EDIT: A week after writing this, my game got shadow-banned by none other than Garry himself. Garry directly hid my game in every single search result, and even hid the game on my organization page. They kept me around for 3 years, and I only now learned that my worth was entirely in the beta testing hours I provided for them, and nothing more. My content generated 3,319 hours of playtime over that period before he decided to cut me off, and I didn't even get a notification for it or any sort of warning, I had to ping Garry directly in their Discord to get an answer.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3721439231

Not to mention that this guys first response was to try and obfuscate the fact that it's shadow-banned further...

I'd remade Five Night's at Freddy's 1 from the ground up in 3D for s&box, without the monetization turned on. I haven't seen many FNAF 1 recreations in 3D without gameplay changes (eg. allowing Foxy to go right) compared to the original, so I wanted to make one.

Because my modelling skills are nowhere near good enough to make my own and I can't afford to hire an artist for a free game, I used a lot of Help Wanted models/materials. AI isn't an option and should never be.

https://sbox.game/dagabey/fnaf

Facepunch has forgotten one of the important pillars that made GMod successful in the first place: the freedom of the workshop and the toybox.

An example, think about the YouTuber SMG4. I didn't watch them growing up, but the important thing about them right now is that in a lot of their most popular content they used tons of Mario related workshop items. SMG4 recorded them in parody, so that's fair use, but what about Garry? In this instance allowing direct rips of Mario from Super Mario 64, among others, yet he didn't feel the need to take it down before Nintendo came knocking, and that definitely directly contributed to SMG4's income/popularity.

The kicker is that I got most of the Help Wanted models and textures as re-uploads from the GMod workshop. By this logic Garry should go preemptively strike every single FNAF asset on the GMod workshop, because it's not a matter of if but when, though you won't see him do that until he's told to by an authority. Only when it has a chance of affecting him does he care, and that's how he treats you as a player and as a developer. Why is he allowed to wait it out, but I'm not?

Despite being one of the best performing (framerate) games on s&box, one of the highest reviewed games on s&box, and having one of the highest thumbs up counts in s&box, they'd rather me feed you people a slop game than feed you something with at least a little substance.

I learned about an hour before Garry banned me that their top earning game right now is a game that's mostly made with AI and has been given $2.9k USD from Facepunch in the last week alone (according to public numbers from Facepunch). Then you have the poor games in 5th and below earning less than 1/6 of that. That's clearly the content that'll sell s&box though...... right?

If anyone who played my clone reads this, thank you for playing. A real human put up with at least 600 man-hours of Facepunch's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, only for Garry to get his panties in a twist 3 years after the fact and arbitrarily say "no", invalidating all of my effort. Stay far, far away, and this is probably a prime example of why you should never meet your heroes.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Get rid of the AI and it might be good."

This was my initial review, but after Facepunch decided to break my game less than 24 hours after launch, I felt compelled to update my review and elaborate on why this sucks. For reference, almost all of my time in-game has been spent working on my game since late 2023, not playing.

In their infinite wisdom, at some point close to launch they put a fullbright button on F2/~, with no way to turn it off. My game relies on darkness to hide things and fullbright is equivalent to cheating, so I had to implement a system to detect when mat_toolsvis wasn't the default string "Normal". If this system triggered, it'd cause an instant loss.

The day after launch they release a patch to lock it behind sv_cheats, but in the process ♥♥♥♥♥♥ everyone who had their own system in place. Without sv_cheats on, running Sandbox.ConsoleSystem.GetValue("mat_toolsvis") returns null instead of returning the value. They've made it so sv_cheats doesn't just stop the client from reading/setting values, but not even the games can check. Because my system wasn't designed to handle the convar suddenly not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ existing anymore, it caused a bunch of false positives and ruined the experience of a bunch of people before I caught on and fixed it.

This is one of what must be thousands of examples of Facepunch making random breaking changes daily; changes made with no thought behind them (definitely not AI, for sure) and shipped without any testing. If you decide to fork over the ridiculous $26 CAD for this circus and decide that you want to make a game in it, you need to prepare yourself to babysit it every single hour of every single day just in case Garry decides to introduce a silent game breaking bug.

