Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4233520/Aster_Pebble_and_the_Case_of_Bad_Bureaucracy/

My wife and I recently released our first game, a short point and click time loop mystery, all made by hand. (It's open source too!)

I just wanted to say that I really appreciated seeing this community come up in my feed. I don't post much on lemmy, but recently my brother gave us feedback after trying out our game.

He felt like we could have made a much better game if we "embraced AI tools"

Two direct quotes:
"I think it is an insane time to try to make a video game a success unless you are embracing current AI tools. The market is about to be flooded with 100x as many games as before, and yeah sure 90% of them will be slop, but the 10% of 'real developers' who start use modern AI tools will make games that are 10x better than they could have a year ago"

"our generation was given the idea that if you follow your dreams, and do what you love, and put something out there that you are proud of, that people will buy it, and that is just not how the world works"

It was heart breaking. We hadn't even asked for feedback or anything, we just shared a key with him because we wanted to share the joy of having made something.

Anyways, I won't rant more but I wanted just to share my recent experience and I look forward to seeing more human games

This is so cool! I wish you both the best!

It's open source too!

This is also cool as well. Could you share the repo?

Sure!

You can find it on Codeberg at https://codeberg.org/Wandering-Door-Games/Aster-Pebble-And-The-Case-Of-Bad-Bureaucracy

It would have looked awful with AI assets. I like what you have done.

I'll definitely grab a copy. Out of curiosity, how much of that $7 does Steam take? I prefer to buy through GOG whenever possible.

Thank you!

Steam takes a 30% cut of each sale.

We're also available on Itch.io (https://wandering-door-games.itch.io/aster-pebble-and-the-case-of-bad-bureaucracy) which only takes a 10% cut if you aren't a fan of Steam.

In terms of GOG, we applied to get Aster on there a while before our release, but at the time for whatever reason they never replied to us.

We thought maybe once we had our first 10 reviews on Steam to get a review score calculated to show what people thought about our game, we could re-apply and hopefully get on GOG too.

However we thought that would happen closer to release but so far we've only gotten 9 reviews from people who bought the game so we ended up not following through with GOG again yet 😅

I appreciate the comment!