Your games also take money and none of them are completed before you move onto a new project. This is the exact kind of behavior I was bringing up as a problem in my original post. I’ve played your older game and it was pretty good. Just learn how to sprite and stick to one project and you’d make good stuff.
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The Gojicks situation could’ve been handled better. That entire thread reads like an elaborate trolling attempt. And if it is, then they’ve certianly hit the jackpot.
But there’s also a lot of reactionary opinions in this thread that stem from personal beliefs instead of any kind of moderation issue. If someone has a problem with certain tools being used, they should have the means to filter it. There’s really no need to re-invent the wheel. Calling for blanket content bans, off-site moderation and entire site redesigns is presumptuous and unnecessary.
The mentality of seeking “wins” in some sort of perceived battleground is counter productive. If you’ve taken the time to learn a craft, I personally think you’re entitled to wield a degree of elitism, but demanding that things be banned because you hold a strong emotional belief on it is just childish. Temper your expectations and let people choose what they want to play.
You’re talking a pretty big talk about heavy handed moderation in order to keep the site tidy, yet you’re pushing a patreon link with no playable content and claiming to need money. How do we know you’re not a bad actor? In my opinion, monetization like that is in poor taste, but I’m not out here calling for its removal.
Aside from that, I do have some guideline suggestions for project topics that I think might improve the user experience:
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When creating a project thread you must include at least a short description and one screenshot - I don’t think this is an unreasonable request, it’s helpful for the user and has been considered the bare minimum in most mod & content scenes for decades.
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If you’re releasing a project which has a download link, be it a demo, WIP, or full release, you must provide a link that leads to the download or itch page. Having to sift through someone’s patreon or discord to get a password to a link? that’s just complete nonsense. If you’re posting it here - link it here, it’s a matter of respect for the user and the website.
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Finally, better and more visible options to filter content, ideally without the need to log in, along with tags which are accurately verified.
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Seeing all the supposed artists get all riled up over a mere tool not too unlike your own 3d modelling and painting programs is definitely something. Like, sure, keeping the AI things separate is a good idea and it should absolutely be implemented, but going as far as just outright ban even the slightest mentions of it is honestly stupid. Like I said, AI is just a tool and its up to the one who uses this tool to wield it properly. Just a fact that there are projects who use AI and still are pretty damn good games standing out on more then just those elements should be enough of a proof to that, provided that the dev actually cares to put some effort into using it. And lastly, even if we take the case where the developer does not bother to put any actual effort into their creation, then whats even the difference between sloppy usage of AI generation and any of the other development tools if the final result will be ‘shovelware slop’ anyway?
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Calling someone a “supposed artist” because they don’t like AI is exactly the sort of inflammatory language that causes shitstorms like this to happen in the first place. You’re not going to win anything by just insulting the opposition.
Yet another example of why we need a firm stance from the top on this. Discussions (and I’m being very generous there) on AI on this site alone have been going on for at least 4 years, show no sign of stopping and are only becoming more toxic. I’m bored of it, frankly, and it’s clear neither side is going to “win”. Ban AI, ban discussions on it, hell even throw your full support behind it, whatever. Just do something to stop this continual torrent of shit. The hands-off approach we’ve got currently isn’t helping anyone.
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The thing with AI is we aren’t going to see much collaboration with artists if we foster a community culture that excludes artists.
One of the reasons I do most of my deving off site is there just aren’t any artists here. We don’t have a home for them. Example; I have an RPG maker resources thread. Has anyone actually found it?
And yes the new wiki has a Resources section. No one is going to take the time to create a wiki article if they don’t have a relationship with the forum and currently this place is unfriendly to artists.
Yes in AI “my computer can do your job” sense but also just in the structure and layout of the forum. There’s no obvious place for me to show off my graphics.
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The other reason is it’s a bit to easy for children to monkey around here and I think some of the misbehavior I see around here is due to their immaturity.
Put up an “I am 18” button at least. There’s a bare minimum that I think isn’t being met.
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For the record, that exists. It’s part of the sign-up. First part of the FAQ:
Weight Gaming is a NSFW community and thus all users (guests or members) must be at or over the age of 18. By creating a account you verify that you are 18 or over and accept that the admins or moderators can ban your account if it is revealed you are under the age of 18.
If you believe a user does not meet the minimum age requirements of Weight Gaming please send a message with your proof to our staff for investigation.
It just doesn’t ever pop up again because the entire forum site is NSFW and so “verify you’re able to see NSFW” is pointlessly repetitive once you’ve done the first sign-up.
I will give my piece here even tough i know that in my tastes im from the very minority here.
