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Weekly Update - Steam Page, Dreamons, AI

2 years ago1,858 words

How's your first week of 2023 been?? My mental state's improved a bit, but I've only touched Atonal Dreams briefly. I should post on Reddit about it soon; I altered ∞ its Steam page ∞ a bit for that. Also, some thoughts about a side project I've been working on, the game Child of Light, and are you worried about AI too?

I wanted to get more used to posting regularly on Reddit, not just about my game(s) but in general... though I managed to keep that up for like a whole day before falling back into my cocoon. Oh well.

I should probably try to post there properly about Atonal Dreams next week, though. I've been wondering what to say, and where. I'm unsure whether mentioning I made MARDEK in the past would go down well or not, but I'll probably end up doing something like that anyway since it might at least give me a tiny edge over the many, many other indie devs trying to get noticed.

(But do I even want to get noticed? Is the big question I've been wondering about a whole lot, what with all the trauma from it in the past.)



I updated ∞ the Steam store page for Atonal Dreams ∞ a bit in anticipation of doing that, mostly with updated screenshots and short description; the longer description is the same as it was ages ago. Maybe I'll need to rewrite it a bit, but...

I saw ∞ this Reddit post about Steam users' behaviour when browsing games ∞, which mentions how they generally use the store page's contents to quickly gauge a game's genre, and whether or not it lines up with games they're already familiar with. That fits with other stuff I've seen over the past few years: people want something that's maybe 90% familiar, not something entirely novel.

That post mentioned that the first four screenshots are the most important, so these are the four I chose:






Hopefully they paint an interesting enough picture. I chose images that communicate what I'd want to see and know when looking into a new game, not what I thought looked flashy. The menu, for example, definitely isn't a good 'promo shot', but it (maybe) gives a good idea of how the game actually plays.

I've been wondering for a while whether Atonal Dreams registers as an RPG, or JRPG specifically; what do you think, especially from the content on the store page? I'll probably ask about that on Reddit at some point too.

To get the new screenshots, I replayed the game for the first time in maybe three months? Which was... interesting. When we spend too much time with something, we become so familiar with every detail that we lose sight of how it'd seem to fresh eyes. Unfortunately I'll never know how a complete newcomer would perceive the experience, but it at least felt like I'd got some slight distance that made me concerned about some aspects I thought were fine before. Hmm. Could just be my recent negatively-biased mental state, though.



But it's not as if other games are perfect. I recently finished Child of Light; I don't remember if that was popular in a way that things like Celeste were, or whether it's relatively obscure and someone just mentioned it to me. Have you played it?




I got the impression it was an indie from the general look and gameplay, though the credits suggested otherwise? It also has a ∞ fairly lengthy Wikipedia page ∞. Maybe it started as an indie and was adopted by a bigger entity; I can't be bothered reading into it though!

It's an interesting blend of genres: you move around the world using 2D platformer mechanics, but when you touch a monster you go into a turn-based RPG battle (complete with a shift to an arena) with what I felt were easy-to-learn-but-sufficiently-complex mechanics based around turn speed.



The writing is deliberately stylised: rhyming, and poetic, which I could appreciate the thought behind... but personally I found it more awkward, confusing, and hollow than immersive and appealing. I got the feeling of a less-than-stellar translation job, so maybe the game wasn't originally developed in English... though the credits were so vast that I'm surprised nobody among the crowd of names associated with its production felt it wasn't adequate.

I suppose it's not a bad thing realising that I don't need to strive for perfection, though, since the game seems to have done okay despite it. Maybe. But it also had a proper marketing team, so there's that.



While I've touched Atonal Dreams a couple of times this week, most of my time's been spent tinkering with some new project I devised while lying in bed depressed, which could potentially make use of various ideas I've had over the years while avoiding some of the biggest issues I'm facing with Atonal Dreams (long development time, mostly).

I've been wondering whether to explain it here, or keep it to myself, considering how I often lose interest after sharing and my recent ideas weren't exactly well-received...

Ehh, maybe I'll talk about it in more detail later, but in a nutshell, it's kind of like if Beast Signer had you venture into psychepelagos like the ones in Atonal Dreams -



- made by players like in AFC, to tame figmon (though I may rename them?) using mechanics similar to Atonal Dreams, which you'd then battle with Pokemon-style, but they'd evolve and die over real time like Digimon handheld virtual pets.

All stuff with clear origins in my creative history if you're familiar with it.

Concerningly, though, despite working perfectly for the past couple of weeks, while trying to test the game moments after opening the project this morning, I got the same BSOD-causing bug I was experienced with another side project a few weeks ago that I though I'd seen the back of. I really hope that's not a sign of major hardware or Unity issues I'll have to face all the time going forward.




I'm still mentally sore from getting negative comments about my ideas here and on Patreon before Christmas, so I've been slow to approve comments, haven't replied, and haven't even checked my Patreon in a couple of weeks. Sorry about that; I know I need to push through this if I want to have any hope of continuing on this path.

I had a long talk via phone call with a friend earlier in the week, which helped, and it also prompted me to finally take some steps towards getting mental health help again.

Annoyingly the place I used to go for (free) counselling has apparently since moved and doesn't offer the service at the new location, so I contacted my GP to see what they'd suggest. They offered me counselling at the surgery just a ten minute walk away, which I'm surprised by; either treatment for mental health issues is getting more commonplace, or there's been some misinterpretation somewhere. I was told I'd be contacted again next Thursday or Friday, so I suppose I'll find out then how much help it'll actually be. It'd be ideal if it's both useful and local, though.



Have you been keeping up with what AI is capable of these days? I always thought it'd be the manual labour jobs that'd be replaced by machines first, but instead it seems that visual artists, programmers, and writers are facing some serious competition from the likes of DALL-E and ChatGPT.



I saw images such as these on Reddit yesterday, for example (apparently in several subs, though I saw them ∞ in r/CasulUK ∞), which were presumably produced by typing in some text. I've been following the progress of these AIs for a few months, so I know it's not quite as simple as writing in a word or two to get exactly what you want, but even the most effortful AI-manipulating endeavours trivialise the amount of time and work that goes into developing the ability to create visual art yourself.

And I've read that ChatGPT can already write academic essays in seconds that rival the efforts of good undergraduates, perhaps to the degree where universities (or at least their current assessment methods) will soon be obsolete, and it can come up with working computer programs far more quickly than human programmers; in one Reddit post I saw a few weeks ago, someone described to it the rules of a programming language that he was just making up on the fly, and then asked it to write a program in that language, which it did. Startling stuff.

History's full of new technologies making old jobs obsolete, but this to me seems like something different. Previously, a typewriter-user could transfer at least some of their skills over to using the computers that'd replaced them, but if this gets advanced enough - and at the rate things are going, that's likely to happen soon, like this-decade soon - then there'll be no need for some AI-wrangler human in any part of the process.

Since I've been wondering a lot recently about what I can do with my life since making games from my bedroom isn't exactly wise or stable, knowing that pretty much all the things I'm any good at might soon be done by AIs is... concerning.

I'd be curious to hear how these things have affected you if you have jobs in things like programming.

I remember reading about the singularity a few years ago: the point at which the AIs can essentially augment themselves and the rate of growth becomes exponential and unstoppable, and essentially a new God is born in a day. Are we on the cusp of that?

I suspect the world in 2030 will be as alien to us now as 2023 would be to someone in 1923...

But who knows. I should stop being scared of negative feedback and post about my silly game on Reddit.



...I also just found out that my mum currently has COVID, meaning I'm pretty much guaranteed to have it too. So that's great. It just seems like a cold for her, so I hope it doesn't progress to anything worse for either of us.