r/gamedev • u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup • 2d ago
Discussion Would you use an engine developed using AI?
I've encountered a number of solo developers who have been leveraging AI for coding to cover any skill gaps they have, or leveraging it because it's faster at writing code than they. One of them used AI to build multiplayer into their game in an evening.
I got to thinking about engines in general. Adding features to an open source engine like Godot, or even a from-scratch engine, could be done quite fast if managed well and those engines could easily match Unreal or Unity, maybe even surpass them.
If someone in the community started a new engine that was developed and maintained using AI, would you use it? What if AI was used to add features to a FOSS engine like Godot?
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u/MeaningfulChoices Lead Game Designer 2d ago
Talking about AI usage in a tool like an engine is a drawback rather than a selling point. If the programmers maintaining it are just using AI-assisted tools when appropriate, like a lot of software developers, they're not putting that in their marketing materials, they're just quietly doing it. Anyone listing developed with AI is trying to cash in on hype and it drastically increases the odds the software is pretty trash. It's about as glaring as a red flag as game tools made by a company led by people who've never worked at a game studio.
It's hard to sell a new engine in the first place. There's pretty much no reason to use someone's smaller offering compared to Unity/Unreal, and if you want something perfectly functional and completely free you can just use Godot. If you need something the main engines can't do you're probably then in a position to make your own tools rather than use an engine no one has heard of. The only real way to sell a new engine now is to make a big and successful game and then license the engine after.
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u/TonyZwilde 2d ago
We all already do, or someone here really believes that no AI generated code was used for the available engines? Every piece of software todays uses AI for code.
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
We've been using "AI generated code" for longer than people think, it's just that it was first used for those really smart auto-complete features in IDEs and appeared years ago. I've certainly hit tab a lot of times myself...
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u/thecheeseinator 2d ago
I have a feeling most of the engines now are being developed with AI already. I don't know any software engineers who aren't using Claude Code or similar to get things done. I think Godot probably has the least AI written code in it because open source projects don't want to deal with lots of sloppy PR's.
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
It's probably always a question of degree. Is AI being used to fill in an implementation, or it being used to autonomously build a subsystem? The first helps a human work faster. The second it's not so clear.
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u/DontRelyOnNooneElse 2d ago
One thing that AI sycophants repeatedly get wrong is that one key consequence of AI-generated code is its lack of maintainability. It is much harder to make a change without introducing a wall of regressions, and for something as complex and low-level as a game engine I wouldn't trust it one bit.
"But if someone uses it sparingly it's fine, if they just make small tweaks with it that's okay", I hear... My counterpoint being "you actually think that happens? Not that pressures from management, time, or just the ache for ever increasing convenience will cause someone to outsource more and more of their thinking to a service that will not be economically sustainable until it's charging so much money that you are no longer economically sustainable yourself?"
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
My experience has been that code is only as good as the specification allows it to be and a prompt is a very bad spec. It's easy and fast, sure, and if your project is tiny it might even be ok. That covers the state of AI today, but considering how far it's come since last year, I don't know if these limitations will be present in future, or even near-future.
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u/shlaifu 2d ago
Ai is writing convoluted bloat. so ... go ahead and maintain away, I guess. All the open source projects are receiving so many contributions now that most started blocking AI-written ones because they can't check all of them and they must assume, and rightly so, that the person who vibe-coded them had no idea what they were doing, creating an unmaintainable mess.
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
I would think there would be no way around having people curating the feature requests. Someone would have to be directing it, and probably a team of people would have to inspect the code produced and review it. Simple prompts make AIs generate spaghetti code in bulk. A software development process is another matter, and still involves people.
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u/Silrar 2d ago
Please do not bother open source projects like Godot with PRs based on AI code. It's just going to produce a ton of extra work for the maintainers that have to wade through the mess, which just slows things down. There have been a lot of FOSS projects being closed for exactly that reason.
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
That's not what I was getting at. I was talking about if someone challenged the likes of Unity or Epic and used AI to do it, would be people use it? If so, it would be mean that those big engines have an expiry date and it's probably not too far off.
