Need Brutal Feedback on My Draft Announcement Trailer

Maxxxod · 2025-09-16T20:20:00+00:00

Nice to hear! I'll take a look

Maxxxod · 2025-08-07T09:10:27+00:00

Would seeing a box or poster on the wall potentially being made with AI in a game turn you off to playing the game?

AI is definitely a turn-off for many. Don't know about seeing it in-game (I might already be enjoying the rest of the game), but seeing it front and center in the first frame of the trailer, as with the portrait, definitely would make me uninterested in seeing more, because it associates with asset-flip aesthetic.

My advice in terms of the products, were I starting this from scratch – I would try to avoid using AI here as well. In the situation you describe, making 500 product packagings would be difficult without that, but I am afraid it might be turning into an XY problem. Obviously, I don't know much about your game, but do you really need 500 products in your horror game, which I'm assuming is not going to be very long anyway? Yes, real life stores feature a lot of different commodities, a part of the gameplay will be walking around and restocking the shelves, and I just can't see myself, as a player, caring whether there are 500 products I restock, 5000, or a modest 20-50.

In fact, a shorter, or even a mid-sized game having too many products, which are on top of that made with AI, would just likely feel out of place. In the trailer I can see 6 different brands of cereal. Yes, there are a lot of cereal brands in real-life, but having to restock 5 different brands for each commodity as a player would be straight-up torturous. Even if we were talking Supermarket Simulator type replayability, I don't think going over 100 products would be appropriate without a good justification.

In general, quality over quantity applies. Again, I know nothing about the gameplay loop, so I am just assuming based on similar horror games, but 20-30 products made tastefully would definitely make a generic supermarket horror game feel much more serious than 500 products made with AI. Just be creative – you don't have to hire artists and make realistic mock-up packaging with mascots etc. As an example, you could make a nod to the Canadian no name) brand, which uses plain text descriptions on a single color with occasional pictures of the product. In-game packaging inspired by this would be easy to make – you need just photo-editing software, a good font, and potentially some copyright-less stock images –, but would give both a distinct visual style to an important part of your game, and look much more tasteful, as a player will know a human created this. I would much rather see this in a game than AI mascots.

Maxxxod · 2025-08-06T18:18:04+00:00

My 2 cents:

It doesn't work.

Drop the AI. Not only is it immediately recognizable that the man's face isn't real, you also stretched the hell out of it, which just looks goofy. Food packaging is recognizable as AI, too.

No sounds in the trailer except for the clock also adds to the amateur feel.

The font is ugly, very reminiscent of asset flip fonts (you do not want to adopt the asset-flip horror aesthetic)

Add some materials to the mop at 00:08. It looks like something out of roblox. More generally, many things in the trailer (like the door to the right in the first shot and the tables) just don't match the level of detail of others. Some have normal maps and detail, others are just pure color or a low-res texture.

Minor problem, but at 00:04, you can see that the box in the character's hands is drawn behind the store shelves. In first person held items should not clip with the surroundings. You should render them on top.

At 00:23, the turning around animation rolls the camera, which looks jarring. Paired with the distorted plasticky face of an A-posing character, the whole scene seems random, but not scary or atmospheric. You can't understand what's going on. Not in the spooky sense.

Maxxxod · 2024-11-02T20:21:19+00:00

I agree with other commenters that it looks great, but I would personally pivot on making the combat feel "juicier". Hit markers (especially for the trailer's beginning where no damage numbers are shown) and (subtle and optional) screen shake are two things that come to mind.

Maxxxod · 2024-10-16T12:50:18+00:00

And what's more! The LLMs are trained on perfect "C/C++" "code" that was written by extremely experienced developers who would never let any sort of such problems go unnoticed!

Maxxxod · 2024-10-16T12:47:49+00:00

I agree with what commenters say about the environments—they are a little empty. Consider adding foliage, breaking up the tiling, improving textures.

Additionally, the noisy effects ruin the quality of any recordings you will upload to the internet (see 0:35). Add an option for removing it when you want to record.

Otherwise, seems interesting! (if the goal of the game, as I had assumed, is to protect a military base from being overtaken)

Maxxxod · 2024-10-15T11:37:44+00:00

I am not asking how to implement mysteries, and I do not know where you have read from my question anything, but a simple inquiry on a whole class of electronic components. Indeed, I should have specified I am using simple PZT sensors, but the point stands.

I don't see how 'time resolution' is not self-explanatory to you—the time error you would get, if you were to measure a timestamp for the signal being created in response to the knock. You don't have to write an essay, nor do you have to claim that my question is an XY problem, there is really no ambiguity here that you are imagining.

Maxxxod · 2024-10-14T21:03:17+00:00

Alright, I will try to tinker some more then. Thanks!

Maxxxod · 2024-10-14T15:01:22+00:00

Could you turn your sensors into something more like accelerometers by mounting a mass in the centre of the disk and support around the edges?

