I want to ask this as politely as possible, because you set out to do something nice for your nephew and he had a good birthday.
The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children. For example developing specific skills like drawing, and general emotional skills like concentration and learning to be happy with their own skill level.
I respect it was a light post where your aim was probably to highlight something fun, but I couldn't see any note of what you thought about it.
What do you think about that? What do his parents think?
Yes, these are great questions, and I appreciate your politeness.
Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.
My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.
Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.
I'm not OP, but it seems to me that LLMs offer extraordinary access to new skills and information to the uninitiated. Someone who has a positive experience creating a game like this is only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented, the language used, the architectural choices and rationale, etc. The LLM is a competent tutor in all. What I would have given as a child for such access... I had to make due with the help docs, and an occasional book from the library.
> "...only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented..."
That question will never be asked and we all know it. It's been demonstrated time and time again that the masses prefer entertainment to enlightenment and it is still being demonstrated today by the high rate of AI assisted cheating in high schools and colleges.
I'm kind of hopeful that the "always helpful and courteous" personality of LLMs unless pushed intentionally will lead to more positive experiences around inquisitiveness in the youth. And more ability to retain it into adulthood. Even though I'm unsure about the second-order effects on human-human interaction.
why should they learn it? for what purpose? We used to learn these things so that we could use that knowledge to create more. now there's no reason to learn it, other than pure curiosity.
Why should you learn anything? Because it helps you ask better questions, and gives you more and different experience to draw connections between things and situations and ideas. It lets you do more stuff, and doing stuff is fun.
Having recently sat with a bunch of non-coders who decided to play with Claude Code—they learned more in an afternoon than they had in a lifetime, just because it was fun for it to get them to a thing they wanted. Versus months of drudgery and study as the price of entry (and an end result that would probably be super janky compared to the consumer products on offer to them).
I learned some about carpentry by reading, and by watching videos. I learned much more, much faster, by picking up bits of wood and tools and just doing. I did little dumb stuff that was trash but that was mine, and that was satisfying enough that I did more, and before I knew it I’d backed my way into picking up some scraps of proper technique.
And now so many more people with a vague itch can “just do” in relation to software systems.
I mean. Nerds have always existed and will always exist. But, the last couple of decades, it's just been fashionable to "be nerdy". They're faking it. So you're right: Most people won't. But there are reasons why people think people should or would, even if those reasons are wrong. I'm very cynical in my advanced age about peoples' willingness to learn things. All those "go into STEM" efforts aimed at little kids are just fluff. Most people don't enjoy learning. They hate it. Most people just want to watch TV in bed. AI is an amazing teacher, but most people don't want to learn. They're averse to it in their bones. It's like that t-shirt with the picture of french fries on it that says "not everyone can be an astronaut": Yeah well not everyone can be a nerd.
And yet the child is not being taught any of those things, but is instead being given instant gratification slop before they're old enough to know better or develop. LLMs are useful tutors (significantly worse than expert private tutors but probably better than one public tutor per 30 or 40 students), but 99% of people aren't using them that way. If the OP article had been about teaching his nephew how to leverage LLMs to learn the skills he needed to make his own game, that would be a very different story.
I was a kid, and I have 2 of them. My experience has been kids curiosity works top down, not bottom up. As such, instant gratification turns into curiosity or wanting a slight variation or whatever, and bit by bit they learn.
The kid is doing game design with hand drawn sketches and game mechanic, as now he has his own team of software engineers and artists to make his vision a reality.
I’ve been hand coding a contra-style game with ours, and also importing their drawings as all the monsters, it’s incredibly exciting for them to see their work going right into the game. Highly recommend it.
I first learned to program in middle school with Logo, and the extent of that was "telling the commander" (or whatever the term was) what to do in almost plain english.
That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.
As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.
When I was a kid I got into programming to make games and websites partly because of the challenge of it. It was quite difficult to do and whenever you made something work it felt very rewarding.
