itch.io

See that’s the thing. I don’t see it as “stealing.” When I tried to teach myself to draw, I picked some styles I liked and tried to copy those artists’ styles. I looked at their stuff, practiced, and in the end, produced similar (but inferior) content mimicking those styles. Generative AI is the same concept, but on a much larger scale. AI isn’t going to create an outright copy of someone’s art. It creates something based on the prompt its given with a similar style.

And you’re right, it is a tool rather than a replacement. I can use it to whip up a concept for a character quite easily, but human artists still have several edges that they had better take advantage of while they can:

1. AI is bad at doing human interaction/multiple people in a scene, etc.
2. AI can’t fine tune things. “Oh you want that character’s belt to be different? Okay let me completely redraw it with a bunch of other things different as well.”
3. AI goes full stupid on some things. I tried to createa water mage concept but it kept giving her elf ears, no matter what.
4. NSFW content. I mean AI can do this, but its far less accessible since nearly all of the freely available ones block it.

I think at the very core of all this, artists are simply just afraid of being replaced by AI. The truly good ones will continue to find ways to stand out instead of relying on a style that’s “generic anime.”

Ultimately, AI is inevitable, so why don’t people work with it rather than against it?

That’s too bad. It’s a legitimately useful creative option for people who lack artistic talent, just like RPG Maker is a creative tool to help people make games even if they lack programming talent.

Who are you, and what have you done with Hawkzombie? I mean, you can’t possibly be him, can you? The Hawkzombie I remember was always a really chill dude with the patience to review and stream some of the worst games ever made without hurling daggers at the games’ creators. (I can say this because he’s streamed/reviewed a few of my god-awful creations.)

I knew that, if I was only going to play one entry in this jam, it would have to be this one. I played it through to the very end, and it did not disappoint. It perfectly sums up my feelings about the current state of RPGMaker, which is why I didn’t even bother entering the jam this time around. I’ll probably be the only person posting here who agrees with the game’s message, but I’m okay with that. I’m glad not everyone is irrationally insane about this subject.

Anyway, about the game itself:

1. There was an annoying, but harmless bug where “changed” rooms showed their previous state when a fight triggers, and only updated after the battle concluded.

2. The battle system was both interesting and annoying at the same time. Encounters felt too frequent, and the weak points were never obvious. Not ONCE did I get to hit something in the nuts and have it count as a perfect hit.

3. I liked how each world had its own unique puzzle vibe going while still using a simple and easy to understand mechanic.

4. I literal lol’d at the credit roll.

11/10

Correction: You also referenced the Kobayashi Maru. Rating updated!

Just saw this in my itch.io feed and figured I’d take a peek. It looks really nice on the surface, however what might make me hesitate to actually use it is the fact that the lighting seems to use the normal/default blend mode with transparency. This makes it pretty difficult to see sprites underneath the lighting effects.

Also, it’s a shame but most of the RM community has been poisoned against AI. It’s very cool to see a RM developer who hasn’t completely lost their mind about what’s ultimately a helpful tool for making games.

Thanks for playing it. :)

I’ll agree that the final boss is suddenly “hard” compared to the rest of the game where you can’t die. I wanted to make the enemies damage the player back, but then I realized I’d need to display a HUD for the player’s HP, implement some way to recover/avoid damage/regen/etc, and that was outside the scope of low effort. I figured a final boss with death pits could still add some challenge while still maintaining the low effort feel.

With topics like these, you know it’s going to be a great jam! Looking forward to this.

Don’t spit on that thang!

Super late response, but nope! Sounds like you both just had the same “luck.” Poor Lucius. :(

No worries, it’s a pretty old meme. Robot Chicken even featured it briefly. :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X81KcwawIAE (It’s the very first few seconds, thankfully)

Thanks for playing it and giving it more air time than it probably deserved. Since people were confused about it, the “raise your rank from 3 to 1” was actually a reference to an ancient meme. I’m sad that nobody caught it. :(

Well I had to get Harold in somehow :D

The RPG Maker shooter idea is cool, but it definitely has that RPG maker jank to its controls that doesn’t work well with a genre that’s generally all about precise and careful movement. Luckily, this was a basic shmup instead of a bullet hell and none of the foes were overly complicated, so the controls didn’t impede the enjoyment all that much.

