Ethan

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

Hrmmm, so obviously using a reference isn't terrible. Tracing, depending on the degree it's done, isn't THAT bad considering. It's that, like, there's so much mech stuff out there that has these sorts of poses they could have used instead. You could probably get away with it just by adding some extra lines and flourishes without too much extra work.

Also you can see how he's tracing some of the more nonsensical lines the AI generated and then erasing them when it's obvious they look bad lol

the parts themselves not having thick outlines while the sprue and joints do is inflicting me with some kind of ailment

Like, I get it, I'm also a game dev with a specialization in programming and design, not art. But 1 I wouldn't make an art centric game solo, that just sounds like asking for trouble*, and 2 if you're gonna use AI, be honest about it.

The worst part is that if he had been using the AI as an inspiration instead of tracing he'd probably actually be good enough after making so much of it to design his own mech art from scratch. By just tracing without thinking critically about the structure he likely hasn't learned as much about drawing.

• just remembered I DID start an art centric game project I was really passionate about a few years ago and I abandoned it without making much progress because it took me a week to make my first base character art and I needed to make a bunch of variants before that was even really usable. So my point still stands, but I too am an idiot

I agree this has the telltale flavor of slop, but I have two big problems with this chain:

• I have no classical art training at all, no understanding of form, etc. I'm self-taught like a lot of devs. I do draw by starting with an outline and filling it in! I don't think that's necessarily suspicious. (Again, this still looks like Slop. But my timelapses look similar)

• Buying and using premade assets is just fine, that's what they're for.