounds boring

CuriouslyC

6 days ago

You misunderstand me, AI solves the "making" part, but not the "fun" part, which is 100% you.

Culonavirus

6 days ago

Yea not the "making" part even (at least not yet). Every single demo/sample of a vibecoded* game thing is a piss poor "counter strike clone" or "gta clone" type of app that has bare bones everything (and i mean PS2 level or worse) and plays like absolute ass down to the basics of character control ans basic gameplay mechanics.

*: I don't consider a project you built with an LLM to be "vibecoded" if all the important ideas are from your head, you know what the code is supposed to be doing (domain model is in your head) and you guided the project every step of the way. Otherwise we're all vibecode. So yea, I don't doubt you can create amazing games with AI, but "with" as in "together", not as in "Claude, build me a Minecraft clone, make it fun, no mistakes."

monknomo

6 days ago

this is probably a personal problem, but sometimes I get turned around on 'fun making a game' vs 'making a fun game' and I have the idea that ai elides this distinction even further

nekooooo

6 days ago

seriously, games require balance and playtesting, and synthetic users don't count.

advisedwang

6 days ago

AI will solve it the same way it solves everything else - by reproducing the patterns in its source data. Which means you will never see novel mechanics or combinations or mechanics.

joquarky

6 days ago

"Never" is a very long time.

Kkoala

6 days ago

Points to https://playground.google/ which just returns 403 error. Cool

icantevenhold

6 days ago

“you do not have access to this document. That’s all we know.”

Well ok then

accidc

6 days ago

They definitely know why, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to tell who to 403 vs not. They obviously dont care to tell you because of ‘security’.

This dismissive contemptuous attitude is typical of all big tech, all your value is just reduced to data generator to be mined, without any other regard.

tgma

6 days ago

It looks like the generic edge server 403ing (presumably country-gated), not the application generating that error message deliberately.

hmokiguess

6 days ago

I'm okay with Google offering models, but I'm not okay with Google offering more PaaS offerings.

Let developers use your models and tools and build stuff with it. Why own everything.

Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform.

bko

6 days ago

I don't know, it seems like it's just fun thing to play around with. I don't think serious things are meant to be built on this.

I often want to play simple games like Pacman, space invader, breakout, tetris or some other random iteration. Sometimes there are non-spammy simple versions of this game but often there aren't. This seems like a pretty cool fix. And if they disappear in the future, who cares?

hmokiguess

6 days ago

That's precisely how something ends up becoming ubiquitous. You, and everyone else, start having fun on it and then suddenly it's a locked-in platform monetized by them.

YouTube started exactly how you described it, some silly thing not meant to be serious and today powers multiple 100M+ businesses using it for content to reach mass audiences.

xnx

6 days ago

> I don't think serious things are meant to be built on this.

I read at some point that projects at Google didn't get a greenlight unless there was a reasonable expectation they could be used directly or indirectly by a billion people.

yipinwong

6 days ago

With your logic, Google should give us their search logic/libraries, so we can build our own search engines.

You ain't making sense. Companies need $, and what's wrong with what they do with what they own and can do in this particular case?

hmokiguess

6 days ago

Nothing wrong with me having an opinion on their strategy

My logic is not “don’t make money” but more so pick a lane

They can empower the community and let a PaaS emerge that’s locked in on their APIs for example

For example, did Shopify get into building Marketplaces for E-commerce? No

It isn’t like they would not be able to make money from the gaming industry by being just the layer zero, my beef here is that they’re going one layer up

yipinwong

6 days ago

I respect the opinions, and I was looking for more logical reasoning on how one arrives at that.

Whether to empower the company or not via open-source/open-weight etc is based on a company culture, value, and future direction/projection.

And it all depends on the scale.

Google didn't need no HR, no companies normally start with everything in place. AS the companies scale up, they add security team, HR, legal team, etc.

That means more $. Google is 20x the size of Shopify in terms of market cap. Google was loved for their search engines when it was at shopify level initially. REmember decades ago when everyone loved Google search?

This does not mean, Google will keep the same strategies for their direction neither will Shopify. I already hear a lot of complaints from my friends hosting on Shopify on the enshitification.

Anyways, I diregress a bit.

So my point is, at least try to reason about why `hmokiguess` arrived at "Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform". What is too much here in homikiguess's opinion (that is verys subjective, need verification),

hmokiguess

6 days ago

Where did you get open-source/open-weight from my message? They offer models via APIs, they have GCP, they already have a Cloud PaaS that lets you build a Gaming PaaS on top (in fact, some existing ones are exactly that)

You're contradicting yourself, the reasoning for them to have too much was said by you in your own comment, they are 20x the size of Shopify.

underlipton

6 days ago

>With your logic, Google should give us their search logic/libraries, so we can build our own search engines.

Yes. Google does not actually care about search anymore, and the threat that the technology could disappear altogether is real.

yipinwong

6 days ago

That's a slippery slope. It's like saying, we should not drive cars because it kills people.

underlipton

6 days ago

My first read is that that's a terrible analogy, but also...

user

6 days ago

[deleted]

user

6 days ago

[deleted]

pjmlp

6 days ago

Because many devs don't pay for tools unless forced otherwise via a network paywall.

