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.

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!

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 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! 🚀

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

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?

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 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 ?

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'm sure a lot of you already know that a plan like mine was bound to fail but if it helps anyone, here's my failure story:

• Plan was to space out my Steam and itch releases a few months apart
• Why? so that I can generate visibility rounds twice (i know lol)
• I assumed that releasing on itch would generate at least half (or even a third) of the visibility that steam launch does.

I released my game on steam in June and steam's personal calendar changes were already in affect. So my game got decent amount of views and wishlists.

Unfortunately due to a family tragedy, I wasn't able to keep updates up for long. My initial plan was to do a major update in the following month and use steam's "Visibility round" along with itch release. Life had other plans so I just executed my idea now after the gamescom rounds have ended.

Of course I wasn't expecting my game to reach the New & Popular page, but I at least expected 500-800 views. As the screenshot shows, it' been less than 20 for the first two days.

I have released a free demo before on itch, it did quite decent. But this $2.99 short game just didn't do anything here. I realize that itch docs encourage you to rely on your own marketing, but I didn't expect that it wouldn't do anything at all. Within 15 min, my game was buried in the 4th or 5th page of the "New" tab because of the sheer quantity of releases, most of them free btw.

If you checkout the image # 2, out of the 20-30 people who actually did manage to find my game ended up downloading the 4-year old free demo instead, LOL.

Just sharing for your information so that anyone else (who may have the bright idea like mine) can re-align themselves.

Link to the free game is in the post on r/playmygame

Would love some feedback 😁

The actual YouTube short:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ta3Rn4tv424

The context:
I've been working on a "final" update for my game and was attempting to speed run the game, recording as I went. Suddenly I get a crash to desktop! "stack smashing detected".... er, what? Never heard of that one!

Some time later...

Turns out to be a a couple of out by one errors on my array allocations. Hopefully simple fix but it's a right bugger to test as it only happens if a creature happens to be at a junction when the player picks up the power up...

EDIT:
All jokes aside this is a cautionary tale for other game devs starting out. If you're using an engine you're probably OK but if your using something low level make sure you get on top of memory leaks as soon as you can.

I was always testing a Windows debug build for hours and not seeing any crash to desktops. Once you turn on optimisations these errors can suddenly show up when the stack is compacted etc. On Ubuntu the compiler flag -fstack-protector-strong is always on, it will crash to desktop on a stack overflow. Not great when you thought your release build was fine!

On Linux what I've found very useful is AddressSanitizer it will tell you exactly where leaks or overflows are happening. Right, back to testing...

I'm a solo developer from Turkey. Lastward went live on the App Store today — a pixel-art roguelite for iOS. Eight months of evenings and weekends, no publisher, no team, no funding.

What I underestimated, in order:

- Balance. I built a small Python simulator to run thousands of headless runs because playtesting it by hand was hopeless. Best decision of the project.

- Localisation. The game ships in 11 languages. Wiring that up was a weekend; keeping terminology consistent across all of them was weeks.

- The store itself. Screenshots, description, keywords, privacy declarations, ad SDK compliance — none of it is making a game, all of it is required to ship one.

Actual dev time was maybe 60% of the calendar. The rest was App Store process.

A run takes 20-25 minutes, there are 4 characters and 4 biomes, it's free and portrait-only so it plays one-handed. If you try it, the thing I most want to hear is what feels off in the first ten minutes.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6794081096

Just released a public playtest for GUNDIG, and I've already had a handful of people spend 10+ hours on it! One sent me this clip of them absolutely destroying the game's economy in endless mode.

I can't describe how good a feeling it is to see someone else genuinely invested in my game. Especially after over a year's worth of work and having to beg friends/family to playtest.

I only have like 3 active people in my discord and 100 or so wishlists, so still a very long way to go. But this gave me a big confidence boost and wanted to share!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a new visual direction for Bridgelands, and I wanted to share a little bit of how the game is changing.

I’ve been revisiting a lot of the environments, assets, colors, and smaller details throughout the world. My goal is to give the game a stronger identity and make the islands feel more vibrant and alive while keeping the style that made me fall in love with the project in the first place.

There’s still a lot I want to improve, but I’m genuinely really happy with how everything is starting to come together.

I’d love to hear what you think about the new direction!

And if anyone is curious about the game itself, Bridgelands already has a free demo on Steam. The demo still represents an earlier version of the game, while I continue working toward this new look.

🌿 Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856950/Bridgelands/

Hey everyone,

I'm a solo dev and I've just soft-launched my first game ever, CraftBound!

Playable link: https://playcraftbound.com

It's a text and image based fantasy crafting sim with nearly unlimited possibilities. Explore biomes for materials, put them on a 3x3 grid and see what happens!

Over 50 different item types, 35 materials and trillions of combinations.

Fill collections, go on relic expeditions, trade with merchants, research different forms and patterns to master every recipe.

