I believe AI is going to be a net negative to society for the forseeable future. AI art is a blight on artistry as a concept, and LLMs are shunting us further into search-engine-overfit post-truth world.

But also:

Reading the OOP has made me a little angry. You can see the echo chamber forming right before your eyes. Either you see things the way OOP does with no nuance, or you stop following them and are left following AI hype-bros who’ll accept you instead. It’s disgustingly twitter-brained. It’s a bullshit purity test that only serves your comfort over actually trying to convince anyone of anything.

Consider someone who has had some small but valued usage of AI (as a reverse dictionary, for example), but generally considers things like energy usage and intellectual property rights to be serious issues we have to face for AI to truly be a net good. What does that person hear when they read this post? “That time you used ChatGPT to recall the word ‘verisimilar’ makes you an evil person.” is what they hear. And at that moment you’ve cut that person off from ever actually considering your opinion ever again. Even if you’re right that’s not healthy.

Of those that remain, those who disapprove of erotic furry content that features species-accurate genitals, which is the threshold VISA was in, and is too spicy for some lemmings. I don’t fully understand why this is a subcategory.

This one actually makes the second most sense to me out of the ones listed (first being explicit sex of course). To a lot of people who aren’t furries, at least in the horny sense, the emphasis put on making the genitals resemble those of real animals is a clear connection to bestiality. In order to care, you have to know, and to know you have to spend a lot of time looking at animal dicks (or spend time with people who do).

To make my point, ask yourself how you feel about other fetishes / kinks with similar properties. For example, consider ABDL. It’s a fetish that uses fairly direct references to being way too young for sex despite being adults, much like the animal dicks directly invoking, well, sucking animal dick despite not being an animals. There are tons of people who see that and immediately think it’s for pedos. Though, weirdly enough, many those same people don’t have nearly that much of an issue with various more mild but more realized forms of neoteny in porn (the industry’s obssession with 18-19yo girls springs to mind).

For what it’s worth I’m not really in that group (consentual adults yada yada), but I did have that gut reaction when I first encountered it.

I’d have to subtly disagree with this. It is really good advice, especially when the scope of your game is larger than what one could reasonably finish in a game jam; If you can’t get to a fun game in a couple of days or less, you need documentation as to what your plan is to get there.

The problem is that this is the best advice for someone who has the technical “hard” skills to make a game (compsci, digital art, etc.), but lacks the "soft"er skills (software eng., scheduling, etc). To be fair that is super common, but the OP implies to me they’re not confident that they have the technical skills either yet.

Without either of those skills you can’t know what’ll take a couple of days or what’s actually weeks of work, and the value you get out of design docs becomes effectively random.

The common advice that I’d have to agree with is that your first few games should be as small of a scope as you can make them. Other comments to this post already go into detail, but the jist is that when you’re starting the amount you learn is more per-project than per-hour, so get out as many small things as possible to get your bearings.

Once you’ve done that, this is really good advice for your first sizeable project.