MufinMcFlufin
@MufinMcFlufin@lemmy.world
- Comment on 'If you can’t show your game to the world without fearing it’ll be cloned, something’s broken' says Moonlighter studio on its canceled demo 5 hours ago:
Yep, I’m familiar with it, though I’ve never used one before. I don’t think it’s as accessible right now as LLMs are, and to my knowledge I believe it’ll still struggle with security bits which I believe are fairly common.
I guess a better comparison would have been something like some “Pickless Lockpicking App”, to emphasize that such a thing would have similar accessibility to LLMs.
- Comment on 'If you can’t show your game to the world without fearing it’ll be cloned, something’s broken' says Moonlighter studio on its canceled demo 7 hours ago:
I don’t disagree with that, but my point is more along the lines of enabling low effort “theft” (or if you so dislike that term then perhaps “cloning” would better suit your tastes) demoralizes and thereby disincentivizes high effort creative works, on top of making high effort work harder to find by muddying the waters they’re both going to be put in.
Suppose I put in the work to craft a brand new style of game. Something that nobody has ever seen before. I now have to promote it in order to get sales, but by promoting it vibe coders now see it and can make a low effort clone. Because these particular vibe coders are trying to cash in on the hype I’m trying to build up they don’t necessarily care about quality, only about getting a return on the investment I put in on designing my original idea, so they’re able to produce something functional and ship it within the weeks of time I’m trying to use to build up a fanbase.
Depending on the success of my marketing, how much time I dedicated to marketing before release, the technical requirements to execute my game design, etc then I might still have a successful game and people are able to recognize the difference in quality between my games and the slop cash grabs but I also might now be fighting an uphill battle against the reputation the slop cash grabs have created around my original game design. What incentive do I then have the next time I come up with a new idea for a game?
Getting back to reality, I think many people can recognize a cash grab when they see it but I still think that LLMs enabling them made the already existing visibility problem for indie devs so very much worse.
- Comment on 'If you can’t show your game to the world without fearing it’ll be cloned, something’s broken' says Moonlighter studio on its canceled demo 9 hours ago:
Didn’t realize the bar minimum to expect of a technology is not killing everyone. I guess if you lower the bar down to “not committing mass genocide” then it’s a lot easier to like every new tech regardless of any other standard.
As far as I see it LLMs and vibe coding will not prevent people from coding by hand, but they will enable people to steal far, far more easily than they ever could before.
If something built an Automatic Lock Picker 3000, able to pick any lock in the world at an 80% success rate otherwise just try again ad nauseam, then a lot more people will steal shit. People obviously could steal before the ALP3000’s release, but it wasn’t trivial for just anyone to do beforehand. Now it is.
In a similar vein I think LLMs trivialize the process by which people can “steal” concepts. It’s pretty damn demoralizing to know that you spent months to years working on a game, start promoting it, then someone with a Claude subscription can make their own clone of your game then sweep the rug out from under your feet. You’re trying to build a good and successful game, then you could easily have legitimate claims that you’re the clone since someone else released something similar several weeks before you did.
That’s not even to mention all of the code and other assets GenAI stole without consent in order to enable these vibe coders to steal your ideas your ideas.
No it’s not going to be the end of the world (but it sure will enable climate change) but it’s going to make things a lot worse for the people who actually care to craft something good while enabling the people who only care about having that thing done.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Hopped on How to Fish with a few friends for about an hour or so, then played quite a bit more on my own afterwards. Just finished getting every fish and thinking about trying for the last two achievements I have to unlock: beat the game in under an hour and kill the final boss with your bare hands. The speed running one doesn’t seem too bad with a little creativity, but I have doubts I’ll be able to do the final one on my own or at least without toning the difficulty down.
Besides that, I’ve been playing a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics’ remake on steam though that’s been on a little bit of a hiatus.
Lastly I’m prepping for an archipelago randomizer soon. Haven’t decided what I’ll play yet, but it’ll probably include Cave Story, Tunic, and Dredge.
- Comment on Have you played games with a crap translation after playing them in their mother tongue first? 2 weeks ago:
Not exactly the same, but I played Cave Story with a fan translation for years before it had an official English localization. For the most part I don’t recall any specific differences which indicates the fan translation did a pretty good job, but the official translation did change one thing that I really liked.
One of the antagonists in the game, Balrog, always shouts something when entering any cut-scene. The fan translation said “Huzzah!” which I always liked because it’s not a common thing to shout, especially not during an entrance, so it was pretty easy to identify with him. The official translation translated it as “Oh yeah!” aka the exact same thing the Kool-aid man shouts before breaking through a wall.
