NewtypeWoman

i love that they thought to include a timelapse of them drawing the art in the game's description, almost as if to prove that it wasn't ai-generated -- despite the fact that the timelapse clearly just, shows them tracing something not visible

i’ve seen recs for this game and i never really vibed with it despite having the exact type of autism that would make me like it. idk if the ai art was the reason why. i think it’s mostly cos i didn’t think the mech designs felt very cool maybe? and also that mike inel made the one paimon figure one that looked really fun. idk

Oh, how especially frustrating! Hiring an experienced mech artist to inject a bunch of loving pastiche (or inspired designs, or even just an authentic vision of a hypothetical franchise) is exactly the ticket to selling the experience! It needs to feel curated and real or all you have is the mechanical assembly which… c’mon!

steam has voluntary disclosure for use of generated content and it's wild to me that this mfer has gone to such lengths to avoid it. fake-looking timelapse of tracing over the output and everything. if you're going to those lengths, if you know damn well that people aren't going to like that part of your process, you can damn well go to the trouble of finding an artist.

anyway, this also does kind of explain why most of the mech designs it had on deck were sort of boring lmfao

it isn't even their idea. Last Call BBS did this already, and from the looks of it, did a better job of it too, even aside the art issues.

awwww, boooooo.... that fuckin' sucks, i remember seeing this and thinking it was a neat concept, what a damn shame

they have now added, a very passive aggressively worded, blurb stating ai has been used on some models. still should be tagged properly but it is interesting to see a response

I thought Steam's AI section was mandatory to fill in if you use that, to avoid exactly this kind of situation. That's atrocious, I hope the backlash punishes this dev real hard and Steam kicks their ass for it.

what frustrates the hell outta me with this is not just the cowardice from refusing to disclose the use of AI art, but the sheer laziness on display. Mech designs can literally be anything you want! Fei-Yen and Bal-Bas-Bow exist in the same universe with wildly different designs, and inspiration can be pulled from anything, from anime to construction sites to aircraft! and this AI tracing is just.... lazy.

this is just a zachtronics ripoff

Just looks like Last Call BBS's model builder... Like, okay, I played LCBBS and adored it and fell instantly in love with its model builder and my first thought was "wow that needs to be expanded into a full game", but some monkey's paw somewhere must've heard me because "copy the game design as is without iterating on it and by using AI art" is some ghoulish shit

I actually did a deep dive on this on Twitter, even the current disclosure is still a lie which is just so pathetic. Multiple images with AI artifacts, a lot of images that at the exact default Stable diffusion and Mid journey resolution of 1024x1024 at 96dpi, and a lot of other things. Even parts of the code seem AI generated, because while most of it are in Spanish, the few files that are in English are nonsensical and also not indexed by Google so it's not stolen code, such as the achievement code having variables for "coins collected" and "enemies killed"

Mech builder is such a funny name for this. It's like in a cartoon when the milk just says MILK on it

reminds me of the NFT "games" that Jauwn reviews on Youtube, the ones that are all Unity/Unreal marketplace game frameworks with generative AI "art" on top of them

except, of course, for the ones that are just rebadged open-source projects

considering their only other game on Steam is a Vampire Survivors clone (that, based on reading the top reviews, seems like it doesn't offer much!) I sort of feel like this dev is trying to find themselves a shortcut to success and hoping nobody notices the hole they made in the wall

not to be confused with Mech Engineer, which doesn't seem to have this issue

So! I saw this after playing the mech builder in last call BBS and really enjoying it!

two things kinda put me off it-

1. the designs all looked kinda, uninspired? lacking in character somehow?
2. waifus. I mean fucking come on.

I thought it was neat that someone took an element of somone else's spitballed idea and thought to run with it to make it something more complete, I don't think that is strictly bad!
IIRC, tabletop simulator cribs it's tactile design from wolfire's desperate gods jam.

BUT yeah, if you're just tracing over GAN mulch, what are you adding?