I may just like games too much, but I can't take this seriously in its current form. This feels like one of the old and basic 'build your own game' toolboxes for non-developers, but with AI - not an 'AI game engine'. It shows that even the demos they made for the trailer are all simplistic endless games that remind me of average Flash games with a different coat of paint. When your entire 'game idea' can be expressed in two sentences, it's going to get old fast. There's only so many endless runners, trivia and single screen 'move from point to point' games one can tolerate. I can't see this specific product having any impact on the gaming industry, despite many people here already talking about the industry at large.
xnx
Just got #2 in the world (for now) on "Steampunk Match". Very impressive what's possible in the browser. No way I would've thought this was AI generated. It was much higher quality than the vibe coded games out of Claude. The best outcome would be for this to enable some new weird games that wouldn't have gotten made otherwise, and also to bankrupt games that basically operate as casinos.
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pkal
I don't want to (and can't) use this myself, but I've always wanted to see if an AI could implement an idea I had for a while: "A 4D version of Agar.io where you move through a 3D slice of space by moving the mouse cursor, and then rotate through the fourth dimension using the scroll wheel. All other game principles remain the same." Will this implement support for multi-player games as well? The really interesting part here for me is how well the AI will implement a game unconventional UI and how successful it is at making it usable and intuitive for humans.
palata
I thought it was just not working on Firefox, but it doesn't seem to work for me on Google Chrome.
"Create custom games in minutes > Press Start" just opens a new tab with... the same page?
We've hosted an AI game development platform for a while now and found there's a big difference between "making a game" and "making a fun game". I'd love to see if they are solving the real problem, but the link to try it out is a 403 for me.
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aqme28
How long until someone makes a tiktok-style game platform?
Play a little game, then when you're done it generates a new one based on what you've enjoyed. Repeat ad infinitum.
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Sarkie
Reloads the same page for me
hmokiguess
I'm okay with Google offering models, but I'm not okay with Google offering more PaaS offerings.
Let developers use your models and tools and build stuff with it. Why own everything.
Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform.
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TomGarden
For anyone getting a 403, it's US only right now and fails rather ungracefully. I just tried out a few games, framerates where strange/choppy, even in a match 3 game, and the games I tried were quite bad overall. I'm sure this type of thing will get good very soon though
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msabalau
You can build standard games now, and there is a waitlist for Unity Spark. But there are demos of Unity Spark games now, if you want to see what will be possible.
I was able to spin up a couple of games really quickly--a 2D cosy space exploration game, and a snarky sci fi trivia game. I'd say the the writting for the humorous trivia questions and the cosy interactions was reasonable--this isn't a tool that can only do reskins of old school arcade games. In addition to music and graphics it can do text to speech.
It's still an experiment, simultaneous impressive, and frustrating, with rather unexpectedly low prompt compliance. But, beta.
It really doesn't seem to like shifting from multiplayer to solo play. It seems like you ought to have a strong opinion upfront. (again, early days)
It's natural to think of this quick and easy tool for playing game, but I suspect part of the eventual value will be learning tools and "self gamification" I could imagine doing a variant of my trivial game for memorization or language learning.
mycocola
Hard for me to understand the why in this. I don’t think tech companies have ever understood games, almost certainly because they do not engage with games.
Edit: It’s for training. RL on playtimes, ideas, etc. Just rushing towards a world where we have no value to each other.
vmg12
If you want to try this but with free multiplayer servers check out https://snack.game (my site)
I also didn't bother with in-app game dev for now since I figured your local agents will be better. So for now you just develop locally with a CLI and your favorite subsidized model.
danvoell
Best case scenario for this is...replace Roblox with games that don't have reward systems solely based on you playing as long as possible. We are losing a generation of children to these games.
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_pdp_
I could not test it because I am also facing 403 error - UK.
Anyway...
If you are interested, there is also an open-source way to do exactly this and it works with your existing subscriptions and local models too - your data is kept private on your devices.
