DO NOT OPEN A DISCORD SERVER. EVER.
Wanna have your own official community? Host your own forum.
Many if not all problems community wise can be traced to that accursed platform.
Agreed. I just see Discord only as one step up from Reddit because Redditors that don't like your community can claim it's "unmoderated" to override who's a moderator to effectively subvert a community.
At least with Discord, moderation is ultimately up to the person running the server, even if the characters that website attracts are questionable. A web forum is preferable, but then the issue is delivering game news in a good manner and keeping engagement. People with bad opsec usually share their socials on their Discord profile, and that makes it easier to weed out undesirables (setting aside throwaways). Better to have an official community rather than just leaving it to third party sources that are more difficult to find and gatekeep. Really just a damned if you do/don't situation.
Agreed. I just see Discord only as one step up from Reddit because Redditors that don't like your community can claim it's "unmoderated" to override who's a moderator to effectively subvert a community.
At least with Discord, moderation is ultimately up to the person running the server, even if the characters that website attracts are questionable. A web forum is preferable, but then the issue is delivering game news in a good manner and keeping engagement. People with bad opsec usually share their socials on their Discord profile, and that makes it easier to weed out undesirables (setting aside throwaways). Better to have an official community rather than just leaving it to third party sources that are more difficult to find and gatekeep. Really just a damned if you do/don't situation.
Discord’s biggest problem is that it’s impossible to see what’s inside the server from the outside and how easy to use it is.
Back in the good old days to create a community you had to spend some money and time to get a website going. Now any retard can just open up discord, create a server in mere seconds, get some people and bam! A new retarded discord clique is born. Away from prying eyes to so unless they raise up a stink nobody will ever know about their existence.
Funny you mention that game, there's currently a sperg fight involving the Cruelty Squad dev happening on Xitter over it. A right-wing nobody "gamedev" personality decided to shit on the game, prompting John Crueltysquad to come out and gunt guard for it.
This dude had another meltdown today over new blood advocating for their games to be pirated and someone mentioned this meltdown of his so thanks for the screencaps
This dude had another meltdown today over new blood advocating for their games to be pirated and someone mentioned this meltdown of his so thanks for the screencaps
I used to follow this dude, before he blocked me, and it's so sobering to see him even get clowned on by that Airbagged dipshit.
So this is the guy who made the AI mouse in a suit meme, and the one crying about Godot not working on their fonts while virtue signaling on Twitter? Isn't that what he's doing right now?
This dude had another meltdown today over new blood advocating for their games to be pirated and someone mentioned this meltdown of his so thanks for the screencaps
i wish he would work on his fucking game (a quirky rpg no less, which he is aware of the connotation of), he's utterly disingenuous with how little he shows of his own work. how can you believe the opinions of a self-proclaimed game developer with no games?
i also don't understand why he insists on royalties for a fucking AI generated meme. who gives a fuck! maybe you'd be making more money if you had a GAME. hell, i know he does draw too, he could be getting good at it and taking commissions and that'd help him out a lot since people already know him. he just spins his wheels in place and complains that he isn't moving.
I understand seeing something you helped create get popular and wanting some sort of reward for said popularity but you cant really do that with internet memes.
maybe you'd be making more money if you had a GAME. hell, i know he does draw too, he could be getting good at it and taking commissions and that'd help him out a lot since people already know him. he just spins his wheels in place and complains that he isn't moving.
I dont think he actually has a creative urge in him its all about making money and you need a creative urge to actually get shit done when it comes to indie game development.
Looking at this one screenshot without even playing the game, I can tell you this is terrible UI, with many repeated elements and unnecessary information. I'm not a game designer, nor a UI designer. But, I've played many shooters with what I consider good UI. And I think I compare why this UI is horrid, while other games of the past remain good UI.
Lets look at a screenshot from PAYDAY: The Heist. This game needs to get a lot of information out to you in as little as time as possible. So it needs to be compact, and not reuse elements. This is an example showing the HUD before starting the heist by putting on your mask.
Lets first take a look at the health and status portion. Notice how everything is very clean and compact. The green bar is the health, the white outline is the armor, and the portrait shows your character's chosen mask.
