There’s a new wrinkle in generative AI-assisted game development with Unity Spark, a tool specifically designed to make such practices easier. The idea is, if you have a notion about a game, you can bring up the chatbot, throw in a prompt, and it can help build a working prototype. But Unity wants to be clear – this isn’t about producing games in the blink of an eye, and using it like that doesn’t suddenly make you a clever dev.
That’s what Unity CEO Matt Bromberg told Game File, anyway, in his explanation of the technology and its intended uses. “Asking the AI to reproduce a game that has already been made does not make you [Hideo] Kojima,” he declares.
“It doesn’t make you a famous game developer any more than typing the first paragraph of War and Peace into your word processor makes you Tolstoy,” he adds.
He’s right about that much. The process is what makes you creative, and there’s simply no bypassing that when it comes to doing anything worthwhile in any medium. But, unfortunately, there are plenty who immediately jump to shortcuts like those provided by Spark.
Bromberg mentions “we have no interest” in people “one-shotting games,” though I get a different impression from the official site. “Prompt it. Perfect it. Publish it,” is the tagline, suggesting you could get a game up and running extremely quickly using Spark, and you’d only need to refine it somewhat before it’s what you might deem publishable.
The prompts you provide are answered by premade assets from the Unity Store. At the very least, what you’re making will be an asset flip without much visual identity.
Kojima himself went on the record that although he sees AI as a potentially worthwhile tool, he doesn’t want to see anyone lose their jobs over it. Unity Spark seems more catered toward beginners in the space who wish to start realizing their ideas. But I’d consider this even more precarious, because you mightn’t learn how to problem solve and build from scratch the way you would if you just had to iterate over and over.
Whatever the case, Unity Spark will be available soon. Expect to see a few projects from it land on Steam and other stores soon after it launches.