You can make the game, stream it directly from your AI hub or play it locally on your devices. You can cast it on the TV while converting your phone into a controller (with haptics support) or you can connect physical game controllers for local co-op.
The README does not talk about this feature but you can find videos in my twitter account.
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regenschutz
I've always found Google Slides to be a great way to create cute, personal games. It requires no coding, and anyone can play them easily in their browser. Seeing what people are able to do with a simple presentation (PowerPoint, if you will) has been repeatedly eye-opening every time I've seen one.
I'm a bit worried that Google Slides-games will fall out of fashion now ;(
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light_triad
The biggest challenge is designing the mechanics that make games fun. AI is not quite there yet but with enough data could potentially get there.
I put together a site a few months back to play around with 3d assets from Sketchfab and animated characters from Mixamo as an experiment: https://gobananas.co/
goshx
Beware: "you are on the list" - "or upgrade to access instantly"
I upgraded, same message. I downgraded, they kept the money because now I have a month of a plan that I didn't need to check something I still don't have access to.
qingcharles
The games on here were really janky.
The Sandbox one is a lot more mature and better thought out:
Since this thread will contain the intersection of people interested in coding games and people interested in AI, can I ask whether the latest AI coding tools can help someone vibe code a simple low-poly 3D game? I only ever used Twine before.
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educar
I got a 403 from Germany
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NiceWayToDoIT
So, google invented idea collection box for their own profit? Again?
niwtsol
A few of my friends and I have been building a game for a few weeks. It has been really fun because anyone can make a level and it’s somewhat random what level you get sent to- each level could have wildly different controls/goals, but getting oriented is part of the fun. We also have a ton of inside jokes and memories cooked in - I don’t think it would be very fun for someone external, it’s fun because a group of friends are building something together and that process is very fun. This seems to be just more of a game printing machine
kursus
I don't see the appeal of scrolling through a list of games I could potentially make myself VS scrolling through a list of games I could immediately play.
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jameshart
Does Google not have lawyers any more? Playground Games is the name of the Microsoft-owned games studio behind Forza Horizon; X-Box studio is as part of their current restructuring merging them with Turn 10 (the mainline Forza studio) and, weirdly, handing the resulting studio Fable to work on, but Microsoft definitely still has an interest in the trademark of ‘playground’ in the context of video games.
TheAceOfHearts
It doesn't work for me, when I click any of the links it just opens a new tab to the same page. $4.2 Trillion marketcap company with access to world class geniuses plus effectively unlimited AI compute and this is the trash they're making.
kingstnap
Error 403 unfortunately.
> To keep the experience safe and welcoming, every published game undergoes safety screenings aligned with our Community Guidelines, along with user reporting.
Kind of cringe. I mean I suppose its one thing to stop people making CSAM but safety screens make it sound like you can't have any sort of mature game? Gore, violence, drugs, suggestive themes or nudity etc all disallowed or something? Everyone has to make a T for Teen game?
ahmedfromtunis
I’ve been thinking of building a personalized game full of inside jokes as a birthday gift for a friend who moved to the other side of the planet.
This looks like it might be very useful indeed!
RayVR
what a heavy, poorly performing site. my fairly powerful macbook pro struggles on that site.
Then, of course, there's the fact that all of the start and access buttons just open the same page in a new tab.
Game design is really difficult. Programming a game is only a small part, and not the most important one.
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collabs
What is the minimum age required to use `Google Playground`? Why?
> CONTENT ACCESS LIMITED
To access Playground, you’ll just need to verify your age. Confirming you’re old enough helps us keep the platform safe and secure for everyone.
kraig911
Roblox copy/equivalent incoming I'm sure and that'll get kid's heads turning.
Am I the only one that feels repulsed by this kind of offerings?
Im not sure how to justify the feeling. Maybe it's that I expect more than entertainment out of creative works (which I consider games to be), but this... Corporate slop firehose seems fundamentally empty in a way that raises goosebumps, like a black mirror episode.
