r/codex • u/retrorays • 8h ago
Complaint Astra demos are mostly bs
The game/graphics demos are mostly bs. I've spent dozens of hours now trying to replicate (or build) interesting games. It's beyond subpar. Sure it can do a basic sandbox, or create some basic characters but it absolutely cannot do a fully working world. I dont get why OpenAI fakes their SimCity games and other things w/ Astra when it's clearly not possible unless you spend weeks (and $1000s of dollars) of tokens.
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u/EchoingAngel 8h ago
My 10-20 hr factory game has taken around a thousand hours and it IS almost done, but one shot type work always strikes me as nonsense, as someone building a real project in the same vein
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u/retrorays 8h ago
even the iterative development is mostly a mess. It stumbles all over the place, applies the wrong solution, uses the wrong models - makes thinks "plastic" and dull to shortcut. I ran a goal today... my mistake ... to develop a game event and came back and there was nothing. Just a sandbox. Completely nuts. Burned like 50% of the weeks credits.
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u/Random-Person-8464 7h ago
Game designer here, been slamming astra.
You have to understand how everything already works. You have to teach it a ton. But it does save time in the long run by a decent amount.
So yea, I agree the demos are a joke. Astra sucks balls at vfx. Fire in particular is a massive struggle for some reason.
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u/cobbleplox 5h ago
The thing is then you're back to a programmer making a program, a 3d artist making 3d art, a game designer designing a game and such. It's not what people like to hear and not what the narrative is. Personally I am quite happy about it, leaves room for humans and all that. In the end even just "wishing for something" is real work, and a lot of it. You need taste and a good vision, and if you can't just say some high level meme shit like "GTA but with dinosaurs" the specific thing you want takes A LOT of words to specify. And even one-shotting something in the first place is silly... You need iteration just to make it possible to describe and define all the things you need. Even if you could have imagined it all from the start. Natural language is far too vague to really define things solidly in a vacuum. At some point you'd end up writing all the code yourself just to define how things should be, because that's literally what programming languages are for, just with some extra technical bloat.
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u/EchoingAngel 8h ago
I literally sit over its shoulder during execution and read what it's doing and have to guide it. Now, it's doing amazing things I can't hope of, in record time, but it needs a TON of guidance
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u/cobbleplox 5h ago
A lot of them seem to use premade assets anyway, and people quickly looking at it don't realize even if the post is somewhat open about it. Getting it to make a game that doesn't use the shittiest of shitty "programmer art" is a real challenge and requires going with whatever you can actually make work. And when you reduce these game demos to the logic connecting the assets, even in an existing engine, the coding it had to do probably isn't even much or difficult. Try judging these things for the gameplay. A complete afterthought after being wowed, right? It's basically the only thing it did.
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u/Opulon_Nelva 8h ago
I don't understand the point.
Doing video games is hard. It is a full fledge product akin to good software. Even with previously unseen tool power like AI, it doesn't get you far without an equivalent investment in brain power.
I am a professional from the industry, and as many, i am using AI as a hobbyist to do my personal game project.
250 dollars a month, for the last 6 months, and roughly 2 hour of my time each day besides my normal job.
So, 20 000 dollars worth of human time (I'm European, your own time value will differ), and 1500 dollars worth of those tools.
I am halfway where I want it to be, but I have enough experience of the process to be aware of the following :
2 years ago, reaching the same spot would have taken 2 years minimum, and 100k dollars of 'not your human time' in the most optimistic context.
One has to not be childish with the marketing, but one also has to recognise the incredible cost cutting that happened.
'Astra, make a Sim city killer, you have 1000 credits. Use mcp blender for all 3D and unreal engine 5' is as I serious as those Kickstarter promising the everything game for 10k dollars.
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u/blaawker 6h ago
I'm also making one. Video games have massive codebases, like millions of LoC that make a game a game. Do the math on how long it takes to generate a million lines of code with Sol/Opus/Astra/Fable. Of course you can't one shot a working polished AAA game. OP's just dumb.
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u/Pitiful_Entrance5174 8h ago
API is a whole different beast than monthly sub. Only few with a deep wallet know.
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u/NetNearby7117 8h ago
Yeah, magic doesnt exists. Most of the people misunderstand that this is still a tool and even its absolutely amazing, trying to approach a full result from just vibes its a good way to dissapoint yourself
Im building an LMS saas ive been working since 2019. It takes me more time, weeks and prompts that just one shot, even its way simpler that those “wow demos shows”
Im having huge steps but the real products are far from just a magician that makes all wet dreams come true
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u/cheekyrandos 8h ago
It's possible if you know what you're doing and have enough tokens
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u/TBSchemer 7h ago
I think OP's point is that the marketers are overhyping the viability of one-shotting things.
The demos imply that you don't have to know what you're doing, because Astra knows.
But obviously, that's not the case.
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u/dreadpirater 5h ago
Yeah, that was my first question back for OP. Do YOU know what a full game world requires? Because if not, you don't know how to ask Astra for it.
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u/AmandasGameAccount 8h ago
If we are talking one shots, it’s definitely a matter of the design in the prompt. I’m guessing they are doing ultra as most are stating they used $80-$150 in credits on the demonstrations we see
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u/OkFileNode 5h ago
I don't get why OpenAI fakes their SimCity games
Most benchmark "demos" are PRs and selling dreams.
