6 ms·

The proof is (or isn't) in the game. If the game is something genuinely great then this all worked and is important. If the game is a bloviated, boring, and der

by jshaqaw 24d ago

The proof is (or isn't) in the game. If the game is something genuinely great then this all worked and is important. If the game is a bloviated, boring, and derivative mess then it didn't. Without any proof point on the output it is hard to say if the article has any value.

SwellJoe 23d ago
The player community seems to hold the opinion it's the latter. Steam reviews are pretty dire. Worse, there really aren't a lot of players. Certainly not enough to cover Yegge's absurd number of Claude Max accounts.
- scorpioxy 23d ago
  This whole article is very strange to me. Consider the following quotes "I have been launching new game features so fast that the players asked me to slow down." and "using magic tricks that are a year ahead of their time. It's a system that we can ride so hard that it scares the players and they tell us to slow down. " That tells me a lot about the operation. Maybe I'm out of touch but none of what was described seems like a sustainable operation or business. Fun experiment perhaps but that's it. In another section there's also boasting of how the problem was that more code was needed to be produced and faster. I don't know. Was that really the problem all along before LLMs and agents showed up?
  - SwellJoe 23d ago
    Am I so out of touch? No, it's the players who are wrong.
  - dwroberts 23d ago
    This also stands out as strange to me: > interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team Like, really, there are 5 human designers on this game? What are they doing, exactly? (Or is this just a fancy way of saying, they approve/reject design proposals of the stack of agents, and they have zero agency of their own?)
    - frabcus 15d ago
      Assuming he's doing this well, and he implies he is, they're doing the content - stories, characters, graphics, level design. He says Fable isn't good at that stuff - his human games designers presumably are.
chowells 23d ago
Eh. A quick scan of steam reviews shows a clear pattern - the game has been in decline ever since Yegge took over, well before LLMs were a product. It seems he started upsetting people with a capitalist-brain insistence on extracting value, and nothing has changed since. As long as he doesn't understand that his goals are contrary to building a game people enjoy, quality of the code is completely irrelevant. I don't think this one works as a test case on the value of programming like this, as the intended audience just isn't interested.
- andrekandre 23d ago
  > his goals are contrary to building a game people enjoy, quality of the code is completely irrelevant i think this happens a lot inside and outside of games when people get obsessed with the tech or process behind it; they completely miss the goal of the job

by jshaqaw 24d ago

SwellJoe 23d ago

The player community seems to hold the opinion it's the latter. Steam reviews are pretty dire. Worse, there really aren't a lot of players. Certainly not enough to cover Yegge's absurd number of Claude Max accounts.

scorpioxy 23d ago
This whole article is very strange to me. Consider the following quotes "I have been launching new game features so fast that the players asked me to slow down." and "using magic tricks that are a year ahead of their time. It's a system that we can ride so hard that it scares the players and they tell us to slow down. " That tells me a lot about the operation. Maybe I'm out of touch but none of what was described seems like a sustainable operation or business. Fun experiment perhaps but that's it. In another section there's also boasting of how the problem was that more code was needed to be produced and faster. I don't know. Was that really the problem all along before LLMs and agents showed up?
- SwellJoe 23d ago
  Am I so out of touch? No, it's the players who are wrong.
- dwroberts 23d ago
  This also stands out as strange to me: > interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team Like, really, there are 5 human designers on this game? What are they doing, exactly? (Or is this just a fancy way of saying, they approve/reject design proposals of the stack of agents, and they have zero agency of their own?)
  - frabcus 15d ago
    Assuming he's doing this well, and he implies he is, they're doing the content - stories, characters, graphics, level design. He says Fable isn't good at that stuff - his human games designers presumably are.

chowells 23d ago

Eh. A quick scan of steam reviews shows a clear pattern - the game has been in decline ever since Yegge took over, well before LLMs were a product. It seems he started upsetting people with a capitalist-brain insistence on extracting value, and nothing has changed since. As long as he doesn't understand that his goals are contrary to building a game people enjoy, quality of the code is completely irrelevant. I don't think this one works as a test case on the value of programming like this, as the intended audience just isn't interested.

andrekandre 23d ago
> his goals are contrary to building a game people enjoy, quality of the code is completely irrelevant i think this happens a lot inside and outside of games when people get obsessed with the tech or process behind it; they completely miss the goal of the job