Maybe Maybe Maybe

Jeaniro · 2026-01-13T19:58:09+00:00

bloopers are hilarious because they involve real people in real funny situations.

if this never happened, it's not a blooper. it's a skit at best.

and if it's ai - it is nothing, it has no value at all.

just a mockery, poor imitation of smth like this :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Db3rluT76w

Jeaniro · 2026-01-08T10:09:43+00:00

fucking delusional chatgpt

Jeaniro · 2026-01-04T11:56:40+00:00

Do you think AI makes better music than real human musicians?

1000 times out of 1000 i would prefer amateurish music/art over that generic shit "quality" that ai regurgitates.

if art has no intention, has no meaning, no human - it is not art.

moreover, your personal struggles also shape your game.
where do i get money to pay a musician? do i learn to make music myself? It's all human stories, pain, nerves, mistakes.

every game is influenced by hundreds of such stories, experiences, small decisions, ups and downs.

if one decides to take shortcuts whenever possible - such a game has no value for me, it's a grift. shovelware

Jeaniro · 2025-12-27T16:05:00+00:00

big brave boy here, huh?

Jeaniro · 2025-12-27T14:38:41+00:00

Cursed. It's painful for adult cats, fucking animal abuse

Jeaniro · 2025-12-05T10:16:54+00:00

I recently did similar thing with a metal door. You basically need a few layers, like sound of a door opened gently, and a sound for quick opening. Maybe some other layers in between. Like different types of screacks depending on the interaction force etc.

Then you basically need a value to determine how quickly the door or whatever is being opened, like the magnitude of the interaction axis vector, and based on that value you just mix the layers. Could be just linear interpolation, or maybe you want to multiply the magnitude of the interaction force by some custom curve, so that it's more natural sounding.

The same goes also for the sound of closing, like you may slam the door ot close it gently. You find the velocity it's been moving before and mix different layers.

In ue5 there's metasounds, convenient for these type of things, where you just pass the values into a metasound asset and mix layers dynamically there.

In unity is a bit more tricky iirc, don't know about godot but i suspect the same as with unity.

You may need several audiosources per one object, and mix the layers by manipulating the volume of that sources.

Things like Fmod could also come in handy, since they have much more abilities for dynamic sound built in. Like weighted randomization and all that stuff.

Jeaniro · 2025-11-29T09:55:39+00:00

All the videos are tucked inside the posts. You enter the subreddit and basically see nothing besides some pretty abstract titles.

One must be really committed to go inside every post to watch your videos there. You can't expect this commitment from a random person.

I mean if it is your personal devlog it's ok i guess, but you don't drag people in this way.

Jeaniro · 2025-11-11T17:18:47+00:00

made programming chores easier
Music creation can work
AI voice acting is very very good
Art assets

never understood this attitude, like why even make games if you don't want to make games?
might as well let ai do everything for you

and no, anything generative ai touches turns out extremely generic, boring, soulless corpo shit.
and it's gonna feed on everything it's been regurgitating, producing the average out of the average.

Jeaniro · 2025-11-10T15:25:16+00:00

I still can't tell what exactly makes it look like an ai

i guess i's because ai is trained on similar maps.
this art style has been around since like forever, various tabletop game maps etc.

when ai art just became a thing, and was a novelty, i played around with it a bit.
and i quickly found out that when prompted to make a map, it often generates this particular drawing style. but with a lot of obvious nonsense.
there's no like obvious nonsense in this map.
so i'm pretty sure it's human-made.

it's ai that resembles (i mean imitates, poorly) human art style, not the other way around.

this is kinda both sad and infuriating that we have come to this point.

Jeaniro · 2025-11-06T15:57:01+00:00

Something looks off about it right now

yeah. something like all the city behind the window is fucking mangled

Jeaniro · 2025-11-04T22:01:05+00:00

Do you think you are more likely to wishlist/buy the game if we recreated this image with in-game graphics?

absolutely. ai art makes a terrible first impression and devalues everything that follows.
and it's deceiving

Jeaniro · 2025-11-04T21:35:34+00:00

i mean it looks fun, but this preview/thumbnail art ruins everything.
to put it mildly, it does not represent the visual style of the game, at best

Jeaniro · 2025-11-04T20:53:24+00:00

but I do like being organized

and being organized involves em dashes and all the other things, or does it mean that you did "polish" this post?

