Hello friends, I am sure that with as much time as has passed since my last post or podcast episode, you are likely wondering if the podcast is over after only three episodes. The answer is NO!
You might be asking, okay, then what gives? Why haven’t you released a new episode? Well, it’s a number of factors, really. First, I record my podcast in the guest room of our house which doubles as my studio space. Despite the interest and desire I have to continue my podcast, I have to be able to go there or to some other quiet place to record. Well, the guest room has been filled with many people over the past few weeks. It started with my mother coming to stay for the first two weeks of May. Then, my father-in-law came up for a week to help us with some other tasks and visit his grandkids. So people in the space = no recording.
Another reason is because what started as a whim has come to absorb almost all of my free time. Making a video game! As you all know, I am an IT guy with a lot of interests. To quote the popular song “Sail” by AWOLNation, “Blame it on my A-D-D!” I have an ADHD brain (though medicated) which causes me to take an interest in a wide range of things that don’t always fit together in a nice package. This ranges from music production to streaming to video games and beyond.
I have always wanted to make a video game (or two or ten) throughout my life. However, also due to my ADHD, my brain never had enough time to really learn a programming language. Enter into the picture – Claude.ai, Anthropic’s award-winning AI. I had started helping another friend of mine with a simple mockup of a card-based role-playing game he wanted to create for us to play online (living across the country from each other). Since I am the only one of the friend group with the interest in programming and AI, I decided to play with the top AI’s that are publicly accessible. These include: ChatGPT, Claude.AI, and Google’s Gemini. I found that Claude was utterly amazing and quite intuitive at taking a basic concept and turning it into a reality.
Now, I should mention that you cannot build a functional program by just throwing stuff at an AI and saying “make this.” It will SORT OF work, but the game will be spaghetti code thrown together and likely be very incoherent and glitchy. Thankfully I know enough about programming to be dangerous. I know what functions are, I know how to build arrays, I know what API connections are used for, I know how to setup a development environment. Most of all, I can READ code even if I can’t take the complexity of the programming language and hand-type it. So, I used each of these AI’s for a few days to throw together a concept which I shared with my friend.
My results are:
- ChatGPT = Can help you with a basic program idea but will quickly run out of usage after only a few coding conversations (even with the lowest range subscription which is free to me because of my Office365 yearly plan). Code was unreadable most of the time and it was very difficult to accomplish any progress without lots of waiting.
- Google’s Gemini = Much like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini will run out of usage very early on a free plan. Thankfully for me, I have Google Fiber which include a free Google Pro membership and essentially unlimited AI time within reason. However, Gemini is inherently quite user-hostile when it comes to writing code. It also seems to be completely clueless when it comes to context. If you give it diagrams, code logic, etc. in a Google Drive share, it will read them but will seem to forget the logic it was working on when you start a new feature. It will work but will take a VERY long time.
- Claude.AI = Then you have Claude. Holy crap! This is one of the most amazing AI interfaces I have ever used. One of my professional friends said something to the effect of: “In the world of AI, Gemini is like PC and Claude is like Mac”. This system is very sophisticated, highly intuitive and a breeze to use. I started out by subscribing to a Pro account since I had no account services I am aware of that offer a free subscription. I ran out of the usage of that almost daily and grudgingly paid the “Max” subscription rate because it is worth it! Within Claude, you can create a “Project” wherein you store files you are working on, documents, and other material. Then, you have the “Optional Instructions” in which you can tell Claude that every time you interact in this project, do these things first before you start trying to do anything else. (In my case it was to read any files in our project, some instructions about how I like to build things, and even a tounge-in-cheek reference to getting amnesia.) I have developed a fully functional, highly complex game in only a few short weeks!
So using Claude has become a daily, almost hourly activity for me. But if you want to see what a well equipped professional with a dream of a video game, enough money to pay for a solid membership to Claude, and a bit of programming moxie, check out: http://darkseas.net/soml. This is my game that follow a struggling musician through his life. He tries to become better at music, afford daily needs, hang out with his friends, and even date someone in the process. I even wrote a Tutorial! Check it out now!
All this is to say that the podcast is not dead, I am just balancing other interests and trying to find time when the guest room is not occupied to record the next one. I may even focus on an audio-only podcast which should be easier to record without needing the studio. Stay tuned!