TomGarden

6 days ago

For anyone getting a 403, it's US only right now and fails rather ungracefully. I just tried out a few games, framerates where strange/choppy, even in a match 3 game, and the games I tried were quite bad overall. I'm sure this type of thing will get good very soon though

ninju

5 days ago

HN Hug of Death :-)

Leynos

6 days ago

Google yet again showing their leadership in product delivery, marketing strategy and bureaucracy

pkal

6 days ago

I don't want to (and can't) use this myself, but I've always wanted to see if an AI could implement an idea I had for a while: "A 4D version of Agar.io where you move through a 3D slice of space by moving the mouse cursor, and then rotate through the fourth dimension using the scroll wheel. All other game principles remain the same." Will this implement support for multi-player games as well? The really interesting part here for me is how well the AI will implement a game unconventional UI and how successful it is at making it usable and intuitive for humans.

msabalau

6 days ago

You can build standard games now, and there is a waitlist for Unity Spark. But there are demos of Unity Spark games now, if you want to see what will be possible.

I was able to spin up a couple of games really quickly--a 2D cosy space exploration game, and a snarky sci fi trivia game. I'd say the the writting for the humorous trivia questions and the cosy interactions was reasonable--this isn't a tool that can only do reskins of old school arcade games. In addition to music and graphics it can do text to speech.

It's still an experiment, simultaneous impressive, and frustrating, with rather unexpectedly low prompt compliance. But, beta.

It really doesn't seem to like shifting from multiplayer to solo play. It seems like you ought to have a strong opinion upfront. (again, early days)

It's natural to think of this quick and easy tool for playing game, but I suspect part of the eventual value will be learning tools and "self gamification" I could imagine doing a variant of my trivial game for memorization or language learning.

mycocola

6 days ago

Hard for me to understand the why in this. I don’t think tech companies have ever understood games, almost certainly because they do not engage with games.

Edit: It’s for training. RL on playtimes, ideas, etc. Just rushing towards a world where we have no value to each other.

prajish

6 days ago

Yes, that's what even I was thinking. Does all this data from users help in improving their "world models"?

vmg12

6 days ago

If you want to try this but with free multiplayer servers check out https://snack.game (my site)

I also didn't bother with in-app game dev for now since I figured your local agents will be better. So for now you just develop locally with a CLI and your favorite subsidized model.

danvoell

6 days ago

Best case scenario for this is...replace Roblox with games that don't have reward systems solely based on you playing as long as possible. We are losing a generation of children to these games.

estearum

6 days ago

Having been a young game-addicted person in the past, I would assume the addictive part of Roblox is the social component, no?

Is it really just that they give kids nice shiny imaginary points for playing longer?

MisterMunchkin

6 days ago

Yeah the addictive part is being richer than the other children. It’s like trading card games, the actual game isn’t good but you get to be better than the people who don’t have rich parents.

estearum

6 days ago

Hm... I remember games (especially social ones) being plenty addictive even without dynamics like that.

watwut

6 days ago

Kids I know genuinely liked playing Roblox games. It was not just shiny imaginary points, it was that games were "for them" and they did not needed money to try another one.

stephenlf

6 days ago

I predict a very orthogonal outcome. This is an interesting experiment. If it gains some traction, Roblox and Minecraft are both very well situated to build a similar product and dominate the market.

watwut

6 days ago

Who is it "we" that is loosing a generation of children and for what purpose are those people loosing them?

hmokiguess

6 days ago

If anything, this is them trying to eat their lunch by grabbing the market share and using the same playbook.

Do you really think Google cares about gameplay in the same likes of, say, Nintendo?

zamadatix

6 days ago

I don't think Google gives a crap about games one way or the other, they just want people to use their AI.

geraldwhen

6 days ago

If that were true, they would release Gemini 4.

zamadatix

6 days ago

I'm sure they will right after their initial "cyberdefenders" have had a few weeks to hype how it's too powerful to release.

_pdp_

6 days ago

I could not test it because I am also facing 403 error - UK.

Anyway...

If you are interested, there is also an open-source way to do exactly this and it works with your existing subscriptions and local models too - your data is kept private on your devices.

You can make the game, stream it directly from your AI hub or play it locally on your devices. You can cast it on the TV while converting your phone into a controller (with haptics support) or you can connect physical game controllers for local co-op.

https://github.com/pdparchitect/noodle

The README does not talk about this feature but you can find videos in my twitter account.

rakamotog

6 days ago

I just wish, someone tested this experience for EU where it doesnt work. Auto playing video below the fold and try plays video in a new tab.

shooly

6 days ago

Off-topic, but that showcase image in this repo is truly pathetic. "What should I get Mum?", "find me something to do on Sunday morning" - is this seriously what people need AI for now?

regenschutz

6 days ago

I've always found Google Slides to be a great way to create cute, personal games. It requires no coding, and anyone can play them easily in their browser. Seeing what people are able to do with a simple presentation (PowerPoint, if you will) has been repeatedly eye-opening every time I've seen one.

I'm a bit worried that Google Slides-games will fall out of fashion now ;(

xnx

6 days ago

Never heard of this. Is there an example of the best of the genre? I assume these are point-and-click adventures?

yolp5

6 days ago

You never played PowerPoint jeopardy?

komali2

6 days ago

For some reason they're 403'ing us in Taiwan. I can access from a USA vpn...

regenschutz

6 days ago

I got 403'ed too (Sweden). Then I saw this in the fine-print on the blog:

>Playground launches today for users in the U.S. (18+)

light_triad

6 days ago

The biggest challenge is designing the mechanics that make games fun. AI is not quite there yet but with enough data could potentially get there.

