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today, Minecraft stopped being the favorite game in our house... and I got kicked off both my workstations
so I am relegated to prompting the Virtual Matter world through my phone during live playtesting of our onboarding experience, that now has incredible tropical water we cooked last night with Opus 5.5
what a time to be alive
Not Slop
The funnest part about making games with AI is the quick iteration after you've landed on a vision and created your own tailor made engine.
After my post went semi-viral this weekend I created 50 new map elements, a custom map creator, a marble designer studio, and a whole extra game mode ...all from the couch on my phone while watching the Pats
Play free and in browser now! Meticulai.com
#threejs #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #anthropicAI @threejs
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
All creative work is derivative.
Daniel Tabár retweeted
Game menus were perfected in the late 90s and early 2000s. I have no idea why studios moved away from that.
Age of Empires, Heroes of Might and Magic, Command & Conquer, StarCraft, Diablo, and Warcraft were the reasons why you couldn't wait to turn on your PC back in the day, and once that menu loaded you were locked in!
Daniel Tabár retweeted
"Do not see AI as the bus driver, see it as a multiple performers in an orchestra where you are the maestro."
(was from LeCun or Carmack... i forgot)
Well, as you've probably noticed, there's a controversial discussion going on, and since controversy isn't something I shy away from, I'd like to chip in.
Specifically I would like to show example of using Ai acceleration to achieve YOUR vision while maintain absolute control over the result, hence this thread.
So here's a tool I've made, which I'll talk about a bit more in the comments.
#gamedev #indiedev
Daniel Tabár retweeted
my ai-generated games have reached millions of players globally :D
and helped me survive the downfall of the industry over the last 3 years
after being a hardcore programmer for the last 12 years,
i have stopped writing any code since the last 2 years - even removed all the IDEs
my coding language now is: english (or hindi)
>the publishers i work with love my games
>the players love the games
>i spent less time developing, more time researching and ideating
win-win for everyone?
Replying to @MoralzzX
Developers who are getting value from AI should speak up. There's safety in numbers. MOST developers are doing it and loving it - and if they're not talking about it it's mostly out of fear for haters attacking them, their product, and their company.
Daniel Tabár retweeted
This is amazing!
Well, as you've probably noticed, there's a controversial discussion going on, and since controversy isn't something I shy away from, I'd like to chip in.
Specifically I would like to show example of using Ai acceleration to achieve YOUR vision while maintain absolute control over the result, hence this thread.
So here's a tool I've made, which I'll talk about a bit more in the comments.
#gamedev #indiedev
having a lot of fun with this new renderer and the embodied agent in the scene that just makes anything happen
Cel-shaded microvoxels in a couple of prompts. Not polygons.
Just ask the built-in agent. Our entirely new renderer is rolling out now in Virtual Matter.
What look would you try?
virtualmatter.dev
Daniel Tabár retweeted
beautiful explanation. this is 100% happening. xitter.cf/sotak/status/211179423…
Daniel Tabár retweeted
Tim Sweeney built the original Unreal Engine, and you’re lecturing him about “not making things himself.” 😂
This is what I mean when I say the anti-AI crowd are bullies and talks nonsense. Disagreeing with his tools doesn’t erase what he created.
Daniel Tabár retweeted
This is 100% correct and on point.
2026 is the year most programmers get on board in a serious manor. Those who wait of hand wave it all away will likely regret that in the future.
Your time is valuable and limited. Once you get up and running on ai coding a pretty magical thing happens. You have more time for more important matters. Harder coding tasks. Design tasks. Marketing tasks. Whatever it is.
I know most indies think ai anything is kryptonite. That's ok. It really is a war of attrition, and it's also ok if people never adopt it. But I think that latter point will put you are a disadvantage competitively just from a time standpoint and what you can do with it.
Do not fear it. Do not handwave it away. Embrace it on any level you feel comfortable. At some point the lightbulb will go off and you realize how much more you can get done or just enjoy some more free time.
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
Daniel Tabár retweeted
A golden age is coming for gaming, and not just for gaming. All software can and will be created rapidly faster and better than was possible before.
Computing will see a renaissance. Old hardware will become completely usable again. The seemingly impossible becomes possible.
the browser games worth playing are already here
endurance-racing.vercel.app/
Now with the trailer 😁. Everything you see in this video is the actual gameplay. Nothing is faked pre rendered video ⚡
#threejs #screenshotsaturday
Daniel Tabár retweeted
Once again, the smartest people in the room have rational takes on AI. Game developers who are against what @TimSweeneyEpic is doing, take note:
Linux maintainers have declared that LLM usage is no longer required to be declared.
Linus Torvalds calls a ban on AI 'utterly stupid'.
Linus adds, "Quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools."
Linux Maintainers Can Now Submit AI-Generated Code Without Declaring It ift.tt/RfvxBJc
hear hear
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
Sneak peek for you all: MASSIVE update rolling out now with entirely new renderer written from scratch, 4x more performant on some platforms - esp. Macs in the browser.
Link in the thread to the live starter experience.
No install - no signup - no friction
hop in the water... it is lovely
start.virtualmatter.dev

