Well now why would anybody bother writing that code by hand? Perception will/has shifted very quickly to coding being something that is simply done by AI with human oversight.
If I was a kid now maybe I would be using AI to create games or something but I think I would probably just get bored quickly and never bother to learn coding.
Sure, but I have gone from enthusiastically recommending a career in programming to being very cautiously optimistic that the strong kids will still find a place.
Not learning to code might be ok; maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.
When you buy your kid a cake for his birthday, do you think that it's hurting the development of his baking skill, because now he knows cakes are something that he can just hire someone to make with money?
Counterpoint, I think it’ll get them more into making things, because they don’t have that big frustrating period where their output is nowhere near as interesting as the giant smorgasbord of interesting stuff being pushed on them constantly. I’d much rather they spend their time making stuff with AI than passively consume the garbage streaming on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon 24/7, which was the status quo with my generation. Making can now compete on instant gratification with all the other stuff now.
I mean… it was a birthday present. Everything in moderation, and there are a lot of ways to involve the kids in the process more.
I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.
the crazier possibility is that little kids' drawing skills - whatever pedagogical value that has, i agree that it has some - may stop improving, but there might be way more videogames authored by them that turn out to be really good.
The art is really bad. There's no easy fix for this: today's image models are simply not good enough yet. (At CFG>1, which is the typical setting, they give the overcooked "AI look". At CFG=1, that problem disappears but the images become blurry and nonsensical. It's a tradeoff that can't be easily resolved.) You can use models for coding, they're good at that thanks to RLVR, but the art still has to be done by humans.
There are some areas in which Fable is clearly better but subjectively the Opus 5.5 version feels more fun.
Both are one shots, Opus 5.5 was done a few weeks ago before they added "guardrails" around recreating games. Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
In my 2 minutes of testing I liked the gameplay elements from Fable 5.2 much better. I think Opus 5.5 sound effects may have been a bit better but that's it.
This is both cute but also a bit sad in terms of game stylization, I guess these generic AI designs could become so normal to the youth that in the next 10-20 years it just appears everywhere
I'm kind of hoping that the youth will recognize that stuff that can be made with AI is just nothing special anymore, and find something that is (or still is) special. I don't know what that is, maybe something that AI can't do on a fundamental level (maybe something physical?).
(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)
don't really think there will be anything - this is an entity that can learn anything (even physical things) faster than any human or the collective of humanity for that matter.
I've found analog photography to be a rewarding hobby, and although an LLM can help me refresh my memory, the overall experience is certainly not something that an LLM can replace.
We also connect to people through art and play. So if we automate those things, then I guess we'll spend the rest of our lives living unsatisfying experiences.
That was already happening before AI, with in-house game engines dying off and all converging on the same quasi-realistic style and often the exact same assets.
Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.
Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.
- punch and kick don't seem to have differences in effect, just animation
- bosses don't have obvious gimmicks to beat them
But the main take-away for me is that this takes me back to computing in my youth, where you could dream up a project and bash it out in a few days. It wouldn't be polished, it wouldn't be perfect, but it would be yours. It would do what you wanted. Computing was ours, it didn't yet belong to big corporations controlling what we could do and how we could do it.
Projects like this give me hope that a new generation will experience that. Aiden won't ever forget this game, even if it's nothing special to you or me. Aiden won't ever forget that feeling of imagining a change, and having it happen. The price for it would've been somewhere around $300-$500, so not exactly broadly accessible - making AI efficient enough to run cheaply should be the main goal of humanity, but we're letting computing get locked up by a few rich sociopaths once again.
This style reminds me of those mobile game ads with helpless characters that need YOUR help not to freeze or something. Probably the exaggerated facial expressions.
What does one-shot mean in this context? Aiden (the main character)'s walk cycle is kind of a mess and its also the animation that a player is going to see all the time.