I put together a site a few months back to play around with 3d assets from Sketchfab and animated characters from Mixamo as an experiment: https://gobananas.co/

PostOnce

6 days ago

SaaS is dead, superseded by SaaS: Shovelware as a Service

Sarkie

6 days ago

Reloads the same page for me

goshx

6 days ago

Beware: "you are on the list" - "or upgrade to access instantly"

I upgraded, same message. I downgraded, they kept the money because now I have a month of a plan that I didn't need to check something I still don't have access to.

ragazzina

6 days ago

Since this thread will contain the intersection of people interested in coding games and people interested in AI, can I ask whether the latest AI coding tools can help someone vibe code a simple low-poly 3D game? I only ever used Twine before.

gobdovan

6 days ago

Yep. Simplest is browser game with three.js, the only lib you need. But for low-poly 3D, you can basically tell the frontier LLMs to build yourself the rasteriser itself in whatever language you want (not recommending it, just saying they're that good). Literally just put your comment into Claude Code or Codex and see it do it.

educar

6 days ago

I got a 403 from Germany

sha-3

6 days ago

> Playground launches today for users in the U.S. (18+) at playground.google, with tiered creation access rolling out based on your Google One membership.

Looks like they forgot to create a "Not available in your region" page, which makes me wonder whether they made this over a weekend.

gloosx

5 days ago

Just move to US, luckily this is a matter of two clicks on the internet

giarc

6 days ago

For the main page or for the playground.google link?

calgoo

6 days ago

playground.google link

giarc

5 days ago

They have updated the link now.

>Not available in your region Playground is expanding to more regions soon. In the meantime, you can explore other experiments today.

calgoo

6 days ago

Same in Spain...

collabs

6 days ago

What is the minimum age required to use `Google Playground`? Why?

> CONTENT ACCESS LIMITED To access Playground, you’ll just need to verify your age. Confirming you’re old enough helps us keep the platform safe and secure for everyone.

niwtsol

6 days ago

A few of my friends and I have been building a game for a few weeks. It has been really fun because anyone can make a level and it’s somewhat random what level you get sent to- each level could have wildly different controls/goals, but getting oriented is part of the fun. We also have a ton of inside jokes and memories cooked in - I don’t think it would be very fun for someone external, it’s fun because a group of friends are building something together and that process is very fun. This seems to be just more of a game printing machine

palata

6 days ago

I thought it was just not working on Firefox, but it doesn't seem to work for me on Google Chrome.

"Create custom games in minutes > Press Start" just opens a new tab with... the same page?

torben-friis

6 days ago

Am I the only one that feels repulsed by this kind of offerings?

Im not sure how to justify the feeling. Maybe it's that I expect more than entertainment out of creative works (which I consider games to be), but this... Corporate slop firehose seems fundamentally empty in a way that raises goosebumps, like a black mirror episode.

efields

6 days ago

I was repulsed too at first, but honestly cheap build-your-own-video-game tools have been out there since the 90s at least. This is just the modern version. Fine.

I could see microgames creep into social media feeds maybe. That's what this allows for. Games that might be novel for a few minutes. Some folks will put in the effort to make a modern multi-hour game here but very few, like their player-base.

Also, prototyping! Maybe it's good for that (just don't share it publicly).

AIblemblio

6 days ago

Nope.

We are in the ara of commoditization and we just have to learn handling it.

And its not just AI 'slop' making it so, its also A LOT of peole having acess to so much more.

The indiegame scene got crazy. As soon there is one new game concept, hundreds of small adjustments to this idea are popping up.

The sorting game thing? Has now a lot of clones/variations.

AI adds more of this for sure, but its not the underlying issue.

argentinian

6 days ago

Is just your interpretation. AI will eventually be used to produce any kind of media or product that humans can think of.

If you are disgusted by this, the resources spent on AI adult content would make you mad. But why judge what other people choose to do.

There's an episode of President Curtis where USA is running out of energy and the final solution is to (spoilers) tax AI porn.

torben-friis

6 days ago

I don't care at all about AI being used for porn, or ads, or corporate videos, that kind of stuff is soulless by definition.

And I don't have a problem with AI _assistance_ in creative work either.

What horrifies me is the picture of someone absentmindedly placing a half formed thought into a textbox and people consuming it, no deep thinking at all involved in neither creators nor users. It's the mental equivalent of the wall-e humans.

AIblemblio

6 days ago

When do you draw a line then?

I had an idea for a small game for ages, never the time for it and now i'm vibing on it randomly because its fun.

How much finetuning/prompting would you allow me until you think its reasonable? One prompt? Or a certain amount of resources i put in?

Don't get me wrong, i'm curious on when you think a certain quality is reached. I ask this myself too. Like i have a lot of experience in the area of game development, game mechanics, programming and usability. Now the game itself i adjust constantly because i have a lot of strong opinions.

But will this ever be something i might release for free and people get a benefit out of this?

torben-friis

6 days ago

It's a fair question, and I don't have a clear answer.

I do think I have a general principle, which is: once we have a new capability, we can use it to reach further or to reach the same places with less effort. Reaching further seems objectively good; reaching the same places with less effort is more of a gray area.

I realise there's an argument for democratization, for reducing friction to put creativity in the hands of more people. Say you're a great artist who could make beautiful games but don't know how to code, you might use AI as a crutch to enable you to express your art. Same if you're a coder or have great ideas about game design but don't have graphics available to make the whole product happen.

If AI is covering all fronts though, we're throwing the baby with the bathwater here. There's no talent allowed to shine, no message that can now be better delivered, no idea better expressed. it's all wrapping.

and notice how the message from google is not 'reach more people', or 'let your talent shine'. The message is 'type a whim from your couch and you'll get it instantly'. Quick empty dopamine, no quality involved.

argentinian

6 days ago

This is like saying that going to restaurants does not allow your talent to shine in cooking.

Every person decides what to do with their saved time. Some people may want to use a ready made game, others may prefer to write a story or alter the script of the game. The ones who play a ready made game may express their creativity in areas not related to gaming.

