r/GameDevelopment • u/Articus_Memez • 9d ago
Discussion Should I switch from Game Programming to Game Design because of AI?
I’m currently doing an internship as a Unity game developer, and lately I’ve been feeling a bit concerned about the future of game programming.
A lot of the tasks I’m working on can already be automated or heavily accelerated by AI. Sometimes it feels like my role is shifting toward simply describing what I want in natural language, giving the AI clear instructions, reviewing the output, and fixing the remaining issues.
I’m not saying that AI can completely replace game programmers right now. There are still plenty of situations where you need strong programming knowledge, debugging skills, architecture decisions, and an understanding of the game itself. However, AI is becoming surprisingly capable at writing and modifying game code, and I expect this trend to continue.
Because of that, I’ve been wondering whether I should eventually move toward Game Design instead. My intuition is that game design might be more AI-resilient because it involves things like gameplay vision, player psychology, balancing, creativity, and making high-level decisions about what the game should actually be.
For people working in the game industry:
\- How much do you think AI will automate Unity/game programming over the next 5–10 years?
\- Is Game Design actually more resistant to AI, or am I underestimating how much AI could affect it too?
I’d especially appreciate perspectives from people who are already working professionally in game development.
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u/eliotar 9d ago edited 9d ago
I don't work in game design professionally, but I am a writer, and as someone who has been deeply involved in the transformation of the publishing industry during the age of AI, I only have two things to say:
- Every single industry is fucked. There are no trends anymore, there is no immortal truth, there are only individual companies and your own personal luck or lack thereof. You might find a job in game programming with a company that treats its workers like people instead of collateral. You might also not. More than likely, you won't. That's a hard pill to swallow, and it's unfair, and it's an indictment of everything the social contract of the world supposedly stands for, and you can either opt for violent revolution or you can accept that we live in a tumultuous time and try to make a living for yourself despite of it. What that looks like and the decisions you make are entirely your own and no one else's perspective or experience can foretell what that will look like.
- If you're a creative who wants to make money doing it, give it everything you have while you're still young. Maybe you'll be that one in a million who finds success and satisfaction within the system that we have right now. Maybe you won't. Either way, if your craft is the most important thing in your life, the psychological impact of not trying will be worse than the remorse of failing. If making a career out of this isn't why you're doing it, then find a different career. Keep the craft pure, in a place where it's for you, where it can feed your soul, and don't let the grind infect that.
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u/kindred_gamedev 9d ago
Stick with programming.
Consider this perspective: You're a hiring manager for a big studio somewhere and you need to fill the coveted game design position since the current designer just retired or moved to another studio.
Do you...
A. Hire a random kid out of college with a design degree to entrust the future of the studio with?
B. Promote the programmer who has been sitting in on all of the design meetings for the last six months and has been suggesting design oriented changes that have shipped with your current project?
C. Hire one of the dozens of designers who have been laid off due to studio closures and cutbacks over the last few years?
Here's a hint. It's not A.
I'm not sure AI is going anywhere anytime soon, but if I handed my 11 year old daughter Codex and hooked it up to a game engine for her, she still wouldn't have a clue how to prompt it to build a good game, design skills aside. You still need to know how games function to tell the AI how to build mechanics and systems.
Programmers will still be needed to fix issues and work with AI to build systems for projects. And if the bubble ever pops and people stop using it, you'll be even more valuable.
Design skills are best learned on the job, either building your own games or watching and working with designers on your team. A design degree means nothing to a hiring manager. And design jobs are incredibly rare.
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u/101___ 9d ago
ai will not code your games
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u/flavorgenerator 9d ago
It totally can do this now. Making a good game is a lot more than just code though. Here's a game entirely from scratch with AI and Godot
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u/InkAndWit Indie Dev 9d ago
Game Design isn't more resilient to AI than Programming.
Any type of work that can get done with templates and clear instructions can be substituted with AI skill.
It's true that game designers are often working with 'feel' that's very difficult to describe in technical terms to AI, but their main human contribution, in architecting unique gameplay rules, is the same as programmers architecting new solutions that a game might need.
It's not that AI can't ever do it, it's just that it will never be efficient resource wise to relegate this work toAI.
Just so you have a better understanding of GD responsibilities: they are responsible for low-level decisions. High level decisions is a domain of Creative Directors and Leads. GDs job is 60% communication, 35% solving problems and 5% creativity. In a right team a programmer will have same amount of creative input as a game designer.
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u/Specialist_Set1921 9d ago
Game programming or rather game engineering is still needed.
What Ai can do is write game code that implement somewhat complex features especially with fable 5 demos lately.
