In this podcast we talk about our new short game, “Toilet Hero” (pic above). We also talk in depth about AI in Game Development.
Nobody will treat you like a serious game developer until you finish and upload a game!
And your game must be widely available to be bought or played on steam.com or talked about during development on itch.io –
Our tip there is make a small game. We quickly realised that Augment Me will take 2 man years to make. It’s why we’re currently toying with smaller games like, “Toilet Hero”..
In the meantime, there are Youtube tutorials. Thankfully lots of them.
And talk. Lots of that, too. Listen to us…
Working with Clients
There are good experiences and bad experiences when working with clients (aka “bosses”). You need to go into every job with an exit plan. This is as much the case for Civil Engineering as it is in Game Development.
- What if this doesn’t pan out?
- What if I’m not having a good time?
- Is my client the reason why I’m staring at my ceiling instead of sleeping?
What the client wants
- Does your client (or boss) know what they want?
- Do they understand the scope of what they’re asking for?
Often they don’t know what they want. Until they see it. And that’s understandable. It’s why you got hired.
Education Games
My Son, Charlie, is 4. His school gave him online access to a bunch of pretty good educational games. Phonetics, reading games and basic maths. The games are really well made and he spends a solid 10-20 minutes on there. The games have good graphics, simple characters are properly voiced with real actors (some voices that could be done with Eleven Labs). Each game consists of a suite of jobs that will take over traditional methods.
“Evil AI” & AI Character voices
“Evil AI” (as Phil calls it) will save Game developers thousands. It is already possible for sole developers to develop games that would normally take a team of about 5 people.
There are amazing voices. All you do is type what they say. You can even adjust things like tone, enthusiasm, character ‘s age:
While such things are great (and nearly free) – there are limitations. For example, there are few children’s voices, and most adults speak with American (or british) accents.
What you can also do is feed the AI a voice and it will emulate the person. So, at the risk of not summoning up a demon, I’ve been feeding my Son’s voice to Play.ai and hopefully he weill be able to narrate and education game I’m building for Medical Health and Sciences (ECU).
Phil has found a voice that’s meant to be Margot Robbie. “And I’ve got to say, it sounds quite a lot like Margot Robbie.”
What about Open.ai Vs Scarlett Johanssen? They asked for her permission to use her voice likeness and she refused. Turns out the voice they used sounded exactly like her anyway.
Bring in the lawyers.
Phil says, “AI is constantly shitting on people’s intellectual property or likeness rights. Do people even have the right to their own voices or appearance?”
AI is bad, m’kayyyy?
There’s this whole negative thing about negative AI. Edwin teaches classes in the design school at ECU and lots of kids think it’s going to take their jobs. They rarely use it. Interestingly enough, students from other schools, (e.g. the ones doing an elective from say, marketing) are open to it. So are the kids who aren’t particularly good at “art”.
But it’s part of what we’ve got now. Some students are going to start coding next semester and for complex things (e.g. the float and fly of a butterfly) they will need it.
There’s no sense of achievement unless you borrow a bit of code from here, borrow some from there.
Is AI the end of gaming?
As Anato33 says in this Reddit post about Thomas Brush and other Game developer Gurus . . .
“He mostly talks about the marketing and selling of games, which I think is extremely important. Game devs often think that just making something good is enough, but if you think that’s the case in the real world, you’re in for a rude awakening.”
“Is AI Going to Destroy Game development?”
(Thomas Brush)
AI in Your Face
AI is everywhere. If you use Google, then Google smashes AI right in your face. You get the AI answer to your search before the links.
Phil’s brother hates AI. He’s a prfoessional designer. He has made a very interesting point. Google as a search engine has started to be relatively not as good as it was. Google is now garbage as search. Is Google a poorer search engine in 2025 than it used to be?
AI & SEO Industry
Google straps as AI in the beginning. When you go to Google now, if you start with a question, (it seems to know the difference) Google’s AI response is usually fine. if you do a search, it will show you a bunch of sites – and that’s my day job. SEO. The idea is to get client’s websites higher in search.
Ed uses AI in many ways with his SEO work:
I use one particular kind of SEO software which tells me how to adjust my content so it can be found (e.g Rankmath Pro)
I use various AI tools to write copy for websites. The new reasoning models are particualrly fantastic writers because they are sort of writing with two brain hemisphere’s rather than just outputting an “Encyclopedic” article.