I've been working on something similar with a Claude skill: https://newtab.party. I'll echo what others have said: AI isn't great at making even a silly little MiniClip-style game fun. I've noticed it's a lot better in Fable, but there's still a long way to go.
komali2
For some reason they're 403'ing us in Taiwan. I can access from a USA vpn...
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small0
Spawn is way ahead of them. This feels like desperation after they started going viral.
Oras
Well done Google! 403 you don’t have access to this document
Please hire some QA instead of embarrassing yourself this bad
tomashubelbauer
> 403. That’s an error.
> We're sorry, but you do not have access to this page. That’s all we know.
Happens when I click Press Start. Did Google kill this before they shipped it?
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accidc
I wonder if it can do board games (or similar), there are no examples of that (not allowed to test)
pjmlp
Great, 1983 crash will look like a joke compared with the crapware and copycats that will come out of this.
Buttons840
Is this something I can try now? Or is this an announcement of a future product?
trash_cat
For me the page just reloads no matter where I click.
2001zhaozhao
I think the point of this product is not the quality of the games, it's the accessibility and distribution and the fact that it's free to use.
Big tech already controls the distribution of traditional platforms so they are building AI platforms to make sure they keep control of the distribution of new forms of content, including that for AI games now that they're easier to make than a YouTube video.
But inevitably these products (and the competitors they will inevitably spawn) put us closer to a future of arguably dystopian, AI-driven hyper-entertainment world, even if no one inside the companies meant to do that. I can only hope in that future many people still appreciate human-made games, and even on these AI platforms genuine human ideas (assisted by AI) can still bubble to the top.
As for game quality, these look close to Opus 5.5 one-shots to me, maybe even a little worse.
fancyfredbot
I'm usually very pro AI and the idea that people could vibe code their own games which combine exactly the things they enjoy appeals to me so was quite excited for this.
I played a few editors picks. "Westbound Frontier" is a kind of RTS. On mobile all the windows open on top of eachother and the text is very hard to read. The amount of resource required to build the first building after town hall was way too high by and you had to wait ages to do anything. There was an infuriating AI sound track singing "ooo-wee-ooo". 0/10 from me, broken and not fun.
Next I tried volcano run, a 3D infinite runner. Not my kind of game but a nice aesthetic and it actually worked. After about 30 seconds though the graphics changed to a really low contrast mode (night?) and I couldn't see the rocks I was supposed to dodge. 2/10.
Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this. It's obviously not ready, the "Editor" who picked these games should have known that. I am not sure if this is some kind of set of skills for Gemini or a fine tune or just a prompt but it certainly feels very low effort and embarrassing.
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jackmalpo
has anyone found an ai sprite generator that doesn't suck?
I was out after the slurping sound in the first 1-second.
bearjaws
I do kind of believe this is the "end game" at this point.
"Friend-slop" has already proven wildly successful, and significantly lower effort than AAA games.
Combine this with the fact your game will be stolen and put into Roblox, it really feels like we're approaching a era of just rapidly produced games that live for weeks rather than years.
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mv4
Can't test. 403 in the US.
NichoPaolucci
Holy shit man, the current state of things…
- Click “Start Now”
- Prompted to log in
- AutoFill with credentials (good and ok up until this point)
- Get prompted for password
- Get prompted on whether or not I want to store this set of credentials
- Get prompted to open the YouTube app to verify my credentials
- Open the YouTube app
- Get hit with an advertisement
- Click the X, Click “Verify”
- Go back to the browser
- Get prompted to add a third factor of authentication
- Click no
- Get prompted if I want to add face scanning to my account
- Click no
- Get redirected back to the site (FINALLY!!!)
- Still not logged in
- Get prompted to log in again
- Leave site in anger/disbelief
Seriously, what is going on.
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Growth_SF
Games are pretty fun, with easy access, which I appreciate as a new user.
Buttons840
I asked for a NES-style top-down Zelda game, but with some Roguelike Dungeon Crawler content mixed in. Think real-time DCSS (or Brogue, or Tales of Maj'eyal) with controls and a setting that feels similar to the NES Zelda game. Anyone who has played a 2D Zelda game and DCSS immediately has an idea of what I'm suggesting here.
