Hey, so I have a question. Basically I’m a beginner with Unity and know a bit of C#. What is the point in spending months (if not years) learning a game engine when AI is capable of writing all the code you write in a few seconds? ChatGpt is capable of coding quite well, but Copilot is astonishingly good at writing code for all game engines. Copilot can pretty much write any code you ask it to and then give you the steps on how to set it up in the editor. Implementing complex systems which would typically take days, can be done in minutes. Sure, AI isn’t perfect. It makes mistakes sometimes and doesn’t always use the best coding practices. But just a couple years ago and AI was barely capable of anything. Now we have things such as Sora which can create literal movies. AI is constantly learning and improving. Programmers are inevitably going to be replaced. Sure, you could argue that AI doesn’t have the imagination and creativity that humans possess, but AI will probably be at that level in just a few short years. AI will soon be making entire games all on its own.
So back to my original question. Is there any point in pursuing game development at all?
First of all, I doubt it. AI is dumb AF. If you don’t know what you’re doing all AIs will take you deep into the woods without a path for escape.
Besides, if you’re passionate about games, you will make games. Yourself. Not with AI. If not, you make boring run-of-the-mil garbage anyways. AI can help with making garbage, it can’t help make you actual games.
So if you want to make games, continue to learn game development, if not, whatever.
I have been gamedeving for six years. Afraid to try AI code. Cant imagine knowing nothing and thinking AI will do it for you. Where would you start?
So, try it out. Try to make your dream game with AI. Keep us updated.
I think you’ll find you need to learn more about game dev than you anticipated, and all your unique ideas will present unique challenges AI just will not be able to help with.
Just saying, this stuff is way harder than it looks.
Congratulations! You’re already ahead of the AI which doesn’t know C# at all. LLMs are just statistics engines that predict the next token in a sequence of tokens, and it just happens to lead to functional code from time to time. It’s not reasoning on any of the text that comes out of it. It’s not even creative. That’s just randomness added to it.
AI merely gives the impression that it could write all that code, but it can’t.
AI extracts what it believes is the right sequence of statements for a stated purpose based on input context and previously written code that seems to match the goal.
More often than not, the code that AI produces is between subtly broken to completely wrong.
Where it excels is answering the basic questions that have been answered over and over and over again. The same basic tasks beginners struggle to implement mainly because they are unable to formulate the problem statement and/or don’t research on the Internet for solutions. That is the part the AI does for you, so for a beginner it seems like magic. But this magic fades away quickly once you ask an AI a complex statement like:
“Please write the code for a splitscreen-enabled, fast-paced online multiplayer first person shooter like Quake with audio, visual FX, animated characters and destructible environment.”
Try asking that and you will not get code or even a complete project but only general guidelines on how to approach this tasks, what to watch out for, etc.
The AI can write code to make your character’s weapon shoot, it can create code that hurts actors from explosions, it can write code to set up splitscreen, it can write the setup code to get players connected over the network. It can answer very specific questions that have been answered ALL OVER THE PLACE if you just go looking.
But what AI cannot do is to connect the dots, put all these pieces together in a meaningful way.
What the AI lets you do is to focus your learning a little more on the architectural details, the connecting dots part, and less struggling with minor implementation details.
This is true, but it’s not the point. If AI being able to do it changes whether you want to do it— if you are struggling to see any point in doing game development now that you are a beginner, this is not for you and you shouldn’t do it.
^ ^ ^ Exactly this… Don’t get into gamedev if you don’t like it. Don’t get into anything if you don’t like it.
Gamedev is one of those amazing art/engineering areas that grabs me in a way that no other endeavor that I have found grabs me. The feeling of problem solving, of figuring out how to do something, the ultimate product of creating an experience that others can play… amazing.