Balrog does indeed break through a wall the first time you meet him, so the official translators seemed to be making a reference, but because of it now I’m thinking of a commercial with a giant jar man every time the comes on screen (even when it’s not through a wall) instead of the character actually in front of me.
- Comment on Microsoft patent describes in-game advertising triggered by boss fights, loading screens, and cutscenes 4 weeks ago:
Truth be told, that actually might be a neat thing to do. Imagine trying to think up really scummy ways to inject advertising into games, create new forms of mtx, etc. just to patent them and sit on those patents.
I feel like it would do a bit of the Streisand effect since by patenting them you’re making them known, but that could be a bit better than letting someone else figure it out and get exclusive use of that patent for years. Either way anyone checking gaming patents can learn about it, but in one situation it’s used for the duration of the patent and in the other its not.
- Comment on Source Skin Rendering 1 month ago:
The 2 degree offset for Iris angles is something I’d never thought about. I wonder if that’s because each eye independently looking at an object in 3D space will need to be pointed slightly toward each other. If so I wonder if that 2 degree offset is just kinda an average they used so they wouldn’t need to calculate that angle once per eye.
- Comment on PSBLACKOUT (boycott of PlayStation) 2 months ago:
I was under the assumption they were talking about the PS Vita memory sticks which were already expensive at release and haven’t really followed the trend in prices that other SD cards have since then.
That problem is mostly solved these days by the modding scene making the SD2VITA so you can use regular MicroSD cards in the game cartridge slot, but Sony would still have you pay $65 for a 32GB stick of their official storage.
Meanwhile I found an SD2VITA available for $7 and a 128GB MicroSDXC card for $35.
- Comment on Nintendo Responds To Tariff Refunds Lawsuit, Tells Customers They "Got What They Bargained For" 2 months ago:
Thinking of it as movie tickets, I guess it’d be like if there was suddenly an illegal tax being imposed on every theater to charge an extra 20% per ticket. A customer’s $20 ticket becomes $24 and the theater makes up for it by passing that cost 1 to 1 onto the customer. The tax is struck down as illegal and as such the theater sues the government for that $4 per ticket.
Thinking of it this way I think it’s strange the theater is suing the government for that $4. The theater chose to upcharge for the same tickets despite the fact that they otherwise would have earned near exactly the same amount otherwise. At best I think they should be suing not for the $4/ticket but lost revenue that would have been incurred from the price increase imposed by the government.
By making headlines that they’re suing for that $4/ticket it naturally would give customers the impression that they’re entitled to at least a portion of that given the customers are the ones who actually paid that $4/ticket. The theater would have had a negligible difference in costs for operations, real estate, supplies, wages, etc during the period that tax was being imposed, so in theory they should have remained almost exactly as profitable as before, except only that the customer would have $4 less to potentially spend on anything else with their ticket.
- Comment on Nintendo Responds To Tariff Refunds Lawsuit, Tells Customers They "Got What They Bargained For" 2 months ago:
Nintendo got exactly what they didn’t pay for and they’re getting the refund for it too.
- Comment on As Xbox and PlayStation flounder, Steam is reportedly having another record year 3 months ago:
I wanted to get a PS5 but since almost the only thing I’m actually interested in playing on it is Demon Souls I figured I’d wait until they got a lot cheaper before picking up a console exclusively to play like 2-3 games. Then AI drove the prices way up, Sony added 30 day online checks for their games, and now a digital only PS6 means I’ll probably not be getting anything from them for a long time.
- Comment on #StopPayingGames 3 months ago:
I would use Minecraft as a counterpoint considering it’s perfectly reasonable that someone could play the game exclusively online using nothing but community servers while completely ignoring all single player experiences (which I’d argue hasn’t truly existed in a long time since the game now hosts a local server which you connect to during “single player”), but I get the feeling you’d still take issue with that example because it does still have a single player experience you could do.
So for a (as far as I recall, it’s been years since I last played it) multiplayer only experience: TF2 and its community servers. Valve could shut down all of their own servers for TF2 tomorrow and (aside from a hiccup in operation with making a server to distribute the list of community servers or making some other work around) the game would still have a thriving online community.
- Comment on 3 months ago:
Also worth mentioning that’s with the game uncompressed. There’s likely going to be many large sections of the game that will compress to a fraction of their original size.
- Comment on Am I just bad at games??? 3 months ago:
They’re using GameNative to play the PC version of the game on Android. Considering the 10 minute startup time, it sounds like it’s recompiling the game every time it launches.
