>made by a team of freelancers, to our specifications
So...did these freelancers not communicate with each other at all? When I saw the first screenshot on the page, of the newest game, I thought it was composed entirely of assets purchased from an asset store and built in RPG Maker and I expected the body of the article to be centered on why it's ok to buy assets when what you're focusing on is gameplay. I feel like this dev is really being taken advantage of by his cadre of artists because the other games on the page don't actually look bad. Maybe a hair generic, but not bad. The newest one, though, damn. That looks like someone's homework.
He doesn't have a cadre of artists. They might not be working concurrently in the same game. He specifically says multiple times that they come and go, life happens.
I guess there's an argument to be made that he could focus on better and better specifications for those artists so, over time, the style stays consistent. But I dont know anything about that. Seems doable?
You can absolutely write specifications for art. And I would consider a pretty technical checklist for quality control that is agreed on in advance (lighting from predetermined direction, adjerence to color palette for corresponding scenery, shadows consistent, required silhouettes recognizable etc.).
I remember an old style guide written by MS for Windows XP that outlined in great detail how icons in the default theme style meed achieve their look. It gave technical details like the exact location of the vanishing point for perspectively drawn icons. So coming up with an art style specification should be doable once the style has been developed.
Nethergate looks absolutely awful, and I'm not fond of Avernum's art either.
Exile: Escape From the Pit looks OK, it uses bold colors and a pretty consistent palette, it could be improved (the texturing attempts on the wooden elements) is bleh and the perspective is a bit odd) but the world area at least is fine.
Honestly the rest of what he says about hiring artists makes me suspect he doesn’t so much have a team of artists as he has a series of artists, with no communication between them.
Reading between the lines I think he is also not paying his artists very much, and not offering them any other perks that would make them want to come back for another fun Spiderweb gig on the side.
The graphics immediately reminded me of Tibia (https://www.tibia.com/news), the MMO running since 1997. My friends were into it at one point, and I cut my programming teeth writing bots for the game (sorry CIPsoft).
Kind of sad to see the playership has been in decline for the last 10 years though :(.
The art in that game looks consistent, lighting looks decent and the colours work well together. Sadly all of these properties lack from the OPs screenshots.
Seeing the graphics I was reminded of Realmz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realmz), which was a game I absolutely loved as a kid. So to me the games hit a nostalgia spot.
It seems like Fantasoft published the first Spiderweb game (and looking at screenshots there are definitely some shared assets) so there is actually a connection there.
There's a difference between a conscious choice to maintain a certain style or level of detail, and a lack of willingness to improve said style. The whole article reads to me less like "I don't want to upgrade to 3D or higher detail" and more like "I'm too comfortable to want to improve the current art by putting in 10% more detail".
Disclaimer: I'm not a business owner and don't work in the games industry. My opinions are that of a layman from the (sometimes similar) maze of the development agency sector.
Lesson 1 is correct. Perfectionism will always be there.
Lesson 2 has a false premise that the amount of effort and cost to increase art quality is more than the value gained in sales and profit. It's not wrong that hiring more people will be a bit of a gamble, but also putting more time in it to iron out kinks is an alternative step. If you're a business owner then long hours are the norm, no?
Lesson 3 is just putting the blame on the freelancers. Yes it's hard to find talent and yes it's hard to afford it, but that shouldn't be an excuse to just give up on trying to strive for better.
Lesson 4 I agree with. One should follow their strengths. However that doesn't mean stagnating at one level.
> There's a difference between a conscious choice to maintain a certain style or level of detail, and a lack of willingness to improve said style. The whole article reads to me less like "I don't want to upgrade to 3D or higher detail" and more like "I'm too comfortable to want to improve the current art by putting in 10% more detail".
He has an entire section dedicated to this issue though. Which boils down to the fact that improving the graphics sufficiently for enough people to not say "this looks like crap" far outstrips the budget and team he has available. His take:
> I have had games where I worked very hard to improve the graphics, spending a lot of time and money, and they really did look better! But when I released those games, the vast majority of people who had said, "Your games look bad." STILL said, "Your games look bad."
I get his position and I don't see a problem here. Gamers are incredibly fickle and I wouldn't want to be subject to the whims of the gaming community's opinions on graphics. Of course, he's choosing to limit his audience to an extent but ... that's fine. He wants to focus on everything else that can make a game good and valuable and it seems that's something that his business has continued to survive on.
I think he doesn't understand why people say the games look bad (and people may have trouble articulating the real reasons too); I believe 'meheleventyone captured the root issue elsewhere[0] - the game he presented has inconsistent, crappy style. Which can be contrasted to other simple games he uses as a justification - these games look well because they have a particular style.
The solution isn't to go 3D, or add more details - it's to get one artist responsible for the overall style and refactor art relentlessly so that it all fits together. It should be entirely within his budget.
It's an interesting pattern to notice; well written articles that pre-emptively address common questions, and then a pile of comments that ask those exact same questions.