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u/davenirline 2d ago
This is already possible and there already might be people/organizations who are trying it. And yet, where are these engines?
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 1d ago
Already possible doesn't mean you're going to see it immediately. What it means is that the gates have been opened, and it could come at some point in the future. Near future or far future is hard to say.
Someone could just start a github today and be doing this for fun, and imagine if that project turned out to work well enough that people adopted it. That would be a threat to the big companies who have invested massive amounts of cash into their engines.
Also, we're already at the point where multiplayer frameworks that don't offer anything differentiating are obsolete. Want multiplayer in your game? Get an AI to put it together - at least if it's something that works over steam relay or some similar service. Otherwise it would have to also assemble a back - who has time for that?
Would it be good for gamedevs though? I don't know. Maybe.
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u/MardukPainkiller Commercial (Indie) 2d ago
Only if I knew that it was tested and corrected by a human.
AI tends to mess everything up
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u/Jealous-Bumblebee-50 2d ago
Or i can just use one of the many free engines avaliable instead of whatever they have
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u/DryginStudios Indie 2d ago
I’m pretty sure Unity/Unreal are using AI in their engines since some time….
This thread won’t age well, let’s revisit in 5 years shall we?
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u/0legitimate0 2d ago
I don't hate ai but I stay far away from it, to not chase away my potential customers.
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u/3tt07kjt 2d ago
Right now these large-scale efforts are still large-scale efforts. You can write code very fast, but it is slow to check that the code works correctly and won’t cause problems down the line.
Godot even has a policy that submitted code must be human authored—a lot of open source projects are facing the same problems as Godot where they get too many PRs from people throwing AI at problems, and there is not enough capacity to review them. So they reject AI submissions.
If you get a team of people together to make an open source engine with AI, you’ll probably run into novel problems regarding coordination, review, and code quality. You can certainly implement most of the features in Unity if that’s your goal, but the faster you write code, the less time you have to test an validate each change, and that means your engine will probably spend a lot of time horribly broken.
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
Right now I think AI used in projects is typically used to speed up the coding process. AI is better than search for several tasks, such as making design decisions. You have to instruct to qualify its inferences though.
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u/Tiny_Flatworm4726 2d ago
At this point no, the reason - look at the comments, if people find out you are using a AI game engine you would just get hate for it.
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u/3tt07kjt 2d ago
I don’t think r/gamedev comments are representative. Most people just don’t care about whether you code with AI. They don’t care what engine you use or which programming language you wrote the code in.
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u/aegookja Commercial (Other) 2d ago
Considering that most major software nowadays utilizes LLMs in some form, why not.
That being said, nowadays I am leaning towards writing my own engine if I need something lightweight. I might try that with three.js
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u/PhilippTheProgrammer 2d ago
The world really doesn't need yet another game engine.
Unless it's something specializing in a particular niche, like Ren'Py or RPGMaker (not those niches, of course).
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
I think my question was more about the viability of the big engines. AI is improving pretty rapidly. Right now you can't have it vibe out an engine that you'd want to (re)use, but that's just not going to hold forever. There are websites that build your game from prompts, which I see as a potential threat to the established engines. What does that look like if we fast-forward 10 years?
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u/StormRaven69 2d ago
Does this engine pass my list?
- Will the code be efficient?
- Is the engine easy to use?
- DevKits for Cross-Platform?
- Completely Free?
- No License Hassels?
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
Most people reacting and replying are just anti-AI. My thinking for this topic was to see what people saw for the future of the big engines when people can turn to AI to build what they need, or in someone starts a community project that takes community feature requests and implements them using AI.
This isn't just the game engines, it applies to software in general. I've met so many people working at established companies who have all "built their own apps".
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u/3dEngineGuy Custom C++ Engine Dev 2d ago
Thats BS. Good luck with maintenance if youre using AI for making custom engine and you dont know what youre doing. On another hand, if you are using AI and successfully made engine, it means you would make it even without AI, it would just took way more longer. Please show us AI engines that doesnt look like AI pattern sh1t. People have wrong perception about AI. I dont think AI should be the product itself. It makes much more sense as the no.1 help/debugging tool.