You are judging people for not doing what you think they should do. As if your role was to be their social engineer.

torben-friis

6 days ago

>This is like saying that going to restaurants does not allow your talent to shine in cooking.

It really isn't, presumably you go to a restaurant to enjoy someone else's work, and the owner put some effort at the dishes.

I suspect you'll struggle to find an example of human activity where there is no effort or agency in both the consumer and the maker.

>You are judging people for not doing what you think they should do. As if your role was to be their social engineer.

Kind of a weird argument. Now you're judging me for the writings of my post, as if you were my editor (?). Of course debate implies voicing an opinion.

argentinian

6 days ago

I think I see your point. I don't say it's wrong. I just wanted to comment that your feeling repulsed is the result of the way you interpret the situation, and that there are many ways to see it.

Agency is an illusion. You don't generate your thinking, it just happens. I don't know why you believe that agency of the maker is needed for something to be enjoyable.

We could also say that the makers are the builders of the IA, and that they put effort in building it.

AIblemblio

6 days ago

I agree partially aabout your google view but it just might be the first easy thing someone plays around with and gets motivated to dive deeper.

argentinian

6 days ago

Many people do many absent minded activities with no deep thinking. Social Media sites are now in a big part about that, feeding pointless low effort distraction.

You may analyze why do people seek such a thing and feel compassion. and what should humans do instead? Why? Is there an objective answer?

sham1

6 days ago

It's honestly both very funny as well as very sad that one of the most unbelievable aspects of that is them taxing the AI pornography industry. Given that being a Rick&Morty spinoff means that Prez Curtis has plenty of outlandish aspects to it already, yet suspending one's disbelief about an industry actually getting taxed kinda goes over the limit.

onetrickwolf

5 days ago

Yeah it was already really hard to find good games before AI due to a massive influx of indie devs, easier to use engines, review gaming, and asset flipping.

I worry how this will impact finding quality games.

I know people keep saying “we’ve had slop factories before AI” but this really feels different.

NiceWayToDoIT

6 days ago

So, google invented idea collection box for their own profit? Again?

modulus1

6 days ago

On Google Chrome, linux: Unable to load game. Your browser is missing essential components required to run this. Please update or switch to a supported modern browser.

ahmedfromtunis

6 days ago

I’ve been thinking of building a personalized game full of inside jokes as a birthday gift for a friend who moved to the other side of the planet.

This looks like it might be very useful indeed!

jameshart

6 days ago

Does Google not have lawyers any more? Playground Games is the name of the Microsoft-owned games studio behind Forza Horizon; X-Box studio is as part of their current restructuring merging them with Turn 10 (the mainline Forza studio) and, weirdly, handing the resulting studio Fable to work on, but Microsoft definitely still has an interest in the trademark of ‘playground’ in the context of video games.

kursus

6 days ago

I don't see the appeal of scrolling through a list of games I could potentially make myself VS scrolling through a list of games I could immediately play.

xnx

6 days ago

? You can immediately play the games on that page.

kingstnap

6 days ago

Error 403 unfortunately.

> To keep the experience safe and welcoming, every published game undergoes safety screenings aligned with our Community Guidelines, along with user reporting.

Kind of cringe. I mean I suppose its one thing to stop people making CSAM but safety screens make it sound like you can't have any sort of mature game? Gore, violence, drugs, suggestive themes or nudity etc all disallowed or something? Everyone has to make a T for Teen game?

hackersnooze1

4 days ago

I feel like a large portion of the quality of a video game comes from micro-optimizations and extremely fine tuned tweaks that can only be made by made through constant play testing and debugging and I am not sure an AI can really do that yet.

heffro

6 days ago

I've been working on something similar with a Claude skill: https://newtab.party. I'll echo what others have said: AI isn't great at making even a silly little MiniClip-style game fun. I've noticed it's a lot better in Fable, but there's still a long way to go.

Tepix

6 days ago

Game design is really difficult. Programming a game is only a small part, and not the most important one.

elicash

6 days ago

This is why no code / low code is exciting. It will allow people who excel in what you call the "most important" parts to be able to create games.

Now, I don't think Google Playground is the best demonstration of this point, given it's intended to be quick turnaround. None of what's shown in the demo video is particularly thoughtful. But it still is a good indication of things to come.

fg137

6 days ago

Most people are not remotely capable of designing even a mediocre game.

The more games you play, the more you understand and appreciate what makes a game good, and how hard it is to come up with a game that is original, enjoyable to look at and fun to play. Lots and lots of games created by professionals don't even excel at any of them. Meanwhile indie game developers are never limited by their programming skills.

I'm not looking forward to all the slop that comes out of this.

socalgal2

6 days ago

I feel like the person you're responding to is correct, AI/LLMs opens up game design to more people. Yes, good game design is hard and/or talent. Still, we see the same in other areas. Before smartphones and youtube, making "TV Shows" was hard, now tons of people are doing it because it became easy. Yes, the percent of crap is high, but it's also where Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, 3Blue1Brown, and 1000s and 1000s of other channels came from.

AI in games seems the same to me. It opens game dev to more people. Yes, like everything else that means more crap, but it also means tons more people who wouldn't have done it otherwise but now will and end up doing it well will put up their games and like those youtube channels, find a audience.

That said, Google Playground doesn't seem like the way forward.

elicash

6 days ago

The creators of indie games are never limited by their programming skills?!

throwaway1183

6 days ago

yes. Under the hood they manage to craft experience with as little of programming knowledge.

Look into Yandere Simulator, Undertale. There are videos explaining the horrible code practices but those are stellar experience

elicash

5 days ago

I'll dig more into it. I did a quick search on Yandere Simulator, and it suggests that the terrible code and assets that aren't optimized is then impacting performance of the game, that it's laggy. This person might benefit from higher quality code, no? Someone who has a talent for making games, but just can't get there technically.

