itch.io

Don't let yourself get bullied by these people. Use whatever tools (AI or not) you want and don't get discouraged from doing non-free games with AI.

Most of the people complaining about AI art are using AI at work (or school) themselves.

Interesting approach and I respect the effort, but since Itch has a ton of new games every day and gives you next to no free exposure, I believe you won't get much usable data. Analyzing Steam tags or looking into Steam genre breakdowns might be more fruitful.

If you disagree with some tools that some creators are using, just pick another game. There are over a million games on itch alone.

You have published 11 games in 3 days. I'm just curious what your motivation to do so is.

Also how about combining ideas from those games into one game that is more fleshed out, cause right now all of them are very minimalist.

Cool! Good improvements over the previous UI.

Simple and good as side-entertainment.

I think the UI effects can become too overwhelming. Especially when you got like 50 drones and every click produces 20 animated lines it quickly becomes more of a visual noise which runs at <1FPS. I think the game would benefit from a different display of loot.

Also the cargo scan is quite slow when you are scanning like 15k items. I think your creation of so many UI elements in that scroll panel is adding to the slow down a lot, but I'm not sure these UI elements are all that necessary. I think most people won't be interested in seeing the details of the cargo scan item Nr. 8629.

Example image of the busy UI after a few clicks:

I like the theme, but this has a lot of errors. Selling company simply kills you immediately by saying you ran out of money. Having one sales guy triggers the "they sold the data" lawsuit like every 5 days, which can be devastating in the beginning and irrelevant when the company has grown. The stability and the related event does not seem to matter as stability always jumps to 70% within1 or 2 days and the tech debt just disappears.

Fixing these bugs  could improve the game quite a lot.

"And Linux and C? You don't have to rely on Linux to code C or C#. This is like saying: You need Linux to code in Python. You simply don't."

Yes, exactly. Which is why it would be absolutely asinine (and evil!) if there were people going around bullying creators for using Windows or "the wrong programming language". So, please stop going around bullying creators here, just because they use tools that you personally dislike. Look up statistics of AI use, the vast, vast majority of students are using some sort of AI in school and university. Of course you can be a Luddite till you die and hate against all people for using new tech that you protest for some weird reason, but what is the point of that? Just let people live as they want.

This looks nice. Did you develop that game further?

And if you had made a game with vbscript and then some bully came around hating against you and devs like you, because you are not using linux and C and that's supposedly makes you a worse creator, wouldn't you be annoyed too?

Also I simply don't believe that you aren't using AI at work. I bet when Google provides some AI summary to your search query, you at least glance over it. Additionally the new types of auto-completion rely on machine learning methods, which is as AI as LLMs.

You are using AI at work too, so don't be so hypocritical and stop bullying people.

Also it's 2025. We have AI and most people use AI at school or at work. Creators don't have to justify the tools they are using to haters.

This game does not auto-save?! 😐

Ah. That makes sense.

Nice, relaxing game with decent game loop to keep hands busy while listening to something.

I'm not a fan of the casual mass murder theme though.

What's up with the production per hour numbers? Some building might say like -2/hour, but then reduces the resources in the top line by 14/hour. Workers might have a +0.2/hour, but then I wait multiple days and no new worker arrives (despite having enough room). I don't get it.

I like it, but it is too easily broken with the Interest upgrade, which earns money far too quickly.

Also add more upgrades, more levels and some active mechanic and this is will be quite a good game.

I see the potential, but right now it feels quite frustrating. The fact that enemies level with you and become much stronger than you are (without a possibility to reduce arena levels) means that you run into a hard wall.

I got stuck on level 2 despite having the best weapon and armor that I could be crafting. Now I can't loot anything because all enemies defeat me. The only way out seems to be creating food but this basically is a "wait 30 minutes creating ingredients for a minor buff which gives you a slight chance to succeed".

Also the help screens should be accessible with a help-button and when you navigate to a new screen there should be a quick description instead of a full tutorial screen. Also maybe you should have ranch, farm, canteen and contracts be unlocked after some condition, just to prevent the high information density in the beginning.

It's a cool game and I think there are good ideas, but it feels somewhat unstructured. Example: You create dozens of cybersecurity organizations before you can buy your "entry-level motherboard".

At least you show that you aren't willing to admit even a single, objective point, when it disagrees with your agenda.

I'm not interested in continuing the conversation with you, if you simply dismiss everything in a very unproductive way. The other guy presented an article that was biased against AI, but, for the sake of argument, I still took the joules as the energy cost, applied them to my generation process and provided AAA gaming and the BigMac as a scale comparison to put things into perspective. I did this because people often do not know how much "1188 Joules" actually are.

1188 Joules sound like much, but if you have a 1m^2 solar power, it produces somewhere between 500000 and 750000 Joules in an hour on a sunny day in Germany. This puts things into perspective and helps people understand that image generation isn't "destroying the planet" or (as the other guy said) "ai is literally killing our planet. it takes 10x more power than anything you can conceive of."