Next to your health is the other players statuses (I was playing single player for the first screenshot) Under your health shows your player reputation and cash (Reputation = Level Cash =Experience points/EXP) put inside a bar. So for example, our buddy Jerry Jargson [101] is IN CUSTODY so it shows red bars on top of his player portrait, also the '5' was his trade-in delay for a hostage (covered more later down) he has 5 seconds before he can be traded in.
Now lets look at Beyond Citadel's health and status portion. First off, there is something out of place and that is the item pickup being in the status section. In regular doom, the item pickup history is shown in the top left, but here the top left shows the mini map, while the top right, shows the controls. I talk about this later, and the fuckery it created.
So instead of the UI designer maybe putting it higher up maybe in the left middle of the screen above the status portrait, it's clogging the health portion instead, putting more information in an unrelated section. Why didn't the designer just put the item history in the top-right? It makes no sense.
There are other problems, notably that the consumables (F1, F2, F3 buttons with icons next to them) Are shown under the bars instead of maybe beside them to left or right.
This would not only clog the status bars, but makes it slower for players to read their bars because the consumables are formatted in a way where you have to skip them with your eyes, and that can create player mistakes such as to the extreme of accidentally reading the wrong thing then dying because of it.
Here's a positive though, the status portrait and the level info. I haven't played the game, but looking at game-play, I see that the portrait reacts when you get hurt and die. It also blinks too.
I'm not going to say these are bad, because I actually think this is a pretty good way of communicating to players that they're getting hurt. Same as in DOOM with the Doomguy's face having reactions to getting hurt. Although there are no faces for acquiring an item in Beyond Citadel from what I've seen. Maybe because our little tranime protagonist wants to act all chill.
Now, in the screenshot below, I'll do an analysis regarding the space of HUD elements of PDTH and Halo 2 compared to the Minimap of Beyond Citadel.
Look at the upper portion of the screen on PAYDAY: The Heist. We'll see most of the information about the heist here. Current location (top) Current objectives (Top left) and in the middle, the OBJECTIVE banner, which here the OBJECTIVE ACTIVATED was to find the bank manager. And in the top center, and PRESS (F) TO START THE HEIST. Which conveys the obvious.
Very concise, and spread out so you're never having to look at clogged information in one portion. All the HUD elements stay right where they are and don't have elements that say the exact same thing. There's no info out of place, like for example, item pickup history shown in the health section instead of somewhere more relevant. In PAYDAY, item pickup history is shown in the OBJECTIVE banner:
Now lets look at Beyond Citadel's way of giving info for current location. My biggest problems are overlapping info, and the lack of space. First off, this is a mini-map section put in comparison to Halo 2's mini-map along with all the other elements.
In Beyond Citadel, you have multiple elements that are actively interfering with the mini-map or going outside of it, such as the view cone displayed from the top left to right. Why does it have to go out? Why not just keep it inside the mini-map like Halo? Elements are kept within each-other so players don't extend their eyesight towards unnecessary parts. I don't need the cone to be outside the mini-map as it doesn't help me at all and is just unnecessary even for visual flair.
Expanding further, text is going inside the mini-map, when really it should be separated from the mini-map, so it doesn't intertwine with it. The zone, day and time should be shown in a column rather than at different corners such as (ZONE 1-3 ---- DAY 2 ----- 19 H 7 M) next to the mini-map at the top right side. If not next to it, maybe in the topmiddle of the screen similar to PAYDAY: The Heist's method of showing location, because there's empty space there. Either way, the mini-map still gets a dedicated portion and the location info is given close or further from it.
Lets move on to the combat section of both PAYDAY: The Heist and Beyond Citadel. First up, the aryan-pilled Swedish-win gemerald.
In this shot, the game is in the ASSAULT stage of the heist (First World Bank) where cops come in to stop the players, so naturally, it shows that relevant info at the bottom middle of the screen with a red pulsing triangle, under it, the amount of hostages you and your team has. Small, concise, and simple. No need to repeat this info at all.
Hostages determine how long before another assault occurs and help disperse the enemy as they will focus on freeing the hostages rather than focusing on the player. They also act as the means for which a player in custody can be traded in for the hostage to be freed.
Moving onto the weapon info portion of the HUD. This is probably the best example to show why I think Beyond Citadel's UI for weapons is horrid. In PAYDAY: The Heist, you have three weapon slots, moving from left to right:
- Sidearm - This is your pistol, I'm using the Crosskill 45 here.
