I have absolutely had it. I have a desire to make pony games and mods to keep the tradition alive, but I can only take so much. With practically no coding experience, I have made one or two mods here and there, nothing substantial, but I actually could learn things as I went by studying what others have made, going over documentation, reading online forums, following tutorials, and some trial and error. But what are you supposed to do when all of this becomes impossible to come by?
I make this thread to call for a jihad on devs, the ones responsible for this horrid state of gaming. So many people lie and say it is all thanks to corporations and executives that don't give a shit. They certainly don't help, but the source of the problem has always been and always will be the dev. They refuse to document their process, insist on fragmenting what little information they do share in thousands of discords, and making the worst fucking tutorials you ever witnessed on Allah's shithole of a world. Let me tell you how this got started.
I was growing ever frustrated with Hearts of Iron IV and the Equestria at War mod, trying to add things such as Aryanne. The tutorials available for this are years old and are for very basic changes to the game. I could learn only so much by following them, but I did my best. I actually figured out how to change what character you can make the leader of the nation. But I wasn't satisfied. I wanted a unique focus tree to go with my addition of Aryanne. For whatever fucking reason, the tree spazzed out every time I wanted to make a new point on the tree and undoing the change didn't fix the UI, even after resetting the game, deleting the code I did, somehow this was a permanent fuck up. I looked all over for anyone else that had this problem, but I can't find anything. If it exists, the information is not made easily available.
I tried messing around over and over until I finally gave up. I worked on some other things, like an economy system, and couldn't make them work either. An update hit and somehow fucked everything up save the picture I made. I don't know how that happened and there is no documentation to tell me how. How the fuck are you supposed to fix what you don't know is broken? The infidel dev will say "Welcome to my life, because I don't know either and it takes dozens of hours to fix any one problem" failing to realize that he is the source of his own suffering by not fucking documenting what everything does in the code and what patches will do that might fuck with other things.
So, I decide I will abandon the whole thing and make my own game. I won't be cucked by the whims of two sets of retarded devs. I proceed to look up how one can make a strategy map within a free engine like Unreal Engine 5. There are two tutorials to choose from. Every other result is 30 seconds of people showing off their development of their own projects with zero information on how they did it. The first tutorial is in French with English subtitles and it is years old to the point the UI of the engine does not match anymore. Clearly this baguetteling was not of the Light of Allah because he stops halfway through his series to say he did everything wrong up until that point and he says he will redo it all and upload the correction. He did not. He did upload the finished file of his correction, with no documentation on how he did it correct this time. So, that tutorial is out because I need to learn how to do this thing and replicate it so I can make my own game. I can't learn from a fuck up.
The second tutorial is in English, at least I assume it is. This guy fucking mutters everything he says, when he isn't saying "umm". He is quieter than Fluttershy in the first episode of the show. I am not fucking joking. He also doesn't really spend time on anything so I can properly learn how to replicate it reliably. With the only options in video format exhausted, I turn to the searchable internet, a dreadful place as search engines no longer bring up any useful data or sites where you can try to find answers.
I navigate to an official Unreal Engine 5 forum and there is a post asking how one might replicate grand strategy maps like Europa Universalis IV, a game that is similar to Hearts of Iron IV. I am in luck! But what a fool I was, because the answer was never given within the thread, instead another thread was linked as someone was going to make their own answer. I click and what do I see? It was the fucking Frenchy again with that shit tutorial! Why the fuck is he here? Why is everything just a fucking loop of bad practices and shitty tutorials in which I can't learn how to do anything?
I look through the rest of the forums, praying to Muhammad above that some true believer had blessed the forums with the presence of a prophet, but alas... nearly everything was useless. Most threads were left unanswered and the couple that were only had generic advice like make sure the UI scales. Fucking brilliant answer there. There was only one forum with any aid whatsoever. This one was by a Paradox technical artist. Surely, he will come to the aid of those that seek aid. He states he is bound by NDA contract to not speak of what to do, only to look through the folders of the games. So, there is no one that both knows what to do and has posted publicly and in a coherent way on the internet.
I declare a jihad on all devs for this blight upon the land. They will all be given a chance, as per the wisdom of Allah, to convert and stop being shitbags. They will learn to document their code and leave their knowledge to the public, just as the Holy Prophet documented the Light in the Quran. All others must fall as we tread upon their rotting flesh, the perfect reflection of their inner self. There will be no mercy for their souls.
Meanwhile, I guess I will just fucking trial and error this shit for a few months and see what I can figure out.