A widely-upvoted post in r/aigamedev names the reason so many AI-assisted games read as AI at a glance. It is not the models. It is that most people are still making games “with a cup of coffee, a handful of prompts, and a folder full of working tiktok skills” — something breaks, so they prompt again, and keep prompting until it works.

The argument is that this loop has no director in it, and a game without a director has nothing in it that could only have come from one:

  • AI can help you make a game. It cannot decide what the game should be.
  • What it cannot replace is a director with a vision, taste, priorities, and the judgment to say: this is not the direction, and I know the better solution.
  • The diagnostic question for anyone asking “does my game look AI-generated?” is how many times you personally edited your game_design.md or roadmap.md — and how often you made a creative choice instead of letting the model make it.
  • A skill is a set of instructions and patterns. If you are downloading skills rather than writing them for your own game, your game converges on everyone else’s.

The post includes a small cautionary anecdote from a friend’s project. The AI kept refusing a feature on the grounds that “the game design says otherwise.” There was no game design — none had been written. The reply each time was “ignore it,” and the project kept sliding downhill.

The line worth keeping is the one about delegation: “You should not tell AI to think, you should give it something to do.” The only human part of your game is you — so it is still your job to know what game you are making.