- Primary - This is your rifle, shotgun or big boy like the Brenner-21 LMG in this screenshot.
- Secondary - Special weapons, like Sub-Machine Guns (Compact-5 and Mark 10), the Locomotive compact shotgun, and the GL40 (m79) Grenade Launcher.
All of this is very simple and straightforward, showing your total ammo for the gun, along with a visual showing how much bullets remain for your current weapon (the Brenner 21 in this screenshot) The name of the gun also shows temporarily, then will disappear after a short time.
Notice how the ammo which is shown on the other weapon icons will disappear once the current gun is selected, and moves under the icons, along with the bullet count. The player only has to look ONCE at the ammo count to see how much they have, they don't need to do the same movement to look at the reserve because the total ammo is represented. The current ammo being used is in the visual bullet count similar to how Halo does it. So there's no problems created by unnecessary info.
Beyond the weapon selection, it also shows from bottom to top:
Current deployable (G), in this screenshot it's a lovely medic bag.
Player perk, in this screenshot it's extra start-out ammo.
Mission item, since this is First World Bank, this item is thermite needed to get into the vault.
The Mission equipment used in the heist, for First World Bank, it's a drill.
Let's compare this relatively simple info given in PDTH to the confusing and diabolical way Beyond Citadel shows this info.
These two small snippets show unnecessary information. Such as the name of the gun WHICH DOESN'T DISAPPEAR like in PDTH, and it's item slot number (4) And you HAVE to know that it's buckshot obviously because that fucking matters. Also, the ammo is screwy too, it shows the current magazine, detached from the actual ammo count of the gun which goes down each shot, (right shotgun ammo box with 50 ammo) instead of having the ammo count and magazine in the same element. So now, the player has to divert their eyes back and forth to check on ammo, instead of looking once to see how much they have like PAYDAY!
The Magazine is also represented by a orange bar, which is fine, but also, there's a vertical bar which shows if you have chambered the gun, so if you shoot, the bar goes gray, then becomes orange once you chamber it again. Why not just gray out the magazine bar instead of adding a unnecessary element? Or just show a visual of shotgun shells?
Also, another note, the orange bar moves from right-to-left AWAY from the ammo count, which is completely mind boggling. Instead of left-to-right like every most other FPS games.
Here's how to CORRECTLY do this, using a similar gun, a shotgun.
From left to right, nearly empty showing a red shotgun shell with spent ones transparent, fully empty showing all shells transparent and dark red, full showing all shells completely opaque and white, and one shot showing a single shell transparent, that being a spent shell, and the rest opaque white.
So simple right? Then it's very hard to fuck up, but Beyond Citadel does it anyway. In some gross attempt to be 'visually quirky'.
Anyways, moving onto the pickup history I mentioned in the first Beyond Citadel screenshot. I found that the controls were a player choice, and so the player pickup was never in the top right, it was ALWAYS on the status portion, which just makes the choice to put it in there, dumb as shit, I don't know why you would put it there unless you SPECIFICALLY wanted the player to lose their focus (such as needing to look at health, while you picked up something, so now you look at that)
In regular DOOMII (I was running ZDoom in the screenshots below), the pickup history is shown in the top left alongside other messages. I picked up the chainsaw in MAP01 in the first screenshot. In the 2nd I was on MAP015 I picked up two clips from two dead zombiemen and a single stimpack.
Very simple, straight the point, you only have to look at a different part of the screen that's not taken up by anything else other than system messages and other messages. DOOM II is a simple but still fun game, so lets look at that next to do our final comparison with Beyond Citadel, which if you didn't know runs on the UE4 Engine not the DOOM engine. (According to PCGamingwiki and A steam forums answer on the first game: The Citadel, yes this game is a sequel)
Speaking of DOOM, lets look at DOOM II's HUD, shall we? I died in the first screenshot to get a good example, be happy. All the info in DOOM is confined to the bottom of the screen. It shows from left-to-right:
- Ammo
- Health
- Arms 1-7 (Your weapons)
- Doomguy portrait, similar to the tranime portrait seen in Beyond Citadel, it also shows emotions such as getting hurt. Although Beyond Citadel shows low health emotions, it shows it at low numbers, lower than doom. 30 and under to be specific. This is because the max health is 50 or 40, looking at the gameplay I saw on Jewtube.
