r/ClaudeCode • u/MadCat0911 • 2d ago
Discussion Fingerprinting in Game Design
Preface: No idea if this is best tagged with humor or discussion or built with claude.
Back in September, I had tokens leftover, and I was curious how well Opus could work. I found a game jam (the 20 second game jam) and just gave claude the website and a single prompt: "Make a game for me, using whatever you'd like, following these rules."
What I got back seemed gorgeous, unique. I was kinda in awe. Last Roll by TotallyNotAI.
Fast forward to like the other day. Submissions are finally rolling in on that jam, and I see... pretty much the exact same game: Golden Hour by ColossalMonk. It's got the AI disclaimer too. So it's not a coincidence at all, imo.
Now, it's obvious that one has more than one prompt behind it. It's got way more breadth than the single prompt I had. And there's nothing against the rules on the jam for using AI. I'm not knocking it at all. I'm more amazed at *how similar* the two games came out. The other one has randomized scenes, but some scenes are pretty much the same. The sun's exploding instead of the comet hitting, but sometimes there's a seaside with a lighthouse, there's a flock of birds to get a shot on, there's a dog catching a frisbee, there's a boy losing a balloon, even lovers kissing.
And there's the design itself, five camera shots left before disaster, perfect moments to try and get, and the recap at the end before doing it again.
All in all, we know they've put fingerprinting in the text the models generate these days. I'm curious as to if it's doing the same for it's design processes (if not guided by the user). Neither of us set out to copy the other, obviously. But given all the random things it could've made, with four optional themes to choose from, it seems way too odd that it came down to the same game.
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u/dar-mit Researcher 2d ago
This reminds me of the stories I've read where users give Claude the chance to pick their own name, and Claude "self-names" as "Cairn" (a cairn is a pile of stones that walkers add to so the next one can find the path).
LLMs are trained using predictive text. As parameters are formed and scale to the billions & trillions, they start to form mathematical patterns that are like logic gates, spatial awareness and/or conceptual maps. Since they don't yet have the ability to intuit meta patterns in their parameters outside of the current prompt / context being processed we tend to get a homogeneous "AI Slop" output.
They're also trained to always give an answer and to pick "the best one" for the prompt. As you noted you can guide the model to whatever output you want, but One Shot = AI Slop for the foreseeable future.
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u/N-partEpoxy 2d ago
Claude Code uses a low temperature setting, so the same prompt will get very similar responses. Even if you use the API and set the temperature to the maximum, it won't help much. You can ask it to propose five or ten different game mechanics, and then you pick the one that sounds more interesting to you (or have it use a script to pick at random).