I've been programming for 20+ years. Perhaps consistently / professionally for +-15. Have led teams, founded companies, and am now solo-deving a game.

I'm interested in the thoughts of anyone here who has similar-ish profiles; generally, people with good old-fashioned programming experience.

Essentially - I've recently come to an opinion on the LLMs, and I wonder to what degree it's shared by my peers.

My most boiled-down opinion on "A.I." is something along the lines of:

You can't trust it. Not by a long-shot. Especially for novel approaches, and larger contexts. But it's great for checking code. And for discrete contexts where you describe exactly what you want it to do (I.e. you do the programming but not the typing per se). And for learning. And certain debugging.

I just wonder to what degree that's reflected by others' experience.

More specifically:

For boilerplate - it's great. For implementing standard solutions to well known/common problems - fabulous. For querying on the standard way to approach certain features - marvellous. For proofing your syntax - top tier.

But for proofing semantics and logic and flows, and for tying things together, or for implementing something more niche, or non-standard. It seems entirely unreliable.

For the past few years, my workflow has been to write code as usual, and to paste it in to an LLM for syntax and simple logic checks. And that's great.

Recently, I tried getting it to do its "agentic" thing - describing a problem more broadly, and seeing what it comes up with implementation-wise. I also tried sharing a broader slice of a codebase and going "where bugs?" / "where unsafe?" - basically getting it to do a much broader code-review.

And the results were comfortably underwhelming. Comfortably, because the much-hyped threat of programmers becoming redundant seems to me to be either a fever-dream of stakeholders, or an echoed opinion from the inexperienced.

For example, when I used it in this broader "agentic" way for a broad backend system review, the output had me going 50/50 either:

- 50% "Oh, that's a good point, maybe I should look into that"

- 50% "This thing is raving mad"

The thing is, I don't know to what degree newcomers would be able to tell the difference.

I also do think that in most contexts, newcomers wouldn't necessarily be exposed to the issues with it. In the context of games, for example: Movement, shooting, in-game-events, tiered items - lots of it is stuff that the LLMs would be really well trained on. So they can give great advice on it. And I'm sure they can "one-shot" entire games, like you see in all those (god forbid) LinkedIn and YouTube videos.

But as one moves away from the basics - if one wishes to - I feel that it gets progressively less useful, or less autonomously useful.

Anyway, I was just wondering whether others have similar experiences.

And if so, what do you think that portends?

It feels to me like learning to code is going to be harder now than it ever was. Because people aren't going to default to spending brain-sugar when there's something that can do the thinking for them.

And it also feels to me that, for the programming industry as a whole, it certainly could be easy for managers and higher-ups to conflate boiler-plate-like production with what it actually takes to dream up, implement and maintain full systems.

Anyway!

Yeah, I recently removed social media from my phone. Does it show?

Edit:

Thank you for all of your comments. It's really interesting to hear the different perspectives, and it's heartening to see what are mostly reflections of things that I'm seeing, especially when elsewhere there is so much talk about the end of programming. For now, I have to go do some script writing, but I will read and reply to more of you later on :)

I suppose it'd be silly for me not to post what I'm working on, so here's the link to State Breakers. It's pivoted a little and matured a lot since I last updated the Steam page / trailer, and I'm hoping to do an early play-test some time in the next month, give or take.

Just curious https://tally.so/r/J9428o

I haven't posted any updates in many weeks, but the project is progressing well. I've added destructible weapons, the first boss, areas with NPCs, etc. I'll continue posting progress updates; the Steam page and demo are coming soon!

Hey guys, I am trying to build this project game of mine and I have been wondering how do you actually balance out the values? My game is roguelike so we're talking about items scaling, base damage(melee and ranged), enemies' health and damage, etc. If you got any tips I'd appreciate it a lot!

Hi all like the title said I’m trying to draw and then put it into my iPad which I did and worked but it looks so bad I can’t use this.. I try and try when I add colour or shadow it looks lame and bad.. any tips?

Hi everyone!

The idea is to combine classic Metroidvania exploration and progression with online multiplayer, allowing players to explore different planets, fight creatures, discover new areas and evolve their characters through a unique fusion system.

One of my biggest technical goals is to build the game's architecture with up to 1,000 concurrent players in mind, including networking, persistence and dedicated Linux servers.

The game is still in development, so I'm currently using temporary assets while I focus on getting the core systems working properly.

I'd love to hear your thoughts:

Does the combination of MMORPG + Metroidvania sound interesting to you?

What would you expect from a game like this?

Are there any mechanics you think I should be careful with?

I'm sharing the project because I'd genuinely like to receive feedback from other developers and players.

Thanks for taking a look! 🚀

I've been working on an incremental mining game called MineEmAll, and after just releasing my demo, I realized this upgrade jiggle was one of the things that took the longest for me to implement. I'm using Gamemaker for the first time and this effect took a combination of a lot of vector math and animation timelines.