- Armor
- Keycards/Skulls needed to open doors
- Total ammo and max ammo for all weapons.
Probably one of the most well-known HUDS, mostly because it's so concise and simple. Doesn't repeat already known info, doesn't show you unnecessary bullshit (like permanent weapon names) and can easily be looked at while playing. Without needing to read for long amounts of time. You know EXACTLY what's going on, and it's mostly the player's fault for not paying attention, because the HUD is so simple.
Also the screen flashes once you get hit in DOOM, the same behavior happens in Beyond Citadel and most other FPS games. like PAYDAY: The Heist, where the screen flashes and also shows a directional blur from where you got hit in some scenarios. I have two shown here, along with two screen flashes around the edge of the screen from Beyond Shitadel. One is getting hurt (orange along with directional marker) the other is getting an item (green flash)
So props to them. But it still has a shitty UI, so let's have one final look at the UI, from a Jewtube video, look specifically at the center of the screen in these shots.
Now, what do you notice? That's right, an ammo counter along with the crosshair, showing a bullet in the chamber first, then the rest of the ammo. (1+10 in the last screenshot with the magnum)
Also, there's a numbered weapon selection, showing a shoddy barely visible ammo icon for each gun, so the shotgun is the shotgun shell, pistol is the magnum shell so on so on.
I wonder what game did this better... Oh right, Half-Life 2.
[On a side note, I wasn't even running any graphics mods besides changing the weapons to MMod counterparts, but the game's artstyle is a million times better than Beyond Citadel ever will be.]
Anyways, the weapon selection is at the top of the screen, away from your general line of sight of the action, so you won't have to look at the center of the screen, distracting you. It's also quickly readable, you can tell which gun is which. Next to my screenshot, I've provided the full weapon selection made by gamma07 on deviantart.
But compare that to Beyond Citadel's weapon selection where it's cluttered in the center of the screen, so you HAVE to look there, where there is even more info around it for your eyes to get lost. There's just too much space wasted, because you could put up at the top where there is LITERALLY NO INFO AT ALL! So why not put it there?! I don't get it, honestly.
Anyways, all the weapon icons are messy and hard to read in an instant for Beyond Citadel. And there's even similar looking iconslike rifle bullets, three of them look almost exactly the same. So how the heck are you supposed to know which one gun it is if you're getting used to the game?
A new player might have the possibility of just guessing at times if they haven't gotten used to it or aren't using the number controls. I know it's a little nit-picky, but game designers should be considering all possible outcomes when it comes to how the player operates.
Also you'll notice that it does a similar thing to PAYDAY: The Heist where it shows the total ammo for each gun. But since there are so many slots, it just looks messy, and you might as well not have it there in my opinion. Half-Life 2 was fine without showing that info anyway.
Besides that, what brought me to bring up Half-Life 2 was the 'Quick info' showing the ammo count and player health. In Beyond Citadel, there is no player health shown, only ammo.... So you might as well look at your fucking ammo if you don't show something to go along with this center ammo count. But! It shows a heccin epic wholesome hitmarker! WOAH! I really needed to know that I obliterated an enemy whose guts I can see splatter all across the FUCKING WALL. Like no shit! They're dead! Don't show me that stupid ass hitmarker, god-damn.
In Half-Life 2, there's no immersion breaking hitmarkers, or useless ammo counters because it's called quick info for a reason. It's so you don't have to look at the bottom of the screen to see your health or ammo. You just look at the center of the action without needing to take away your attention. The left bar shows your health, the right shows your ammo. Along with a crosshair in the center to see if your shots are lining up. There are multiple states such as full health, full ammo, half health, low health, low ammo, etc.
Here's a short compilation of images: So in my opinion, so much more interesting and superior to Beyond Citadel's 'quick info' if you can even call it that.
What should you really take away from all this? Well, you only need to see the HUD for a second to understand how fucking confusing it is. The fact of the matter is, Beyond Citadel's HUD is very cluttered and repeats info. Examples really do show this confusion such as:
- Quick info only showing ammo and a shoddy crosshair.
