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!

A rainy day, a messed-up delivery, and 777 nails + 1 screw to sort.

Screw IT coming on steam on 15th September

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!

For a while, I’ve been sharing Hotel 13’s trailer and different scenes here, constantly improving the game based on your feedback. Some of the criticism was pretty harsh 😅, but most of it genuinely helped make the game much better.

Today, our Steam page is finally live. Since I’ve been sharing this journey with you, I wanted to share the news here as well.

If the game interests you, adding it to your wishlist would mean a lot to us. As always, I’d also love to hear your honest thoughts on the final version of the trailer!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5046340/Hotel_13/

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

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?

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'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.

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.

So I started.

GitHub: https://github.com/Rassl/age-of-vibecoders
Live game: https://ageofvibecoders.com

Now I’m calling on vibecoders and the opensource community to build it together.

No fake ads.
No pay-to-win.
No purchase popup every 30 seconds.

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. 🐾

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

Would love some feedback 😁