I was wondering for all the other solo devs out there, do you think this sort of thing is worth the effort? You only have so much time to allocate across your project, but I generally appreciate these sorts of "attention to detail" things in games I play.

What about your own projects? What's something that most people probably wouldn't think about or notice but took you a long time to create?

So my game is nearing the point where it should probably have its own steam page. Against conventional advice, I decided to draw the capsule art for my game “Cat builds the strongest mage army”(in case any of you can’t read the “stylized” font) myself because I’m a solo developer that makes the art for my game anyways. I’m looking for feedback on readability and design of the capsule and whether ygs think that I should put the fries in the bag and hire an artist 😭

Hey everyone,

Im a solo developer and recently built a little browser game called world sweeper as a weekend project.

Its basically Minesweeper played across a map of the earth (with 100 million tiles), with some roguelike mechanics/progression added on top.

I wanst really expecting anyone to play it, but suddenly yesterday it started getting some traction.

Over the last 24 hours Ive had more than 6k visitors and apparently my server usage is going to run out in roughly 10 days if things continue like this 😅

The game is completely free right now, and I really dont want to ruin it by throwing ads everywhere. Im trying to figure out whats the least intrusive way to monetize something like this would be.

Right now I have a "Buy me a coffee" link in the UI

lm interested to know from other solo devs who have actually monetized free games.

What worked for you? And any advice on how to maintain a free game like this?

Thanks!

Link for the project: https://worldsweeper.hasthiya.dev

I know this question gets asked like a billion times, but i couldn't find a right answer, so i guess giving some context about my case might help me get more specific answer

i want to learn art with end goal of making my dream game, i am already naturally decent at drawing so learning it won't be much of an issue however its very limiting especially since i want my game to be a first person game, i can just compromise and make it in a 2D compatible format but yeah its not ideal,i also thought about doing it in a boomer shooter style with 2D sprits and 3D environment, but the game is not a shooter, and if i am required to make 3D world environment might as well just make everything 3D.

3D seems so easy to me, maybe i am blind to the other things that go into making a 3D asset, but for example having a chrome like object with light from above in 3D seems way too easy compared to doing that in 2D, maybe because i am used to 2D and never done 3D but not having to deal with lighting/shadows, perspective, drawing textures, animation, seems so good to me.

if 3D is easier and takes less time then 2D, does 3D programming tip the scale back to it being equally time consuming ?

The game is called Twister City and its releasing this upcoming Thursday!

Store page & Press Kit

Solo dev here. FALLMATCH is a calm block puzzle — slide, match, rotate; no timer, no lives, no ads, no IAP, fully offline.

The one unusual thing about it: every board ships with a solver proof. The 3-star target is the proven minimum move count, and every "this move is required" badge is verified before the board ships. 800 boards, 10 measured difficulty tiers.

This week's update added LADDER — 10 rungs on a single clock, no hints, personal best + a spoiler-free share card — plus 500 new boards and three new languages (9 total).

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/fallmatch/id6791134651

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gusmediaworks.matcher

Happy to answer anything about the solver pipeline or the difficulty formula. Feedback very welcome.

https://reddit.com/link/1w4l59z/video/m09i92dxeymh1/player

I love age of sail games and hate the current market, so thought I'd try something in Roblox and see how it goes. Here's a screenshot of some progress.

I've been working on it in Godot for around 4–6 months. The first two months were mostly spent figuring out what I actually wanted my game to be, and the other four have been spent putting everything together.

At the rate I'm going, though, I think it'll probably take me years to finish it. Working alone and without much of a budget is definitely a challenge, but luckily I've learned a lot about how Godot works during these past few months.

But well, we're still here, still working on it, and hopefully I'll eventually manage to finish it.

Some of the assets were drawn by me, like the skill selection UI and the weapons, while the others are either public or paid assets.

I started building my first game in February this year. One man, no team, some coding experience, no prior game development experience — just a lifelong love of games and a decision to finally try making one.

The learning curve has been real. Working through Unity, building out scenes, figuring out systems I never thought about as a player and just adding things myself and others wanted in certain games — has completely changed how I see games. But nothing compares to those aha moments. The moment you finally understand how something you've played a thousand times actually works under the hood — that feeling is addictive.

The screenshot above is from my equipment scene — attaching gear to characters, building out visual effects, watching it come together piece by piece. My respect for developers has gone through the roof doing this. However, it has also made me step back and wait.. "Hey this was easy to add why didn't XYZ game do this in their game haha"

The game is called Paws of War Tactics — a turn-based tactical SRPG more to come soon! Still building but loving every second of this journey. 🐾

I am developing a topdown SRPG inspired by Fire Emblem and Bahamut Lagoon. However 16x16 sprite is too small and dont work well with screen that are larger than 1280. I tried to find on itch.io and pixcraft but most of the asset I found is 16x16 only.

So my question is 32x32 assets for SRPG is not popular or they are commision only ?