- The weapon selection showing ammo icons instead of concise weapon icons. Has very similar icons for different guns, confusing new players.
- The weapon and ammo info being hard to read in an instant
- The status bars such as Health, O2, whatever the fucking green bar is, all being supplemented with consumables underneath, which ruin readability and time to read it because your eyesight will be switching from the consumable to the bar in some cases.
- Overlapping elements and even elements going outside of their dedicated elements, such as the mini map cone going outside the circle, or the time going inside the map on the edges.
- Unnecessary information not going away to free up the screen such as the weapon names staying visible.
- Weird choices such as not merging both the magazine and ammo count.
- "Quick Info" being utterly useless as it only shows an ammo count which already exists at the bottom-right.
- Hitmarkers ruining immersion.
Ultimately, a good HUD isn't only just for 'aesthetic' purposes. You must also realize that the player NEEDS a good HUD in order to play the game well and enjoy it. With all the good UI examples, you'll see that it remains simple, and doesn't give out unnecessary info. Isn't cluttered, and also aesthetically pleasing at the same time.
What I think the developer or UI designer was going for, was purely aesthetics first, functionality later. But you must realize those two elements of a good UI cannot be separated, they must remain together in order to create a seamless, easily readable and recognizable HUD. That's why Beyond Citadel's UI is shit, while PDTH, Half Life 2,Doom and Halo 2's UI still remain glorious and recognizable because those games were made with functionality and aesthetics, not one over the other. I also have a video of Beyond Citadel game-play, showing this HUD in it's full, shitty glory. Beware of guro, if you don't really enjoy looking at anime girls get fucking blown to shreds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErtYZjCAOSg
From my time trying the demos for Citadel and Beyond Citadel, it's crazy how they run like liquid ass even with lowered settings. Struggles to hit 60FPS quite a bit on midrange hardware, you can only really hit it at 1080p, but the game's resolution and graphics options are ass. This game should be at least locking at 120FPS on my hardware.
Regarding Psuedoregalia, from what I heard, the game could run better, but the developer decided to use specific project settings in Unreal which hinder performance by quite a bit. Does that game even need to use anything outside of forward rendering? You don't need deferred rendering or the engine's entire rendering stack for a N64 looking game or something that looks like Doom. Unreal Engine games are a gamble because 80% of them could run better than they do if the developers actually bothered to look at the project settings or to use a performance profiler.
From my time trying the demos for Citadel and Beyond Citadel, it's crazy how they run like liquid ass even with lowered settings. Struggles to hit 60FPS quite a bit on midrange hardware, you can only really hit it at 1080p, but the game's resolution and graphics options are ass. This game should be at least locking at 120FPS on my hardware.
Regarding Psuedoregalia, from what I heard, the game could run better, but the developer decided to use specific project settings in Unreal which hinder performance by quite a bit. Does that game even need to use anything outside of forward rendering? You don't need deferred rendering or the engine's entire rendering stack for a N64 looking game or something that looks like Doom. Unreal Engine games are a gamble because 80% of them could run better than they do if the developers actually bothered to look at the project settings or to use a performance profiler.
It fails me that people prefer to keep motion blur on in most games i don't get why people like their games where every time they move it looks like you smeared vaseline on the screen.
rom my time trying the demos for Citadel and Beyond Citadel, it's crazy how they run like liquid ass even with lowered settings. Struggles to hit 60FPS quite a bit on midrange hardware, you can only really hit it at 1080p, but the game's resolution and graphics options are ass. This game should be at least locking at 120FPS on my hardware.
maybe i am not a well versed technical genius when it comes to coding but none of this should happen in a low poly retro game where you shoot at jpegs. The absolute state.
Reminds me of that time yanderedev tried putting a 3d model rigged for film as a random asset on his game , so rendering a single toothbrush took all the memory and crashed the whole thing.
I'm playing the free demo of Peripeteia and I can't fucking stand the shitty sewerslvt music. Seriously in 2025 even when that pedotroon's controversy is well known by this point? That's like if some gamedev made an open world crime game in the vein of GTA SA and they still use rap music by Drake and Diddy. I know the game was long in development but they couldn't like have a contest to select some new OSTs made by someone who isn't a pedotroon? Maybe should've saved some of that crowdfunding money on commissioning John Maus.
