I’ve been thinking hard about what I want this space to be. I used to consider myself more on the creative side of the dev/creative line, but in recent years, I been solidly on the dev side. Then this amazing, devastating thing happened. Claudecode and OpenCode came along, and everything is different. I’ll post something separate about thoughts on AI.
So what now? Well – I want to get back to some creative stuff – in particular, posting and write about games, and game making. I used to enjoy making Flash things back in the day – that was mostly about creating fun interactions. With games, I have a bunch of thoughts – but the core of the thought, which I think is particularly relevant right now, with the release of The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time Remake, is that I’ve often thought of video games a kind of conversation between the game maker, and the player. The game designer, makes a level, matches mechanics, and makes choices – the more clever, the more fun the interaction, and the player works to tease out what the designer was thinking – at least on some level, whether conscious of it or not, and especially where puzzle box games like the older Zelda games were concerned. That OOT holds up as if it were a modern game – better in many ways, it a testament to this design philosophy. I did a review a while back for Metroid Dread, maybe I’ll do a review for OOT as well.
That specific way of thinking about a game, is why LLMs will never be able to fully replace human game makers. Just like with writing, or any kind of story telling, the game maker, has to have something to say – or to tease. The biggest tell for soulless AI generated slop, is that it has no through line, has no particularly strong core message, and can’t stay on theme. The same thing shows in slopware game design (or even in AAA spreadsheet driven game development.)
So anyway – just wanted to poke my head up – I have more coming. It’s time to rescue my brain from the social media algorithms, and get back to creating, get back to blogging, and build some cool stuff. It’s never been easier.
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