Some articles (like this) don't address common questions, they brush them aside, possibly not realizing that actually addressing them would remove the point behind the article.
It's more that people don't like the answer: That he's happy with where he is, feels safe doing what he knows works, and don't want to take risks that could very well give him a massive boost but could also make his business fail.
> and then a pile of comments that ask those exact same questions.
It would be nicer if the remarks in this thread were presented as questions, rather than absolute convictions...
I'm impressed that out of everyone who read the article none have lost their nerve and started responding to every zomg-bad-art-hire-an-art-director poster asking which indy game company they've been profitably running for the past twenty years. Or maybe it's only me feeling that compulsion... :)
I know. But that doesn't change the fact that a single art director would most likely fix the "look like crap" problem.
The article reads to me like, "would-be customers complain about X, I gather that A, B, C are the causes of X, but I won't address them; moreover, I won't address the issues Y and Z (which happen to be the true causes of X) either; so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯".
> Lesson 3 is just putting the blame on the freelancers. Yes it's hard to find talent and yes it's hard to afford it, but that shouldn't be an excuse to just give up on trying to strive for better.
As a business owner, you have to do some kind of de-risking to your production process. If that includes not relying on freelancers so you can hit deadlines, that's fine. It's a completely valid excuse.
Arrrgh, there are a lot of interesting and good points in the article but for the most part they miss the wood for the trees. The actual answer is that care isn't being taken to develop a style that looks good and meets his constraints. Jeff needs a good art director.
The Ultima V and Baba is You examples are excellent counter-points because they show how great games with simple styles can look.
He actually addresses why he won't solve any of the "problems" with more manpower. He's found local maxima and is willing to stay there because there are risks associated with moving.
But it's not a question of adding more manpower. When I say Jeff needs an art director I mean that Jeff needs to care about art direction and that making a good looking game with his existing constraints is perfectly feasible.
> When I say Jeff needs an art director I mean that Jeff needs to care about art direction and that making a good looking game with his existing constraints is perfectly feasible.
Then say that instead of "Jeff needs an art director", which literally means that Jeff needs an art director. Which means another employee. It doesn't mean "Jeff needs to be an art director". Which he is, but results in the current situation where his games have the art they have, people complain, he writes an article explaining, and people like you criticize him for reasonable justification for why things are the way things are.
Jeff needs an art director doesn't imply anything more than that. It could be him, it could be another full time employee or it could be something he has a freelancer develop at the start of the project.
And it seems like he focused more on making sure that his artists were replaceable, even at the price of a hodge-podge style. The criticism is legitimate - it doesn't seem like Jeff has invested in his own ability to direct art.
Yeah and because art has vastly different constraints from coding, wanting to swap out artists is just counterproductive.
Then again, the older I get, the more I think the same should apply to developers. You should never lock knowledge inside one person's head, but the idea that you can take over a project without its original creators doing a years long hand off is naive, and leads to all the expected pathologies.
I remember a new $250k CTO saying he was amazed our code didn't have abandoned parts nobody wanted to touch ... this is how professionals are supposed to work, not something they discover "late" in their career.
> Yeah and because art has vastly different constraints from coding, wanting to swap out artists is just counterproductive.
It's actually really common. Most games take years to make and in my experience at least it's very unusual to ship with the same team that started. Art is also the side of things that most readily gets outsourced, either through bought and modified assets or through freelancers and outsourcing companies. Maintaining consistency is something that has to be managed.
> wanting to swap out artists is just counterproductive
You're saying this like this was one of his design goals from the very beginning when he started 25 years ago. No, it's become a requirement because of how unreliable freelancers can be and how difficult it is to find a replacement that is able or willing to stick to the previous style. Thus generic fantasy stuff has become his solution to this issue that is unavoidable, regardless of whether people agree with him or not.
Perhaps. Or maybe freelance artists are frustrated working with someone who doesn't seem to understand what they like to see in good work, and what gives them a sense of satisfaction in a product they have worked on.
I mean the guy seems incapable of comprehending style if this is what he's putting out 25 years in.
I don't really see the problem. If you're not a visual person, and you don't want to be, you shouldn't make visual decisions. He's already hiring freelancers, so he obviously gets this point. The problem is, he should just give a freelancer a broader brief. Like, 'pick all the colours the game will use'. Or even, 'do the art'. I don't see what the difference is between hiring a freelancer to do direction, and hiring somebody to do a couple of sprites.
It's common in the advertising world for a company to be paid to produce a design document, that specifies stuff like writing style, colours, photograph guidelines, and so on. The idea is to create a guide for making media that fits the brand. Doesn't need to be complicated - from what I saw of his games, it would be a night-and-day improvement if he just had a decent palette.
I think everyone is missing the point. This was not a call for help. It was an explanation of why things are the way they are and why they will not change. Guy's found a way to make a living with the skillset he has and I say power to him.