Each character having different shots was a cool concept, but never actually felt necessary to utilize so I just chucked fireballs the whole time.

Awesome! Making an AI-assisted game for laughs was something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, but never got around to it.

The game’s strong point was definitely the exploration, like seeing all the weird crap lying around the world. Unfortunately, the constant random encounters made this really tedious, even with the instant-kill superweapon. In fact, they were so annoying that I actually went into the game code and disabled them after awhile so I could explore freely. That said, the AI-generated enemy sprites were pretty cool. (Yes, I’m one of the rare people who doesn’t freak out over AI created assets)

Now, I’m not sure if it’s a player error or a bug, but I’m stuck at 80% on the decryption and there’s nothing left to interact with. Trying to find this missing 20% was what actually prompted me to delete the random encounters–and even then I never found the last part. Oh well, was cool while it lasted.

So good job overall, but if you decide to touch it up, please reconsider the use or at least frequency of the random encounters. :)

Thanks for playing it. :D

Glad you thought so! Be sure to buy the DLC and loot boxes to enhance the experience. (Now that I mention it, I wish I’d added parodies to stuff like that)

Thanks! When I first came up with the TP mechanic, it was meant as more of a failsafe for the magic users, so they wouldn’t end up out of juice with no way to recover when the boss appeared. I could’ve just stuck a recover all on the sparkly save/tutorial point, and in retrospect, maybe that would’ve been better. And yeah I suppose the encounter rate does force a lot of back-and-forth running to make them appear. The “battle every step” approach would’ve worked here.

Anyway glad you didn’t find it completely terrible!

Finished the whole thing just to see how the story played out. Therese as both a character and as an opponent was the only one that really required any strategy–the rest were just same-rotation kills. Also, not sure if you meant for Reid to be able to single-turn kill literally everybody, but he can! :D

The final boss also bugged out and kept going when I one-turn killed it–it healed itself for 2 hp, then when I killed it again the second turn, then the scripty bits took over as expected.

Was fun overall, nice job!

Crap, looks like I failed already :D

Maybe it’s because I left and returned to Dione’s house, but the only two events present on the house map are the two map transitions.

You’ve still got a few days, so I highly suggest fixing whatever bug prevents me from progressing after I can move around as Dione. There’s only a few people to talk to and places to visit, but none of them progress the story.

Update: Watching your video has shown me several gameplay bugs I somehow missed. (high accuracy abilities not working right, espresso not working at all, etc) Thanks for making that, I intend to fix those in an update soon. :)

Thanks, glad you liked it! I used to make the battles in my jam games a lot harder, but I learned over time that most people…aren’t fond of that. There was going to be an expert mode, but no time to tune for that. :(

Thanks for giving it a go! Yeah I mostly wanted to make fun at how “war on christmas” can be taken multiple ways combined with the whole santa-is-based-on-odin theory. The battle unfortunately didn’t have time to get tuned properly, so I’m just glad it was beatable. :D

It’s on the to-do list, along with adding content for the rest of the rooms. :)

Oops, turns out I forgot to edit the number, but if you pooped correctly (it shows as ending 9 in addition to the actual ending 9) then you got it. :D

A deep, meaningful psychological journey. This game changed my life forever.

Wow it was worse than I thought. Thanks for bringing them to my attention, I’ll brush them up within the next few days/weeks/months/etc :D

Aw I thought I proofed it pretty well. Do you remember what lines they were?

I would never inflict SS-style gameplay on anyone. Ever.

Thanks for playing it. Regarding the enemies, one thing I’ve learned from my past jam entries is that people don’t like being thrown in against hardmode ballbuster enemies right at the start, before they’re even used to the battle system, skills, etc. I always felt like FF4 did “hard” really well, so I tried to follow that model.

Wish I’d caught this one, too. Still was very informative and showed me another bug I missed–the compass orb (upper-right display) breaks on floor 2. Also regarding somebody’s comment, it’s not FF7 music. It’s by YouFulca, who I apparently forgot to credit. D: This game had so many bugs/oversights, so thank you for bearing with it for as long as you did.