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(+2)

I'm sorry, but it's not really my cup of tea.

In the preview of your game, it showed that last screenshot, so I was really hyped up for a visual feast, but then once the game loaded... it showed the actual art style and I was very disappointed to be honest. Why do you use that last screenshot as your preview just to hype up potential players about amazing graphics when that is clearly not the used art style. It seems a bit click-baity to be honest.  Anyway, once ingame, the green scenery looks cool, but the rest is just decent, it all kind of lacks charm. I think you mentioned that nearly all art assets are AI generated, so it just lacks that human touch and feels loveless. To add to that feeling, there is that very strange AI voice. Now, I know it may seem like I'm just a big adversary of artificial intelligence, but that's really not the case: it has its place, but I was really not a fan of how it was utilised here. Potentially because I had such vast expectations of seeing the thumbnail screenshots.


Now to the positive: 

I love your camera controller. Movement felt smooth, rotation worked, too and it really felt like one of those city builders. Definitely a great job on the scripting side there.

The leaderboard was a nice touch and I admire how you set up and entire backend just for that service in a game jam entry! Honestly, I've seen a few entries in this jam that do this and it's quite remarkable. Do you use your own machine, do you buy a host somewhere or how do you utilise this service?

I also liked the scene transitions and the other "little things" that add liveliness to your game like the clouds' movement etc. It just adds that sense of charm to games in my opinion.

Finally, I want to mention the scales animator which is just awesome. Hovering over one button makes it scale from one side to the other, stopping the hover makes it return to its default state, etc. Very good job!


=> To sum up, I hope I didn't come off as a hater or anything like that. Judging from the other reviews here, nearly everyone seems to really enjoy the art. But I just have to be honest and say that I was not a big fan of it, which may be caused by the thumbnail screenshot that felt a bit like a clickbait to me. The game is made with love, that much is clear by the charming little things like animations, polish, leaderboard, smooth scripting and so on, but that love is sadly strongly diminished by the use of AI art assets

(1 edit) (+2)

Thanks for the honest feedback.

I mean, I get the clickbait thing, but that's just the background for the login scene, it's fairly standard to exaggerate the splash art of a game in order to provoke a certain "feel", the obvious gamble here is that it can also provoke false expectations, like in your case.

Regarding usage of AI, which seems to be the basis of the negative part: This is mostly a proof of concept of what AI is capable (or rather, what can I develop with it, as a hobby, in 30 days), hence the honesty on what AI was used for. There is no way I would have developed enough narratives for the dilemmas, voices, models, art, etc without it, specially given I had 0 prior experience in blender and near 0 in the other arts.

But thanks for the thoroughly developed opinion.