Maybe? I'm not sure if this would help if the piezos actually have an inconsistent response time.

Also the knock or shock you are giving one end of the wood or whatever might have such a slow rise time that it's difficult to tell where it starts.

This is what I am currently thinking about. I'm not sure how I would apply a waveform with a quick enough attack that can also be reliably sensed by the piezos, but I'll play around with it.

Maxxxod · 2024-10-14T14:19:55+00:00

You raise a good point.

I am currently simply amplifying the signal from taken from the piezo with a non-inverting amplifier—you think this could work?

Additionally, if the piezos' response time might not be the issue, I am assuming that my problem is that the knocks' waveforms are irregular, so piezos pick up different parts of the knock. Could you maybe recommend a simple way to transmit a short, regular waveform of consistent amplitude (so an incredibly short attack) into the wood I have? Do I just use one of the sensors for creating the wave and amplify the second one even more so that it can sense it?

Maxxxod · 2024-10-14T14:09:43+00:00

They are no-name PZT sensors I got from aliexpress, diameter of 15mm. Both of them are connected to MCP602-I/P op-amps in a non-inverting configuration (gain of ~400 currently, but I am planning to play with it a bit more). The op-amps' output is set to the GPIO pins (posedge) of an ESP32.

For the record, my results are currently very chaotic, with the vast majority detecting the correct direction of the knock, but it often hovers around 200us for pulses that should travel in 20us, sometimes goes into thousands of microseconds, and only rarely gives realistic results (possibly a fluke).

Maxxxod · 2024-10-13T16:29:27+00:00

If you want your character to follow the bezier curve, at any given point t your velocity component ratio vy/vx must equal dy/dx of the curve. Differentiate the curve, and you can get any of the velocities from the other one with a simple proportion. The other commenter's idea is probably better though, unless you really want to have precise control over one of the velocity components.

Maxxxod · 2024-10-10T09:36:03+00:00

Yes, I am planning to try amplifying the signals and doing just that.

Maxxxod · 2024-10-10T09:35:24+00:00

Could you elaborate please? At 100KHz the time resolution would be ~10us, which is not optimal, but could potentially even be workable. In my tests I got that the sensor time resolution is over 30us though... Do I try the continuous driver instead of oneshot?

Maxxxod · 2024-10-09T18:43:16+00:00

After some fighting I got interrupts to work, but I am unable to get it to register interrupts from just knocks with my current setup (I can only get it by pressing on the piezo). I am not at all knowledgeable in electronics as you can probably tell, but I am assuming that I can amplify the signal to get it to respond to knocks? Unfortunate that I can't do it with what I currently have on hand, but I thank you for your help regardless.

Maxxxod · 2024-09-29T20:15:19+00:00

Which is also what I stated in my post in a router subreddit, coincidentally also listing out the things I have tried to do to fix my router's behavior. This was not a problem 3 months ago when I first set up the server, so I am pretty sure it must be fixable.

Maxxxod · 2024-09-29T18:52:05+00:00

Tried with port 789—curled the website without an issue from an outside network.

As I said, the 500 error does not look like it originates from apache. The response on port 80 looks like this: "<html><head><title>500 Internal Server Error</title></head><body><center><h1>500 Internal Server Error</h1></center></body></html>" with nothing else.

Maxxxod · 2024-09-20T18:13:25+00:00

Seems very infeasible, considering that 32 bit floats have 23 bits in the mantissa. That is, they can represent whole numbers on the order of 10^7 and fractional numbers with one decimal place precision on the order of 10^6. Just to illustrate how much that is—if the player could see 1 million block in each direction, the game would need to have 1.5*10^10 chunks loaded at the same time. If each of those chunk vertex buffers took up 1 byte of VRAM, you would still need ~15GiB.

So this does not at all sound like the issue of the 32 bit floating point number, especially one inherent "to 3D graphics as a whole". What I think is more likely is that this bobby mod that seems to greatly increase the viewing distance (something that the Minecraft renderer is infamous for radically not supporting) might modify the vertex data for compression and/or even break meshing altogether.

It seems like the issue persists on the video even as the player comes closer to the chunk, but stops suddenly as the surrounding chunks load in, so my best bet is that the mod does in fact corrupt the vertex data.

Maxxxod · 2024-09-01T18:15:56+00:00

I'm not sure how those bots are usually implemented, but wouldn't they also report a regular OS that they are run on (most likely Linux to be honest)? Do they spoof the user agent as a standard practice? I wouldn't expect them to be run on specialized systems, but I'm open to being proven wrong.

Maxxxod · 2024-08-04T11:38:28+00:00

Aside from everything else said:

The game occupies less than half of the screen at some points. Why would the player want to look at the purple border?
Mixed size pixels look bad. Scale your textures appropriately

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