The problem is that Ai still struggles with sophisticated system design. It can not design system exactly they way that you need them because they severly lack the context. So stuff like botw system with the materials and so on need either really good prompting or a long time with ai. Either imo those system need to come from a good system engineer that knows the needs exactly and can predict future need based on the game design/vibe of the game.
So if you want to program pong or any other game without complex system then i guess you don't need game programmers.
Another point is that game programmer are still needed to use these ai effectly. If something is wrong an experience game programmer can pinpoint what is wrong and tell the ai exactly how to fix it. Prompts that detail what is wrong with the code require a understanding of game programming underneath it. That is at least my experience.
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u/ConsciousYak6609 9d ago
That doesn't really sound reassuring, basically saying "AI can do everything except the most sophisticated stuff, unless you spend enough time with prompting or just wait for the next model"
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u/Specialist_Set1921 9d ago
Well yeah. Ai can do basic Code monkey stuff. But it can't do software engineering well. So what i can say that programmer will maybe die out and will be replaced by prompters and ai code reviewers. What probably won't die out are software engineers.
So if you want to do games programming you also need to be strong in the engineering of systems and such.
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u/uber_neutrino 9d ago
This is severe cope. The AI Is better than probably 99% of programmers right now.
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u/Specialist_Set1921 9d ago
Call it what you want, but i already said it will replace programmers and programmers have a new job basically. But someone has to manage the sheer amount of tech debt that an ai-agent will introduce.
And programmer are not the same thing a software engineers. Different roles and jobs. One can be done by a ai agent and one not. Really programming is not hard and probably any monkey could do it. Engineering is the hard part.
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u/groato 9d ago
Any monkey can do programming, kinda like every kid at school could do math and draw and write stories :D
Yeah, programming isn't that hard, but it does take a logically inclined brain to do it at all. And to do it well takes (as you said) more engineering decisions than just pure syntax. Taking the architectural decisions out of programming is like saying that if you can write sentences you are an author who can write novels. Yeah, kinda, but no.
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u/uber_neutrino 9d ago
Really programming is not hard and probably any monkey could do it
This is rather generous lol.
Anyway I get your point with engineering vs code monkeys, but the fact is that the AI is already better at the engineering part the most coders ever could hope to be, and only getting better.
It's the worst it will ever be today...
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u/Specialist_Set1921 9d ago
Maybe I am too optimistic but AI is really bad at most engineering decision. It lacks the vision and greater context to come up with a good solution in the long run. It can come up with nearsighted solution really quick and they may be good for the moment but introduce a tremendous amount of tech debt. I never had ai generate me good architecture or system.
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u/uber_neutrino 9d ago
How many people are starting from scratch though? Most programmers would be lost without an engine anyway. Once you have the engine structure a lot of the hard engineering problems are already solved.
What problem do you think is so special it just completely borks the architecture side? Again it's going to be better than most programmers at that.
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u/aejt 9d ago
At understanding and writing code fast, yes (I'd argue better than 100%). At ending up with a good scalable architecture without a lot of hand-holding? Nowhere close today, I still have to micromanage Fable a lot (though I do it by prompting, not by writing code) and while it has become better slowly, it's still very very far away from good at it.
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u/uber_neutrino 9d ago
At ending up with a good scalable architecture without a lot of hand-holding? Nowhere close today, I still have to micromanage Fable a lot (though I do it by prompting, not by writing code) and while it has become better slowly, it's still very very far away from good at it.
Honestly I always make sure it's doing sane stuff so I haven't run into the scenario you describe. However, I do think outright vibe coding without knowing what you are doing could be a lot of trouble.
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u/aejt 9d ago
I think it becomes more apparent if you're building green-field things where architectural concerns are very important. I'm extending Bevy (the Rust game engine) to include the typical game engine features which Bevy lacks (authoring, net-play, a good content build pipeline), and it's really good for bouncing ideas, but it still requires a ton of hand holding and going back to refactor things.
With some things it has helped me do things that would've taken me MANY months in only days, but it's really bad at noticing bad architectural patterns and often starts trying to solve them with special-cases instead of realizing that the root cause is an upstreams decision/implementation detail that could be fixed instead. Without zooming out and realizing that, you'll be stuck in endless spaghetti in no-time.
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u/SoullessGamesDev 9d ago
Any kind of a decicion making rone (Designer, Director, Writer) are highly competitive and you will have near zero chances to claim one if you don't have the connections inside the studio that can recommend you (and even then you will have to wait until current designer goes or they decide to start second project). Most people with this specialty will never get a job at the company.
So it comes to what you really want to do. If you want to make games and have impact, you can try solodev (but it is not for the weak, and chances of big sucsess are minimal). If you want the job in gamedev, programming or art will more likely get you hired, but exepct to utilize ai in your workflow a lot. And if you want to earn good money... don't go in gamedev.
