Think about it. Why would they put "body type A" and make the characters androgynous? Surely they know that will lead to controversy and therefore fewer sales. So obviously there is another reason to make it worth the loss of sales.
Say you're making a movie and some big nosed dude offers to pay you $1M to make your main character black and gay which doesn't make sense because its a kids movie about penguins. Well, thats a lot of money so you'd do it.
Anyways, for good games in the modern era we must turn to independent developers. But with gamedev being so easy now, best do it yourself! Check out:
Game Maker: easy beginner program for 2D games
RPG maker: very straightforward if you want to make a 2D rpg. Too many limitations for my liking. It's free on steam, or of was a while back.
Godot: my favorite. It's open source and has incredibly useful documentation. Very power engine.
Unreal Engine: the original slop creator, but it'll be your own personal slop. This engine holds your hand the whole way. I hate it.
Unity: the same as unreal but costs more money
No engine: just code it yourself. Or tell a chatbot LLM to code it, try out various languages. This is known as "vibe coding" and it's slop.
Even if you're not interested in making games, I still suggest trying out these game engines because most of them will have demos and templates and even full games that you can play. The asset tab in Godot is extensive, its incredible bow many addons have been made for it.
In conclusion, the solution to modern woke games dominating the industry is to have an army of passionate hobbyists creating games. The big, legacy game studios will just have to be ignored until they fadeinto obscurity.
It's open source, so it doesn't matter that some twitter rep made gay tweets a few years ago. You can make "Fag Slayer 5000" in Godot if you wanted to.
I don't know much about Redot, afaik it is exactly the same as Godot 3.x.
If I get successful making a game, I'll donate some of that money to Godot, regardless of their political stances. I feel they deserve it and the donation would go towards improving the engine.
I looked into Redot. It's just a fork of an old version honestly. I mean it works, but I'd probably hold off on sprinting towards Redot unless you're willing to recode it later OR it becomes necessary to fork Godot due to actual bad product. If they change license to make it against policy to make your Fag Slayer game , they can only apply that to the current version, so you fork the latest one. Or if they actually make the engine bad. Otherwise I don't see the point.
There was a point when Redot updated and it was just the new Godot update with the logo changed. Like, no one did anything. The Redot "update" wasnt an update of the last version of Redot, but just another fork of a newer Godot version.
If the Godot developers decide to make policies against what games can be made in the engine, they'd have to make it closed source and then people could just continue using the latest cc0 version. And there are other good reasons why someone would want to stick with an older version of the engine anyways (updates lead to bugs, more features = less performance, bigger programs need more power).
Decent looking pixel art games that come out these days required an actual artist, because AI doesn't do well with pixel art yet.
But I'd say the most low effort slop of all are games made from Unreal Engine templates. There are tons and because Unreal does everything for you the games all look and feel the same. It's that awful default shader you see on every game since Ark Survival. It's those games that perform like garbage because the dev didn't know how to optimize; the dev didn't know anything and probably just bought some assets from the Fab store. Most low effort slop there is.
I grew up in the 90s when 2D games were peaking and 3D graphics were just primitive shapes. Still, didn't care for the 2D games as much. I thoought Pokemon was garbage, even though I loved it, I thought of it as very basic and mindless (just mash A until the battle is over) but forgave them because they put so much into a gameboy cartridge and the simplicity went along with the new "mobile"/"casual" genre that Pokemon was pioneering.
When I got into making games in 2002, I used Game Maker and over time did a lot of pseudo 3D effects. I made my own Pokemon game that used a technique called "Oblique Projection" which looks like a 3D orthogonal camera but is actually just isometric 2D with split faces so that the viewpoint can be rotated. The math to do this is actually a lot easier than it sounds, especially if you remember learning trigonometry in high school.
I was a teenager when I moved on to 3D gamedev. I encourage anyone stuck in 2D to give it a try, its really just the same with an extra coordinate to consider. Making games in 3D is not that much more difficult, it's even easier in some cases.
The 2D format has it's benefits though, mainly in performance. Compare Age of Empires 2 and Red Alert to AoE4 or C&C4, the main difference is NOT that the visuals are "Realistic" and 3D and the camera can change angles, no the main noticeable difference is that those new games SUCK. They suck because you only see a few dozen units at once, the battles stopped being epic, as the hardware limitations of running in 3D are turned into limitations of game mechanics. If you want to play an RTS game with hundreds of units moving around, 2D is king. Multimeshing in 3D is possible but tricky if you want to include animations or AI, and it may be more performant to have each character unit be it's own draw call depending on how complicated the game is (just look at World War Z for example).
So yeah bullet storm and RTS genres may actually be better on 2D currently. Certain other games may be subjectively better in 2D from an artistic standpoint. Platformers is where we see a split: a lot of gamers hate 3D platformers while many others hate sidescrollers. Many people to this day consider Mario 3 to be the best Mario game, much better than Mario 64, Sunshine or Galaxy. But I disagree with those people and think 3D platformers are very fun.
