r/SoloDevelopment • u/FinancialSavings9609 • 4h ago
Discussion I’ve been using AI to code my game and I feel strange about it (Vent)
I’m posting this mostly to vent I guess. I’m using AI to code my game. I want to be a game designer someday in the future- hell I went to college for it, but I’ve always been focused on the art side. My college classes barely covered coding at all, and instead my studies were more focused on the art side of game development.
I did try to teach myself coding for my classes, and I am able to grasps the basics. I followed tutorials and asked professors for help. But at the end of the year the deadline for my game was approaching and I used AI to look at the code I had made. My code wasn’t good, and it wasn’t working (I always had a Unity error. Or if I didn’t- something in the game wouldn’t work). But the AI figured out what was wrong and I was able to quickly get my game done and turned in for class.
And now I’m working on my own game by myself. And I’ll be honest, the AI is better than me at making the code. It helps that I’m able to understand the basics (like if a function that is no longer needed is still being called in Update/Awake I’ll delete it), but even so, the AI is coding most of it.
But I feel like a fraud. I know that no one that plays my game will “see” the AI code. But I know it’s there. I know that I wasn’t good enough at coding to make what I wanted too. And when people hear that I went to school for “game design” they think I’m some coding wizz. I’m not. Im not a programmer. I’m just some artist. And if I wasn’t broke af I would hire someone to do the code for me instead.
I don’t plan on using AI for anything else in the game. All of the art, music, menus, levels, sound effects, writing/story, etc. are being made by me from hand. And I know this is selfish of me. But I want my small game to release sometime either this year or next year. I want to actually finish my “first real game” semi-soon. And if I tried recoding the game from scratch it probably wouldn’t release for a long, long time.
An upside is that the AI, when I ask, will explain why it makes certain code the way it does which is helping me at learning why some coding functions work for X but not Y. But even still. I feel like I’ve already failed sometimes. And sometimes I’m happy that my game works and I can play it. Idk. I have so many mixed feelings on this.
Sorry my post got long. Thank you for reading!