I'd like to make games. Inside my head there's a constant thread thinking about games. It's been there as far back as I can remember, even when I was a very young child. RPG's, Action games, board games, I love games. Hell, I don't even care if I win or lose! To me simply playing the game is the victory condition. At some point I started making games, and it continues to this day. So much of my free ideation time is thinking about how games work. So in a complete shock to no one what I want to do when I grow up is make games. Specifically video games. And in a complete shock to no one my day job is maintaining cloud network infrastructure.

I've been trying to produce a game for a long time now. I'd like to say to varying degrees of success, but how many degrees of abject failure are there? My GitHub is littered with now defunct repositories of projects. From these many husks I have found many ways not to make a game.

Gen AI

AI in it's current phase is a total shit show. For obvious reasons. Clearly AI generated images are grotesque. LLM generated text output is whatever the hell it is. In both cases, they were trained on so many human works that have dubious provenience, and in may cases were outright stolen. There's no way to view that theft and subsequent mulching of human expression into a ready to extrude slurry as openly hostile to the human experience.

Where am I

And yet. In my day job life there exists a KPI that necessitates that I interact with LLMs. In this endeavor I have tasked myself with finding a way to use GenAI in a way that allows me to sleep at night. As a matter of course, I started following that line of logic in my game projects.

The common threads for where I stop working on a game can be categorized thusly:
- I want to make a too large game.
- I devised a mechanic novel enough, or fun enough, to finish the construction.
- I end up chasing down and building over complex or maybe even not necessary systems.

The self same predilection that allows me to work on cloud infrastructure systems is an impulse I have, wherein I get bogged down in systems and tools that can be used to create, takes me away from the core task. I have a game carcass that became mostly a vehicle for me to make tools to add things to the game, without actually adding things to the game. My time became about making something to save me time.

And all of that feels like progress. All of that leads to the same place, I have one (1) very bad "game" I made for a jam published. Yet I feel, still, that I'm making progress. If we're being honest, I don't think I am any more.

Synthesis

So how do I think these things fit together? To keep this clear, my thoughts are only applicable at my scale in my current situation, as a solo indi dev. If I had infinite money I would hire out everything. Currently I think there are a slew of systems that have to get built for a game, that don't necessarily benefit by being done by me. Chiefly things that don't directly end up in the game. Things like pipeline tools, to make sure the game version is handled. Or tools that hook into the git process, that enforce standards I came up with to keep the code base tidy. I think there are plenty of places, that are not directly game content (story elements, art assets, music or sound assets), that need to be made to call it a game.

The tools I have made so far I think of as jigs. Little throw away tools that help me actually create the project.

Is that ok?

Weighing my usage in with my general thoughts on GenAI, does that come out on balance as acceptable?

I honestly am still not sure. I do think without those tools I could still make a game, albeit much slower. However, I still think that's pie in the sky thinking that doesn't take into consideration the actual boots on the ground context of my life. When I weigh that in, kids, my wife, my day job, and my aging mother, I don't think I can make a game at all. So if I leverage AI to take care of all the grunt work to enable me to do the task, is that ok?

Is there an alternative to it? Out of the gate I can pay a person to do this work. But that runs into the same problem as above, it's cost prohibitive. Just monetarily, not in time. What about starting or joining a team? At the end I do want a commercial product, so that creates friction that has it's own level of nuance. I've been involved in a creative commercial business before, and after that exploded I have more than a normal amount of apprehension around who to work with. This compounds when you add in the things I'm not willing to compromise on, art assets, music, and anything else that would enhance the game experience that I have to pay for because I don't have the skills to make.

So where does that leave me?

I'm not sure.

Thanks,
RJ