I usually save games or demos from content i like from this site in folders from previous years and if we go by amount i feel the recent years there is much less of them but i also feel we are being unfair because in 2020 and 2021, so many people were working from home and had a lot more free time, so the influx of games we got was huge. So i would see new games coming out at any month and would be able to play them whenever i wanted. Nowadays, even tough i visit the site daily in the hope of seeing something, i feel like the site is filled with a lot of very small ai games that might even be paywalled and the only good meal to have in the year is when the game jam is hosted and we get games with a lot of creativity behind them as they need to go for a theme.
I have seen in the past the financial reports and as somone who hasnt contributed with a single cent or done any content, i dont want my opinion to have much weight behind it but there are some amazing artists that passed trough here and left amazing marks, some even passed away during the years that the site has been online. I feel such artists and their craft should be celebrated. We now have Ai and i have seen some people using it to make stuff like backgrounds or simply food items to cut on time but i have played in the past VNs with a simple stock photo in the background and i didnt die for seeing that, so i feel you should avoid it as you can.
In the end i hope to see what it used to be before but money makes the world go around and i understand the previous systems might have been unsustainable, so i will keep myself lurking here and hoping to see a diamond in the rough from time to time or just wait until the game jam to know the best of the best will be going around.
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Ignoring AI, why would any artist go here looking for work? This isn’t a space friendly towards artists in the first place.
This is a forum for game development, with everything from project ideas to completed games gets posted. There is no art gallery, no wide community outreach where pieces can breach containment and become viral, and certainly no image platform.
If someone is looking for work in this space, they’d find this place easily, but any other platform is better for offers. Most artists have commission infos and post on any socials, from Deviantart, to Pixiv, Twitter and so on. There’s just more of an audience there. Why would they come here to advertise their work or join a project that might not even be able to pay them?
I understand you point, but I think we’re already firmly in the “undesirable” category as far as unattached artists go. Because I think any artist being passionate about making a game would already be doing that. The ones that aren’t have no reason to be here for that, since games require such a huge amount of art, which requires years of commitment, while also usually having no or next to no chance of pay. Who other than artists passionate about games would want to do that?
I think the only way to get an artist on board is to ask them on their socials.
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Personally, I think this is a huge missed opportunity. I recognize that we can’t do art-platform image hosting here due to the inherent costs, but… there’s no reason we can’t do more to platform the required parts for making games to lower the barriers-to-entry for game design and development.
Right now, if you’re coming here looking to get started making a game? You can struggle against the current, trying to put together something that uses free assets (mostly found elsewhere) and development guides (mostly found elsewhere or unearthed from the bowels of the forum pages via lots of trial-and-error search-function digging)… or you can tell a genAI system to do most of it for you and post the “eh, close enough” result along with all the others. Or, technically, you can blow a huge wad of cash for basically no gain by custom-commissioning people (again, mainly elsewhere) - but nobody does that, because it’s blowing a huge wad of cash for basically no gain. How many of the games posted here have turned a more-than-minimum-wage profit, percentage-wise? I doubt that number is double-digits (even including the almost-no-cost-outlay genAI stuff).
We should be doing more to get fat-fetish, feedist, and other associated artists involved here. Because they’re the source of the assets people want to have in their games. That’s why I suggested something like an “asset jam” earlier. Basically, this really isn’t even a hospitable place to actually talk about making games at this point - there isn’t a good support structure for those conversations or the various building-blocks involved in them, and as a result people are generally only using this space as a billboard for their itch or Steam or wherever listings. Which then makes it even harder to talk about making games, since it buries alternate conversations in all the easily-accessible ways to track what people are discussing.
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Seeing the topic shifting to artists here, wanna speak my piece as someone who only found this place like last year and has since helped on projects:
Absolute know-nothing (what’s the opposite of know-it-all?) about the dev side of games here, speaking from a very small sample size of just myself, I think this place has been great to a small time artist like myself. Find a game I like, draw fanart of the character, meet lots of lovely people, get invited to help with a game jam, branch off to helping another Dev and make all the art for a full game!
I think the AI situation is unavoidable at best - for such a niche community as we are I think every game that’s made is a blessing (so long as the intentions behind it are good… cough cough that Rose game scenario…) - not to say I’ve played every single game here, I avoid the ones I have no interest in but I’m sure every game has it’s audience.
The journey this past year hasn’t been all peachy of course, I wish when people brought up the “Game Jam 2024 drama” they wouldn’t just solo out Jup, I worked on the game too be mad at me also!!! I’m still peeved at the 1 sentence feedback we got from one of the judges…
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Let’s not allow the AI discussion to distract us from the fact that gojicks is still here. I truly cannot believe that he’s allowed to remain here and keep a thread of his game up. We do not need a person making games using images of real women nonconsensually who is unable to understand the ethical implications of it on this site.