It appears to be eight frames, but after taking a closer look, I found that they don't seem to be consistent [1]. Using ControlNets and various other strategies, you can definitely build out a "nominally acceptable" walk cycle [2], but you still have to do some manual work.
The article clearly explains what the author/their nephew did. There is no ambiguity. One-shot never means 'so perfect there is literally nothing to be improved.' It means no back-and-forth iterations between the human in the loop and the AI.
- In traditional ML/vision, it meant learning to recognize a new category from a single training example.
- In LLM prompting, it has always, at least the last seven years, meant giving the model one example in the prompt (zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot).
- Vibe coders/AI-influencers use it to mean "one-shotting" a task on the first try with no back-and-forth.
One shot: One prompt; no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done. You are totally inspecting other parts of the game. Not the same meaning.
Just a small suggestion on the prompt. I usually also add something like "Bring in a critical Art Director, Animator, UX Expert, Staff Engineer. Don't release the game until they all agree it's AAA quality." I wonder if that would have helped with some of the issues/bugs others called out. I do this with Codex and it's been working really well and not using many tokens.
I have experienced this myself, although the novelty kind of wears off after a while. It is still fun to make small games to co-op on the TV.
Yes, hard to believe but most of these games can be almost one-shotted in my experience, with bugs but still playable. We are not talking about some properly made games but imagine for a second that there are some number of casual players out there that wont mind spending 30 minutes on a game for just a bit of fun and having these just materialised just in time is a lot more convenient then hunting for them on the app stores.
For anyone interested, I put all of of my work into an open source tool that uses your iPhone as a console which then can cast on your TV. Up-to 4 local players supported. It can even run proper games via WASM. It is Apple Silicon only.
I quickly dove into the game and then got lost as I couldn't exit and had to spam keyboard to see the controls. The menu refers to "Punch" but it wasn't obvious what key that is (and it wasn't "p"!).
I see that ENTER pauses, but may I suggest also making ESC and/or P pause. And then the pause screen showing or linking the keyboard controls and an exit path.
(Caveat: I'm not much of a gamer so maybe the current controls are standard? Anyway, I feel like it could be more inviting to casuals with something like the above.)
It's crazy how even the intro text to the Fable 5.2 Extra's game still reeks of AI. Like, wow, the models can make a game that almost makes sense, but still can't write text that sounds remotely like a human was involved!
Positive little kiddo gets more screentime!!!! Yaaaaaayyy!!!!!
Negatives: we either are annihilated by AI or enslaved by technocratic feodalism living in a worse conditions than 1800s mine workers. Uau
It’s a lot of fun to build games. I started building little pieces of one[0], then a builder for it, then a story, then a video recorder. And there’s a lot more iterations in the roadmap. It’s great as a creative outlet
It’s not one shotted anymore or course. But in the process, it’s also cool one-shotting new features or experimenting with variations of things very quickly
Eventually it becomes similar to any longer lasting project. Complexity starts creeping in, maybe technical debt, and managing everything to keep it consistent/coherent slowly starts taking most of the time. And I’m not maintaining it for real active users, which would also become some other type of project
I appreciate the token breakdown, but how much would this cost in money? Chatgpt estimated $400 to $600, but I don't have enough knowledge of token pricing to know if that's accurate at all.
Yeah, it would have been expensive via the API; the tokens were free when I tested it, but it would have been something like $300 USD for the Claude tokens at Fable 5.2's API prices.
> I must admit I never tested this with Opus 5.5, so I'm not sure whether this was possible before Fable 5.2 rolled around.
Since somewhere around Opus 4+ it's been really good enough to do these things, but 4.6 was the most pivotal version since a 1 million token context window can allow a model to fit so much "in its head" basically.
Some parts of this seemed cool, and others made me terribly sad. I am not sure how to express it beyond - I really think inserting hulk as a character was a mistake as you don't have any chance of having intellectual property rights to the character.
