LLMs play a surprising role in a revival for language-based programming in game development, says Rocketwerkz CEO Dean Hall.

Rocketwerkz CEO Dean Hall and Floating Point Origin Interactive founder Felipe Falanghe sound downright giddy when they talk about the new C# framework named “Brutal.” During a recent call with Game Developer, the brains behind DayZ and Kerbal Space Program couldn’t stop making random asides to each other about what they’ve pulled off with the tool and how they’ve inspired each other’s work.

Their joy was infectious because once you understand how Brutal functions, you realize every new feature is a bona fide accomplishment even for this pair of seasoned developers. “It’s called Brutal for a reason,” Hall said after Felipe compared working with it to the experience of sitting on a bar stool while all your friends using engines like Godot are sitting on a comfy couch.

  • lad@programming.devEnglish
    10·
    1 month ago

    For someone like me, who was a bit lost on the meaning of framework, framework here is what you use to build an engine (I thought it’s on top of the engine instead)

    Also, the beginning of the article is a bit messy and the author jumps around thoughts, but it gets an interesting read, and they even talk about how to actually use AI for benefit instead of for multiplying bugs:

    “It’s hard for me to talk about it without sounding like a cult member,” Hall said sheepishly, when describing how he uses ChatGPT while working in Brutal. But he and Falanghe agreed—using LLMs has made language-based coding an easier task.

    Not that much easier, to be clear. They both said that when querying an LLM, they rarely copy and paste whatever code it generates. Instead they ask questions about C# libraries or Vulkan documentation, and the software is able to return high-quality answers. Answers that normally require programmers to sit down for hours to pore over documentation or scour ancient forums to find that one post with the solution (which was probably written in 2014).

    “An LLM is essentially tokenizing language, then putting masses of vectors around that to build linkages between those tokens,” said Hall. “What could be better than a highly-structured, in fact brutally structured language?” Vulkan and the latest version of C# are very “highly structured, with very clear syntax.”

    Developers critical of ChatGPT maker OpenAI should be able to replicate this process on open source models like DeepSeek, Falanghe said (though he hasn’t tried this himself).

    This process doesn’t work as well with Unity and Unreal because they’re both “highly spatial” as a result of their visual scripting tools. A solution for one game’s problem may not work with another because of the different scripted elements. LLMs scouring the web can’t produce consistent answers.

    It is also the opposite of vibe coding, a method where programmers tell an LLM what they want a system to do and it generates code—and it isn’t code completion, where AI tools “predict” what someone is typing and finish the string for them to speed up their workflow. The only thing the LLM does for Brutal developers is speed up access to information, letting them research without watching a 40 minute YouTube video.

    Maybe we will finally see no-vibe solutions, like we saw no-code solutions 🌚

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
      2·
      23 days ago

      When it comes to game development, engines usually have their own IDE and have many tools ready that make it so you don’t have to code everything - in Godot, for instance, you can create AnimationPlayer and AnimationTree to handle animations.

      Frameworks (MonoGame for C#, libGDX for Java, LOVE2D for Lua) can be understood as “pre-engines” or libraries for those coming off webdev, they offer lots of ready made functions to make your life easier (input handling, loading and handling most types of data, showing stuff on screen), but you’ll still need to code pretty much everything else.