EDIT: This blog kinda sucks, not gonna lie. I think we need a little break today from work to recharge our brain.

Let me be clear, I've BARELY used AI for SHIT on my project. My embarrassing YouTube streams where I struggle for hours to fix simple shit are testament to this fact XD, but recently I have been indulging a SMIDGE here and there since 90% of the time I have no idea WTF i’m doing and I have zero resources or support network or schooling to draw on. For example, it helped me get some code that helps me parse the number out of two parentheses like "(8)" = 8. And honestly that's about it. I don’t see any value in retting overly commented and mish mashed code that isn’t designed specifically made for my workflow and needs.

I use it as an advanced learning utility to kinda learn new types of code, then I go through the motions. I have a hard enough time parsing through code I wrote myself, I'll be damned if i'm going to work on some infernal machine’s bugs.

Seeing as how we haven't seen any teams out there putting out fantastic games made with AI, maybe all this time everyone else has been floundering waiting on this tech, we've been cruising by in our little bubble of self learned garbage code XD

WHY THE HELL AREN’T WE JUST IMPROVING THE BASE CODING ENVIRONMENT!? The logic and sertups we use are so archaic and buggy in the most stupifying ways imaginable that it boggles the mind. Don’t get me fucking started on ENUMS!

So one of the ABSOLUTE first issues I ever ran across trying to make code was trying to fire something just one time, and have it stay off until it's enabled again. Imagine you're in a store in a video game, and you select a bag, it might play a little animation, so you need some bit of logic that checks every frame when the bag is selected, then you need more logic to say "Play this animation, but only once!" Then you gotta enable the bag to be able to do it's thing again, but only after X seconds have passed.

This deceptively simple arrangement of logic can create ALL KINDS of crazy bugs with so many of these assets in the same area, and likely doors and portals to other areas, since you will likely be tagging the player not to be able to attack and having to interact with new UI elements for stores. It's crazy how complex these seemingly simple arrangements of functionality becomes from a back end perspective.

ANYWAY! I'm getting off topic.

So after all this time of just doing it the dumb way, I decided, "You know, I'm sure there's gotta be a much better way of doing this that I'm not aware of, and I asked some AI to give me the following code:

This is the EXACT same crummy logic that I made years and years and years ago when I had no idea wtf I was doing. And this is actually some of the most basic logic that you would expect an AI system to improve upon to make .

Even better news! I asked it to simplify the system to not require the bool check and be automatic and it added in events and shit which just gets stupid complicated!

This is EXACTLY the sort of crap I've seen in the gaming industry where designers and coders just LOVE to make things more complex for the sake of making things easier. It's so fucking dumb, and I'm so happy right now that the AI code generators are just as incompetent at overengineering this stuff with no creative instincts for simplicity or inventive tricks to make it easier.

Oh here's a new float I made the other week that i've been in love with as of late, I did ask AI how to make it so it could automatically return a value without having to add ".value" to the end though:

And while typing up this blog post I figured screw it, let’s FINALLY make that logic we wanted to do so long ago! So here is our new “Fire Once” bool check class, that simply checks if the amount of time since the last time it checked is greater than one frame (if you weren’t just sitting in the fire condition the whole time)

Now alls I need to do to make sure something only plays its selection animation/ sound is this

if (playPurchaseableSoundAnimationOnce) FireSelectionOnce();

FeelsFuckin’GoodMan.jpg

It’s so weird, I always thought I was too old to learn how to code, and I put it off for so long. And now everyone else is creating these massively complex AI algorithms to produce these terribly massive bits of code that don’t make coding easier, it makes it HARDER! Because it was designed by a bunch of other neckbeards who like to overdesign and create problems that don’t friggin’ exist!

Am I crazy for thinking everyone jumped the shark pushing AI super hard trying to get it to improve key bits of logic that are inherently SHIT? Like if our coding languages were more ergonomic and natural I feel as though we would have a WAY easier time chasing the singularity.

I may actually be fucking retarded here. Maybe there is something I’m not grasping about all this insanely overly complex bullshit everyone else seems to fall over themselves to figure out. But I’ve just been over here doing shit my own way outside their bubble and I kinda feel like SeaCrit is kicking ass! We are like the absolute inversion of what anyone would think would be a modern gamedev. We’re old as shit, we don’t believe in the ideology of the day that all the great creatives bow to, we’re self taught, didn’t learn code till like 5 years ago. I need to stop because I’m starting to convince myself that we’re totally fucked XD!

I try not to think about how fucking good I’d be at this shit if I’d started at a younger age, spent most my life parking cars and bussing tables and washing dishes in this stupifying world. But who knows, maybe i’d have gotten a desk job somewhere and been incorporated into the way of coding that everyone else does and we would have never gone down this stupidly simple road of creating our logic this way.

I dunno… I believe there is a non zero sum chance that we are actually architecting some pretty cool logical systems and adapting the coding pipeline in unique ways in these parts, which feels really weird to say since 3 years ago we were just some dip shit that had no idea wtf they were doing.

We’re still some dip shit that has no idea wtf they’re doing XD