Been doing indie game dev on the side for a few years. Mostly smallscoped stuff, tabletopadjacent mechanics, procedural systems, that kind of thing. When I saw what Google Genie 3 is doing, generating a navigable 3D world from a text prompt, my first reaction was genuinely mixed.
On one hand it is technically fascinating and I spent way too long reading about the architecture. On the other hand there is this background hum of dread that is hard to dismiss. Not because I think it replaces game dev wholesale right now, it clearly does not. The output is rough and the design coherence is basically nonexistent. But the trajectory is hard to ignore.
The part that gets me is not AI replacing art assets or writing, that conversation is already exhausted. It is what happens when world building, the part that actually takes craft and intentional design decisions, becomes a prompt. Because that is the part I actually care about. The mechanical and spatial logic of a space, not just how it looks.
Curious where other people who build things land on this. Is the indie advantage going to be design intentionality, the stuff AI genuinely cannot do yet, or is that just a comfortable story we tell ourselves while the gap closes faster than expected.
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