What I got was a Vampire Survivors style "run around in this square area while enemies spawn and swarm you" game. Which is funny, because I have seen several game engine tutorials that build exactly this type of game[0][1][2].
I asked for a variety of possible "builds", including melee and spell castors, and said that not all builds should be viable--some combinations of stats should just not work. I also asked for a variety of spell schools with different pros and cons.
What I got was a game with no way to perform melee attacks, but there were melee oriented stats I could choose to upgrade. All the spell schools felt the same, they would shoot a basic projectile, or have some sort of wide area burst attack. The ice school froze enemies in place--how original. The controls were a bit awkward and for the first 5 minutes I didn't even know what spell school I was using. Sometimes the colors would change, which I think meant I had switched to a different type of magic, but I don't know. It all felt the same.
I asked it to fix several things, and then it worked for several minutes and changed literally nothing about the game--well, actually, it did change the game from being 5 levels long to 4 levels long, even though I didn't ask for that to change.
So I prompted it a second time to fix several things, which it mostly did, but it also changed the speed of the enemies and made them way to fast. I didn't ask it to change the speed of enemies, it just decided to change that on its own and introduced new problems in the process.
I get the impression it has no idea what the essence of a Zelda game is. This is "The Legend of Zelda" here, one of the most popular game series of all time and a classic. There have been several 2D entries in the series and they all have the same essence, but the AI was not able to capture any of that. It seemed to instead latch onto a very minimal Vampire Survivors essence and do a poor job at even that.
i believe services like this "generate an ai game in one prompt" will always fail. if i could make a game that people actually wanted to play with ai, why would i do it on here and not just sell it on steam for a few bucks?
the slop games fall to the bottom to services like these while good games would rise to the top and go to well established platforms.
4729738210
Over-under that it'll be shut down in a year?
Noaidi
Why do the tech lords continue with this infantalization of humanity? What are they distracting us from?
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ncr100
How do we incorporate advertising/monetization that compensates us the creators into this?
Google Playground is a destination, currently, with no monetization. So any gamedev effort and ideas we contribute into it are collected by Google.
EDIT:
It is offered as "for funsies with your pals in America, bros!" and it looks a lot like it's almost a feature in the Google Play portfolio which makes me think this wasn't thought through fully.
So Google doing something strategic here which is not clear to me.
- are they training their AI?
- are they collecting user feedback for an eventual commercial launch?
- This is google experiment, meaning you're sadly likely invest more time in the product / community than google will from this point forward. (That's just my "fool me once" voice talking.)
- There really won't be much advantage to building in their playground vs building directly with any of the frontier models.
- Interest and distribution will be challenging because the bias is towards building your own game vs playing the games others make.
Every time I see a vibe-coded game, I think to "I should try that prompt" not "I want to play that game". I think personalized apps, experiences, and games are amazing but are a different beast and won't have the viral impact some creators are hoping for.
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FinnLobsien
Google seems to have some desire to enter the gaming world, with Stadia before this.
Perhaps it's their culture of letting engineers experiment with stuff during work hours that also led to Gmail, Maps, etc. and the mobile game ad market is certainly big.
I guess this mainly competes with mobile games, most of which are mediocre at best and aim to get a few "whale users" to spend inordinate amounts of money on coins, gems, or whatever in-game currency.
Maybe the theory is that those games are so easy to vibe-code that completely democratizing it will lead to enough of a flood of games?
And a few will stand out and become Candy Crush-sized successes?
Or perhaps it's the idea that if you can have millions of extremely niche games, each may have a few hardcore fans because it caters to their specific interests (the same way Kindle Direct Publishing enabled hyper-niche literary genres)
ncr100
Google allow state-sponsored violent organizations but not non-state sponsored violence:
> Violent Organizations and Movements
> Known violent non-state organizations and movements are not permitted to use this product for any purpose. Do not create, upload, or distribute content that facilitates or promotes the activities of these groups, such as recruiting, coordinating online or offline activities, sharing manuals or other materials that could facilitate harm, promoting ideologies of violent non-state organizations, promoting terrorist acts, inciting violence, or celebrating attacks by violent non-state organizations. Depending upon the content, we may also take action against the user. Content related to violent non-state organizations may be allowed in an educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context, but please be mindful to provide enough information to help people understand the context.
