u/Front-Bird8971

I'm a nobody dev trying to make S&box games for a while now. Garry just announcing an approval process for playfund in a youtube comment has convinced me to leave. He doesn't have to implement it. I'm done. I've been annoyed waiting for standalone for years at this point. Not because I have a ready game, not because I ever will, but because the thought of finishing a game and not being able to put it on Steam is disheartening. The thought of working my ass off to create the best product I can and have it rejected by some approval process I don't even have the details for is too much to handle. You know Facepunch. You've seen how they talk in discord. Is that the type of person you want with final say over your game being monetized?

People say it's for quality. They've blacklisted slop games. Yeah Mow the Lawn is pretty sloppy, but if it's not botted to hell, if they're legit and real players are actually enjoying the game, why shouldn't that be allowed? When are you going to call my game slop and blacklist it? How am I suppose to dedicate years of my life to an engine like that? The thought of one day making just a little money with playfund is the only thing that kept me working in this engine and with that being uncertain there's not enough left. I like working in the engine but they've fucked up everything else.

My friends are scattered across the states. Is that going to be a problem?

The original AC games had beautiful, flowing, visceral combat. It wasn't hard, and it didn't need to be. It was there to convey the power fantasy. Black Flag wasn't a stand out, but it was a hell of a lot more satisfying than the RPG combat we've had for multiple games. I watched a lot of Resynced combat and it's not an improvement. It didn't even reach parity with the original. There is potential but I doubt they'll improve much. Maybe in a year this stuff could be fixed.

Movement is clunky. Like all the other RPG ACs, the engine seems to require you perform an animation and come to a complete stop before giving back control. Stealth takedown? Clunk. Combat Takedown? Clunk. The older ACs let you smoothly transition into run/walk from just about every interaction, especially parkour and executions. Nothing like pulling off a sprinting assassination and watching your character come to a complete stop before you start running again.

Ragdolls look jank. I love good ragdolls and these aren't. Sometimes they look... fine, but almost every time there is a finisher the transition from animation to ragdoll causes the pelvis to pop like death means orgasm. The transitions in old AC were seamless.

There are not enough finishers. This could be a player issue because the content creators just spam, but there seems to be ONE leg sweep takedown execution. One is not enough. 3 is the minimum, or give the player more agency to choose how they interact with a leg swept person. This isn't even a game with a large number of weapon types, Ubisoft can afford to make some more animations.

If you want to see what the combat should look like, watch some OG Black Flag. If you want to see what an improvement on AC combat looks like, watch some Crimson Desert.

I'm not a vibe coder. I don't mind paying for a subscription. I find inline suggestions a useful way to pass boilerplate off. Now I find that vscode suggesting the dumbest shit whenever it feels like has caused me to a hit a quota that I was never made aware of, and subscriptions are paused so I have no way to rectify the issue. I'd happily turn off auto suggestions and manually request them if I knew I was suddenly under a quota, but the shady fucks at Microsoft probably did this on purpose to push people toward a subscription YOU CAN'T EVEN PURCHASE.

How can I fix this? I'm betting Rider will still give me suggestions. Maybe I go full time on that?

Edit: Gemini has a vscode extension that does inline completions. Guess we'll see what their quota is.