You can't even acknowledge that my image generation cost (1188 Joules per pic) is tiny compared to gaming or a single BigMac (20 million Joules) and so you try to dismiss my point by claiming that somehow the energy costs are incomparable and saying "maybe people do not game at all?".  We both know that you understand how devastating this point is to the guy's "ai is literally killing our planet" argumentation. You know. I know. So ask yourself why you do this...

So, do you acknowledge that generating an image has a very low energy footprint?

To the other point: The claim is just begging the question, because learning is literally not "stealing". You could be calling it "plagiarizing" if the generated images were close reproductions of some original images, but this isn't even the case. The actual complaint against AI art a few years ago was that some artists's styles was imitated in some images, but this isn't even the case in this game. Or can you point to some artist who's style is clearly imitated here? 

And most importantly: It's neither illegal nor immoral to vaguely imitate some artist's art style, but in this case this isn't even some existing artist's art style! So what exactly(!) are you even complaining about?

Not gonna read your blog, especially when all you did was move the goal post and ignore all my points.

Here is a typical generation process on my Nvidia GTX 1070. The generation of an image takes usually 40-120 seconds. The peak drain is at 17% GPU. A AAA game takes much more and usually people play like 30 minutes to 3 hours instead of 40-120 seconds.

But maybe you are interested in the energy footprint. Ok. Your article says they estimate 4402 joules for a 1024x1024 image with 50-step generation. I typically produce 768x768 images at 16-steps or 32-steps (let's say 24 on average), which is quite typical for the most common model: SDXL variants. The journalists assume a linear energy cost. So this would mean it costs 1188 joules to generate one of my images.

According to this report the energy foodprint of a BigMac is around 20 megajoules (=20000000 joules) 2009Fall_Burger-Energy-Assessment-Report.pdf

So if you eat a BigMac, I could be generating over 16 thousand images and we would have consumed about the same amount of energy. Have you eaten a BigMac in your life? Two? More?

Are you starting to understand how utterly pointless your agenda and your bullying is?

Please, for the love of God, next time think critically about these topics, compare the scale, put things into perspective. Use your energy to improve the world meaningfully. Fight for good causes. Stop falling for hysteric, manipulative clickbait journalism.

You say "LOT of people" will provide art, even for free. Have you ever tried to create an unknown project with free online collaboration? Why don't you go ahead and give it a try...

Also do you know that running AI generation on my GPU takes less energy than running some AAA game? Are you bullying random gamers too, or just solo developers? If you were concerned about electricity consumption in the games industry, you'd be protesting AAA games, cause it costs more energy to run the games and they have hundreds of millions of players. I bet the energy consumption of a month of GTA5 is more than the total AI-image generation of solo developers over the last 10 years.

Please put these things in perspective and ask yourself what you are doing.

There isn't much content as far as I see, but it's still a few minutes of casual fun.

You should remove the Idle tag though.

Game developers are creators too and just because you use AI tools to speed up the process does not mean that there is no creativity involved.

When you give AI generation a try, you'll realize that you have to do quite a lot of work and selecting to get decent results.

Also this bullying of creators needs to stop.

Most of game developers who publish free games here are solo devs who simply do not have the budget to hire multiple artists for months to create these images. So there is no "defunding" happening as the budget that would pay the hypothetical artists simply does not exist.

Please add the option to reduce the volume of the music. Some songs are quite annoying.

Aside from that: I like the game. Quite cozy.

What's the song?

The game is nice, but could be much better if you added more juice (i.e. animations and effects) also some way to make the active gameplay more engaging.

Also please make the mouse controls such that click activates/deactivates mouse control and then the paddle simply follows the mouse position.

Glory to Arstotzka! 

I would love to see a different font. 3x4 pixels for most characters is too little. There are cool alternatives that emulate SNES fonts, which look great in pixel arts games.

This was quite enjoyable.

Is the "Advance to stage 2" the end of the game? I can't interact with any objects and can't buy anything after I advance.

Quite basic and short, but still fun.

There is a bug with the music, which has a very loud glitch sound at the end of the track.

I like the story and some of the texts are really good.

Max Pips on prestige make all the pip upgrades meaningless.

The game flip flops between a ton of clicking and a lot of idling. Personally I like games which are one or the other, or which allow for some hybrid playstyle.

What is "Resonance" (that gives me additional light on prestige)?

I think it's a good start. You should remove the timer and tease content that isn't in the demo, or you should give more warning so it's not abruptly over. Or you could make it into a soft-cap ending: After the timer is over the XP is reduced to 20%. Add some ascension system with unlockable perks and this could go quite a lot.

Maybe skip the 3D graphics or make them more drawn, so they don't clash as much with the 2D graphics. Sounds is fine.

Overall it's a small, nice game with much room for growth.

Bug: When the pin I'm dragging (or its shadow!) collide with another pin (or that pin's shadow), then the placement gets invalid.