I may just like games too much, but I can't take this seriously in its current form. This feels like one of the old and basic 'build your own game' toolboxes for non-developers, but with AI - not an 'AI game engine'. It shows that even the demos they made for the trailer are all simplistic endless games that remind me of average Flash games with a different coat of paint. When your entire 'game idea' can be expressed in two sentences, it's going to get old fast. There's only so many endless runners, trivia and single screen 'move from point to point' games one can tolerate. I can't see this specific product having any impact on the gaming industry, despite many people here already talking about the industry at large.
Just got #2 in the world (for now) on "Steampunk Match". Very impressive what's possible in the browser. No way I would've thought this was AI generated. It was much higher quality than the vibe coded games out of Claude. The best outcome would be for this to enable some new weird games that wouldn't have gotten made otherwise, and also to bankrupt games that basically operate as casinos.
I don't want to (and can't) use this myself, but I've always wanted to see if an AI could implement an idea I had for a while: "A 4D version of Agar.io where you move through a 3D slice of space by moving the mouse cursor, and then rotate through the fourth dimension using the scroll wheel. All other game principles remain the same." Will this implement support for multi-player games as well? The really interesting part here for me is how well the AI will implement a game unconventional UI and how successful it is at making it usable and intuitive for humans.
I thought it was just not working on Firefox, but it doesn't seem to work for me on Google Chrome.
"Create custom games in minutes > Press Start" just opens a new tab with... the same page?
Points to https://playground.google/ which just returns 403 error. Cool
We've hosted an AI game development platform for a while now and found there's a big difference between "making a game" and "making a fun game". I'd love to see if they are solving the real problem, but the link to try it out is a 403 for me.
How long until someone makes a tiktok-style game platform?
Play a little game, then when you're done it generates a new one based on what you've enjoyed. Repeat ad infinitum.
Reloads the same page for me
I'm okay with Google offering models, but I'm not okay with Google offering more PaaS offerings.
Let developers use your models and tools and build stuff with it. Why own everything.
Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform.
For anyone getting a 403, it's US only right now and fails rather ungracefully. I just tried out a few games, framerates where strange/choppy, even in a match 3 game, and the games I tried were quite bad overall. I'm sure this type of thing will get good very soon though
You can build standard games now, and there is a waitlist for Unity Spark. But there are demos of Unity Spark games now, if you want to see what will be possible.
I was able to spin up a couple of games really quickly--a 2D cosy space exploration game, and a snarky sci fi trivia game. I'd say the the writting for the humorous trivia questions and the cosy interactions was reasonable--this isn't a tool that can only do reskins of old school arcade games. In addition to music and graphics it can do text to speech.
It's still an experiment, simultaneous impressive, and frustrating, with rather unexpectedly low prompt compliance. But, beta.
It really doesn't seem to like shifting from multiplayer to solo play. It seems like you ought to have a strong opinion upfront. (again, early days)
It's natural to think of this quick and easy tool for playing game, but I suspect part of the eventual value will be learning tools and "self gamification" I could imagine doing a variant of my trivial game for memorization or language learning.
Hard for me to understand the why in this. I don’t think tech companies have ever understood games, almost certainly because they do not engage with games.
Edit: It’s for training. RL on playtimes, ideas, etc. Just rushing towards a world where we have no value to each other.
If you want to try this but with free multiplayer servers check out https://snack.game (my site)
I also didn't bother with in-app game dev for now since I figured your local agents will be better. So for now you just develop locally with a CLI and your favorite subsidized model.
Best case scenario for this is...replace Roblox with games that don't have reward systems solely based on you playing as long as possible. We are losing a generation of children to these games.
