This post is actually about not making the same arcade games and making a 3D Dune Minecraft instead.

I think all good apps should strive to achieve a flow-state, and Rosebud is no exception; we aspire to achieve the same. The AI part is to solve a problem rather be a feature. The kind of users we want to serve, and what they want, is to make games. The chat interface is a way to create a flexible interface to do that, not force AI into the solution. "AI build me ___" is only addressing simple asset generation or addition of game features, which is a very limited use of AI to solve the bigger problem we are focused on, which is to decrease the barriers to entry to making games.

There is also a useful distinction between generative AI features of gameplay versus AI in aiding the creator (game dev) to make games. We do both, but they are driven by different user needs. For instance, for the former, there are AI powered characters which gives players a sense of spontaneity in the gameplay.

Thanks for stopping by! That was a fun video to be a part of, Grant’s math videos in general are so well done. I think this video was from 2017. Funny thing is that even back in 2014/2015, which is when I officially changed my PhD from pure math to AI, I had the fear that it was a little late (was originally from Toronto where neural nets were worked on my Hinton and his students —-Ilya, James…etc….so I felt like I had my chance to join much earlier and missed it). Only after 2012 did we start to see super human performance of AI in some tasks (namely, at first, classification). It was the Lee Sedol match with AlphaGo that convinced me that the field became a lot more interesting after I got to Berkeley (and also the generative stuff coming out early days from Alyosha’s lab and Deep RL stuff from Pieter’s).

But look at the world now! It’s never too late, jump in and build if you are excited now!

Thanks for summarizing these and spending a few hours trying out Rosebud!! Some detailed responses below:

"I found getting assets into the game a bit tricky. Sometimes it would try updating the code to reference assets that we hadn't created yet. After that I couldn't get it to generate assets for me."

This is an known issue we are trying to solve. But to give more color on why it's been tricky, since we are relying on a chat interface, our agent has properly determine is your ask includes an ask for asset generation, and if so, it has to determine whether an asset exists, and if it does not, whether to generate an asset, after which it needs to determine where to insert it and whether to modify other parts of the code when inserting. For instance, in the character templates, the AI can successfully modify an asset and character's description in one prompt, but sometimes it doesn't correctly interpret the instruction and pulls existing assets from the Phaser JS library. In short, it's quite finicky to get agents in prod to behave reliably 100% of the time. But we are working on it! Have many ideas of how to improve and are experimenting.

"I thought this would be a useful tool for prototyping, but as a programmer I would probably never use this to release a finished product. Maybe it would be better to target this kind of tool for prototyping instead of being able to make a full game that people will want to pay money for." & "I tried making a simple turn-based (american) football game. It's pretty good for getting some boilerplate set up, but sometimes it felt like it would have been easier to modify the code myself at times than try to explain what I wanted modified to the AI."

For users who already know how to develop, we've definitely heard similar validation that this is better for prototyping currently than for final games. I think this stems from the fact that 1) currently we don't have multi-file support and more advanced features like multiplayer yet, which makes it hard to compare with what's achievable by a more advanced game dev. And 2) the chat based approach is not always reliable, so it's frustrating sometimes to get what you want versus coding it up yourself. This is why we are also targeting less technical users, because they don't have many options available to them that can be as flexible as Rosebud. We have been delighted to see what these users create because some of the stuff gets very creative and addictive, even with our current limitations.

"It seems like whenever I did try to modify the code by hand, my changes would get wiped out by the next iteration generated by the AI. Maybe it was referencing the old code?"

This is a bug. If you don't mind sharing in the feedback channel specific cases when it does this, that would be super helpful. We've been fixing aspects of this bug over the last few week.

"Sometimes the AI would get stuck on something (e.g. generating an asset), or it would make a mistake. In that case I couldn't figure out a way to "go back" to a previous iteration of the game."

We have a history feature we are shipping in stages. Right now you can only regenerate, but we want to let users go back to different states of their game. Many users have wanted this feature and we just have to make some choices about what gets saved in the history (all llm changes or also manual, ... etc).

"At one point I tried to get the AI to make a change, which it did, but the code it generated had a large portion of the original code based removed and replaced with something like `// The rest of your code here.` which obviously broke the game."

This stems from a context length issue and is definitely annoying. We also have plans to implement diffs and other solutions that should let users run into this issue less.

Do you use blender and what would you want AI to help in that workflow?

Thanks for trying it! One of the more impressive things we have seen so far is how some beta testers with no coding background were able to get deep into debugging by having our AI explain what the issues are and how to fix them. However, as you pointed out, it does not reliably provide working code all the time for the user to apply directly. This is something we are aware of and are trying to make the generated code better and more reliably provide working solutions with no formatting errors. It is basically quite a hard (and thus fun technical) problem we are solving.

