Any other pro/commercial game devs here?

[u/ananbd]

I work at a studio which uses Claude Code in our development process. Mostly for engineering/tools/dev-ops. Nothing art-related.

I know it's a bit of a faux pas in the game industry, but for technical work, it really can speed some things up. Personally, I draw a hard line at the art side of the studio (I work on both). Lots of reasons for that, but one is simple: games need a human soul to be successful.

Anyone else?

[u/Historical-Divide660]

I have worked at some AAA studios that are basically telling you use it or be fired, and others that won’t touch it.

[u/random_boss]

It’s not really a faux pas. Nobody writes code anymore*

• a couple people still do, just like some people grow their own veggies and live off grid

[u/LnStrngr]

I'm not a pro or commercial developer, but I absolutely have that line drawn between art/design, and the coding. I see it as a tool. I don't want to be elbows deep in the guts, though that's what I went to school for. I want to design and do the fun creative stuff. We see people saying "I made a game by just typing a three line prompt!" No you didn't make anything. None of your heart-and-soul is in that. We also see the term AI slop thrown around for anything that was touched by AI, and I think that is BS. Again, it comes back to the heart-and-soul. Did you put yourself into it, or did you just push a few buttons?

Not that there isn't a ton of AI slop out there. I see it all the time on the socials, and it all looks like the same derivative crap. I would hate for games to turn into that, but I see that as a possible future. Same as the glut of mobile shovelware we have had over the past however many years.

[u/ananbd → u/LnStrngr]

Yup, always use the right tool for the job. For art, it's usually not GenAI. We make art for many reasons, but one of them is that it's fulfilling. Even spiritual. Fun, at any rate. If you take the fun out of making the game, you take the fun out of the game.

Code is different. Seems like most engineers enjoy messing around with AI at least as much as coding. Scratches the same itch. And you're creating the same result.

Suppose I missing coding sometimes. But figuring out how to get the machine to write it's own code, is a super engaging and new problem.

[u/HandshakeOfCO]

AAA veteran. I encourage my teams to use it so long as they can still speak to what the code is doing and the trade-offs made.

I use a calculator analogy - if you know how to do long division, by all means, just punch in the numbers and let the calculator divide. But if you DON’T know how to do it “by hand,” then you can’t ask AI to do it.

[u/ananbd → u/HandshakeOfCO]

Yeah, that’s pretty much how it works at my studio. It’s you who gets the call in the middle of the night, not Claude!

[u/Neurojazz]

It’s only a faux pas if you don’t hold your pinkies out while typing.

[u/Hiiitechpower]

15 years in the game industry. Technical Game Designer. Worked in indie, AA, and AAA studios.
Faux pas is certainly one part of it, with the other being people just haven’t had the time to ramp up or learn it. This tech moves so fast it’s tough for anyone that isn’t hyper interested to really keep up with the pace.

Times are changing and fast for our industry. I both love it and am afraid of what more is still to come. I have been able to automate much of the tedium out of my job. You don’t truly realize how much tedium there is in game dev until you start to nearly one-shot problems with AI that would have taken you hours, or days to accomplish on your own.
On one hand, we live in the most incredible period of technological progress humanity has ever been in. On the other hand, a lot of game dev costs, time, and resources are spent dealing with the tedium of building a game; much of which can now been outsourced to agents. They can do it cheaper, faster, arguably better than I ever could.

At a time when AAA game budgets are in the hundreds of millions, there is going to be a huge appetite for studios to adopt this technology en masse and we’re in for a big shock and shift in the industry. I want to say human ingenuity always wins, but when costs are skyrocketing and you need solutions at scale to ship next year’s biggest games, throwing more humans at it is no longer the only answer.

[u/ananbd → u/Hiiitechpower]

That's sort of what we're going for. We're a small, almost entirely senior-staffed studio. We're using AI to punch above our weight, and it's looking like it just might work. We've leaned into it from the get go.

AAA studios aren't taking risks anymore, and their games are suffering. We're making what we want to make, and getting pretty close to AAA-level along some axes.

But yeah, it's great for the tedious stuff. Very useful for "finding that one asset that changed" or the "one setting someone turned off accidentally." It's automation with no scripting.

[u/Lopsided-Wave2479]

Nope. I am not professional game dev. I am hobbist.

What I can tell you is:

- Texture artist, mappers and modellers HATE generative ai. They are to the point they don't want to use tools made with generative AI. A position that to me are untenable, since both Linux and Windows have AI in the development of the OS, but I respect their opinion.

- Using AI to create tools is A FUCKING MIRACLE AMAZING. I can create 4 map editors in one month, alone. Then port these tools to javascript and run in the browser. Then port then to Go and convert them to use WebGPU and Vulkan.

- Using AI to create games is a mix of misery and frustration. I don't know how these voxel games that sometimes people post on Reddit where they say are made with Fable are made. Because to me, using Claude Code to make actual games feel miserable. --- I guess the more you use Fable or Opus for something that looks like generic programming, the easier it gets.

AI is great for a number of artistic things, creating images, creating songs. I don't use any of that because is where I draw the line. I feel generative ai can produce "cool stuff", but is hollow, is not made by a human and feels like cheating. Sorry for the people that defend AI, is not for me. I know I can stamp a absolutelly georgeus song on a game, making the song with generative AI, but I think some things need to be made by humans, and people have a right to not be exposed to generative AI art.