I could not test it because I am also facing 403 error - UK.
Anyway...
If you are interested, there is also an open-source way to do exactly this and it works with your existing subscriptions and local models too - your data is kept private on your devices.
You can make the game, stream it directly from your AI hub or play it locally on your devices. You can cast it on the TV while converting your phone into a controller (with haptics support) or you can connect physical game controllers for local co-op.
https://github.com/pdparchitect/noodle
The README does not talk about this feature but you can find videos in my twitter account.
I've always found Google Slides to be a great way to create cute, personal games. It requires no coding, and anyone can play them easily in their browser. Seeing what people are able to do with a simple presentation (PowerPoint, if you will) has been repeatedly eye-opening every time I've seen one.
I'm a bit worried that Google Slides-games will fall out of fashion now ;(
The biggest challenge is designing the mechanics that make games fun. AI is not quite there yet but with enough data could potentially get there.
I put together a site a few months back to play around with 3d assets from Sketchfab and animated characters from Mixamo as an experiment: https://gobananas.co/
Beware: "you are on the list" - "or upgrade to access instantly"
I upgraded, same message. I downgraded, they kept the money because now I have a month of a plan that I didn't need to check something I still don't have access to.
The games on here were really janky.
The Sandbox one is a lot more mature and better thought out:
https://www.sandbox.game/en/
Since this thread will contain the intersection of people interested in coding games and people interested in AI, can I ask whether the latest AI coding tools can help someone vibe code a simple low-poly 3D game? I only ever used Twine before.
I got a 403 from Germany
So, google invented idea collection box for their own profit? Again?
A few of my friends and I have been building a game for a few weeks. It has been really fun because anyone can make a level and it’s somewhat random what level you get sent to- each level could have wildly different controls/goals, but getting oriented is part of the fun. We also have a ton of inside jokes and memories cooked in - I don’t think it would be very fun for someone external, it’s fun because a group of friends are building something together and that process is very fun. This seems to be just more of a game printing machine
I don't see the appeal of scrolling through a list of games I could potentially make myself VS scrolling through a list of games I could immediately play.
Does Google not have lawyers any more? Playground Games is the name of the Microsoft-owned games studio behind Forza Horizon; X-Box studio is as part of their current restructuring merging them with Turn 10 (the mainline Forza studio) and, weirdly, handing the resulting studio Fable to work on, but Microsoft definitely still has an interest in the trademark of ‘playground’ in the context of video games.
It doesn't work for me, when I click any of the links it just opens a new tab to the same page. $4.2 Trillion marketcap company with access to world class geniuses plus effectively unlimited AI compute and this is the trash they're making.
Error 403 unfortunately.
> To keep the experience safe and welcoming, every published game undergoes safety screenings aligned with our Community Guidelines, along with user reporting.
Kind of cringe. I mean I suppose its one thing to stop people making CSAM but safety screens make it sound like you can't have any sort of mature game? Gore, violence, drugs, suggestive themes or nudity etc all disallowed or something? Everyone has to make a T for Teen game?
I’ve been thinking of building a personalized game full of inside jokes as a birthday gift for a friend who moved to the other side of the planet.
This looks like it might be very useful indeed!
what a heavy, poorly performing site. my fairly powerful macbook pro struggles on that site.
Then, of course, there's the fact that all of the start and access buttons just open the same page in a new tab.
Damned, that's also the name I use for my OCaml gaming playground: https://aryx.github.io/ocaml-elm-playground/ also with lots of classic games playing online!
Game design is really difficult. Programming a game is only a small part, and not the most important one.
What is the minimum age required to use `Google Playground`? Why?
> CONTENT ACCESS LIMITED To access Playground, you’ll just need to verify your age. Confirming you’re old enough helps us keep the platform safe and secure for everyone.
Roblox copy/equivalent incoming I'm sure and that'll get kid's heads turning.
Reminds me of https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/infinity-arcade
Am I the only one that feels repulsed by this kind of offerings?
