I'm a long-time fan of incremental games, and I frequently brainstorm ideas for how I might design a fun and engaging incremental game. I believe I have a pretty good understanding of what makes incremental games fun/unfun, and I'm confident that I could conceptualize of a game that I would quite enjoy playing.
Unfortunately, I hitherto have not acquired the technical know-how to actually create such a game, despite having started (and ultimately always abandoned) free online courses for game design several times.
Recently, I have been using GPT4 to assist me in writing code that was previously quite a bit beyond my capabilities. Some part of me is hoping that LLMs of the near future will be proficient enough at coding that a lazy "ideas guy" like me will be able to use them to easily develop a decent incremental game.
I currently work a part-time job and have quite a bit of free time. I waste most of my free time watching Youtube videos and playing games. If I developed better discipline and spent my time more productively, I believe I could probably become quite proficient in programming relatively quickly. I have been expressing this same sentiment for the better part of a decade.
Resolves YES if, before the EOY 2025, I have developed (without paying for human assistance) an incremental game which receives generally favourable feedback from a relevant community. For example, at the time of writing, my resolution criterion would be to link the game to reddit.com/r/incremental_games and see if a majority of the comments (representing at least 10 distinct players) regard the game as a decent incremental game (i.e. generally enjoyable to play and not simply a "proof of concept").
Resolves NO otherwise.
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Generated a few proof of concepts, but ultimately never developed anything which would constitute a full gaming experience (even a short one). Here are my takeaways:
Part of the difficulty in designing a good incremental is in finding good cost scaling functions. I imagine there are good ways to go about this by using ROI calculations, but in the early design phases (when things are constantly changing), it was a massive drag.
I feel pretty confident that LLMs are now both good enough generally and specifically stylistically well-suited to generate a good incremental/idle game, but one of the biggest hurdles would be in avoiding the "LLM-generated UI" look. I'm not anti-LLM, by any means, and they generate perfectly passable UIs, but nevertheless the sight of them tends to repulse me for some reason.
It's hard not to be derivative. A lot of the mechanics I wanted to implement were just mechanics I really liked in other games, and it was hard to innovate on them.
Working a part time job while claiming to be an “ideas guy” plus not learning programming despite a confidence in ability to do so easily implies severe misunderstanding of one’s self, the topic, and the abilities of others. This reads like an attempt to shelter your ego by hypothetically having skills and good ideas while never testing this hypothesis against the skill, ideas and hard work of others which engenders a high risk of failure.
While getting 10 positive comments on a Reddit post is an absurdly low bar which can be cleared with the right choice of title regardless of content quality, I think the biggest barrier to someone with the self portrait you provide will be confronting the risk of discovering programming takes real work and most ideas are mediocre.
It will be a great boon to you to prove me extremely wrong and take this as motivation.
@LiamZ That's a fair response; it wasn't my intention to be dismissive of professional programmers.
Ironically enough, I haven't had much time to dedicate toward this, as I've since started working full-time at my job, part of which involves another programming project that I'm quite proud of and which was the subject of a market that has already resolved YES. I acknowledge that it would be hard work to be a professional programmer, but I'm still proud of what I managed to achieve in a short period of time as a mere hobbyist.