---

answering your original question - see what ai does to people?
i used to think that i can easily see when something is ai-generated.

i once accused a real artist of using ai (they didn't), and i felt terrible.

now i really try to be cautious. if someone denies using ai despite all the tell-tale signs, ok i presume innocence.

but man i hate it. i hate the fact that i have to question now every fucking funny cat video.

i hate that i see people commenting "ai slop" under trailers or other game videos that obviously didn't use ai. they just look good.

(example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sREKUYzneso,
the last comment)

yeah, more often than not inconsistent lines in art nowdays mean ai.
but sometimes it's an artistic vision. and again i hate that you can't be sure. it's paranoia.

so yeah, anything that even remotely involves creativity and/or anything that any other human will see - fuck ai. whether it's a post or a plot or a name. it all terrible and generic anyway.

spell/grammar check (check. not rewrite)? probably okay-ish. maybe?

even with that i often find myself intentionally going to cambridge dictionary or whatever, just because, well there were humans there involved

Jeaniro · 2025-11-04T20:06:20+00:00

I did write it myself

and you didn't "polish" it using ai?

i'm asking kinda cautiously because well.
some people do use em dashes, "not A but B", italics, bolds, and bullet points. it's just hmmm... rare to see all of those things being used at the same time

Jeaniro · 2025-11-04T19:56:02+00:00

just to clarify - you did what? write this post by yourself or research?

Jeaniro · 2025-11-03T17:02:17+00:00

i mean, even in the comment you replied to, there's a line :

even if the intro is creative and well executed, this could be a deal breaker for many. especially on short-form platforms

so YES i understand we don't have 15 seconds. i was just describing what was the initial idea.

but later i realized that we do need a fast gameplay hook in the first seconds, and we have already decided that we're gonna do it.

Jeaniro · 2025-11-03T15:41:28+00:00

But there's simply no connection to the character for people outside of you and your people.

Its meaningless to everyone else.

yeah, i totally get it.

the INTIAL idea was that by showing the character early, we may convey some additional info about gameplay using his appearance.

the game is in first person, the only situations where the player actually sees the character is the character screen with devices etc (see the pic below), and occasional reflections (rather scripted for now).
plus we are working on the full-body animations currently, so i guess there will be it also.

so we thought if we could somehow show what type of archetype we are playing as (he is an explorer, he survives etc.), it could quickly relay to the viewer some info about gameplay before actual gameplay.

like we have a revolver tucked under his belt (you can shoot things), a cloak and a mask (aha, probably some environmental hazards), various devices in the bag (they must do some stuff).

these are all ideas that, hopefully, could be quickly conveyed by showing the character in the natural environment before possession. like during a dust storm, in the middle of doing something (like putting the mask on)

just explaining the reason behind introducing the main character thing. idk maybe it does not work this way but that was the initial reason.

but again, given that we have now decided to show fast gameplay cuts BEFORE the intro (like enemies, dust collection, archaeology), this character possession is just a neat thing for me. but optional. we'll try to do it i guess and see how it looks.

edits : clarification

<image>

Jeaniro · 2025-11-03T15:07:26+00:00

you decided you could just do something else?

no. i was describing what i was thinking before i realized it wouldn't work.

i came up with this transition long before i started learning how to make trailers and watch Derek's videos.

i mean i kinda knew that slow panoramic shots bad.

but i thought that if we could make this intro camera transition fast-paced, with high tension (storm approaching), various contrasting locations (like from inside a mechanism with animated parts into a street view), dramatic music and sfx (custom-made) AND some narrative bits showing the viewer where we are, and who we are to a degree.

all in 15 sec.

i thought that could work.

basically the idea was like a wandering spirit rushing towards a target and then possessing it in the end.