- Comment on Am I just bad at games??? 3 months ago:
They’re using GameNative to play the PC version of the game on Android. Considering the 10 minute startup time, it sounds like it’s recompiling the game to be ARM compatible every time it launches.
- Comment on Epic Games unveils Launcher V2 in re-attempt to topple Steam, says redesigned storefront is up to 6.5x faster — promises player profiles, user reviews, universal controller support, and much more 3 months ago:
Don’t forget, they only promised user reviews.
- Comment on Driving game poll 5 months ago:
This sounds pretty similar to what I did back in Test Drive Unlimited, specifically the first one not the second. TDU2 might also be able to do the same thing but my brother sold my copy before I could form much of an opinion on the game. I saw one other person in the comments mention TDU2 but saying that they have “racing games like TDU2”, so it seems like they didn’t get the same experience I enjoyed out of TDU1.
The main similarities I see are that in TDU1 you had very pretty cars on a very pretty island with a large number of roads to go up, down, over, and between. The roads were a means to facilitate races and other missions as much as they were there to allow free roam. Missions and races could only be started if you had found their start point during free roam and you could teleport to any part of any road you’ve previously traveled on.
The total quantity of roads you’ve driven down is also a metric that the game tracks and offers an achievement for 100% completion. The game’s minimap would also show untraveled roads as grey and traveled ones as blue so you could always just roam about and try to find new little roads and sections that you previously missed.
The progression of the game was through the missions and races which got you money, but free roam is easily the mode that I spent the most time in. Also you’ll note I keep saying missions and races. I no longer remember most of the mission types but I do remember there were a few and they were markedly different from being races with extra steps/restrictions. The primary one I remember was delivery missions where in game characters would hire you to deliver their vehicles, then you’d get money based on the value of the car and it’s condition by the end of the delivery.
If memory serves then you would also get a 50% bonus to your paycheck if the vehicle made it to the end without going off-road and without a single scratch. I specifically remember these missions not being repeatable meaning that any money you could earn from them was one-time and if you didn’t earn the bonuses then you wouldn’t get a chance to earn that money again. Most of the time that wasn’t too bad, but considering some of the missions were fairly high value for the early game, it (especially then) was pretty beneficial to be very gentle with those delivery missions so you can buy your first few cars.
The experience you’re describing reminds me of what I most valued out of TDU1, being able to just explore around a large world while driving in nice cars. That being said from what I understand your idea wouldn’t have much in the way of progression. For me, I don’t think I would have started exploring the world had there not been an in game incentive to do so. There were plenty of times I was exploring just for the sake of exploring (like the many times I went riding through the countryside off road, or tried to ride a ramp into the airports), but I’d still say the vast majority of the times I was exploring it was for that sense of progress I got from finding more roads I hadn’t yet traveled, finding more missions to complete, and trying to earn that 100% completion achievement.
If at least some of those aren’t in your hypothetical game I’m not certain I would get much out of the experience other than a pretty world existing for the sake of being a pretty world. And perhaps that would be enough for some people, but I don’t think I’d get much out of the experience.
- Comment on Google removes Doki Doki Literature Club! from the Play Store 6 months ago:
Found the Welshman
- Comment on I can now save my game in Pokemon Yellow again after 25 years. 6 months ago:
There are solder practice kits you can get. They’re usually a PCB and a bunch of components to install, then once the whole thing is correctly assembled it should do some simple function. They’re usually pretty cheap so you shouldn’t have to worry about messing it up, and the kit should be trivial to replace in comparison to the part you actually want to work on.
- Comment on I can now save my game in Pokemon Yellow again after 25 years. 6 months ago:
Just so you know, the orange tape is called Kapton tape. It’s useful for higher temperature work (such as soldering) since it can continue to stick up to 400°C.
- Comment on I've been waiting for this for a long time. 6 months ago:
In my opinion you really don’t have to think to do quite a bit of stuff and enjoy yourself in Factorio. I think if you want to think about what you’re doing you can figure out ratios, making nice blueprints, building circuits, and all sorts but I have a few friends who had hundreds of hours of fun in the game never once considering anything like “what would I need to get a full blue belt of green science?”
The anti-thinking approach would be “I need red science to get this tech, so I’ll set up machines for red science”, “my iron gears going into red science aren’t keeping up so I’ll build more iron gear assemblers”, “my copper going into red science isn’t keeping up so I’ll build more furnaces”, “I have more red science than my labs can use so I’ll build more labs”, etc.
Personally, I don’t mind seeing the exact production numbers and doing a little math to figure out exact numbers of assemblers necessary, but it’s just as valid to build more X assemblers until the X belt is full, then when X’s ingredients start to run out you can repeat that process for its ingredients.