I'd guess this might be one of the videos you were referring to, for others who are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXotP-9LcDY

Noaidi

6 days ago

Why do the tech lords continue with this infantalization of humanity? What are they distracting us from?

drywater2

6 days ago

They're distracting us from "You will own nothing and you will be happy".

kraig911

6 days ago

Roblox copy/equivalent incoming I'm sure and that'll get kid's heads turning.

2001zhaozhao

6 days ago

Roblox has already been pushing AI-generated games heavily.

TheAceOfHearts

6 days ago

It doesn't work for me, when I click any of the links it just opens a new tab to the same page. $4.2 Trillion marketcap company with access to world class geniuses plus effectively unlimited AI compute and this is the trash they're making.

small0

6 days ago

Spawn is way ahead of them. This feels like desperation after they started going viral.

RayVR

6 days ago

what a heavy, poorly performing site. my fairly powerful macbook pro struggles on that site.

Then, of course, there's the fact that all of the start and access buttons just open the same page in a new tab.

tomashubelbauer

6 days ago

> 403. That’s an error. > We're sorry, but you do not have access to this page. That’s all we know.

Happens when I click Press Start. Did Google kill this before they shipped it?

totallygeeky

6 days ago

Gosh, there simply weren't enough options to make a completely uninspired and lackluster game, glad Google made theirs!

____mr____

6 days ago

Finally something to dethrone the AAA Mario video when you want to say a game is really soulless and shitty

pjmlp

6 days ago

Great, 1983 crash will look like a joke compared with the crapware and copycats that will come out of this.

Oras

6 days ago

Well done Google! 403 you don’t have access to this document

Please hire some QA instead of embarrassing yourself this bad

accidc

6 days ago

I wonder if it can do board games (or similar), there are no examples of that (not allowed to test)

thedangler

6 days ago

I did not read a thing, but could I use this to build a game I want to release on steam?

Buttons840

6 days ago

Is this something I can try now? Or is this an announcement of a future product?

Growth_SF

6 days ago

Games are pretty fun, with easy access, which I appreciate as a new user.

fancyfredbot

6 days ago

I'm usually very pro AI and the idea that people could vibe code their own games which combine exactly the things they enjoy appeals to me so was quite excited for this.

I played a few editors picks. "Westbound Frontier" is a kind of RTS. On mobile all the windows open on top of eachother and the text is very hard to read. The amount of resource required to build the first building after town hall was way too high by and you had to wait ages to do anything. There was an infuriating AI sound track singing "ooo-wee-ooo". 0/10 from me, broken and not fun.

Next I tried volcano run, a 3D infinite runner. Not my kind of game but a nice aesthetic and it actually worked. After about 30 seconds though the graphics changed to a really low contrast mode (night?) and I couldn't see the rocks I was supposed to dodge. 2/10.

Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this. It's obviously not ready, the "Editor" who picked these games should have known that. I am not sure if this is some kind of set of skills for Gemini or a fine tune or just a prompt but it certainly feels very low effort and embarrassing.

embedding-shape

6 days ago

> Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this.

Every "AI + Google" product is pretty much like this, impressive to people who basically have no other skills than "talking about stuff others click on video links for" but falls apart to any sort of quality checks, and most of time isn't even internally consistent and coherent.

Let the slopocalypse commence.

gobdovan

6 days ago

There's already Youtube games (youtube.com/playables), where all games are hyper casual ad-driven low-effort games published by companies like Voodoo or SayGames. I believe Playground would compete with those more than with regular PC games. There's no way slop from regular people could be worse than what's already out there for mobile.

yolp5

6 days ago

I'm shocked how bad they seem to be. The other day I was shopping around a prompt to all the AI models to compare and Gemini was by far the most disappointing and laziest

NichoPaolucci

6 days ago

Holy shit man, the current state of things…

- Click “Start Now”

- Prompted to log in

- AutoFill with credentials (good and ok up until this point)

- Get prompted for password

- Get prompted on whether or not I want to store this set of credentials

- Get prompted to open the YouTube app to verify my credentials

- Open the YouTube app

- Get hit with an advertisement

- Click the X, Click “Verify”

- Go back to the browser

- Get prompted to add a third factor of authentication

- Click no

- Get prompted if I want to add face scanning to my account

- Click no

- Get redirected back to the site (FINALLY!!!)

- Still not logged in

- Get prompted to log in again

- Leave site in anger/disbelief

Seriously, what is going on.

digitaltrees

6 days ago

You need to add - get redirected to a different account because your wife has her Google account login on the computer and you have a personal and work gsuite and the login success was hijacked by your work account.

jackmalpo

6 days ago

has anyone found an ai sprite generator that doesn't suck?

bearjaws

6 days ago

I do kind of believe this is the "end game" at this point.

"Friend-slop" has already proven wildly successful, and significantly lower effort than AAA games.

Combine this with the fact your game will be stolen and put into Roblox, it really feels like we're approaching a era of just rapidly produced games that live for weeks rather than years.

jenniferhooley

6 days ago

Yeah agreed, I was talking to a friend few years ago when Google first wiped out blogging by taking over the blog content and showing snippets instead of real links.

Obviously the end-game is for the companies to automate all the text, games, and software so you just go to their feed and pay them a monthly instead of individuals making making this content.

howunfortunate

6 days ago

I don't see any reason why cheap, short games can't happily live alongside massive polished games in the market.

gobdovan

6 days ago

There's multiple reasons people play games. Some people are competitive and play a game thousands of hours to get better at it. So there's always a market for longer lasting games.

shooly

6 days ago

Was there ever a time when short, fun games to play with your friends were _not_ wildly successful?