These are great questions!!

Our aim is to make development on Rosebud as easy as possible, which means we are handling various external integrations that are being used by the platform. With that said, some devs may want the flexibility to change what models are used, including switching out internal models we developed with various external ones. If that is true, we’d want to support devs providing their own keys, but only for added flexibility, not as a default. Put it simply, if you don't want to be forced to provide your own keys, we got you covered.

Right now we will try our best not to charge developers for developing on Rosebud. So we will try to optimize on our backend different ways to control costs. With that said, if we have to create some premium tier because the AI inference gets too high to support, we will likely provide options to reduce inference costs in various ways (such as running smaller models for different interactive generative features of a game).

We’d want to provide as much support as possible so that our devs are successful. So if something is not working, let us know! Our devs succeeding is a necessary pre-requisite for our platform succeeding.

There's no confusion at all about whether we are trying to a UGC platform to make games (i.e AI Roblox). We are definitely not an asset store. Even though you can create assets in Rosebud, it's a feature of the entire workflow, which is focused on converting user descriptions to games.

I think some confusion may be arising from just going to rosebud.ai and seeing the demo video. Instead go to https://play.rosebud.ai/home to make games and play the games other people already made to test it out! Love to hear your comments about the development experience there!

You are right that there is a developer tool angle here, but I think what's interesting to experiment with respect to the business model is whether developers want to be charged first by using the tool (like unity) versus only when they are successful (like unreal). Roblox is able to collect rent because they help the developers build an audience. What we have to show is that our platform can also help developers build an audience to justify collecting rent.

Yeah I’m hearing that but it seems very much like you are selling art, an LLM character service, and some dev/packaging. I don’t think you’re going to reap much benefits from aggregating all these together. Feels like a shovelware machine. One of your homepage trending projects also used Star Trek IP.

Like your value prop is description to game. Ok. But doesn’t that mean that if the description to game is too complicated that you’re going to be failing your value prop? Which is very likely to happen because you’re trying to instantiate something of great complexity? It really really feels to me like you’re selling some tooling.

The art looks much better than the games. Selling devs art tooling might be more sensible even if the total imaginable market is much smaller.

We are happy our custom image models are liked by our users and I think helping game devs make good game assets/art is a valuable problem to solve, but not one we are focused on. The first 3-4 years of Rosebud we focused on image generation based app, so I have thought a lot about the opportunity of focusing on a image/asset gen as the main feature of the product. I would argue that it generally has a thinner moat with more capped upside and can more easily be toppled by foundational model companies like OpenAI (with the exception of Midjourney, which is amazing because they have the moat of a community that guides their stronger aesthetics). Furthermore there are a number of other services that focus just on asset gen, and we allow uploads (from assets generated elsewhere) in addition to our own custom models for asset generation for that reason.

The opportunity I am excited most about, and what Rosebud is focused on, is to increase the number of creators of games by many orders of magnitude. That is why we are leaning into an llm native approach for game dev. I also know that the current best models for code gen will be improved dramatically in the next few years and that will have have an even greater impact on the consumer behaviour of who gets to make games and who gets to build software in general. Building a platform around game creation, not just asset gen, will be able to absorb this impending tidal wave of change that I don’t think even incumbent developer tools like Unity or Unreal can address as fast as a startup such as ourselves. The entire game creation work flow is going to get much more intuitive, faster and ultimately be able to generate the quality of games to compete with AAA. Now it is not there, but soon it will be. The game genres we support may look more opinionated and constrained now (ai characters, RPGs, some 3D) but that’s the first step in being able to let our agent based code gen platform perform well in prod. We are making choices that allow us to absorb llm advances later and that generalize well once those improvements happen.

Also, on the IP point, once we let people monetize on the platform, we will be much more strict about what gets to be monetized (i.e only things where it’s ok from an IP point of view).

But Unreal is not tooling. It’s a game engine. It has physics and rendering and audio and networking. Unreal is not a competitor.

You cannot possibly expect an LLM to be spitting out a AAA competitive engine on top of a great game built with it. If you really want to achieve that level of sophistication then you should probably be building on top of unreal tbh. It’s a huuuuge undertaking. And the AI driven asset store side of things feels like it’s very separate to me

We're not looking at spitting out a AAA game engine. Our goal is more to lower the barrier to entry, for both assets and code. So, yes that means that to start with, the games created may not be AAA quality (ok that's a bit of an understatement). But the same has been said about Roblox. With time, the games will improve. And enabling everyone to create games will surely unleash more creativity. And who can say what could be achieved in a few years?

The same has been said about Roblox but you’re also not producing Roblox quality games. And Roblox loses a billion dollars a year.

I mean I’m not trying to be a dick and I get that you’re just starting here but I don’t get the sense that the team understands what’s required to ship a game.