Im not sure how to justify the feeling. Maybe it's that I expect more than entertainment out of creative works (which I consider games to be), but this... Corporate slop firehose seems fundamentally empty in a way that raises goosebumps, like a black mirror episode.
This reminds me of https://antics.gg/make-a-game
I've been working on something similar with a Claude skill: https://newtab.party. I'll echo what others have said: AI isn't great at making even a silly little MiniClip-style game fun. I've noticed it's a lot better in Fable, but there's still a long way to go.
For some reason they're 403'ing us in Taiwan. I can access from a USA vpn...
Spawn is way ahead of them. This feels like desperation after they started going viral.
Well done Google! 403 you don’t have access to this document
Please hire some QA instead of embarrassing yourself this bad
> 403. That’s an error. > We're sorry, but you do not have access to this page. That’s all we know.
Happens when I click Press Start. Did Google kill this before they shipped it?
I wonder if it can do board games (or similar), there are no examples of that (not allowed to test)
Great, 1983 crash will look like a joke compared with the crapware and copycats that will come out of this.
Is this something I can try now? Or is this an announcement of a future product?
For me the page just reloads no matter where I click.
I think the point of this product is not the quality of the games, it's the accessibility and distribution and the fact that it's free to use.
Big tech already controls the distribution of traditional platforms so they are building AI platforms to make sure they keep control of the distribution of new forms of content, including that for AI games now that they're easier to make than a YouTube video.
But inevitably these products (and the competitors they will inevitably spawn) put us closer to a future of arguably dystopian, AI-driven hyper-entertainment world, even if no one inside the companies meant to do that. I can only hope in that future many people still appreciate human-made games, and even on these AI platforms genuine human ideas (assisted by AI) can still bubble to the top.
As for game quality, these look close to Opus 5.5 one-shots to me, maybe even a little worse.
I'm usually very pro AI and the idea that people could vibe code their own games which combine exactly the things they enjoy appeals to me so was quite excited for this.
I played a few editors picks. "Westbound Frontier" is a kind of RTS. On mobile all the windows open on top of eachother and the text is very hard to read. The amount of resource required to build the first building after town hall was way too high by and you had to wait ages to do anything. There was an infuriating AI sound track singing "ooo-wee-ooo". 0/10 from me, broken and not fun.
Next I tried volcano run, a 3D infinite runner. Not my kind of game but a nice aesthetic and it actually worked. After about 30 seconds though the graphics changed to a really low contrast mode (night?) and I couldn't see the rocks I was supposed to dodge. 2/10.
Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this. It's obviously not ready, the "Editor" who picked these games should have known that. I am not sure if this is some kind of set of skills for Gemini or a fine tune or just a prompt but it certainly feels very low effort and embarrassing.
has anyone found an ai sprite generator that doesn't suck?
That promo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxvrvfyicp0) made me feel even older than I actually am.
I was out after the slurping sound in the first 1-second.
I do kind of believe this is the "end game" at this point.
"Friend-slop" has already proven wildly successful, and significantly lower effort than AAA games.
Combine this with the fact your game will be stolen and put into Roblox, it really feels like we're approaching a era of just rapidly produced games that live for weeks rather than years.
Can't test. 403 in the US.
Holy shit man, the current state of things…
- Click “Start Now”
- Prompted to log in
- AutoFill with credentials (good and ok up until this point)
- Get prompted for password
- Get prompted on whether or not I want to store this set of credentials
- Get prompted to open the YouTube app to verify my credentials
- Open the YouTube app
- Get hit with an advertisement
- Click the X, Click “Verify”
- Go back to the browser
- Get prompted to add a third factor of authentication
- Click no
- Get prompted if I want to add face scanning to my account
- Click no
- Get redirected back to the site (FINALLY!!!)
- Still not logged in
- Get prompted to log in again
- Leave site in anger/disbelief
Seriously, what is going on.
Games are pretty fun, with easy access, which I appreciate as a new user.