I remember about a year ago now Garry said he'd stop breaking games (https://sbox.game/news/march-update-8c52a424#release-cycle or https://sbox.game/news/june-update-d91005cc#dont-break-games, "We've had instances where we broke shipped games. We shouldn't ever be doing this now. We should be bending over backwards to avoid it." - Garry Newman, 6/28/2024), but in the last year or so 4/5 of my updates have just been cleaning up after their mess to keep my game operational.

Everybody has already said what I'd say about the bro-culture of the Discord, or the horrible documentation, or the horrible performance (Facepunch calling 3000 series cards low-end right now is laughable), or the super-duper-secret $100 USD fee you end up paying to export your games, or having to dual fist hammer and their bastardized scene editor for the best lighting, or the forced client-authorative server model, or the forced arbitration, or the AI-ridden games list, or the FOMO-slop, but I have a take about the games list I don't see many people talk about: the sorting.

A long time ago, the in-game browser used to be able to sort by thumbs and favorites, which should be obvious sorts to have. The things with the most thumbs are probably the best representations of your platform. Doesn't take a genius to figure that one out, but Garry woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day and decided that these sorts are too sophisticated for us and removed them. Now the only sorts left are the volatile sorts like updated and trending, which have already proven to just push junk because their algorithm sucks. Bring back the thumbs and favorites sorts, if a game is good it'll make it there.

Further, Garry dismissing the "this isn't GMod 2" complaints isn't entirely valid. He spent the better half of this projects existence hailing it as the sequel, promising refuge for the migrating developers, yet not even his sandbox mode is anywhere close to feature parity. He only changed gears to abandon GMod developers in late 2023, I guess he wants you to forget about that.

Lastly, I don't see people iterate enough that this isn't Source 2, because it's really not anymore. S&box is a great analogy to the Ship of Theseus; walks, talks and acts like it, but in reality it's made like an estranged nephew to Source 2.

If this were $5 CAD or USD, then maybe. If it ever gets to the state they claim it'll get to, then maybe the $26 CAD will be worth it, but promises should mean nothing from Facepunch, proven by the litany of promises made in blogs during development which were never kept.

After 8 or so years in development, I can say that it was worth the wait 3 years ago, but not so much now.