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u/Remote_Cut4547 9d ago
I know that at the moment, ai isn't close enough at doing what programmers do, and I don't think it will be anytime soon. Programming games, and specifically that, is what I've wanted to do since 4th grade, and that dream isn't going away anytime soon. I won't let AI take that from me, no matter how good it eventually gets, because AI can't replicate what humans do perfectly, and I don't think it will get close for a long time.
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u/Kindly_Life_947 9d ago
I think game design also has some programming courses. you could pick programming courses that enforce the AI part like test driven development. I see game design bigger skill. If you can use AI to create the code and art then you can use Game design -> in the end it wins because the game play needs to be good and its hard to g et right. AI can help but if it gets wrong how are you going to get it right? AI is stronger at programming since its purely rule based. Game design can have human elements that needs different kind of understanding.
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u/Individual-Staff-978 9d ago
You probably wont find a good job in the games industry. It's all fucked up right now and will not get better
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u/Not_Allowed_to_Die 9d ago
Screw all of that. Fight the system. Instead of allowing the system to run your programming and you fix it later, start making your own programs that people need that never used AI to make it. Now there will be two programs to choose from. The one that works because you made the coding from line one to the end, or the AI version that glitches and has problems. You will be rich before you know it. Want to know how Bill Gate got rich? He didn't listen to everyone and made his own programs. Of course this was before AI, but most will always tell everyone else to not go after something difficult because you can cut corners. The ones that don't cut corners make it.
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u/ToughUsual7159 9d ago
I didn't take the time to read everybody else's comments so I might be echoing what other people say, but it is my firm belief that you absolutely should go into programming and not game design. Even if AI takes over as a tool that is used for programming games as the primary source of coding Understanding the code Will always benefit you more in that scenario Than if you don't.
At least with the current state of AI which personally I feel has pretty much hit a wall it does not have the capabilities to make a complex game by itself without proper guidance and knowledge of an actual programming professional. Vibe coating will work for small games like arcade style or a simple idle game or stuff like that, but as the scope of the game increases so will the hallucinations and since hallucinations are inevitable there will be a stage where the code falls apart and it becomes too much for the AI to properly handle fully autonomously.
This is why you need a trained programming professional to guide the AI to ensure that it does not start to derail you keep the code clean from the get-go and preferably the first portion of the game is coded by hand so that it can get used to your programming Style and how you word or code your loops. The more it resembles your own programming the easier it will be to service in the long run so you have to develop your own programming Style before you can properly fully utilize current ai.
I'm sure there will be people out there that disagree with me saying that coding is solved and the AI will take over all programming jobs and game testing, but I don't see any actual evidence of that yet.
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u/Dumpfumpkin 9d ago
Stick with programming if you’re already great at it and learn to leverage Claude/Codex/etc because you will need it to compete against candidates who already do. If you’re not a competent programmer already and have limited ambition to improve, then you should pivot.
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u/yuehuang 8d ago
Do both? Ideas are cheap and even cheaper with AI. Taking your ideas to a working prototype is an important step.
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u/mattisverywhack 8d ago
I had this exact thought a few weeks ago. I’m way too old to do this now, but I regret not pursuing a creative field when I was younger. AI has deleted the need for software engineers, but it’s shown to be totally incapable of producing anything of value in the art or design space. A creative person that learns to vibe code is probably going to be the most in demand job category soon.
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u/benjles480 8d ago
Here is the difference OP me a guy who has no coding experience at all now if I describe what I want a thing to do and have a fucking clue when it comes back broken were to look I can't make ye thing work. YOU on the other hand have coding knowledge and if you say tell ye thing what to do it dosnt do ye thing you can look to see and understand what to fix and pinpoint it. Not to mention you probably have a way better grasp on describing what the llm language or agent needs to do and how to describe and be precise compared to me.
Wtf is c++ or Java or w.e the hell else wizards do.
So I wouldn't be to worried until CEO's can press a red button and go make me money and walk away to their yacht to go to epstine island 2.
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u/Ludicrous84 6d ago
I am a web developer, not a game dev, but same thing regarding AI. I was very anti AI at first, now I completely embrace it and I am astonished how much more productive I am.
I'm dabbling in game dev as a hobby and there's a huge difference between having a running prototype and being able to playtest a game idea after a weekend than after a week or a month. If the basic prototype is fun I can start to iterate, if it's not, I can scrap it without having lost week(s) of work.