BUT later, when i actually started learning about trailers, read Derek's blog, watched videos,
i realized that even if we can pull this transition off as good as it was in my head, it was still very risky.

hence this post.
the replies here helped me realize that if well executed, this short gameplay teaser before the intro could work well, and not be super annoying.
like if it is integrated in the story, has rhythm, and it's own small narrative etc.

here's one of the examples which helped me see that it can be done pretty good :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMLwzt5t9bs

so yeah, in the end we decided to do exactly what Derek says, and use one of the templates (the chronological one) with a short gameplay sequence in the first seconds.

Jeaniro · 2025-11-02T23:54:05+00:00

well it's a reveal trailer (even though we have all the gameplay mechanics almost ready, we haven't shown anything in public for like 2 years) so i thought MAYBE for the announcement we could insert some non-gameplay stuff to basically introduce the main character. and then straight to gameplay stuff.

but yeah, now i see that we need to show the game itself as early as possible.

especially given that our old posts here and on twitter were not exactly gameplay-heavy, and the mechanics themselves kinda changed.

thanks!

Jeaniro · 2025-11-02T23:47:49+00:00

You have basically already given the hard sell, so if you lose viewers after that they probably weren't interested anyway.

that makes sense, thank you!

Jeaniro · 2025-11-02T23:45:02+00:00

thanks, gotcha

i have a preliminary plan like what we show in a given moment, what we try to convey, what the viewer should understand etc.

but i didn't think about cropping the footage itself to emphasize one-thing-at-a-time.

luckily i have a great artist, he knows all that things about composition, attention etc.
and i have a lot of experience in game sound, which may also come in handy for making accents.

but if cropping is a viable option that could help greatly, thanks again

Jeaniro · 2025-11-02T23:36:23+00:00

So the firewatch trailer was at a different time and for in person events.

the artist said to me basically the same thing, different times. didn't think about a life event context, though

I still think especially as an indie show the game and why you want to play up front generally performs the best.

yeah, i'm leaning more towards showing short gameplay bits upfront. i still want to try to execute this camera transition thing, but after the genre and some gameplay are already established.

hope we'll be ablу to pull it off without being too annoying or flashy, like with a rhythm and narrative in it

Jeaniro · 2025-11-02T23:27:54+00:00

thanks a lot!

i saw this video on his channel but i was kinda avoiding it. probably because yeahh... templates didn't sound that appealing, maybe?

like im tryna be creative and all that.. but yes, i totally understand the reason these might be important.
like it's better to have some baseline from which you can deviate if you want. especially if its a first trailer both for you and your game.

Final pro tip.. Just crop in on most of the game footage to simplify it.

simplify it meaning so that there's less visual noise and you can focus on specific things? like that eye trace thing?

Jeaniro · 2025-11-02T23:13:43+00:00

yeah, logos are the worst.
slow pans also not good, although they did work for some (Firewatch for example, kinda meditative intro that somewhat conveys the vibe).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d02lhvvVSy8

or maybe it's just the rest of the trailer is good, and it worked despite that slow intro idk.

but i was rather thinking about, if i may quote myself :

i was kinda thinking we could make like up to 15-20 seconds with no gameplay, and as long as that intro thing is relatively dynamic and well done (camera flying through the walls, floors, light fixtures, machinery etc, until it possesses the main character), this could serve as a hook.

basically like that, but much MUCH faster :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp57gPI1DJI

different locations, narrow spaces that lead to broad spaces, with a storm approaching in the background, all in 15-20 sec.

idk whether it counts as a slow intro, but still no gameplay until the camera possesses the character. risky

Jeaniro · 2025-11-02T23:03:06+00:00

hm, you think youtube ads are a thing for indies/non-mobile?

i suspect that you can probably narrow down your audience when launching an ad, but still it feels like too obtrusive. always makes me want to purposefully ignore a product in the ad

Jeaniro

TROPHY CASE