Garden Masters

Cute game for a first game. Was a little hard to play because I would get a glitch that would make my crop vanish and I would have to completely restart the game. Hope everyone on the team continues to make games!

⠀

[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop][b]Warning: AI Slop[/b][/url] This game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated content.[/quote] "Garden Masters" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from Dayton STEM School in the USA. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. The high school students made a simple gardening game with Unreal Engine, some almost certainly flipped assets (never okay and schools should not be teaching students that asset flipping is acceptable practice, it is not), and some primitive, janky game loops. As mentioned, this features really godawful, "wrong" sounding AI slop BGM instead of genuinely and sincerely created game music (even Creative Commons would be better). AI slop sticks out like a sore thumb... and it comes across as insulting. It's absolutely reprehensible that any educational institution would teach students that the use of disgusting AI slop is acceptable. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too, and that's glaringly obvious here. I'm not sure if this is an asset flip, but it's one of those cases where the assets just look much better than the rest of the quality of the game... a glaring inconsistency.  There's no evidence, but as always, the biggest problem with asset flips besides the plagiarism is the deplorably low quality of the other aspects of the game, and even if the game assets are genuinely created for the game, the quality of the rest of the game is indistinguishable from that of asset flips. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 4 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. This isn't a complete game for gamers, and since it offers no profile benefits like a game collector badge, so I can't recommend adding it to your library. The use of AI slop is a direct insult to gamers and real, ethical content creators and artists everywhere.