Someone just cloned my game with AI. No beef, from his profile it looks like he is just messing around and having fun with what the model can spit out and probably will not finish anything. I too sometimes use some form of ai to brainstorm and maybe test some idea before i put my time to it. Started thinking though. Posting dev progress used to feel safer because nobody was realistically catching up in a couple of days. Now any decent idea gets cloned almost immediately and the feed is so stuffed with AI slop that original stuff has a harder time even showing up. And yeah it kinda sucks. Used to feel like there was more art in making games. Even a tiny prototype gave you actual pride because you dragged it into existence yourself and you understood what you built. Now even when something small works that pride feels thinner. Views used to be bigger too a lot of the time because just having a thing like that exist was rarer. Copying with AI still will not save you if you do not know what you are doing though. You see a spider game and want to remake it but you do not know procedural animation or IK so you keep asking the bot to fix the legs and it goes nowhere. Or you want that miniature tilt shift look and you keep poking model scale and camera distance instead of just putting blur and depth of field on it. Without the actual vocab you slam into a wall pretty fast. So I will drop a few favorite pre AI tricks in the replies. Some math, graphics or another tricks that hyped me when i was younger. I hope that i was able to put my feelings through words and i just want people to feel what I felt as a kid when i used to staying up late dreaming of making something, learning everything from scratch, and feeling the genuine magic of indie games before everything started feeling like something idk dead and artificial.