Dawn of AI

It started with small steps, now it is everywhere. I don’t want to repeat the same words as the whole X and social media, praising and worshipping the AI hehe. Well, from my side, there are things I find very tedious, time consuming and not rewarding at all. Since I self-published many games and things: preparing the whole store page marketing material, the killer description text, tags, screenshots, videos, banner and the logo, yes the LOGO. I have my own ways and tools to automate this process but still it is very tedious. And the moment you look away into something else, when you return back you find out Google changed something, Apple updated its screenshot ratios, Steam changed its publishing page… it goes on. Learning all of them again and again. At one point, I wished there was a master tool. You just handle your Unity project and press publish. It updates your game everywhere: itch.io WebGL build, Android & iOS builds and ah ok, at least for Steam I can do it manually hehe. But you get what I mean. Normally in a studio there are people dedicated to this and they do an excellent job. In my professional career I had this luxury of course, but I do a lot of self-publishing also, and when you are a solo developer there is a problem: you are all ALONE.

Ok, now back to AI. AI is finally very useful for me. No, I don’t mean vibe coding. I enjoy coding my games, I like tinkering while coding, and most of the good ideas shine to you when you are actually in the zone and coding. Yea it’s slow but it has its own advantages, ok? But that’s my personal taste. At work I can vibe code to the max if the company is pushing for that, that’s a different thing. Anyway, back to what I want to say, wrote 2 paragraphs but still not getting to the point. Those tedious things that I mentioned, finally someone, an invisible partner, took most of them off me. Yea, it still requires lots of chatting and guiding, but I was able to convert this blog from a rusty blogspot.com account and make this blog & portfolio site. I coded the sinus scroller, that’s the most important part haha. And I wired up the domain and updated many screenshots etc. Still it took the whole day. Yea, even if you have the AI gods’ power, iterating and hammering until you like it takes time. What would I do if I didn’t have this AI tool? Well, I wouldn’t make this website, just keep using the blogspot until Google kills it one day. But it was eating my brain: one day I will use Hugo or Jekyll to make a portfolio site and I’ll carry my old content here. One day, one day, one day… But that day was never coming. Until I said yea, let’s see if Mr. AI is good with this? Of course it is. I was able to carry my old content from the old blog to here, and all my games and portfolio, everything in 10 minutes. The rest was updating my CV, portfolio, adding missing videos, links, descriptions etc. So AI is fast, it is me dragging it back hehe, but there is no speed up for that. And yea, I spent at least 45 minutes on the scroll text to master it ;)

But, I have 2 more blogs and I’ll update them as well. Well, I wouldn’t touch them, but now I have this AI power, I feel I have to do it, there is no excuse now. Before there was an excuse, it was so much manual work. Now it is mostly automated and the excuse is gone. Checking and validating is still there though, damn.

Plus I have around 10 games on Android. With AI I can mass update them to the latest Google SDK and update the old ad packages etc. I was doing this manually every year and it was taking me 3-4 days. They are in very good shape now, I fixed a lot of API-breaking stuff in the previous update, so it shouldn’t take too much time. But testing and validating is still there. I installed BlueStacks, hoping it will make the testing easier.

Ok, last words. AI speed is really here, but not every step is suitable for automation. Things still take a lot of time, especially when you start tweaking and making it production ready. The more you work on it, the better it gets, that still comes into play. Of course at some point you have to say “ok, it’s done” and let it go.