Developers Aren't Owed Niceties

 

Right before sitting down at my computer to write this post I read an article online about how the lead developer for Starfield went on a bit of a rant because people who don't know anything about game dev criticize games that they play.  More specifically he said that he didn't like that people will speculate on why things were made a certain way within a game when they have no knowledge of the process and yet talk about it like an authority.  Which is fine, it's no a statement I agree with 100% but I get where he's coming from.  But there was a line in that article where the guy said that he doesn't talk ill of other games out of "respect for his fellow developers" and this, to me, seems incredibly daft.

He's not the only one who has said this kind of thing either, there's been a sort of prevailing attitude in a lot of gaming spaces where it has become taboo to overly criticize developers just because the process of making games is hard.  I first ran across this idea when watching Awesome Games Done Quick where occassionally a speedrunner would accuse a developer of being "lazy" and that's why certain tricks within certain games work but then these comments became frowned upon and you aren't really allowed to say that kind of thing anymore.

Obviously game development is an extremely difficult undertaking.  With it being an amalgamation of a number of art forms as well as technical ability it's fairly obvious that the process of creating a game, either by yourself or in a team, is a stressful thing to do.  But the other thing that you have to consider here is that games also cost money.  Once money is put into the equation, any requirement for me or anyone else to be nice to you over the thing you made goes out the window.  I worked for my money and then I chose, based on the developer telling me their game is good and cool and interesting, to give you money in exchange for the thing that you made.  If then, the thing that you made sucks shit then I get to call you a stupid lying, talentless asshole.  

Take my famously well documented distaste for the Outlast games.  I get that making a horror game is hard, you have to code it all together to make sure it's actually playable and then have a bunch of artists, musicians and writers create things that are scary and then all of that has to come together and be marketed and shipped.  That's hard, I get it.  But Outlast also cost me about 20 quid and wasn't very fucking good.  The writing was shit, the music is forgetable, the game isn't scary and the enemies are are not very well coded and behave like shit.  I would go as far to say that the developers are Red Barrels are inept, having completely no idea on what makes a good horror game and instead just slapping together a bunch of imagry that's generally accepted to be "spooky" and calling it a day.  It's lazy, badly made dross and I do not feel even a single pang of guilt for saying that.  You know what else those guys are? fucking liars too.  The original marketing for Outlast made it look like Mirrors Edge Survival Horror Edition and I thought that idea was cool as fuck but then it came out and it's a slow, plodding hiding and sometimes jogging away kind of horror game and it's embarassing that  I was charged money for it.  

If Outlast was made by 2 guys and distributed for free then I wouldn't be so harsh.  I would still give my criticisms of what I didn't like about it but I would assume inexperience over ineptitude or malice. But these were guys who were previously at Ubisoft now telling me to roll up for a brand new horror experience and what I got was a waste of cash.  Outlast IS lazy and poorly made and it costs money so the devs at that company who effectively stole my cash can get fucked. 

Also why not drop the ego?  There's a lot of developers I've interacted with, such as the developers for Crosscode and Benbo Quest who get defensive and insulted when you, even gently, tell them things about their games that kind of sucks.  Criticism is good for artists and creators, it's how you get better.  Back in like, 2014, I wrote a book that I published to Amazon called Noise and I shopped it around a few people I knew for some feedback.  The thing that pissed me off about this whole process is that out of the 10 or so people I gave free copies of the book to for that feedback, only ONE gave me any kind of genuine criticisms of the story.  It fucks me off to no end that everyone just told me it was great when, reading it back now, even I can see glaring flaws with it.  I'm never going to improve as a writer if people don't give me shit when my work is low quality .

I am currently studying and working on a game of my own.  I plan to release it to wherever will take it for a low price, but I'm hoping to maybe get some money for it when it's done.  If you buy it and think that it's a poorly made piece of garbage, I'm fully expecting you to call me out on that.  If you didn't like it and have some constructive things to say, that's even more useful and if you liked it and want to say something nice, that will stroke my ego good and proper, thank you in advance.  But I am not owed niceities and gentle language just because the thing I have decided to try and teach myself is hard.  If you're so fragile that you think that difficult tasks require kid gloves, even when you're taking peoples money as you do that task, then stop.  

If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.  If you can't handle armchair developers calling you a lazy asshole for charging them 20 bucks for your shitty Zelda clone, then stop being a developer.  Just fuck off, the art world is worse with you in it.

Brotato: Fun To Learn, Boring to Master

 

Vampire Survivor clones are generally a genre I stay away from.   Vampire Survivor was a fun little thing to mess around with for a day or two when taking a break from work or whatever but it wasn't exactly some incredible, ground breaking game that changed my life.  It did however, seem to make a metric fuckton of money and therefore has been added to the list of things to copy wholesale by the indie scene and Brotato is a product of that complete lack of creativity from your average indie developer.  The game, however, was gifted to me by a viewer and despite my cynical comments about it, it is pretty good.

The one thing that's interesting about this game, and maybe the whole genre in general is that it's an incredibly fun time for the first handful of runs that you do and then interest dies quickly as you learn what makes the game tick.  When you first fire up Brotato and start a run you are confronted with a ton of shit that you must wrap your head round regarding the characters stats and equipment.  Do you stack HP? Or is it more effective to prioritize dodge and armor?  Is it worth spending your precious level up upgrades on Harvesting and Luck? Or should you be upping your damage instead?  Should you buy that item that ups your speed but tanks your range?  Maybe you should be changing out your weapons for more damage or lifesteal.  It's incredibly fun at first to get your head around this stuff, experiement and work it all out.

But then you do work it out.  What I've found works for me is getting some luck and harvesting early on, then armor, dodge and HP and then focusing on my damage output and doing that has basically guaranteed me a win with every character so far.  I've also found that the Engineering stat along with buy shittons of turrets is an absolutely busted way to play that makes the gameplay trivial even on it's highest setting called Danger 5.  I am, at time of writing, about half way through the large cast of characters and I'm at the point where I'm sort of glazing over as I play.  I'm not thinking anymore and just going through the motions each time.

This doesn't happen with other games though.  Brotato reminds me quite a lot visually of The Binding of Isaac and mastering that games gameplay and RNG didn't result in a boring experience.  I stopped playing Isaac because I had done pretty much everything in it that there was to do and I wasn't on the verge of falling asleep with each run that I did because the better you got and the more you understood about it, the harder it got and more intense challenges were thrown at you.  Brotato doesn't have that kind of scaling and once you learn how to do 20 waves then it's extremely simple to win every time after that.  Maybe you'll lose a run here and there if you don't get good items for the little egg man that you play as but outside of getting buttfucked by randomness the game is extremely easy.  

However, what I'm not saying with any of this is that Brotato is a bad game.  The game has been incredibly useful for me as a new father because it's a perfect game to play when holding a sleeping baby.  I can play it pretty much exclusively with one hand and I can leave it running between ways if I have to run away to do baby stuff.  I'm not going to lose my flow or forget what I'm doing, it's perfect for sqeezing in a quick session in a busy schedule.  I wish it had more music and there was more to the areas than just a square that fills with enemies, maybe some extra levels with obstacles or maybe mazes to have to deal with and navigate would have been a fun addition but for what it is, a shameless Vampire Survivors clone, it's pretty solid.

If you like these kind of games and you need a new one to fiddle with then Brotato is absolutely worth picking up but otherwise your money might be better spent on something a little more involved.