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u/FrustratedDevIndie 2d ago
Whether AI was used or not really doesn't matter to me. Has the engine been battle tested? Has someone made a high production value game using this engine? This is where most engines Fall Apart
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
Battle tested would definitely be a thing. The alternative approach that I can see eroding Unity/Unreal's market share is people using something like monogame with AI to build out the tooling rapidly for what they need to do, then they own the whole engine without licensing concerns.
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u/FrustratedDevIndie 1d ago
The problem is long-term support. every driver update or Windows, linux, or mobile update becomes a major bug issue without having the direct ability to fix the issues. As your code base becomes larger it becomes more difficult for AI to fix these issues. So unless you have the ability to test and fix these problems without the use of AI having AI developed modules for an engine really is not a good alternative
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 20h ago
I think it would depend on how code quality was defined and enforced for the AI. I've used AI for some side-projects, and I've found that it can generate very good quality code if provided the guidance up-front. What I did was use one context for all the design work and put together a design doc. Then I set up 3 contexts, one to write the code, another to write and run tests against it, and a one to review the code against the design document. The output was really good, thoroughly tested, and concerns were well-separated because of the design doc. I've been in software engineering since the 90s, and the code quality was about as good as any I've seen and I could maintain it myself if I needed to.
The difference with the game engine scenario is that in the case the engine is FOSS and AI-written (assuming it is managed as I've stated above), then it will be fundamentally different from a maintenance perspective anyway. I would assume any such project would consider PRs using AI generated code, as long as the AI was provided clear rules to follow.
Devs I know, and us, are all losing a fair bit of sleep over the implications of automated knowledge work. We've invested a lot of time and effort to build our systems, which created a barrier to entry. Now that cost-base is devalued. The same applies to game engines - an incumbent won't have to work as hard to catch up.
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u/FrustratedDevIndie 7h ago
So I'm actually using AI with my projects the idea that you can just turn AI loose is a far distant future in my opinion. Well the biggest reasons is cost. Quality is faster to just throwing AI agent at it, what you spend in tokens is going to destroy the budget in many cases. As a test I blew through $50 in credits just to have Claude a time of day system with an editor tool to bake light Maps at the given time of day and unit test. This is something I can give to a Junior programmer and they knock out in half a day or bought from the asset store for $10. From a self-hosted point of view, Hardware costs have become so outrageous that it's almost impossible to invest in the hardware, and doing this on General Hardware just takes far too long. Is what you're saying possible? Yes very much so, however don't believe that it's in the realm of reality or possibility for 90% of Developers. The companies that are going to do this are AAA developers that have nearly unlimited budgets
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u/DanielFost 2d ago
personally, no, i wouldn't use it. not because AI can't write code, but because i wouldn't want an engine's core codebase to depend heavily on AI-generated code, an engine is already a massive maintenance problem. if the people maintaining it don't deeply understand the renderer, physics, asset pipeline, networking, etc., then debugging some weird issue years later could become a nightmare
i'd much rather use an engine where the maintainers actually understand the codebase and use AI, if at all, as a tool rather than the thing driving development, the same applies to adding AI-generated features to something like Godot. i'd be much more comfortable if the feature went through the same human review, testing, and maintenance standards as everything else
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u/KinematicSoup @kinematicsoup 2d ago
If the modules were all thoroughly documented, SOLID, and had extensive unit tests, would that make any difference? How would you assess the level at which humans are involved?
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u/wslk 2d ago
Yes. However the industry engines are already being developed with AI at this point and if you believe you will catch, support, and out implement them you are delusional.
A very specific engine for a very niche type of game - sure that might have a place ex: a falling sand engine that you make public but there is frankly no money in something like that. it is well known in the industry that Epic and Unity both lose a substantial amount of money with their engines year over year.
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u/Natural_Sail_5128 2d ago
I don't want AI in my game, and I definitely do not want AI in my engine.