> significantly lower effort than AAA games

I think you meant lower budget.

tonyhart7

6 days ago

lol, except most friend slop game is actually good

You be tripping if you actually think AAA soulless that has filled with agenda is better

trash_cat

6 days ago

For me the page just reloads no matter where I click.

2001zhaozhao

6 days ago

I think the point of this product is not the quality of the games, it's the accessibility and distribution and the fact that it's free to use.

Big tech already controls the distribution of traditional platforms so they are building AI platforms to make sure they keep control of the distribution of new forms of content, including that for AI games now that they're easier to make than a YouTube video.

But inevitably these products (and the competitors they will inevitably spawn) put us closer to a future of arguably dystopian, AI-driven hyper-entertainment world, even if no one inside the companies meant to do that. I can only hope in that future many people still appreciate human-made games, and even on these AI platforms genuine human ideas (assisted by AI) can still bubble to the top.

As for game quality, these look close to Opus 5.5 one-shots to me, maybe even a little worse.

mlmonkey

6 days ago

Is there a way to see the prompt behind a game?

ibskhan2025

6 days ago

This is cool, but not that relevant

mv4

6 days ago

Can't test. 403 in the US.

mv4

6 days ago

In the US, got 403.

Buttons840

6 days ago

I asked for a NES-style top-down Zelda game, but with some Roguelike Dungeon Crawler content mixed in. Think real-time DCSS (or Brogue, or Tales of Maj'eyal) with controls and a setting that feels similar to the NES Zelda game. Anyone who has played a 2D Zelda game and DCSS immediately has an idea of what I'm suggesting here.

What I got was a Vampire Survivors style "run around in this square area while enemies spawn and swarm you" game. Which is funny, because I have seen several game engine tutorials that build exactly this type of game[0][1][2].

I asked for a variety of possible "builds", including melee and spell castors, and said that not all builds should be viable--some combinations of stats should just not work. I also asked for a variety of spell schools with different pros and cons.

What I got was a game with no way to perform melee attacks, but there were melee oriented stats I could choose to upgrade. All the spell schools felt the same, they would shoot a basic projectile, or have some sort of wide area burst attack. The ice school froze enemies in place--how original. The controls were a bit awkward and for the first 5 minutes I didn't even know what spell school I was using. Sometimes the colors would change, which I think meant I had switched to a different type of magic, but I don't know. It all felt the same.

I asked it to fix several things, and then it worked for several minutes and changed literally nothing about the game--well, actually, it did change the game from being 5 levels long to 4 levels long, even though I didn't ask for that to change.

So I prompted it a second time to fix several things, which it mostly did, but it also changed the speed of the enemies and made them way to fast. I didn't ask it to change the speed of enemies, it just decided to change that on its own and introduced new problems in the process.

I get the impression it has no idea what the essence of a Zelda game is. This is "The Legend of Zelda" here, one of the most popular game series of all time and a classic. There have been several 2D entries in the series and they all have the same essence, but the AI was not able to capture any of that. It seemed to instead latch onto a very minimal Vampire Survivors essence and do a poor job at even that.

[0]: https://www.gdquest.com/library/first_2d_game_godot4_vampire... [1]: https://www.udemy.com/course/create-a-complete-2d-arena-surv... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgvLbahJOTA

user

6 days ago

[deleted]

user

6 days ago

[deleted]

ncr100

6 days ago

How do we incorporate advertising/monetization that compensates us the creators into this?

Google Playground is a destination, currently, with no monetization. So any gamedev effort and ideas we contribute into it are collected by Google.

EDIT:

It is offered as "for funsies with your pals in America, bros!" and it looks a lot like it's almost a feature in the Google Play portfolio which makes me think this wasn't thought through fully.

So Google doing something strategic here which is not clear to me.

- are they training their AI?

- are they collecting user feedback for an eventual commercial launch?

- are they building hype?

Why did Google spend the money on this?

fsmv

6 days ago

Hilarious that you think anyone wants to play your AI generated game much less pay for it

ncr100

6 days ago

why not?

If it's a great idea and the execution is fine, why not?

Eg Angry Birds. There are real world examples I have.

Why not?

edit: And about "your game" rhetoric, I'm talking about us more than me, unless you think that I specifically, NCR100, cannot create a game that is worthy? Why?

Where's the hope? Is there a presumption that AI generation is bad, full-stop?

Do you specifically assert that everything done with AI has no compelling quality to it?

I was taught that the tools do not make the artist.

When I sit down to build a product, a website, an app, middleware, servers, embedded apps, I expect to be paid if it is for a company. I will use other people's designs and patterns in my effort. I will work with everybody at the organization, even though who have, 'ideas'. It's my literal job as a Creator to make that slop compelling.

Why is the involvement of AI during creation a guarantor of non-compelling?

brazukadev

6 days ago

> Do you specifically assert that everything done with AI has no compelling quality to it?

We are 4 years in and so far literally nothing with compelling quality appeared yet, no game, no app, no book, no music. Every vibecoded shit is slop with rare exceptions of barely acceptable quality.

Quality is more about people and processes, AI won't replace humans for product development but currently countless people and corporations are dreaming about that. What makes this more interesting is that the person that prompts the AI loves the result because it matches their perception of what is good but as most people don't have good taste and understanding of product development, it sucks.

Ironically, the people that could create good things with AI, designers, creatives, are the people that dislike it the most.

ncr100

6 days ago

Yeah I also haven't seen too many one shot games that are worth playing for very long, and note that is just my individual observation and not a proper study.