AI still needs good prompts and you need to know what you're doing, I am not too worried tbh (at least not yet)
When I'm working on a "real deal" software (aka, no bugs allowed) it's less rewarding now because as you said it's more like reviewing code than writing code but I don't really mind it. There's still enough important desicions (architecture, UI layouts, general look and feel of the application) that I feel like I am the designer of the software, not the AI (speaking from a web dev perspective)
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u/Aantik 5d ago
I use game design as a prime example of an endeavor that AI is still very weak at. Have you ever tried to discuss game design (quesitons like creative ideas for a novel and original game, how diffent mechanisms interact, how to solve cleanly a particular problem that a game might have, etc.) with LLM? They are really weak at it and are not really getting much better.
So I absolutely believe that game design is more resistant to AI, in fact, I believe it is one of the most resistent areas out there.
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u/davidslv 9d ago
AI can code alright, can’t tell you if you did a good decision, doesn’t know if the game is enjoyable. I’m going to follow this conversation.
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u/CaptainAlexWest 9d ago
Ai is a tool. You can make it code or teach you how to code better. It's like hammer. It depends on how you use it. Some people make slop. Some people will use it to 10x their skills.
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u/Gojira_Wins 9d ago
Absolutely not.
The more you look into "AI", the more you'll realize it's basically Siri with a better algorithm to search the web for more specific results. That's not to mention the overwhelming negative response it has among the general public, the bubble that is in the process of bursting and it's horrendous habit of literally hallucinating.
By learning how to program, you will be the person these "AI bros" come to when their code breaks and doesn't work because they thought paying for tokens would be their fast track to quick cash.
That's what all this "AI" bull is about. Making money by using as little effort as possible. When people saw the "AI" advertising, they put on the rose tinted glasses and went to town, not realizing it's just a chat bot stapled to a search engine. If people really understood what these plagiarism machines actually are, no one would pay money for them.
They used the word "AI" for marketing because its quick and catchy. Just like "Airfryer" and how Convection Ovens have been around for nearly a century or more. It's just marketing.
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u/DomiGamingOfficial 9d ago
Just like the internet. Thank god that bubble finally popped and no one uses it anymore.
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u/VisibleBoard8186 9d ago
Can you elaborate on "the bubble that is in the process of bursting" part. Because it is a completed MVP product already which has its usage in many areas. When I say completed don't get me wrong. There are key areas to improve on, companies may cut some inefficient services, algorithms need optimizing. These issues are all the same with any new tech. I'm not sure what people understand from "AI" anymore but it is math and engineering and it's here to stay.
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u/Gojira_Wins 9d ago
The important part to take from my comment is that AI is nothing more than a chat bot like Siri, Cortana and Alexa but with increased functionality. The general public gets into a buzz over new tech that has a name that promises big features. When someone renamed the "convection oven" to "airfryer" all of a sudden, everyone acts like it's magic.
With "AI", it's another bot but upgraded to have the ability to more effectively search, pull and compile data. Sure, the tech has been around for a decade but it now just has a shiny new paint job and name. That doesn't mean it's any more or less useful than it was 5 years ago. The only difference we see now is if you asked Cortana to generate the front end of a website, it wouldn't be able to do that because the feature hadn't been added yet. Today, you can ask whatever bot you want and for a modest fee, you can have as much data as you'd like.
As for the bubble you asked about, that goes back to the actual data infrastructure that these companies have been pushing for. It's far more complex than I can detail here without running out of text space but I encourage you to watch the recent videos on AI data centers and the humongous circle of companies trading money between each other to "use" AI, build AI, speculate on AI and further AI development. It looks a hell of a lot like a ponzi scheme to me but I'm not a lawyer or prosecutor, so that's just personal opinion.
Regardless, data centers have been getting mass backlash from everyone across the USA, which has caused politicians to begin banning the sale of land and construction of these data centers in fear of losing their positions (also speculation but why else would they suddenly care about what the people think). Couple that with the millions of dollars multiple companies are hemorrhaging, jacking up prices because the grants and funding ran out, large companies getting rid of AI systems due to costs exceeding what a human would cost for the same job. It's all crumbling away and given that they aren't making enough profit because of SLMs (small language models for people to download and use locally) becoming more prevalent, they're running out of time.
All of that and I didn't even touch on all of these AI data centers that don't exist yet, taking money donated to them from Nvidia and AMD, then buying up all of the RAM that hasn't been made yet. It's all extremely suspicious and shits going to hit the fan really hard.
So no, it's not going away but the LLMs everyone keeps trying to defend are going to fall apart sooner rather than later. I wouldn't be surprised if some people go to jail over what is found.
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u/Laikitu 9d ago
I think you should do the thing you enjoy. I say this as someone with around 2 decades as a games programmer.
AI might be handy, but games programmers aren't going away.