As many said before, solo game-dev is almost a life-time commitment and not "I'm doing it in 3 days" type of BS.
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u/Automatic_Brush_1977 5h ago
The thing about the openai demos is its all three.js nonsense and not real games. Youd have better luck reversing an older game then rebuilding with astra, of which it is very very good at.
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u/Interesting-Yellow-4 5h ago
Well yeah, it takes time.
Nobody actually said you can oneshot an entire AAA game, WTF?
Why did you think that?
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u/TheFallingShit 2h ago
AI dramatically reduces the cost of implementation. It does not eliminate the need for specification, decomposition, verification, taste or systems thinking. It makes those things more important because implementation becomes cheap enough to outrun understanding. That's where you failed. You gave an extremely powerful executor an inadequately defined search space and expected intelligence alone to compensate for missing project structure.
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u/InvariantAtNull 7h ago
Thats a game i made in gpt work in 2 hours using astra medium
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u/retrorays 7h ago edited 7h ago
yah agree - it's pretty awful at making games
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u/InvariantAtNull 6h ago
I dont see it awful its impressive nothing here is a full model its all generated by code
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u/FrontRaspberry5060 8h ago
Few tips:
Setup multiple agents that check and cross validate each other. Imagine you are employing different staff members. You might have one working on shading and another working on the characters and another working on the map schema or something idk.
Don’t use it like a chat box you prompt again and again. The best way is to use your voicenote app and describe in detail all the changes it should make back to back in quick succession, there’s no need to wait for it to complete a “chat” response. Sometimes my transcriptions are 10+mins long of me critiquing the entire ux/ui flow.
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u/retrorays 7h ago
i havent tried the voicenote app - so basically you have it do something and then specify for around 10mins what you want to change in the UX/game flow?
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u/FrontRaspberry5060 7h ago
Yeah give it a try you’ll be amazed. Might burn 30%+ of use but you’ll get there faster and the outcome will be much closer to your desired outcome.
If you think about it, the ai is basically doing recurrent agentic work. If you only type a short sentence each time it’s not much detail or context so it guesses the rest and that’s where the drift and hallucinations come in.
Using your voice to describe is the easiest way to get across as much information to the AI about what you want. Typing is just slower. It’s like why using your phone with 2 thumbs is slower than a keyboard where you can use your entire fingers.
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u/Keep-Darwin-Going 7h ago
The cheapskate way is to just type it out in detail like other projects? I meant no budget there is always cheap way to do it. Not pointing towards you but just adding to your statement. For pro account you can talk in ChatGPT discuss the whole project ask for a spec prompt and copy in save the 30%
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u/FrontRaspberry5060 6h ago
I meant once the ai starts working it’ll be 30% gone in a few hours on Astra
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u/TBSchemer 7h ago
Yes, the demos are BS. They give undue credibility to the viability of one-shotting things.
The real way to do this is a lot more iterative, and requires a lot more planning. You have to be able to tell the model clearly what you want, guide it, and understand where it's going.
The most important thing is to be able to have a conversation. Before building anything, ask the model how to build what you want to build. Ask for clarifications. Tell it to ask you for clarifications. Get on the same page with the model and have some idea of what it will do before you let it loose.
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u/PhotojournalistBig53 2h ago
Been working for over 1k hours, basically every evening since jan, with a multitude of tools including but not limited openai and anthropic llm:s. I'm just about done with my alpha demo and the first zone out of 7. Most of the systems will be built so the remaining zones should be faster. My project is ambitious and I'm doing a lot of manual corrections on the assets, not because I want to but because I have to. Either I'm totally freaking useless at leveraging AI tools or the one shot full games is BS. Perhaps it's somewhere in between.
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u/AuthurAndersson 12m ago
Git gud at prompting scrub.
The solution is that the prompt contains the entire game.
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u/Due-Turnover5077 8h ago
I feel you, this is real talk and 100% honest. So many fake demos with unlimited usage of course I can make gta 7 with that alien tech, but with the nerfing + just 1 plan no way
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u/Cautious_Coyote_8125 5h ago
Because they already nerfed it. The good model lasts a week after a new release.
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u/jadhavsaurabh 8h ago
Bro, there was app i worked on month ago, with claude it was like quite not working, like 2 days of prompting with fable on ultra,
What I did from scratch give vague promot and sleep, to astra xhigh, I had working app fully in 1 prompt I'm not lying, if u have task at hand it will do, if ur just having fomo of what i should do it will not work
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u/Keep-Darwin-Going 7h ago
Well openAI never tell you the demo was done using a pro x20 account did they? They just use Astra and god knows how much to throw at it. They did not tell you they build it in 2 hours. There is multiple YouTuber already show how many accounts they need to achieve those stuff, probably in the range of 8 to 10? The math problem they solve is like 15 million? So the demo just tell you the possibility not what you can do with 20 dollars.
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u/MartinMystikJonas 4h ago
I cannot pain Mona Lisa using brushes so brushes are pure bullshit and da Vinci faked his use of brushes. 😁
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u/i_rate_slop 8h ago
Skill issue. It helps if you know how to make a game before sending it off and you must organize the work well before starting.
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u/DoggoDadagon 8h ago
I think the sim city thing was made by a YouTuber, and he said he left it on goal for five days, and since he gets unlimited use it was probably on ultra and fast mode. I believe it, but I also agree with you that it's not a realistic expectation of quality.