You should not show the content on “trending”. You should show something you have made with your tools that you are happy to call a fun game that is shippable and buildable with your tools as promised.

For example, 1D Pac-Man as featured here. Can you build a clone of that game?

You should definitely try our platform and build that 1D PacMan. I've seen users creating clones of snake, asteroids or space invaders. So PacMan should be achievable.

if that’s true then it should be on the front page

I really think YOU should be making a clone and showing off how easy it was if it’s true

If your goal is to increase game creators by order of magnitudes, and the method involves putting people in a position to make games alone, what exactly is going to keep the game market from being totally destroyed by an endless stream of very-low-value games?

See my comment above for another thread and the subsequent comments: "My take is that whenever we can break down barriers to allow more creators to enter, it's ultimately better for the entire industry. As a platform we can work on curating and filtering for high quality game content from our users, but that's a problem of curation rather than artificially limiting creation for fear of people making low quality content. Most content quality like many things are power law distributed anyways."

We have a bunch of trending projects that you can already clone from (see https://play.rosebud.ai/home "trending"), and this was in closed beta, so once we open the app to more users there will be a lot of projects to give new creators projects to start from immediately.

You can already kind of export the code because we show most of the game code. However what we're aiming to do is to make it easier to build in platform without worrying about deployment. Also we are aiming to bring an audience to play your games immediately via the Rosebud platform so you don't have to share elsewhere.

I think a lot of indie developers have $0-50 (total; the same as RPGMaker license cost) willingness to pay to start working on a game, but would LOVE help monetizing that game. There's a huge dance on itch.io where a lot of niche games are alpha-quality passion-projects, so they start off for free (demo), and then the creators eventually start asking for money to keep working on the game, typically using Patreon.

Even though there's other creator platforms that charge less % than Patreon, like ko-fi etc., and itch.io has built-in payments, patreon still seems to be the prime destination. I think it's because a lot of the patrons are already on patreon so creators hope it's easy for them to add new creators to their list? Also because game progress can take a while, and something like patreon lets them give devlog updates and preview images and run audience polls to keep patrons engaged in the process.

Anyway, there's a oauth integration between patreon and itch.io so that creators can only distribute to patrons, as an alternative for people paying for a point-in-time game version. I think that is a newer feature.

I'm not sure if itch.io exposes functionality such that you can publish these rosebud games there, but they do already allow you to have hosted in-browser games like with renPY and Twine.

Understood your strategy may be to become the destination for these things, but you may be able to get early distribution faster by making it easy to push these games to existing platforms that have network effects around discoverability already. Though I suppose someone could just create an itch.io page with a link to your hosted game??

My take is that whenever we can break down barriers to allow more creators to enter, it's ultimately better for the entire industry. As a platform we can work on curating and filtering for high quality game content from our users, but that's a problem of curation rather than artificially limiting creation for fear of people making low quality content. Most content quality like many things are power law distributed anyways.

Really depends by what lens you use for "better" (let alone for the entire industry), IMO. I think there is truth in that statement, but only in a historical context when breaking into the industry required a publisher and creating a game required writing your own engine; that truth dwindles as the markets approach (real) saturation. (And there's an argument to be made that those two filters were actually great for filtering people who can create memorable games)

People take pride in craftmanship. If AI can match that, that isn't better for them. More choices (competition) means more money diverted in marketing and ads. That isn't better for game studios and all their non-marketing branches.

All this to say, the more competition there is on the market, the winners end up being marketplaces, not game studios. Music is a commodity at this point. PC/Console video games are far behind that, but walking the same path. Mobile games are not far behind music. IIRC about 80-90% of mobile games development budget is for marketing and ads. There are around 10x mobile games released every year, compared to Steam.

I'm biased because I'm working on my own (PC) game, and I am very grateful to be working on this before the tidal wave hits. It will probably be awhile before AI can match hand-crafted/polished digital experiences.

Just sharing my thoughts as a game developer who grew up in the 90s. This isn't personal, humans will almost always take the path of least resistance. If AI matches expert level output, the outcome is inevitable.

My optimism is mostly for increasing the number of creators of games --> best games get even better, at the cost of introducing more games, some of which may not be good. Marketplaces being the winners is a symptom of the players being the ultimate beneficiary of increased competition (and thus a surplus of both good and bad games).

I actually don't see this as an AI to replace, but AI to enable more people to create games. So ultimately, it still expresses the desire of the creator, who is human.

It's there any precedent of this happening before? If I had to bet I would bet on the opposite, that is that the general population would get fatigue from so many games and would stick to old brands/companies and just ignore games from unpopular sources, the small games that would succeed are those that _cannot_ yet be generated by AI, that is that have mechanics hard to infer from existing games, eventually AI would learn to make those games too but by then the existing game company would have some reputation of its own.