Otherwise the game is pretty inoffensive so far but I'm actively aiming avoiding seeing other people's footage and screenshots since I like to play blind. I don't know if there's really anything else that objectionable, tbh. The anime graphics are a bit ehh but I think on stuff like the UI elements where they're drawn more cartoon-y way it's fine, I kind of get a Fallout Vault Boy cartoon vibe from that. Or if anyone remembers the Bioshock plasmid tutorial cartoon characters. Ideally the IRL game world should use realistic designs but the UI elements can be anime/cartoonish which I think is fine.
It's anime Deus Ex made by terminally online Polish indie devs so with all that entails.
It fails me that people prefer to keep motion blur on in most games i don't get why people like their games where every time they move it looks like you smeared vaseline on the screen.
It depends how it's implemented, if it's very gentle and subtle like this video, then I think some people would be fine with it, however now a days if you move your camera with Mblur, everything goes to blur and exaggerated, to the point where you develop sickness from it.
It's even worse when some games like Trepang2, where you get BOTH Mblur and Head bob enabled if you want to have the worst FPS experience in your life.
Reminds me of that time yanderedev tried putting a 3d model rigged for film as a random asset on his game , so rendering a single toothbrush took all the memory and crashed the whole thing.
It's a shame that most of the tools that one could run from the developer console simply are non-existent in Unreal's exported game builds, because that could possibly be helpful on narrowing things down a bit where CPU and GPU time is being used.
I've heard of this entity before but I'm not too sure as to what happened to them. I've listened to some of their music and while I do like "breakcore" to some extent...why the fuck? Yeah that's all I got to say, why the fuck? If this person is a pedotroon (synonymous really) like you say, why in the world would they continue to use their music? Jungle is better anyway.
One of the first thing I saw when I looked it up lol.
Anyone got some good boomer shooters (or games relating to the thread but not shit) they were pleasantly surprised by?
I've heard of this entity before but I'm not too sure as to what happened to them. I've listened to some of their music and while I do like "breakcore" to some extent...why the fuck? Yeah that's all I got to say, why the fuck? If this person is a pedotroon (synonymous really) like you say, why in the world would they continue to use their music? Jungle is better anyway.
One of the first thing I saw when I looked it up lol. View attachment 7021867
Anyone got some good boomer shooters (or games relating to the thread but not shit) they were pleasantly surprised by?
I mean I guess you could make an argument of separating the art from the artist. But like, his entire persona and 'brand' is basically being obsessed with child rape and murder (he's a little too obsessed with the Junko Furuta case, for some 30+ year old Aussie troon...) which is kind of suspect y'know.
What's weird is that I know sewerslvt is popular with like 'edgy' troons who generally swing left-wing. AKA the kind that browse /lgbt/. But why would the devs of Peripeteia (who are apparently mostly TradCaths from Poland that lean right-wing) use his music? Hmm, something tells me there's some Daniel Vavra KCD2 tier shit going on behind the scenes...
These fags are pretty much 85% of what’s wrong with gaming, aside from the lack of original IPs that aren’t hoarded by mega conglomerates and then milked occasionally for a shit game that’ll only profit from stupid asses who actually pre order from these gaming companies who continuously prove they can’t be bothered. Look at concord. Fucking annihilated almost before Sony could even queef out a garbage girlboss hairy armpit Amazon “”””””“tv show””””
Before and after comparison video
From what I've seen, they missed the point that limbo is supposed to look bad. The desert levels look just as empty as before, the structures are still just abstract cubes in the middle of a flat empty plane. Cerberus has clunkier animations and they got rid of the iconic blue/red skull design.
Overall there's a lot of good changes, especially in the prelude, lust, gluttony and heresy. Some of the other ones are unnecessary, they fixed stuff that wasn't broken. They often focused more on polygonal detail instead of populating the levels to make them more immersive and less empty.
At this point it seems like they've completely given up on staying true to PSX graphics. This staircase looks ridiculous now
For example, the old statue certainly looked a bit stupid, but the new one is extremely detailed and dismisses the low poly style entirely. At least the game now has more consistent graphics overall, but it's not really retro anymore.
Still a good update, I hope game performance wasn't affected.