Not to mention brand new account. Yeah, nah.

So much this. There’s only concept art on the website. If this is ready to playtest then there really should be a video and screenshots of the current state of the game.

Otherwise it gives bad vibes like those weird NFT “MMOs” that never showed what the game actually liked like on their website. Like one wants to trick players into downloading rather than enticing them to by showing off the possible experiences.

Fair ask. There are six in-game screenshots at https://cecchigl.itch.io/harling for now. A gameplay video will come when there's something worth showing in one.

Yeah, agree with this. We've already seen a handful of scam-MMOs.

Not trying to accuse them, but I do think it's a valid point to bring up, and it's valid to ask them for more information and for them to show off more of what they've prepared.

Hi man! The game is free, and there’s no plan to change that right now. Development, maintenance and servers do cost money, though, so if the game gets even a little popular I’ll need a way to keep it going. My first idea is cosmetics or similar. Pay-to-win never: I’d rather make the game paid than make it pay-to-win.

I’m not, I’ve seen enough

The appimage (was really not gonna use a .deb for this) immediately makes many connections to sus domains.

Thanks for actually trying it, this is the most useful report in the thread. The launcher only talks to playharling.com (game files, updates, login and game server); voice chat uses Cloudflare's STUN server. It should follow your system language: if it came up in Italian on an English system, that's a bug and I'll look into it. You're right about account deletion: until it's in the launcher, email info@playharling.com and I'll delete the account and its data.

Well... Yeah? Doesn't say anything about how long this has been in development for, could've just waited until they were ready before buying a domain.

What do you mean? I don't think a human was involved at all

As I mentioned in my comment above, AI was used throughout development, both for writing code and as support for the art direction. I’m not an artist :) and the “concept art” shared on the website is the base used to develop some of the places in the game. Today it’s standard practice to use AI extensively at every level of software development, from solo devs to large studios. It still doesn’t make a game on its own (not yet at least XD): there have been months of design, manual adjustments, testing and fixing behind this one, and that’s exactly the part where I’m looking for help.

I've been waiting for this comment, finally somebody said it, lol.

See that makes me want to ask WHICH science based dragon breeding MMORPG you're referring to. The one by "Glitchless LLC" was a joke from the get go as I understand, which is why they haven't removed it from their website when it's been obvious for 2 decades that it's not going to happen. They do have another MMO with a significantly more sane set of proposed features out and it's browser based. But I suspect you mean the one from reddit, which contained the exact keywords to get a gazillion upvotes on reddit (science, dragon, 26 year old lady) and the OP of that hasn't posted a single comment in 10 years :(

No dragons, no science, just a lot of evenings 😄

I honestly prefer dog shit art over AI slop because it's actually art that someone took the time to create, not some amalgamation of theft.

Slay the Spire is an excellent example of having shit concept art, after a certain point you can toggle it on over the final polished art. It's amazing, I love it, and I wish more games would do that.

Nice bullshit slop game that will be 100% unmanageable. I hope it flourishes.

Thanks, I appreciate the offer and the honest feedback. I’d politely disagree on one point: AI is being used across pretty much every field now, and I think it will soon be hard to compete without it. The real question isn’t whether it’s used, but how. I’m pretty new to game development, but not at all new to programming, and nothing generated goes in without being reviewed, measured and, if it's needed, reworked. Without a solid grasp of architecture and software design best practices, and a good understanding of the mechanics, AI can’t do much on its own.

The website does what it needs to for now. Where I’d really welcome human hands is exactly where I’d most like to move away from AI: art direction and polish, world design, mob design, instances, VFX, and sounds and SFX in general. Most of the sounds and some model are actually CC0 packs, not AI, but they’re not at the quality I’m aiming for. If any of that is your thing, I’d be glad to hear from you.

Not tested on a Deck yet. The AppImage should run in desktop mode, and there's Xbox controller support, but I haven't tried it there.