My Thoughts on Google Playground
Google released an ai tool called Playgrounds a few weeks ago, and I just had to give it a try. I did not have a plan nor an idea when I opened it up.
For some reason Sabotage for the Apple II popped into my head and I just went with it. That game also led me down a fun rabbit hole. Stay tuned for that :)
I gave it a prompt and named the game Raid Cascade.
Initial Thoughts on Playground
Polishing is difficult. It wants to do its own thing, and IMO they were very good.
I can't access my assets. It's been a couple of weeks now, yet I'm still unable to see my assets.
IT keeps old assets even after I swore I deleted them. Although, to be fair, this could be user error.
It will sometimes add its own flair to the game. I never asked it to either. For example, I wanted to move some text on the screen. IT did it but then tweaked how the choppers moved! WTFF?
Every game UI looks the same. I tried my best until I ran out of tokens to make the title page look different. Now that I have tokens back, I'm not interested.
The number of times I asked it to change buttons is just too damn high.
The number of times it renamed the game is ridiculously unacceptable. I would love to know why it kept doing that. Did I do something wrong, or did it just decide that you didn't like the name and want to change it?
I can't upload any art. At least not that I know of a way.
The cover art it generates is not great. I'm also unable to see anything new it creates when I try and prompt it to give me something new.
How It Went
I do not think Raid Cascade finished at all. There are some UI bugs, and gameplay still needs to be polished a bit more.
It was complete frustration dealing with the assets it generated. I'm only using about 5 images in the list below. I thought I deleted the unused assets multiple times, but they keep showing up. In all fairness, this is probably more user error than the app. But the missing image icons are not.
The images do download when I download the project.
All I ever see is the missing image icon.
I gave up trying to make new images pretty quickly and instead decided to make all the game assets on the fly.
Image icons never loaded for me.
This game took about 3 days with just a few hours each day for a total of 87% of my usage in the Ultra Plan for Playgrounds. I would have to say that a majority of the usage was trying to polish this thing.
It went rogue a couple of times where it changed all the assets and in one case the entire look and feel of the game. It made a completely different game! Talk about a WTF?! moment. Wasted a lot of usage having to revert a lot of slop.
I don't know who this is for. People who never wrote code before and want to make a simple game, I guess?
It's fun to play with, if anything.
I'm grateful Raid Cascade made the Editor's Choice for a hot minute. I'll revisit Raid Cascade now and then to check out how it's doing.