I don't trust that designers and creatives, currently, know what the future brings insofar as tool development -- features which could be added to generative AI that would give the designers and creatives control over their assisted creations equivalent or superior to that which they currently have with their current tool set.

When I was a boy, (spoken with a drawl), we didn't have affordable computers that could do graphic design. And I did spend time watching professional graphic designers transition from frisket, paper, pencils, pens, paint, film photography, and on and on, to using Macs. They complained. But they got good at it, and the tools got better and better. Nowadays, I do not see people doing graphic design by hand, often. Tactile media creation is obviously still practiced but I would argue that more people use computers to do in my case graphic design I think frisket paper and mechanical pencils and exacto knives, today. So the transition is possible.

mrheosuper

6 days ago

For google: They could add virtual currency, and the games will use that currency

For "creator": Donation link, with some "pay 2 win" items.

eugenekolo

6 days ago

Somebody needed a promotion project huh?

Strategy1088

6 days ago

i believe services like this "generate an ai game in one prompt" will always fail. if i could make a game that people actually wanted to play with ai, why would i do it on here and not just sell it on steam for a few bucks?

the slop games fall to the bottom to services like these while good games would rise to the top and go to well established platforms.

toddmorey

6 days ago

I guess I'm a bit of a killjoy here but:

  - This is google experiment, meaning you're sadly likely invest more time in the product / community than google will from this point forward. (That's just my "fool me once" voice talking.)
  - There really won't be much advantage to building in their playground vs building directly with any of the frontier models.
  - Interest and distribution will be challenging because the bias is towards building your own game vs playing the games others make.
Every time I see a vibe-coded game, I think to "I should try that prompt" not "I want to play that game". I think personalized apps, experiences, and games are amazing but are a different beast and won't have the viral impact some creators are hoping for.

screye

6 days ago

Placing my bets here.

```

Gaming will undergo the movie industry cycle of 2010-2025.

First, Only AAA (GTA-6) or micro-indie games will make money. mid-budget games will get eaten out. <---2010 Hollywood

Until, people get AAA exhaustion and game creation keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.

Then a single auteur makes a mid-budget game with a recognizable aesthetic, that makes AAA money.

A studio (A-24) realizes that auteur curation is profitable, and builds recognize-able identity.

The studio (A-24) starts churning out reliable hitters, that people buy because of the studio more than the game itself.

AAA stagnates, hires the most recent auteur to make their next AAA game with full control.

If it goes bust, then AAA tries again.

If it goes boom, they pick the next auteur for their next AAA game. <---Hollywood is here in 2026

```

alexandre_m

6 days ago

I don't think your analysis is on point regarding the gaming market.

You're leaving out the social and mobile games that made astronomical amount of money in early 2010s like Farmville and Candy Crush.

In fact, the 2010–2026 era proved that non-AAA games, smaller mobile studios, and independent developers could achieve higher profit margins than traditional big studio projects.

Moreover, indie game market has never been as strong. AI will accelerate and democratize this trend further, as upfront development costs is reduced.

oxfeed65261

6 days ago

What is the transformative auteur-driven film in your analogy?

cush

6 days ago

Maybe, Everything Everywhere All At Once? I don't know of many

volkk

6 days ago

i would LOVE to see this happen. we need an A24 of games

MK2k

6 days ago

Annapurna and Devolver maybe?

iberator

6 days ago

This is NOT good news.

nekooooo

6 days ago

you are smoking crack and you don't understand hollywood. i don't think you understand indie games either... what happened is other forms of entertainment ate away at the attention share, and gaming is one of them.

throwaway20222

6 days ago

Beyond the aggressive reply, I mean you are partially right? In addition to the battle for attention the financial model of windowing was destroyed or collapsed into streaming, changing the types/quality/choices of movies that get made, the nuances of what happens in movies and tv shows (fewer character actors) and many other dynamics including change in financial risk and borrowing costs, which in aggregate had an impact that many could argue was on par with the attention battle. Current trends may be able to shift downward the risk/cost trend as well as unlock new formats which may result in the rise of new producers/inputs.

I think it is a “yes, and…”

Though what do I know.

avaer

6 days ago

> Every time I see a vibe-coded game, I think to "I should try that prompt" not "I want to play that game".

Exactly! The fantasy is the game with an audience of N=1, or N < Dunbar.

The platforms are conflating this obvious use case with "make a viral game that not even I care about". Which has an audience of N=0.

afro88

6 days ago

I've been vibe coding a game and it's so far from a one shot at this stage. A week and a half solid of prompting with multiple agents. Haven't looked at a line of code, but been iterating, playing and refining constantly. In my mind there's no chance anyone else could get the same result without pointing an agent at my game and reverse engineering it.

Maybe we need yet another word for this kind of development. It's going to be way more common.

Side note: I feel like I could only get this far with Opus 5.5 level models and tooling (cloud agents). No chance I could get to this point without rolling my sleeves up and helping with the technical side with earlier models, and no chance I could get this far pretty much only using my phone.

I'm basically paying Anthropic for both the experience of building a game with a team of decent engineers (it's been exhilarating), and the game itself. It's been incredibly fun. I would never pay this money for something to one shot it for me. This current level has been such a sweet spot of pretty much every ask being nailed and it still feeling like it's my own creation. Something one shotting it for me would kill most of the fun and feeling of "I did this" ownership.

theropost

6 days ago

Same, I've been working on some little projects and 3d environments, its quite enjoyable overall. This one is a procedurally driven voxel game - still a work in progress, but its turning out better than expected.

https://icemunk.github.io/voxelstrike-site/

lukan

6 days ago

"Maybe we need yet another word for this kind of development."