EDIT: A week after writing this, my game got shadow-banned by none other than Garry himself. Garry directly hid my game in every single search result, and even hid the game on my organization page. They kept me around for 3 years, and I only now learned that my worth was entirely in the beta testing hours I provided for them, and nothing more. My content generated 3,319 hours of playtime over that period before he decided to cut me off, and I didn't even get a notification for it or any sort of warning, I had to ping Garry directly in their Discord to get an answer. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3721439231 Not to mention that this guys first response was to try and obfuscate the fact that it's shadow-banned further... I'd remade Five Night's at Freddy's 1 from the ground up in 3D for s&box, without the monetization turned on. I haven't seen many FNAF 1 recreations in 3D without gameplay changes (eg. allowing Foxy to go right) compared to the original, so I wanted to make one. Because my modelling skills are nowhere near good enough to make my own and I can't afford to hire an artist for a free game, I used a lot of Help Wanted models/materials. AI isn't an option and should never be. https://sbox.game/dagabey/fnaf Facepunch has forgotten one of the important pillars that made GMod successful in the first place: the freedom of the workshop and the toybox. An example, think about the YouTuber SMG4. I didn't watch them growing up, but the important thing about them right now is that in a lot of their most popular content they used tons of Mario related workshop items. SMG4 recorded them in parody, so that's fair use, but what about Garry? In this instance allowing direct rips of Mario from Super Mario 64, among others, yet he didn't feel the need to take it down before Nintendo came knocking, and that definitely directly contributed to SMG4's income/popularity. The kicker is that I got most of the Help Wanted models and textures as re-uploads from the GMod workshop. By this logic Garry should go preemptively strike every single FNAF asset on the GMod workshop, because it's not a matter of if but when, though you won't see him do that until he's told to by an authority. Only when it has a chance of affecting him does he care, and that's how he treats you as a player and as a developer. Why is he allowed to wait it out, but I'm not? Despite being one of the best performing (framerate) games on s&box, one of the highest reviewed games on s&box, and having one of the highest thumbs up counts in s&box, they'd rather me feed you people a slop game than feed you something with at least a little substance. I learned about an hour before Garry banned me that their top earning game right now is a game that's mostly made with AI and has been given $2.9k USD from Facepunch in the last week alone (according to public numbers from Facepunch). Then you have the poor games in 5th and below earning less than 1/6 of that. That's clearly the content that'll sell s&box though...... right? If anyone who played my clone reads this, thank you for playing. A real human put up with at least 600 man-hours of Facepunch's bullshit, only for Garry to get his panties in a twist 3 years after the fact and arbitrarily say "no", invalidating all of my effort. Stay far, far away, and this is probably a prime example of why you should never meet your heroes. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Get rid of the AI and it might be good." This was my initial review, but after Facepunch decided to break my game less than 24 hours after launch, I felt compelled to update my review and elaborate on why this sucks. For reference, almost all of my time in-game has been spent working on my game since late 2023, not playing. In their infinite wisdom, at some point close to launch they put a fullbright button on F2/~, with no way to turn it off. My game relies on darkness to hide things and fullbright is equivalent to cheating, so I had to implement a system to detect when mat_toolsvis wasn't the default string "Normal". If this system triggered, it'd cause an instant loss. The day after launch they release a patch to lock it behind sv_cheats, but in the process fucked everyone who had their own system in place. Without sv_cheats on, running Sandbox.ConsoleSystem.GetValue("mat_toolsvis") returns null instead of returning the value. They've made it so sv_cheats doesn't just stop the client from reading/setting values, but not even the games can check. Because my system wasn't designed to handle the convar suddenly not fucking existing anymore, it caused a bunch of false positives and ruined the experience of a bunch of people before I caught on and fixed it. This is one of what must be thousands of examples of Facepunch making random breaking changes daily; changes made with no thought behind them (definitely not AI, for sure) and shipped without any testing. If you decide to fork over the ridiculous $26 CAD for this circus and decide that you want to make a game in it, you need to prepare yourself to babysit it every single hour of every single day just in case Garry decides to introduce a silent game breaking bug. I remember about a year ago now Garry said he'd stop breaking games (https://sbox.game/news/march-update-8c52a424#release-cycle or https://sbox.game/news/june-update-d91005cc#dont-break-games, "We've had instances where we broke shipped games. We shouldn't ever be doing this now. We should be bending over backwards to avoid it." - Garry Newman, 6/28/2024), but in the last year or so 4/5 of my updates have just been cleaning up after their mess to keep my game operational. Everybody has already said what I'd say about the bro-culture of the Discord, or the horrible documentation, or the horrible performance (Facepunch calling 3000 series cards low-end right now is laughable), or the super-duper-secret $100 USD fee you end up paying to export your games, or having to dual fist hammer and their bastardized scene editor for the best lighting, or the forced client-authorative server model, or the forced arbitration, or the AI-ridden games list, or the FOMO-slop, but I have a take about the games list I don't see many people talk about: the sorting. A long time ago, the in-game browser used to be able to sort by thumbs and favorites, which should be obvious sorts to have. The things with the most thumbs are probably the best representations of your platform. Doesn't take a genius to figure that one out, but Garry woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day and decided that these sorts are too sophisticated for us and removed them. Now the only sorts left are the volatile sorts like updated and trending, which have already proven to just push junk because their algorithm sucks. Bring back the thumbs and favorites sorts, if a game is good it'll make it there. Further, Garry dismissing the "this isn't GMod 2" complaints isn't entirely valid. He spent the better half of this projects existence hailing it as the sequel, promising refuge for the migrating developers, yet not even his sandbox mode is anywhere close to feature parity. He only changed gears to abandon GMod developers in late 2023, I guess he wants you to forget about that. Lastly, I don't see people iterate enough that this isn't Source 2, because it's really not anymore. S&box is a great analogy to the Ship of Theseus; walks, talks and acts like it, but in reality it's made like an estranged nephew to Source 2. If this were $5 CAD or USD, then maybe. If it ever gets to the state they claim it'll get to, then maybe the $26 CAD will be worth it, but promises should mean nothing from Facepunch, proven by the litany of promises made in blogs during development which were never kept. After 8 or so years in development, I can say that it was worth the wait 3 years ago, but not so much now.