AI is a hot topic and video games/video game development is closely related so I thought I would share with you my thoughts/feelings on AI and how it has been used in the development of RogueSlide Mobile. Maybe you don’t care at all but I have some thoughts and thought it could be a fun read for some. 

I personally have a love/hate relationship with AI. I hate that it is impacting our society in negative ways, like job impact, stealing other people’s work, environmental impact and what to me seems like will be, an AI revolution on the same scale that the industrial revolution was. 

 For my day job, I am a Product Designer at a software company and I am seeing how it has already completely changed my workflow and the people I work with. I think with how fast AI is advancing, my job is not going to be the same for much. I think my job title is going to become something like “AI Product Designer” or “AI Product Manager”. I think I will start to do less and less design and become more and more of a manager of AI. I will write lengthy documents to tell AI all about the context of the project and then have it take a whack at it, tell AI what I like/dislike and iterate with AI until we have a finished product. 

This is scary to many because it greatly decreases the barrier to entry in their given area of expertise and whoever will be able to make whatever with the help of AI. 

For these reasons, as an employee in tech today, I hate AI and what I see it doing to my career. It is going to remove a large chunk of what I love to do in my day job, reduce jobs that exist, which will make the job market even worse than it already is.

So, because of that, I have decided to try my best to embrace AI, so that I can be the best at using AI. Hopefully that will help me keep my job, and pay for my family’s needs, which is what I really care about most in the end.

Now I am bringing those desires to learn AI into the RogueSlide project, but only on the coding side of things. I have spent loads of time creating AI images in MidJourney AI and have made lots of cool things but for something like this, I wanted to draw and animate all the art myself. Mostly because I really enjoy that part of the work and I want that part of this project to be AI free. 

Since I am so new to coding though, AI has been a huge help to me. I did not want to be completely dependent on AI to code this game for me so I did my best to learn enough to get started and then I have been using AI to help me solve the problems that have been too difficult for me. This has honestly been such a fun process for me to learn about coding. I have learned so much and I enjoy it so much.

In the recent months though I was introduced by a coworker to Cursor, an AI integrated code editor. It is able to look at all your other scripts and get context from them to then make better suggestions for the code. I like and dislike this. It has been helpful to do small simple things for me, but it often makes poor decisions. I assume it will get smarter and smarter and make better decisions so I have been trying to teach myself how to use this tool better for this project, as well as I have started using it in my day job, making changes to our codebase at work. Something that I never have done as a designer.

So there you have it, my thoughts on AI and how it will impact my future and how I am trying to embrace it to keep myself relevant in my job space. 

As far as RogueSlide progress, I am super excited with where I am now. I am getting very close to creating my first mobile build on iOS and hoping to get a test flight build out and get a crew together to test the game!

If you are interested in testing the mobile version of RogueSlide and want to join the iOS test flight please join our discord and message us in there and we can get you added to the list. https://discord.gg/J66gZMkV 

Thanks for reading!