We still haven’t been told what “cooperative” means in the context of his interactions with the moderation team but frankly it doesn’t matter. Despite the action taken to create the “blindfold” version, allowing the thread to remain up and it being obvious that the version using the nonconsensual images is the “main” one and this version is just to shut us up makes it appear as though the moderation team condones the actions he’s taken as a developer and only used the blindfold version as a way to save face and make it appear as though something was accomplished.
Nothing’s changed. He hasn’t learned anything, he isn’t going to change, and everybody here knows what he’s still doing.
It’s like developing a game with obvious real racism in it that is clearly a reflection of the developer, using slurs and everything, and then making an unlisted version without slurs to satisfy sites that don’t allow it while still openly and obviously putting slurs into new updates. The dev is still racist and he obviously doesn’t care about it except when doing very slight censorship allows the game to have a greater reach, which is extremely disingenuous and is NOT BETTER. A site would still be allowing an obvious racist to have a platform that is only removed from overt, slur-filled racist dialogue by a technicality.
Is racism a fair comparison to make? Perhaps, perhaps not. One could argue that the usage of women’s pictures without their consent is obviously preferable to racism, but I’d argue back that I’d rather be a member of a community that doesn’t allow either, just to nip that counter in the bud. I’m just making an analogy using something we can all agree is a very bad thing to condone somebody having a platform for.
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There goes my GOAT, bun
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literally couldn’t agree more gotta say this,
In the United States it’s not INHERITLY illegal to use another persons online public images for transformative content and while this isn’t by ANY MEANS meant to defend the frankly seedy actions of this rose mf, I’ll say this. In the US it IS illegal to use the images of someone without their consent to promote a product or for some form of monetary gain, something that fits the literal bill of this rose game to a tee. Now I doubt this site will catch any legal flack for this but allowing such a legally grey and morally unethical individual to run rampant in this place kinda sucks. Apostles got me in the place and I’ve been drawing fat bitches since I picked up the god damn pen (although I’m working on projects on this site at a snails pace because life sucks and I’m a slow worker) so it really hurts to see my feed slowly devolve into legally grey projects or no-effort chatbots that are just instant gratification in the form of words on a screen. I really love creativity of this place when the right people get together (LIKE YOU YES YOU AND YOUR GAME AS IN HH CAFE AS IN THAT 10/10 BTW FYI IM TALKING ABOUT YOUUUUH) and reading that the community is gnawing at the admins and wearing em down and seeing this slope does feel a bit saddening. I don’t have much else to add besides that and also ig for now I’ll strengthen the bonds I have and try for fucks sake to ship out a project, stay strong folks!!
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Okay, I don’t know if I have anything profound or relevant to say, but I’ll try anyway.
As a creator relatively new to this space, I’ve been making games outside of this space for some time. I always wondered if I could do something like this, but since I didn’t know anyone in real life interested in this, I always wrote off the idea because I’m just a programmer. I’ve always believed that ideas aren’t worth anything unless you can execute.
It wasn’t until AI got to a point where I could play around with image generation that I thought I could drum up some placeholder art and make something silly. But I never actually got around to it.
Until a friend of mine passed away suddenly and I needed to sink my time into something to distract myself. I started this project just for me, to make something I wanted to play. After a few months of developing, a couple friends encouraged me to post it for free, and I did.
I was astonished by the support, and some people asked if they could support me financially in any way. At first I didn’t want to take any money for the game because of AI, but then I had the idea that I could use that money to pay other artists in the space and maybe eventually replace the AI art.
The game got too big to replace the AI art, and finding an artist who had the time to do all of that art seemed impossible. So I asked my patrons what I should use the money for. I continued to commission voice actors, and artists for fun with the money, but I’ve started paying an artist consistent commissions for sprites for my next project.
I’m not here to make money, I’m here because I love video games, and I think spaces like this are cool. Being able to create something that is special is difficult. But when you create something that resonates, even with just a few, it’s a good feeling.
Without AI giving me the push to try to create something in this space, I never would have bothered.
It’s easy to get swept up in the plethora of posts on this forum. This rose game everyone is talking about I haven’t even looked at, but it sounds pretty awful. Moderation should exist to handle things like that, but I think it’s important to remember that everyone that you’re typing to on the Internet is another human being.
The people running this forum are just doing their best. Most people posting their projects here are just doing their best. Anger and vitriol doesn’t do much in the way of getting people to understand your point of view.
