Anyone knows where Damaris' lost sword is? Can't seem to find it.
It's sticking out of a corpse to the northeast of the rampant lioness. If you go to the north door and look down, it might be visible from there. The corpse is just above water level on a dirt path, right next to a natural arch/tunnel thing that leads toward the temple-ish stuff on the northern bit of the island.
An asset flip is an asset flip. Some asset flips are more tame than others. Its just the term has been morally loaded because of like you said, the games that just buy something from the store and repackage it as a new "game".
My thoughts are that people don't care as long as you use it in a creative or understandable way. I don't expect you to spend 30 hours hand making every texture. Thats stupid.
However, people WILL start using it as a point of critic if you have glaring issues with the core game like this one does. Its just an easy dunk to add in that will hit you if your other qualities don't have redeeming factors. Porn games are more lax about making their own assets sure, but you know people will hit you for it going like "where did all the dev time go if you bought the models LOL", even if its not relevant to the criticism at hand.
Yes, an asset flip is an asset flip, which is when you take an existing project and swap the assets. That's the term as originally coined by Jim Sterling, and it's all about the idea of a quick in-and-out with minimal effort to turn a profit. Ironically, a lot of asset flips under that definition have relatively solid mechanics because they take a decent foundation like Tetris or Breakout and just change the graphics and music. Typically this involves the same developer releasing a lot of small games very quickly. Because again, minimal effort for maximal profit is the goal with an asset flip. The more broadened term as commonly used can refer to half-baked projects where developers bought a lot of assets and shoved them together into a hodge-podge mess for a quick profit, which again focuses on a quick turnaround time and minimal effort.
On the other hand, we already have good names for what this game is. Development hell. Poorly designed. Buggy. Just plain bad. I could go on. My point is that this is not by any stretch of the term an "asset flip" because the developers are sinking tons of time and work into the game - they just keep making the same mistakes because they really,
really should hire a programmer. This is more akin to being the opposite of an asset flip - the devs are doing lots of work, but it's not even remotely close to the work they should be doing or that the game needs.
I won't disagree that this game is poorly made. I will disagree with the way you're using asset flip - especially with how ments referred to the idea of using third party assets as plagiarism. That is wrong and it deserves to be called out as such, because if that attitude sets in then it will have a strong negative impact on legitimate indie developers who are just trying to make a decent game but can't make models or other kinds of assets themselves. It won't impact actual flippers at all because they don't care and never have cared.