On the other hand, it's very much like you photocopied some comic books, cut them out, and did a little home theater thing with them (only with even less effort on your part).
Who cares about IP rights for a one off game you made for your nephew? Are you worried your nephew won't be able to publish it on Steam? I could imagine reasons this could make you sad, but disney's IP isn't one of them.
"find all documents, descriptions, walk through of game XYZ, generate a consistent and declarative document that another agent would read to recreate the game without using existing IP or protected data, do not reuse art but describe general details with the ability to extend and add specifics later. focus on functionality first, then mechanics and then later art and gameplay. generate a 10 page document that will follow MVP to Production quality gameplay"
Based on what I've seen, there's a good chance this would work today (though Anthropic recently added some restrictions around this sort of prompt) -- try it!
Is Pudding the dog (unlocked after beating the first boss) supposed to shrink anytime it jumps? I guess even Claude-turned-world-class-game-developer isn't immune to bugs. ;)
Honestly, setting all the oft-cited AI caveats aside, the end result is cute and perfectly serviceable as a game for the kids. I can't imagine how stoked they were about playing it.
i button-mashed my way through the first level and, what can i say, this is kind of dream i have when i spend my days button-mashing my way through side scrollers.
when i was between about 6 and 8 years old, i used to have this same dream about travelling through space, feeling the tranquillity of the celestial orchestra, and then whizzing down to feel the speed at which they were actually moving from a completely different frame of reference.
there was a sense of fullness and emptiness at the same time, raw power but also serenity. as though everything was coming into being and going out of being at the same time.
i always woke up feeling mystified but full of wonder. I carried that sense of wonder with me through many days and it always came back to me when i looked up at the stars and felt myself on the edge of this sphere, zipping through space at hundreds of miles an hour, but only seeing the tiny twinkling of stars as evidence of this enormous cosmic play.
but i suppose getting revenge on the goons by kicking and punching them, in order to save puddles, is basically the same
I tried the game and in some seconds noticed I can kick the enemies forever if I put them close to the left corner. I'm feeling now that I'm the AI exploiting bugs.
Ooooof the results here are rough. A very young child might find this charming, but I think it's kind of embarrassing. Like, the walk cycles alone are. Yeah...
To say nothing of ur word shaders, inconsistency in the characters, questionable gender stereotypes, etc.
This definitely tells me that AI definitely isn't there yet.
Could you even call it "working" for video games, based on the result, for the same kind of reasons you'd say it doesn't work for those other media?
(To qualify the rest of this, clearly it's job done in terms of the author wanting to make something memorable for their nephew - it's quality uncling, with the best of intents - but in the context of how what's been shared is going to contribute to the discourse around AI, in the shadow of a new model release, during an ongoing pre-IPO hype bubble...)
I'm seeing something which has has the surface-level features of a belt scrolling beat 'em up, but it's missing the result of all the different types of work that would normally happen through "make it actually interesting and enjoyable to play" design and iteration, e.g. you can walk through every stage unchallenged mashing punch, there's no evidence from the 2 stages I played of an interesting mix of enemy types with unique AI which can combine in ways which add challenge and variety to a belt scroller, you can stand and basic punch the first boss to death stepping aside only for its AOE attacks, the second boss infinitely spams a running move when it reaches low health and sometimes bumps into the edge of the screen behind it.
_Something_ was one-shotted, sure, but what we expect of a belt scrolling beat 'em up that someone cared enough to finish and release wasn't, not that people who will point at this in the near future as evidence of "OMG new Fable can one-shot games" will care.
I have been slopping out games for years now. The graphics don't matter unless the gameplay does. The gameplay doesn't matter if the game is too hard or too easy.
The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.
