justdaveisfine

Depends on what’s being sold and where its at.

People set up honor systems like these for plant seeds, books, wood logs, etc and they all seem to work alright.

I couldn’t see it working well for anything easily resellable (with decent profit) as someone would likely exploit it.

Sometimes you do plan ahead but then the delicious smell hits you and then the stomach suggests a tasty new plan.

It took skill to do it right. If you hit it too hard, it got worse, so the smack needed finesse.

One that gets me is when they go ‘ok now let’s put this into the fridge for 24 hours and then it’ll be ready for tomorrow!’

Ok well I’m hungry now so we’re skipping that step.

All of mine did but got increasingly quirkier over time. Sometimes you needed to hit it on top to get the picture looking right. Audio got crackly. The component cables needed a fine touch to display the picture correctly.

That sort of fun stuff.

(Assuming you’re in the US) Back in the day, banks used to have them, you could just walk in and exchange currency without a fee.

That’s how I got a collection of $2 dollar bills.

I had a coworker who would easily pass as a teenager even though she was in her early ~30’s, so yeah, I could see why the doctor might have assumed that. Some people just carry that young look.

With all these studio closures and layoffs, its hard to imagine what will be left of the industry here in a few years.

The first picture has a tree growing out of concrete, then placed in a grass patch in the next picture so…

Its been awhile since I’ve read the story but as I recall, the first two pigs built their houses poorly because they were being lazy and didn’t see the need.

The story morale is more or less that bad things can just come along and wreck your day, so you shouldn’t laze about when things are good, but should prepare yourself for future hardships.

Dang this happens to me all the time lol.

Yeah that’s the scene. I was definitely off but it seems this was the line I was thinking of:

“In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”

Maybe its about time for another reread, it has been awhile.

I’m weirdly reminded of the neuromancer book where the protagonist remarks on a bartender who looks rough but doesn’t bodymod himself to look good. He says something like “When good looks are so cheap, there’s something beautiful about being ugly.”

I probably butchered that quote but I can’t find my copy of the book so it is what it is lol.

Anyways it stuck out as a profound thought and it definitely rings true now. It may not be pretty but its genuine and that’s the most important part of art.

It probably was the dev.

If I had to take a shot in the dark, they may have felt very insecure about their own art, started using AI, then made a post to basically say look how much ‘this person’ improved and their art is ‘good’ now, hoping to get a second look or praise.

Which I get - Publishing art can be weirdly difficult and sometimes you get bad feedback or even no feedback at all, leading you to over-analyze your own work. AI is seen as (and sold as) an easy route to “professional” results.

I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. If it wasn’t you, someone would have eventually pointed out the AI art at which point it would (probably) have to be addressed.

If that dev still lurks here (and making assumptions that it was the dev), I hope they gain confidence in their own art and continue to work on games if that’s their passion.

Sorry I forgot to reply to this.

Its hard to nail down specifics with general awful parts but I have a few notes on why some things get to be a little janky:

• Many mechanics/systems in survival crafting games have to work in all scenarios. Because of this, you can’t (usually) be 100% certain its always going to happen as intended.

…For example, let’s say you have a treasure chest, and when the player interacts with it, the game plays a fancy animation of the character opening and while the inventory screen fades in. But as these chests get placed around the world, you can’t guarantee they’ll always be reachable, at the right angle, or the player doing something dumb (like standing on it while opening it)

Now those are all ‘solvable’ but it starts to become a ‘just optimize the production’ in Factorio style problem where you’re chasing edge cases. Even then, players will find new ways to break foolproof designs.

The general solution is just ‘keep it simple’ where box pops open (or just makes a sound) and a UI pops up. Not great… And sometimes kind of sucks.

• Secondly, many of these games are online/multiplayer. This normally shouldn’t be a huge deal but networking has a few quirks that tend to show up. For example, networking infamously doesn’t like replicated physics. Games like Rocket League are actual magic on how they figured out how to make that work.

Anyways the end result is a lot of fairly static world objects, and when you do get physics, they tend to have a lot of potential jank involved if you’re not hosting the server.

• Regarding UI, making a good UI is honestly a difficult and rare skillset. A lot of engines have some built-in tools (You most definitely have used an Unreal Engine Uniform Grid Panel at some point) that work out of the box but sometimes have quirks or design issues that crop up as games get more advanced.

Making it work for gamepads and KB/M, readable on big screens as well as SteamDecks, and do background tasks like asking the server what my character’s inventory or whatever is tends to be a feat when it all works correctly.

• Open world (which many of these games are) means a lot of content which means a lot of work for sometimes diminishing results. I think it was a developer for Destiny(?) who once said you might work on an area for a month only for the player to fly through it with a Sparrow in like, ~2 seconds.
• A lot of survival crafting games tend to be early access. This is ‘fine’ but some very vocal players are ravenous and burn through years of content in a solid weekend and still want more. The Early access effect is easy to see in these games where some mechanics are not well thought out or abandoned in later updates because rather than reiterating on them, devs are pushed to move onto new content, so you end up with weirdo design decisions or new game directions or whatever.

You also have devs who perceive something as more popular or more true to their vision or whatever and neglect certain aspects while focusing on others.

• Basebuilding has quirks, and its name is navmeshes. AI has to navigate through buildings using a mapped out mesh, basically. When you handcraft a location for enemies, you can tell them to do specific things like jump handrails or step off this platform to fall behind this fenced area, etc. When players can freely build bases, you need the AI to account for a lot of ridiculous things the player might have done, like build massive dirt walls in Valheim, which causes the AI’s logic to stumble.

This has a side effect too though as now your AI has to account for terrain/location/etc before considering to do things. (Unless you built two different AI logic sets for each enemy, which is oof) Such as, the player is in range, but is the player standing on something? Is the player crawling under a wall and stabbing at AI’s shins? What if the player is somewhere the AI can’t reach at all, do they run away or throw rocks or what?

End result is sometimes you see AI doing funky/janky things in unintended cases.

(There are more issues but this post has gotten a little too long as it is)

All of these issues contribute to jank feel and can actually be kind if difficult to solve, which is why many open world survival crafting games stumble here.

All this being said, I agree with you, the genre has a lot of jank and it gets ridiculous sometimes. I have a joke saying that its a design law for all survival crafting games to have some serious game-breaking quirk, and so each new one that comes out, its not about if its flawless or not, its if you can handle whatever inevitable serious quirk it does have.

I have played a lot of games in the genre and always hope one of them will eventually nail it but it hasn’t quite happened yet.

Extremely unlikely they used the literal same code unless it was from a template or asset pack.

That’s also probably intentional because people tend to like the familiar ‘tropes’ and if you go out of your way to do it in a weird way, that design may be burned at the stake in the reviews/feedback.