Think about it. Why would they put "body type A" and make the characters androgynous? Surely they know that will lead to controversy and therefore fewer sales. So obviously there is another reason to make it worth the loss of sales.
Say you're making a movie and some big nosed dude offers to pay you $1M to make your main character black and gay which doesn't make sense because its a kids movie about penguins. Well, thats a lot of money so you'd do it.
Anyways, for good games in the modern era we must turn to independent developers. But with gamedev being so easy now, best do it yourself! Check out:
Game Maker: easy beginner program for 2D games
RPG maker: very straightforward if you want to make a 2D rpg. Too many limitations for my liking. It's free on steam, or of was a while back.
Godot: my favorite. It's open source and has incredibly useful documentation. Very power engine.
Unreal Engine: the original slop creator, but it'll be your own personal slop. This engine holds your hand the whole way. I hate it.
Unity: the same as unreal but costs more money
No engine: just code it yourself. Or tell a chatbot LLM to code it, try out various languages. This is known as "vibe coding" and it's slop.
Even if you're not interested in making games, I still suggest trying out these game engines because most of them will have demos and templates and even full games that you can play. The asset tab in Godot is extensive, its incredible bow many addons have been made for it.
In conclusion, the solution to modern woke games dominating the industry is to have an army of passionate hobbyists creating games. The big, legacy game studios will just have to be ignored until they fadeinto obscurity.
They went woke but there are forks, such as Redot.
It's open source, so it doesn't matter that some twitter rep made gay tweets a few years ago. You can make "Fag Slayer 5000" in Godot if you wanted to.
I don't know much about Redot, afaik it is exactly the same as Godot 3.x.
If I get successful making a game, I'll donate some of that money to Godot, regardless of their political stances. I feel they deserve it and the donation would go towards improving the engine.
I looked into Redot. It's just a fork of an old version honestly. I mean it works, but I'd probably hold off on sprinting towards Redot unless you're willing to recode it later OR it becomes necessary to fork Godot due to actual bad product. If they change license to make it against policy to make your Fag Slayer game , they can only apply that to the current version, so you fork the latest one. Or if they actually make the engine bad. Otherwise I don't see the point.
There was a point when Redot updated and it was just the new Godot update with the logo changed. Like, no one did anything. The Redot "update" wasnt an update of the last version of Redot, but just another fork of a newer Godot version.
If the Godot developers decide to make policies against what games can be made in the engine, they'd have to make it closed source and then people could just continue using the latest cc0 version. And there are other good reasons why someone would want to stick with an older version of the engine anyways (updates lead to bugs, more features = less performance, bigger programs need more power).
Indie 2d games are the most low effort slop of all the things you listed.
Decent looking pixel art games that come out these days required an actual artist, because AI doesn't do well with pixel art yet.
But I'd say the most low effort slop of all are games made from Unreal Engine templates. There are tons and because Unreal does everything for you the games all look and feel the same. It's that awful default shader you see on every game since Ark Survival. It's those games that perform like garbage because the dev didn't know how to optimize; the dev didn't know anything and probably just bought some assets from the Fab store. Most low effort slop there is.
Vampire survivors comes to mind....
I grew up in the 90s when 2D games were peaking and 3D graphics were just primitive shapes. Still, didn't care for the 2D games as much. I thoought Pokemon was garbage, even though I loved it, I thought of it as very basic and mindless (just mash A until the battle is over) but forgave them because they put so much into a gameboy cartridge and the simplicity went along with the new "mobile"/"casual" genre that Pokemon was pioneering.
When I got into making games in 2002, I used Game Maker and over time did a lot of pseudo 3D effects. I made my own Pokemon game that used a technique called "Oblique Projection" which looks like a 3D orthogonal camera but is actually just isometric 2D with split faces so that the viewpoint can be rotated. The math to do this is actually a lot easier than it sounds, especially if you remember learning trigonometry in high school.
I was a teenager when I moved on to 3D gamedev. I encourage anyone stuck in 2D to give it a try, its really just the same with an extra coordinate to consider. Making games in 3D is not that much more difficult, it's even easier in some cases.
The 2D format has it's benefits though, mainly in performance. Compare Age of Empires 2 and Red Alert to AoE4 or C&C4, the main difference is NOT that the visuals are "Realistic" and 3D and the camera can change angles, no the main noticeable difference is that those new games SUCK. They suck because you only see a few dozen units at once, the battles stopped being epic, as the hardware limitations of running in 3D are turned into limitations of game mechanics. If you want to play an RTS game with hundreds of units moving around, 2D is king. Multimeshing in 3D is possible but tricky if you want to include animations or AI, and it may be more performant to have each character unit be it's own draw call depending on how complicated the game is (just look at World War Z for example).
So yeah bullet storm and RTS genres may actually be better on 2D currently. Certain other games may be subjectively better in 2D from an artistic standpoint. Platformers is where we see a split: a lot of gamers hate 3D platformers while many others hate sidescrollers. Many people to this day consider Mario 3 to be the best Mario game, much better than Mario 64, Sunshine or Galaxy. But I disagree with those people and think 3D platformers are very fun.