I worry about them never having the satisfaction of working hard on something and truly creating something that is their own. I definitely sound like a boomer (even though I'm a millennial) when I say this but I totally believe that limitations breed creativity. The AI here is just looking at stuff artists from the 90s laboured t create for Arcades and made its own slop version. But then again, one could argue that Mario Paint let you create slop too back in the 90s. Yet, at least with Mario Paint you had to actually hustle quite a bit arranging pixels or musical notes to have something. There was effort and difficulty with overcoming a learning curve and that effort paid off with the creation of something you could be proud of even if it wasn't professional. But here, on the other hand, even a badly generated prompt still gets you a lot.
There's like, no challenge. Reminds me of that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" where a bank robber dies after getting shot by the popo five-o and he is greeted by a man (angel like guy) who takes him to a cool mansion or house where he fulfills everyone one of the guy's wishes: women, money, gambling, etc. etc. And he gambles all day long and never loses but after a while he gets bored and then depressed that he always wins and there's no effort and no risk, and then tells the angel dude that he wonders why he was put in Heaven and that he thinks he doesn't belong there and wants to go to the "other place" only for the angel guy to tell him he is in fact in "the other place".
Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.
So in a sense, I don't worry about generations not necessarily having hardships like us, cause, look at us, we don't write in assembly code like other folks had to do. But on the other hand I do worry that AI is basically removing all manner of human touch and the satisfaction that comes with suffering to generate that human touch.
I suppose there will be suffering later when you want to polish things, but it will be a different, more frustrating kind of suffering. The kind where you don't know what the hell the LLM did and don't even know where to begin.
They are already growing up on slop. Look at brainrot and Roblox games, and YouTube shorts. This will fit right in with what they're used to. They won't even notice.
heck i remember before covid thinking that the generations growing up with social media were doomed. social media pales in comparison to what gen alpha is experiencing.
test scores are dropping while the curriculum becomes easier as well.
Who says it has to stay slop? Nobody is forced to stop at the single, first iteration of something. They can see the outcome, play the game, and then iterate faster than any professional game dev studio could in the past.
Its funny that the same CS saying "garbage in garbage out" seems even more true in the AI modern day.
The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children. For example developing specific skills like drawing, and general emotional skills like concentration and learning to be happy with their own skill level.
I respect it was a light post where your aim was probably to highlight something fun, but I couldn't see any note of what you thought about it.
What do you think about that? What do his parents think?
Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.
My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.
Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.
Jesus Christ, let the kids play with technology. No parent or relative needs to apologize for kids having fun with AI.
My kids will be fine tuning models.
What impact did being able to take a picture have on the mental development of children?
Recording a moment went from something you needed a court painter and two weeks to do, to something that everyone could do with the click of a button.
A century later kids are still happy to draw things.
That question will never be asked and we all know it. It's been demonstrated time and time again that the masses prefer entertainment to enlightenment and it is still being demonstrated today by the high rate of AI assisted cheating in high schools and colleges.
> You prompt a LLM and it just happens.
The bar for enlightenment is now further away as people are taught to expressively stop chasing it.
You and I know different children. Mine give me the opposite impression. The questions have no end. I think that's a good thing.
Having recently sat with a bunch of non-coders who decided to play with Claude Code—they learned more in an afternoon than they had in a lifetime, just because it was fun for it to get them to a thing they wanted. Versus months of drudgery and study as the price of entry (and an end result that would probably be super janky compared to the consumer products on offer to them).
I learned some about carpentry by reading, and by watching videos. I learned much more, much faster, by picking up bits of wood and tools and just doing. I did little dumb stuff that was trash but that was mine, and that was satisfying enough that I did more, and before I knew it I’d backed my way into picking up some scraps of proper technique.
And now so many more people with a vague itch can “just do” in relation to software systems.
The kid is doing game design with hand drawn sketches and game mechanic, as now he has his own team of software engineers and artists to make his vision a reality.
That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.
As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.
Well now why would anybody bother writing that code by hand? Perception will/has shifted very quickly to coding being something that is simply done by AI with human oversight.
If I was a kid now maybe I would be using AI to create games or something but I think I would probably just get bored quickly and never bother to learn coding.
