OLD TECH IS DEAD

What do you get when you combine a bunch of pre-existing Unity Assets, AI, and a game developer who doesn't write a single line of code?

"OLD TECH IS DEAD"

For this Ludum Dare, I decided to try something different. Make an entire game without touching a single line of code. 100% Vibe Coded.

The irony being, of course, that I'm the Old Tech. A developer who actually writes code. Apparently that's no longer necessary?

I used Codex to build the game, Gemini AI to generate the intro video, and a combination of existing Unity Assets to put everything together.

The result? A multiplayer game. Made over a weekend. Without writing any code myself.

Pretty impressive, right?

Well, the game is also pretty bad.

This was my first time using Codex, or really any AI coding tool hooked directly into a project. I had a constrained weekend, wasn't feeling particularly well, and figured this would be an interesting experiment.

And to be clear, this wasn't some magical one-shot prompt that produced a finished game. There was a LOT of back and forth. Prompting, testing, finding bugs, explaining bugs, fixing bugs, introducing new bugs, and repeating.

Conclusion?

Perhaps Old Tech isn't dead after all. Or maybe it is, and we're just entering an era where anyone can make mediocre games much faster. I clicked on the "I have read the rules" below and it just 404'd - so I'm guessing also the result of Old Tech, so no clue if any of this is even allowed.

I genuinely don't know what to make of it.

Is it art if you directed an AI to build it? Is it game development if you never actually wrote the code? Does it matter if the end result is fun? What if it isn't?

I'm not sure. But I did manage to make a multiplayer game, something I wouldn't normally attempt during a constrained weekend game jam, without writing a single line of code.

So that's something. Probably. Probably not. This game is garbage, soulless - right? wrong?

Looking forward to feedback! What did you think of the game? And perhaps more interestingly, what do you think of making games this way?