EDIT: As I sometimes do, I'm locking this post now that it went bigger than I intended
I'm so tired.
I was excitedly going to spotlight this game, Mech Builder, on @indiegamesofcohost tomorrow. Such an amazing idea, exactly the type of game I've wanted to come out, bought it and enjoyed the tutorial. Such a great idea for a solo-dev, taps into a really satisfying loop. And really clever, using 2D drawn assets instead of it needing to be a 3D game.
Of course, a few hours later, I realize that the dev used AI Art to make mech designs, then traced over them.
I was rooting for this game so hard. I wanted to be its biggest cheerleader. Day 1 of it being released and I had excitedly showed it to a bunch of people already, even before drafting the IGOC post. And now I feel like an idiot for not spotting it sooner.
What pisses me off the MOST though is this: Steam ALREADY ALLOWS AI Art games! All Valve asks is that you fill out a short form on your store page that divulges what you used AI for. This dev, as of writing, hasn't added that at all. He claims that only whiney haters care about AI use, and yet chickened out of being honest and upfront in the Steam store description.
If you're gonna use AI Art to make your art-centric game, at least have the guts and the dignity to be upfront about it and see how your sales do.
Now I don't think it's necessarily fair criticism to attack someone for taking a small idea from someone else and expanding it out into a full thing but I just think it's funny that this game appears to be exactly an expanded version of one of the minigames from Last Call BBS but with AI art.
It's also very funny, by which I mean intensely dishonest, that on the store page this person has a timelapse of himself doing the inking/tracing of the art but with the AI-generated reference hidden from view.
very funny slowing down the process video. nobody draws like this, there is zero understanding of dimension or form, no construction, nothing. not even kim jung gi would do something like draw the outline of an object first (perfectly) and then fill in details.
and you can tell in the finished art! the details kind of gesture at something but are just kind of blobs, the linework is messy and blurry, the geometry is nonsensical.
i can't imagine being the kind of person who is actually into gundam and appreciates the finer points of how mechs are designed and being fed this slop
also, it's interesting to note how in Last Call BBS, all the ball joints and connections and plastic bits are rendered as part of the models with matching lighting, material, and perspective, with visible interiors of pieces that will later be hidden when they fit together.
meanwhile the obviously AI generated game is like "uhhh I guess I cut apart this PNG and add circles???"
I decided to dig into this dev's twitter to see if they have any other 2D artwork published, and no, of course not. Listen, you don't knock out a game with like eight billion 2D mech assets if you've never drawn a mech before much less picked up a damn pencil.
He does have one previous game, a 3D vampire survivors thing with mechs. All I had to do was search the Unity Asset Store for "mech" to find the asset packs he used for everything lol