Not learning to code might be ok; maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.
I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.
Opus 5.5: https://claude.ai/artifact/UuT7P936dU1XoPByYZ7xyD Fable 5.2: https://claude.ai/artifact/UszKFvuonWAT5psjMttAEg
There are some areas in which Fable is clearly better but subjectively the Opus 5.5 version feels more fun.
Both are one shots, Opus 5.5 was done a few weeks ago before they added "guardrails" around recreating games. Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)
anything that doesn't explicitly involve interaction with a human is RLable. frankly even those things are as well.
Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.
Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.
- punch and kick don't seem to have differences in effect, just animation - bosses don't have obvious gimmicks to beat them
But the main take-away for me is that this takes me back to computing in my youth, where you could dream up a project and bash it out in a few days. It wouldn't be polished, it wouldn't be perfect, but it would be yours. It would do what you wanted. Computing was ours, it didn't yet belong to big corporations controlling what we could do and how we could do it.
Projects like this give me hope that a new generation will experience that. Aiden won't ever forget this game, even if it's nothing special to you or me. Aiden won't ever forget that feeling of imagining a change, and having it happen. The price for it would've been somewhere around $300-$500, so not exactly broadly accessible - making AI efficient enough to run cheaply should be the main goal of humanity, but we're letting computing get locked up by a few rich sociopaths once again.
It appears to be eight frames, but after taking a closer look, I found that they don't seem to be consistent [1]. Using ControlNets and various other strategies, you can definitely build out a "nominally acceptable" walk cycle [2], but you still have to do some manual work.
[1] - https://aidens-revenge.pages.dev/assets/characters/aiden/ani...
[2] - https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation
It can either mean: 1 prompt, or it can mean a prompt with 1 example (in which case zero-shot means 1 prompt with 0 examples).
It also has different meanings in other contexts.
Yes, hard to believe but most of these games can be almost one-shotted in my experience, with bugs but still playable. We are not talking about some properly made games but imagine for a second that there are some number of casual players out there that wont mind spending 30 minutes on a game for just a bit of fun and having these just materialised just in time is a lot more convenient then hunting for them on the app stores.
For anyone interested, I put all of of my work into an open source tool that uses your iPhone as a console which then can cast on your TV. Up-to 4 local players supported. It can even run proper games via WASM. It is Apple Silicon only.
https://usenoodle.app/applet/
I see that ENTER pauses, but may I suggest also making ESC and/or P pause. And then the pause screen showing or linking the keyboard controls and an exit path.
(Caveat: I'm not much of a gamer so maybe the current controls are standard? Anyway, I feel like it could be more inviting to casuals with something like the above.)
It's neat (if unsurprising) that Fable 5.2 has this ability as well.
My loose testing shows other models aren't quite as good at this yet. Here's the prompt "Build a mobile-friendly three.js game where a mouse has to hide from a cat" by Opus 5.5 Extra - https://claude.ai/artifact/RRyEndXLSPQbcig3BgzgCZ - and by GPT-6 Extra High: https://squeak-and-seek-mouse-1027.simonw.chatgpt.site/ - the Claude one is a better game, even though they look very similar at first glance.
Update: took it about 40 minutes but here's Fable 5.2 Extra's attempt at the same prompt: https://claude.ai/artifact/Agsqbng2MnkTPAU67it87o
I wrote about Opus 5.5's sense of fun in more detail here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/
Though, now they will never stop asking for more and more. OOP may have opened Pandora's box. :)
It’s not one shotted anymore or course. But in the process, it’s also cool one-shotting new features or experimenting with variations of things very quickly
Eventually it becomes similar to any longer lasting project. Complexity starts creeping in, maybe technical debt, and managing everything to keep it consistent/coherent slowly starts taking most of the time. And I’m not maintaining it for real active users, which would also become some other type of project
0: https://id-le.com
> about 320M tokens read from cache, 19M written to cache, 1M output
320 * $0.2 + 19 * $10 + 1 * $40 = $294
Since somewhere around Opus 4+ it's been really good enough to do these things, but 4.6 was the most pivotal version since a 1 million token context window can allow a model to fit so much "in its head" basically.