- Comment on I've been waiting for this for a long time. 6 months ago:
I could have sworn it went on sale exactly once specifically to raise funds for something, but I can’t remember what. I assume for Ukraine, but I’m not seeing anything in their steamdb price change history, anything from their website, or any talk about a one time sale.
- Comment on Is there a game that combines Civ with Sims? 7 months ago:
It doesn’t quite have everything you were asking for but you might like Space Haven. No cats, but you’re trying to keep your small group of spacefarers alive and your spaceship afloat. A lot of the game is resource management, managing faction relations, and doing small scale tactics as you fight against aliens, robots, and raiders. It has some of the small scale control over your spacefarers similar to Sims, but allows you the freedom to be a group of roaming mercenaries, set up your own little outpost on an asteroid to offer services, or raid everyone in sight.
It’s still in early access, but it has fairly active development with several updates having been pushed out this month alone.
- Comment on 'We Thought It Would Be Fun': Nintendo Has a Whole FAQ on Why It's Selling Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen Separately for $20 Each - IGN 7 months ago:
I mean the game in question is the first of two remakes of Pokemon Red, and (if I remember correctly) the first official re-release of a remake of Red. I’m not going to say all of the releases are the same experience by a long shot, but it’s a little hard to argue they’re only now figuring it out.
If you want to say that it should have been made more available to current platforms sooner then that’s a different argument.
- Comment on Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face 8 months ago:
Discord has some information about it in their press release about this:
- Comment on Why would I buy this? 11 months ago:
- Reviews are mixed: not a great start
Agreed, puts a damper on everything else that follows.
- Requires 3rd-party account: fuck that
Also agreed. If I buy a Steam game, I’d generally much rather it be accessible through Steam and do not appreciate when games are sold on Steam for other platforms.
- 60 euros base game: expensive, especially when the game has mixed reviews
Not the worst price, but yeah I’d definitely expect a much better review score to justify that price. In the absence of a good review score this would be something I’d have to know I’m going to enjoy before I’d consider buying it full price.
- 175 euros DLC’s: are you fucking kidding me? On top of 60 euros for the base game, there’s another 175 fees for content?
I don’t know for certain about this particular game, but I do know people were shitting on Monster Hunter: Rise for the exact same reason: a seemingly exorbitant amount of DLC available from release implying it’s a cash grab and just trying to milk more cash out of the player.
That being said, in my opinion MHR wasn’t even half as bad as the naysayers would have you believe. MHR on release on Steam had a lot of DLC, sure, but it didn’t launch on Steam. It launched on the Switch then later was ported to Steam with all of the same DLC they had worked on since its launch a year prior.
Almost all of the DLC was exclusively cosmetic skins, and almost all of those were part of bundles available for significantly cheaper prices than each one individually. I don’t recall the exact prices but I believe it was something like buy 10 skins individually for $2/ea or buy all of them in a bundle for $5. The real price for any sane person for all 10 skins would be $5, but this showed up on Steam as 11 DLC items with a total of $25. Multiply this by the 6-10 ish bundles they had on the title’s release on Steam to get a huge quantity of items and a massively inflated price compared to what anyone who wanted everything would realistically pay, assuming they paid attention.
I don’t know that CoD is doing a similar thing here, and I certainly wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, but I dislike this argument against them because it can be very misleading.
- purchasable CoD points: so pay to win?
Not necessarily P2W, but yeah I’m not a fan of MTX either and again wouldn’t give CoD the benefit of the doubt to have a good or fair monetization model.
- Comment on Rock Band 4 to be delisted on tenth anniversary following the expiration of its licenses 1 year ago:
There’s also Clone Hero
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 1 year ago:
Planning on not buying it, that being said I was likely never going to even if this controversy didn’t happen. I’m apparently part of 3% of Subnautica players on steam who really didn’t care for the game. Gave it a decent chance (7 hours playtime) and talked with several people who adore the game but found many aspects of the game to be overrated, poorly designed, or frustrating. Just about the only thing I can remember honestly enjoying about the game was the aesthetic, which even then was held back by some sometimes downright bad graphics.
- Comment on Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital 1 year ago:
Make it a legally binding contract, otherwise don’t bother promising.
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 1 year ago:
The other thing is that there was simply fewer games back then so you either continue to play the good games you own or you don’t play games. I loved Ocarina of Time, but I’m not going to pretend it was God’s gift to mankind just because I played it tons in my youth. I played it tons in my youth because it was one of the best games that I owned, and even then I had plenty more options than I’m sure this person had on the Atari for good games