I hope everyone here can find a positive, encouraging space and energy for their projects and endeavors, I’ve been lucky to find one here that seems relatively isolated. I’ll continue to try to create fun games as best I can, and I hope to see others continue to do the same.
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Long and short of it is: if you’re using AI, then don’t charge money for it, then people won’t kick up a stink, yes?
If you’re charging money but also either hired an artist to do the pictoral work, or did so yourself, then people won’t kick up a stink about it. (well there’s some that do but they’re jerks, right?)
and if you’re ripping photos off of insta and asking money for it to boot - well, we’ve seen what happens.
Personally, i feel that the use of AI is something of a crutch, i don’t mean that in the derogatory sense, but rather that most of the folks here can’t afford artists, don’t know any, or not artists themselves, for the most part we have programmers, writers, and people who indulge in these projects on a regular basis.
“But what about people who use DAZ” i hear you ask? you still have to fork out for a chunk of DAZ content, after all, so it’s a little fair to ask for money after that expense and the time and effort to set it up, not to mention it’s kind of hardware intensive if memory serves.
Personally i hope folks can use such things as stepping stones for more creative things down the road, y’know?
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More importantly, DAZ assets are either purchased or open to freely use in the vast majority of cases. Perhaps there are some people pirating DAZ assets, but it’s a minority of cases (and thus impossible to pick out unless people are actually openly talking about how they’re stealing content from asset-makers).
GenAI has the opposite issue; unless the creator publicly discloses “I use an AI built off public-domain images/works only” (which I’ve never seen anybody do, despite the fact that they’re OUT there) then you can be 99.99% sure that they’re using something incorporating stolen creative work as a fundamental building-block. That’s why people don’t want people selling genAI content.
I use genAI for personal entertainment purposes, in the solo RPG stuff I play by and for myself. But I wouldn’t sell that stuff, for a number of reasons. First off, it exposes me to claims of copyright infringement - especially for people who are using models tuned off a specific artist’s body of work. The only way to stay within the bounds of “fair use” protections is not to charge money, because existing legal precedent on fan-works proves that you can’t be held liable if you aren’t making money.
The secondary reason, of course, is that you can’t copyright anything you made using AI. Every genAI game on here could have someone swoop in at any moment, rip out the AI-generated artwork and/or writing and/or coding, and use it to make/sell their own game… and that’s perfectly legal, because nobody can copyright something the AI made. If I’m going to put time and energy into making something that other people can freely take from, I’m just going to CC0 it instead of having it torn apart by opportunists while I’m unable to do anything about it.
Honestly, I’m personally surprised that hasn’t happened yet here. It will eventually, which will be a clusterfuck of its own I’m sure. Somebody’s going to yank all the images from various other genAI-made games and slap them in their own, putting it up for sale, and it’s all going to be perfectly legal. 
I think you’re right here.
Since Deight Class is free and the Patreon only gives you access to updates a week early, and the money is going to artists, people haven’t come for my head yet.
But, it doesn’t stop people from having takes like Grim that AI should be totally banned and AI users are scum no matter what.
The black-and-white thinking and demonization of other people is really disappointing, even if I’ve personally been able to avoid most of it.
Even worse than all of that, people feel like they’re entitled to a space that caters to their feelings. Being upset that admins are leaving up a game like Roses is one thing, I’ve seen many reasonable, empathetic takes for why that shouldn’t be the case. But repeatedly coming at them, drawing false conclusions wherever possible to dig your heels in further, is just the kind of behavior that will make anyone who reads it want to side against you.
There’s a lot of talk about new users to the space coming in and seeing slop, or getting scammed by projects that will never launch. Sure, these “games” are bad products, but I truly don’t understand wanting them to be disallowed. Asking for some sort of “quality check” before something can be posted, means that anybody just getting started has an even higher barrier of entry than having to make the game. Game development is already intimidating enough.
We should expect users to use a little bit of judgement before spending their money on a product, rather than policing the quality of things posted to the forum. It’s easy enough to filter tags, sort by interaction, etc. Acting like new users are children is a strictly 18+ environment is silly.
Being kind, supporting projects you like and rising them to the top of the platform is the only way to cultivate the space you want to be a part of. Moderation should play a part in this space, but harassing the current admin team to bend to your will is not the way to cultivate a positive space.
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I agree with this. Also no one is forcing you into buying or supporting projects that use AI.
I’m just hoping Grot and the moderators main takeaway from these past 200 posts is to simply crackdown on bad actors within our space, whether they use AI or not, I hardly care.
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