I am fine with vibe coding by now. It captures the spirit quite well, if the vibe of the direction is good, you have a rush with one shotting amazing features - if the vibe is gone, it became a slob hell with the model going in circles. But this is not random for me, but depends how much I follow the architectural decisions (and not "great, go on"). So I would rather introduce "slob coding", for mindless prompting without control of what is happening.

clw8

6 days ago

I want this to be a distinction too, vibe coding with benchmarks and evals and making good architectural decisions for the LLM coder based on them takes a lot of mental energy and engineering insight. I've been making a voice agent and Claude's initial attempts were all based on best practices from two years ago. I had to do a lot of paper reading and research consolidation to get any kind of consistent, useable quality results.

jmathai

6 days ago

The scope of what a single prompt can do continues to grow. I’m in the same boat as you but not as optimistic that it’ll be something I enjoy as a craft for much longer.

lukan

6 days ago

I miss the craft, but enjoy very much, that I finally can build the games I always wanted on the side - and yes, I have fun playing them.

andrewcl

6 days ago

At this point, isn't the building of the game the actual game?

b345

6 days ago

Yes, very much like Suno, where users reportedly listen to their "own" (generated) songs the most.

volkk

6 days ago

i generally agree, but i can imagine a world where a vibe coded game hits some certain "threshold" where it has a few properties:

- easily distributable, i.e there is a very clear way to play it fairly quickly

- it doesn't feel like slop even though it's vibe coded

- it's super fun

I predict that will be games, very very few, but there will be some that hit that inflection point likely through Twitch streamers picking it up. But I also predict that they will be a flash in the pan. Even fewer of the already few, the ones that will be here to stay will likely need to turn into an actual mini studio and take the development/customers seriously.

Most of them will be fun projects that die the day they get released simply because building a decent looking vibe coded game is commoditized. Maybe some fun twitter engagements, but nothing more.

ben_w

6 days ago

> - it's super fun

This is by far the hard part. The complete rulesets for most games[0] would be smaller than a prompt necessary to turn that board game into a computer game[1].

Anyone can draw some counters and a board, make up some rules. Making those rules interesting, let alone fun, is so much of a problem that many published board games get house-ruled in various ways[2].

The AI-made games I've noticed (clichés, the AI can't help it) have been at the median level of the old Flash sites, but with less variation: fewer total disasters, but also nothing amazing.

While this isn't great, it's also not nothing: I wouldn't be surprised if one of the current ones goes through an iterative refinement like Bloons TD did.

[0] not all: I was obsessed with Star Fleet Battles as a young teenager, these days I describe it as "A computer game written about ten years before home computers had enough memory to store all the rules", which is why each turn takes 2 hours, one of which is counting out boxes and using that to fill out a spreadsheet as you work out how much power your ship has and how fast it's going and which equipment you can use, and distributing weapon damage on some target is worked out with the help of an A4-sized printout that functionally implements a dice-driven state machine.

[1] Unless the prompt was "here is a photo of the rules, turn it into a video game", but I count that as cheating, "a picture is worth a thousand words" etc.

[2] My main house rule for Star Fleet Battles, these days[3], is to simplify the 4+ kinds of power source into one. I can appreciate the world building of "an impulse engine can't divert antimatter to a photon torpedo", but it's not actually fun to keep track of this.

[3] I've played it like 4 times in the last 15 years.

drusepth

5 days ago

We have a "vibe coded" game on Steam[0] we're seeing the start of this trend on. There was a noticeable point when people stopped referring to it as "slop" (we put it out originally for very early feedback) and started referring to it as "vibe coded" (it's a way more mature game now). We have players who've played for 300+ hours, and 25% of players played the original demo for longer than 5 hours.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/4489800/Alchemy_Survivors...

I actually think "easily distributable" is the least necessary of the three bullet points here (though arguably Steam does make things easily distributable, just not as easily as, say, web games or mobile games). IMO this is a maybe a really good "pick two" triangle.

cush

6 days ago

> won't have the viral impact some creators are hoping for

Maybe that's not the point? Mario-maker is an incredible game. You can play shared levels, but the fun is all in building. Sometimes building is the game.

zecg

6 days ago

it's a slop machine

4729738210

6 days ago

Over-under that it'll be shut down in a year?

FinnLobsien

6 days ago

Google seems to have some desire to enter the gaming world, with Stadia before this.

Perhaps it's their culture of letting engineers experiment with stuff during work hours that also led to Gmail, Maps, etc. and the mobile game ad market is certainly big.

I guess this mainly competes with mobile games, most of which are mediocre at best and aim to get a few "whale users" to spend inordinate amounts of money on coins, gems, or whatever in-game currency.

Maybe the theory is that those games are so easy to vibe-code that completely democratizing it will lead to enough of a flood of games?

And a few will stand out and become Candy Crush-sized successes?

Or perhaps it's the idea that if you can have millions of extremely niche games, each may have a few hardcore fans because it caters to their specific interests (the same way Kindle Direct Publishing enabled hyper-niche literary genres)

ncr100

6 days ago

Google allow state-sponsored violent organizations but not non-state sponsored violence:

> Violent Organizations and Movements

> Known violent non-state organizations and movements are not permitted to use this product for any purpose. Do not create, upload, or distribute content that facilitates or promotes the activities of these groups, such as recruiting, coordinating online or offline activities, sharing manuals or other materials that could facilitate harm, promoting ideologies of violent non-state organizations, promoting terrorist acts, inciting violence, or celebrating attacks by violent non-state organizations. Depending upon the content, we may also take action against the user. Content related to violent non-state organizations may be allowed in an educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context, but please be mindful to provide enough information to help people understand the context.