On the other hand, it's very much like you photocopied some comic books, cut them out, and did a little home theater thing with them (only with even less effort on your part).
give it a link if you want
Honestly, setting all the oft-cited AI caveats aside, the end result is cute and perfectly serviceable as a game for the kids. I can't imagine how stoked they were about playing it.
when i was between about 6 and 8 years old, i used to have this same dream about travelling through space, feeling the tranquillity of the celestial orchestra, and then whizzing down to feel the speed at which they were actually moving from a completely different frame of reference.
there was a sense of fullness and emptiness at the same time, raw power but also serenity. as though everything was coming into being and going out of being at the same time.
i always woke up feeling mystified but full of wonder. I carried that sense of wonder with me through many days and it always came back to me when i looked up at the stars and felt myself on the edge of this sphere, zipping through space at hundreds of miles an hour, but only seeing the tiny twinkling of stars as evidence of this enormous cosmic play.
but i suppose getting revenge on the goons by kicking and punching them, in order to save puddles, is basically the same
To say nothing of ur word shaders, inconsistency in the characters, questionable gender stereotypes, etc.
This definitely tells me that AI definitely isn't there yet.
Top Jobs in 2027:
1. LLM glazer.
None of these work, except video games, something qualitatively different about that art form, IDK.
(To qualify the rest of this, clearly it's job done in terms of the author wanting to make something memorable for their nephew - it's quality uncling, with the best of intents - but in the context of how what's been shared is going to contribute to the discourse around AI, in the shadow of a new model release, during an ongoing pre-IPO hype bubble...)
I'm seeing something which has has the surface-level features of a belt scrolling beat 'em up, but it's missing the result of all the different types of work that would normally happen through "make it actually interesting and enjoyable to play" design and iteration, e.g. you can walk through every stage unchallenged mashing punch, there's no evidence from the 2 stages I played of an interesting mix of enemy types with unique AI which can combine in ways which add challenge and variety to a belt scroller, you can stand and basic punch the first boss to death stepping aside only for its AOE attacks, the second boss infinitely spams a running move when it reaches low health and sometimes bumps into the edge of the screen behind it.
_Something_ was one-shotted, sure, but what we expect of a belt scrolling beat 'em up that someone cared enough to finish and release wasn't, not that people who will point at this in the near future as evidence of "OMG new Fable can one-shot games" will care.
I have been slopping out games for years now. The graphics don't matter unless the gameplay does. The gameplay doesn't matter if the game is too hard or too easy.
The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.
There's like, no challenge. Reminds me of that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" where a bank robber dies after getting shot by the popo five-o and he is greeted by a man (angel like guy) who takes him to a cool mansion or house where he fulfills everyone one of the guy's wishes: women, money, gambling, etc. etc. And he gambles all day long and never loses but after a while he gets bored and then depressed that he always wins and there's no effort and no risk, and then tells the angel dude that he wonders why he was put in Heaven and that he thinks he doesn't belong there and wants to go to the "other place" only for the angel guy to tell him he is in fact in "the other place".
Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.
So in a sense, I don't worry about generations not necessarily having hardships like us, cause, look at us, we don't write in assembly code like other folks had to do. But on the other hand I do worry that AI is basically removing all manner of human touch and the satisfaction that comes with suffering to generate that human touch.
I suppose there will be suffering later when you want to polish things, but it will be a different, more frustrating kind of suffering. The kind where you don't know what the hell the LLM did and don't even know where to begin.
test scores are dropping while the curriculum becomes easier as well.
Its funny that the same CS saying "garbage in garbage out" seems even more true in the AI modern day.