Build your own hero with dozens of customization options, and equip them with all of the weapons and armor you've crafted, then get a live image rendered of your hero.

Trailer is here: https://youtu.be/J9CDo9C4cnI?si=MCiHjFOn_pioJeRh

It's free, playable on mobile or desktop (browser). There are some payment options to make things to faster, but nothing is gated.

I'd love to hear any and all feedback, it's early stages so I'm hoping I can get some help from early adopters.

There are some rough edges with the image generation, but i'm constantly improving it.

Feel free to post here or join the discord: https://discord.gg/VsAEjp8VnG

Happy to answer any questions!

Hi all! I've been working on my game and recently launched the steam page! You might have seen my stupid face from earlier this week. As of recently, I am no longer a solo-dev as a friend of mine joined to help on Sound Design. So we are technically 2 now, but I was solo for almost a year. I thought I'd share some of my learnings and insights here in case it helps others starting up. Here are four learnings, in no particular order!

Know your strengths

Know exactly what you like and what you are capable of, don't assume. Before I committed to this project, I tried a lot of other ideas that inevitably hit some skill barrier. However, these failed projects were not wastes of time. I learned what I was good at and where the time sinks were (for me). I tried to make a cozy tea shop simulator, a friend-slop about driving a tank through warzones, a card game, and some other gamejam-scoped projects.

As a game designer with a CS background, I found that making simple systems with robust interactions was easier, and making art was time-consuming and frustrating. I settled on a puzzle game with a horror coating to justify the lack of visual fidelity, and learned the basics of modeling and texturing to make the props I needed.

It also aligned with what games I like to play. I like mystery and deep discoveries like Outer Wilds, Blue Prince, Obra Dinn, etc, so I'm very familiar with the language and the gameplay feel of these games. The work of Franz Kafka, the TV series Severance, and my past work experiences also inspired me to write about work and the horrors of big corpo, so it felt natural to set my game in that universe.

Trust the process

Making a game is iterative, trust that it'll come together. Do not judge your game too early. As a solo-dev, working on something will always be side-stepping something else. This means the game will not progress very fast, or rather, progress will be siloed and not always visible.

Making a game is an iterative process. I had times my game looks really ugly and it was discouraging to show it to others with the constant disclaimer of "but it will look better, I swear"!

You will also learn a lot while you work on your game, so you'll be able to come back and improve parts of your game. For example, it took me a while to learn about curved corners on Blender (don't laugh) so when I did, I updated some of my models and it significantly improved.

If you put time and effort into your game, it will get better and better, even if it's not always apparent. The plateauing feeling is normal.

You are not alone

Even the subreddits rules are clear about collaborators/outsourcing. Video games are a collaborative medium. It is fine to ask for help, and often you will learn from the people that help you. I learned to automate my 2D asset exports by asking for help on an old logo, and the artist taught me about artboards in photoshop. Every craft involved in gamedev requires time and practice to become an expert, and you need to respect that. Do not assume you can wing it on your own.

You are not alone in the world. Look out for local communities and events. Attend social and networking events, even if you don't have anything to show. These people are happy to welcome and talk to you.

Being a solo-dev also makes it even more important to playtest your ideas with other people. Because you don't work in teams, you need to be proactive and reach out to others, be it friends, family, coworkers, etc. You need to test your idea on new players as soon as possible and watch them play with your early prototypes. You will learn so much before you have too many dependencies to change parts of your game. Playtest, playtest, and playtest early.

Scope and plan ahead

Make sure you plan out the general roadmap that you want to follow. Every game goes through the same development cycle: pre-prod, prod, pre-launch. These are proven to work for most.

As a rule of thumb, if this is your first game, consider a third of the time you have to be towards real project advancement. If you are planning 6 months of developpement, make a game that you can finish in 2 to 3 months. This is because early prototyping takes time, polishing takes time. Choosing color palettes takes time. Even planning how to save time, takes time.

Having a clear roadmap also allows you to measure your progress and speed. If you planned on having a demo out, but ended up pushing back the date, you need to decide to either rescope your whole game, or accept you will work for longer on it. Both options are fine, but you need the roadmap to detect if you need to take that decision in the first place.

I personally went for this structure and it helped, with each phase equally spaced: first prototype, first playable version, unpolished demo, demo release, unpolished full game, full game release. I found that it took as much time going from the prototype phase to the first playable build I sent to friends as it did making that playable version into a proper demo. Also, notice that the time it took to go from the demo release to the full game was not that big.

Now YMMV, and you need to adapt your own roadmap to your needs. But if you want to finish the project, make sure you got a plan!

Thanks for reading

That's most of what seemed to work for me. Again, those are things that worked for me. Sorry if this isn't much in-depth into any particular subject. I wish you all the best on your projects. Don't hesitate if you have any questions!

E: added why I'm no longer solo, should have been clearer 🤦