I asked for a NES-style top-down Zelda game, but with some Roguelike Dungeon Crawler content mixed in. Think real-time DCSS (or Brogue, or Tales of Maj'eyal) with controls and a setting that feels similar to the NES Zelda game. Anyone who has played a 2D Zelda game and DCSS immediately has an idea of what I'm suggesting here.
What I got was a Vampire Survivors style "run around in this square area while enemies spawn and swarm you" game. Which is funny, because I have seen several game engine tutorials that build exactly this type of game[0][1][2].
I asked for a variety of possible "builds", including melee and spell castors, and said that not all builds should be viable--some combinations of stats should just not work. I also asked for a variety of spell schools with different pros and cons.
What I got was a game with no way to perform melee attacks, but there were melee oriented stats I could choose to upgrade. All the spell schools felt the same, they would shoot a basic projectile, or have some sort of wide area burst attack. The ice school froze enemies in place--how original. The controls were a bit awkward and for the first 5 minutes I didn't even know what spell school I was using. Sometimes the colors would change, which I think meant I had switched to a different type of magic, but I don't know. It all felt the same.
I asked it to fix several things, and then it worked for several minutes and changed literally nothing about the game--well, actually, it did change the game from being 5 levels long to 4 levels long, even though I didn't ask for that to change.
So I prompted it a second time to fix several things, which it mostly did, but it also changed the speed of the enemies and made them way to fast. I didn't ask it to change the speed of enemies, it just decided to change that on its own and introduced new problems in the process.
I get the impression it has no idea what the essence of a Zelda game is. This is "The Legend of Zelda" here, one of the most popular game series of all time and a classic. There have been several 2D entries in the series and they all have the same essence, but the AI was not able to capture any of that. It seemed to instead latch onto a very minimal Vampire Survivors essence and do a poor job at even that.
[0]: https://www.gdquest.com/library/first_2d_game_godot4_vampire... [1]: https://www.udemy.com/course/create-a-complete-2d-arena-surv... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgvLbahJOTA
In the US, got 403.
i believe services like this "generate an ai game in one prompt" will always fail. if i could make a game that people actually wanted to play with ai, why would i do it on here and not just sell it on steam for a few bucks?
the slop games fall to the bottom to services like these while good games would rise to the top and go to well established platforms.
Over-under that it'll be shut down in a year?
Why do the tech lords continue with this infantalization of humanity? What are they distracting us from?
How do we incorporate advertising/monetization that compensates us the creators into this?
Google Playground is a destination, currently, with no monetization. So any gamedev effort and ideas we contribute into it are collected by Google.
EDIT:
It is offered as "for funsies with your pals in America, bros!" and it looks a lot like it's almost a feature in the Google Play portfolio which makes me think this wasn't thought through fully.
So Google doing something strategic here which is not clear to me.
- are they training their AI?
- are they collecting user feedback for an eventual commercial launch?
- are they building hype?
Why did Google spend the money on this?
Somebody needed a promotion project huh?
How long until it appears in https://killedbygoogle.com?
I guess I'm a bit of a killjoy here but:
Every time I see a vibe-coded game, I think to "I should try that prompt" not "I want to play that game". I think personalized apps, experiences, and games are amazing but are a different beast and won't have the viral impact some creators are hoping for.Google seems to have some desire to enter the gaming world, with Stadia before this.
Perhaps it's their culture of letting engineers experiment with stuff during work hours that also led to Gmail, Maps, etc. and the mobile game ad market is certainly big.
I guess this mainly competes with mobile games, most of which are mediocre at best and aim to get a few "whale users" to spend inordinate amounts of money on coins, gems, or whatever in-game currency.
Maybe the theory is that those games are so easy to vibe-code that completely democratizing it will lead to enough of a flood of games?
And a few will stand out and become Candy Crush-sized successes?
Or perhaps it's the idea that if you can have millions of extremely niche games, each may have a few hardcore fans because it caters to their specific interests (the same way Kindle Direct Publishing enabled hyper-niche literary genres)
Google allow state-sponsored violent organizations but not non-state sponsored violence:
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