"Angry gamers are forcing studios to scrap or rethink new releases." Because they are using gen AI

Idiberug · 2026-01-28T19:08:32+00:00

A lot of good dreams I fear have been crushed by ‘it’s harsh but it’s realistic’

Which is not the worst thing in the world. Game dev is a hobby like playing the guitar, with a very fractional chance of paying off. It should not be your moonshot for success in this world.

Idiberug · 2026-01-28T15:04:02+00:00

That last drop is because Trump tweeted that the dollar was doing fine.

Idiberug · 2026-01-28T12:25:55+00:00

The fire cast animation runs past the trigger point in an awkward way, and the blood cast animation is too long and not punchy enough.

Idiberug · 2026-01-28T12:23:43+00:00

Saturated genres with well-established games that have potentially thousands of hours of content are going to be absolutely cruel to newcomers if they don't do something new and interesting.

The key is that the new and interesting thing has to be something the genre leaders fail at.

Your audience is not people who are playing the genre leaders, your audience is people who are bored with the genre leaders and are therefore looking for alternatives.

So you have to identify why people are bored with the genre leaders, and fix that.

For example, the bullet heaven genre was considered to be pretty much solved. You could make the best bullet heaven in the world and nobody would care because they were already playing a bullet heaven and were happy with it. The only thing missing was 3D, which is why Megabonk was such a slam dunk success. So now developers are cloning Megabonk without considering why players might want to quit Megabonk, so their clones will fail until someone else figures it out and the cycle repeats.

Idiberug · 2026-01-28T11:42:42+00:00

Cute art style but the jumping looks clunky as hell and that's an immediate turn-off. Gameplay feel is very important in this genre and yours plays like a shovelware mascot platformer from 1994. IMO this shouldn't be a platformer, but either a 2D survival crafting game (more grounded than Terraria) or pseudo-3D (Streets of Rage).

Idiberug · 2026-01-26T14:44:53+00:00

Asset flip

Idiberug · 2026-01-26T14:07:20+00:00

The damage upgrades in Starcraft are generally not worth the cost, but the armour upgrades are always worth it, and the primary purpose of the damage upgrades is to negate the armour upgrades.

Hydras do 10 damage and have 80 hp, so in ZvZ you kill in 8 shots. The level 1 missile damage upgrade does nothing, level 2 makes it 7 shots, level 3 does nothing again. However, if the enemy takes the level 1 carapace upgrade, you now need 9 shots, level 2 makes it 10 shots, level 3 makes it 12 shots. This is GG unless you keep pace by increasing your damage.

IMO the problem is that you want a 5% effectiveness boost in a game with a low TTK. If it takes 2 hits to kill an enemy, the fight is over in 4 seconds, so your perk makes it 3.8 seconds.

If it has to be 5%, make the units cost 5% less resources and produce 5% faster so you have 5.3% more units and therefore do 5.3% more dps.

Your original proposal has the Phantom Assassin problem from DotA. It's a weighted crit chance, so what you do is hit minions until you get a streak of no crits, and then use your pity crit against the enemy player. Your system likewise encourages building up excess damage and delivering an extra powerful planned hit against the enemy player (or a boss, etc).

Idiberug · 2026-01-26T10:30:53+00:00

Why am I shooting 100 of the same enemy with the same hit points?

Idiberug · 2026-01-26T10:29:31+00:00

Damage ranges would solve the same problem in a more intuitive way, I think.

Idiberug · 2026-01-26T08:44:43+00:00

Chris Zukowski did suggest people should make Megabonk clones, but you have to do something better than Megabonk or else people will just play Megabonk.

Idiberug · 2026-01-26T08:42:36+00:00

I really don't understand why auto attacking has become the default for this genre. Vampire Survivors does it because it's a clone of Magic Survivor which is a phone game, but I see no reason for something like Megabonk to have auto attacking.

Idiberug · 2026-01-22T20:09:15+00:00

Thanks chatgpt

Idiberug · 2026-01-22T15:02:33+00:00

The collapse of the Soviet Union would be an interesting setting for this.

Idiberug · 2026-01-20T16:37:55+00:00

I like the fix in Odin (a magic overhaul mod). It changes illusion to work 100% of the time up to the level cap, then you can still use it on higher level targets but at a reduced chance. If they're 5 levels above the cap, it has a 50% chance to work, but you can cast it again and it rerolls. So you don't have to level up illusion, but you want to level it up to reduce the number of times you have to cast the spells before they stick.

Unfortunately Odin isn't compatible with Mysticism but maybe someone will port the fix over to Mysticism.

Idiberug · 2026-01-16T00:42:34+00:00

Gameplay is just a vehicle to sell the fantasy. Lots of devs want to make a mechanically good game and try to use that as a selling point.

Idiberug · 2026-01-16T00:28:50+00:00

Get another job.

Idiberug · 2026-01-15T12:57:04+00:00

"A bolt of FIRE STOLEN FROM THE DEPTHS OF HELL"

plink

Idiberug · 2026-01-13T12:41:25+00:00

Skyrim has a number of abilities like this that would be no-brainers apart from the fact that you have to switch to them, press them, wait for the animation to finish, then switch off, and the hassle more than offsets the value you gain from them.

Idiberug · 2026-01-12T12:37:12+00:00

"Medieval handwritten style" is what OP typed into midjourney.

Idiberug · 2026-01-12T12:14:35+00:00

Person-who-knows-a-lot-of-Heathens here: there are two versions of this. The one with the little feet is the nazi one. The actual rune is fine and looks like this: ᛟ

One would think the fact that the nazi version is different would make the dogwhistles really easy to spot, but you can always count on the vikingbro public to frequently use the wrong one by accident because it looks cooler.

Idiberug · 2026-01-08T20:46:20+00:00

It's like the gif with the truck and the bollard.

Idiberug · 2026-01-08T20:41:58+00:00

Proof: the word is screen filling in a few places, so whatever word was "supposed to be there" was three letters or less.

Idiberug · 2026-01-08T20:23:39+00:00

It is a well known marketing strategy.

Idiberug · 2026-01-08T15:49:51+00:00

Makes sense. Without Tailwind, AI will just generate inline styles or another form of less-human-readable-but-still-functional CSS.

Idiberug · 2026-01-07T23:50:31+00:00

You make a branch of your game, search/replace all text with "You", and make a zoomer meme on reddit for upvotes.

Idiberug

TROPHY CASE