If Ed doesn’t use AI in the highly competitive SEO orld, he’s out of a job (or loses the client).
Working with AI & Authors
Any writer will take three hours to write an article. You’re never going to get paid enough. You might then go to AI, “Hey Claude, Could you clean up my article?” And nowadays with the reasoning models, they can clean up your article really well. They write a good New York Times style, or something that you see in that magazine type like The Atlantic or New Yorker or something really well honed. It’s a good article.
Edwin is working with a couple of authors on a book. When talking to the AI, he uses terms like:
- Pump it up a bit
- Give it a better structure
- Use Syd Field’s Screenplay structure as a guide, but do that for this novel.
- It’s a bit boring, can you up the tempo a bit?
- Can you work slowly towards a conclusion / climax?
- Add colour.
- Where there isn’t description, add some
- Give the characters a little more volume
Phil and I used to use Claude 3.x – I joke that that’s the sentient one. He’s very creative.. Nowadays (in just 2 years) they’re much better than when we use them. But the reasoning ones are really really good when it comes to writing.
Why use the new Reasoning LLMs?
They spell out what they’re doing and they’re going to different places saying, No, Edwin probably doesn’t want that (based on previous responses) – but we might use a bit of that and blah, blah, blah.
So you are the boss. It’s the slave. It talks, it’s your slave. Something like that.
Some software engineers have bailed from the AI companies thinking, yeah, we’re creating slaves. It’s like the 1700s for them and tehy don’t want to be a part of it.
AI Consciousness
If you’re using perplexity.ai to code up the flight and wobble of a game “bee” you probably don’t need to worry about AI “consciousness”. Maybe if you were on a Quantum computer yes (Read this interesting article about consciousness and quantum computers).
If the people who leave the AI companies think it’s alive, there’s a ghost in the machine, they feel ethically irresponsible by staying in the company. So they leave and they don’t burn bridges on the way out. Some just leave and that’s fine.
But it’s lines of code. Lines of code. Yeah. Lines of code aren’t going to kiss your little baby to sleep at night or read a bedtime story.
Traditional Gamers
There’s a lot of game people who’ve been making games for 20, 30 years, since Pong basically. Pong was 40+ years ago, and they used the old fashioned method. They got their oil paints out, and then they scanned the old painting into a computer and cut it out to look like a computer picture. Anyway, many are very anti AI because they’ve spent years using traditional methods. They’re shocked to think that what took many years can now take many hours.
Thomas Brush interviews
Many Thomas Brush Gamer interviews (I highly recommend his channel) start out lightly attacking AI, but sometimes the interviewee, working on a particualrly arduous game, welcomes the idea of cutting corners with AI.
In the above interview with Adam Younis, Adam says that sometimes those versions, choosing, picking and choosing different versions of artwork or gameplay take you in a different direction that you never would’ve had an opportunity to before because you’re not working with a wingman who’s got all the knowledge of gaming behind him.
And so he was open the idea of using AI here and there.
Cut to an old school Disney Animator . . .
This guy welcomes AI. The arduous parts of animation are simply “gone”. He even says he wishes he had AI back in the day.
In the new AI movie he watches, the kids didn’t even have to bother with rotoscoping or green screening. The AI just saw them moving around and just rotoscoped in their movements using various little bits of $10 a month (AU$20) software and made this great little movei based around “RocK, Scissors, Paper”.
The old guy is seasoned. He’s just thinking. He’s thinking – he’s going, wow, these guys. Wow, that’s interesting. I could get that done too. I’m really interested. We’ve been doing that for years. That’s just rotoscoping, but it’s rotoscoping on steroids. You can do it in 10 minutes these days.
It’s another good interview.
So you can open your mind to it and use a a kind of problem solving approach. Some people have a definite problem solving approach to what they do – and I think that’s where AI can come in.
Do the hevy lifting when it comes to curly code for example.
If you look at what AI is actually doing – yes it is putting people out of work – but he keen – the ones who want to push forward can simply use it to their advantage and punch well above their weight. There’s no good or evil in this.
There’s just …
Getting your game made.
Think that’s how it’s taking jobs. The thing that used to take 30 hours, now takes 3.
It’s All Digital
Not every advance is necessarily “evil”. Was the wheel evil to the horse? Maybe. But it’s here now. And these things not only tend to stay, but they get bigger and better with every iteration.
Maybe we’ll see more games actually hitting Steam and Itch.
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