I don't disagree with that at all and of course Jeff will do what he wants and is welcome to that. I just think the art direction is the encompassing unaddressed point that follows through the article despite the enumerated constraints. Also where he does touch on art direction the things he chooses to highlight are not why his games look bad. Particularly when he highlights games he grew up with like Ultima V which IMO still looks great despite being made with the constraints that existed in 1988. I'm also well aware that it hasn't prevented him running a successful business.
I don't think his liking his games art is a reason not to comment with my take on his blog post about it though.
But what I think you're missing is that in order to have an art director who is capable of delivering on what you're talking about, Jeff would need another person. And he clearly explains why he does not want to risk hiring another person.
When you care about art, you usually got some sense of aesthetics and feel more likely unable to bring yourself to ship anything that looks simply bad to yourself.
When you don't got the eyes to see bad art as what it is, you also won't see it as a problem that really needs fixing so you care less about it than is good for you.
You have to strike a balance there. Games are visual independend of the style. Yes you play them – but before you even decide to pick a game up, you see screenshots, trailers or game-play-videos. If that doesn't look interesting, you can have the most interesing gameplay in the universe and it wouldn't sell.
A bit like in films, where the best script can be destroyed by bad acting or the best acting can be destroyed by bad scripts as a passionate creator you have to realize that this is a serious issue.
Amateur filmmakers might figure out directing techniques to get top notch acting out of people who never stood in front of a camera before or they might search very patiently till somebody crosses their way who is a natural talent.
The thing is to precisely know your limitations and do the best you can do within them, sometimes even by not copying the best, but by finding glorious short cuts that sometimes create whole new genres.
I agree that Microsoft's visual design usually leaves a lot to be desired, but I think at one point in the 90s they did succeed for a brief moment – with Windows 95. Compared to its contemporaries like Motif and OS/2 it looks really slick and elegant. (Of course, from the "design is how it works" angle, it's a pretty poor imitation of OS/2's Workplace Shell.)
You don't need increased manpower to over time develop a better sense for how well your game's screens are composed and if things fit together or not. This is a skill you can improve yourself by mostly paying attention. This kind of blindness to your own game's visual quality is a common problem that everyone making a game experiences and people generally work around it by relying on feedback from other developers or from the general public, which you don't need to pay for as you can do it online by just posting images or gifs from your games and seeing how well people react.
A small example of taste problems: in the top screenshot, everything is unnaturally square. It is completely unnecessary: the tiles have different edge types for transitions (e.g. "vertical edge with dark dirt in the low and middle portion and light dirt in the top portion"), there is (presumably) a tileset with all supported edge type combinations and it wouldn't cost more to use nicer shapes. This art has simply been approved as-is, without technical or budget constraints apart from bothering to try more variations.
Exactly: if you have constraints on your work, then recognise the constraints and work within them. Don't try to mix 3D realistic faces in with low-fidelity 2D art, because it just ends up sticking out like a sore thumb.
And at least choose a decent font (looking at the first screenshot on the blog post)
Did you miss the part where adding an employee would double his required budget for the game? Which means he needs at least double the sales? Which means more risk? And there's no guarantee he'll hit that even if the graphics look better?
He spells out that he's working with freelancers, who often flake out for (understandable) various reasons.
You would think after 25 years of making games he'd have enough sense to direct art himself in some way. Seems like he's rationalizing his choices instead of taking it upon himself to learn from his customer's criticisms and his own experience.
If I had made that many games over 3 decades I would have at least learned how to talk to freelance artists in a way that would get better over time. It seems Jeff has put no effort into it, or gave up too early because he's protected his choices with rationalizations.
While I agree with your assessment, his argument from experience seems to be that none of that will affect his sales, so why bother. I'm sure he knows more about that than I do.
Yes I agree. I almost feel bad for disagreeing with someone who obviously put so much love in his games and rightfully stands behind them, but I cannot shake off the feeling that there is a huge potential for improvement there that does not involve hiring additional people, more expensive artists, etc.
Just investing some of his own time reading up on the fundamentals of art, visual language, perception, color theory, could vastly improve his judgement. I try to build games for fun and learning, and I consciously avoid anything that goes beyond my (non-existing) knowledge about creating 'professional' game art. In my case I resort to abstract graphics or introduce very strict voluntary contraints (like: only 8x8 sprites), ie: similar to what games like Baba is You or boxboxboy are doing. If I were to ever shoot for a game that required 'professional game art' I would definitely invest time to get better at it before even considering to start the project.
It's a bit like the programming side of things. Don't try to build your own engine for your game if you barely know any programming, for example.
I suppose, but all of that takes time, and he is only one person, and he only has so much time. If he directs some of it toward all the things you're suggesting, he'll necessarily be directing it away from the things that make a Spiderweb game a Spiderweb game.
I don't think he ever came out and said this directly, but he dances around it throughout the article: As a very small indie developer, that's a huge risk to take. He could end up alienating his current fan base, while at the same time failing to satisfy the tastes of others.
That's a really good point that I think a lot of folks are overlooking. Spiderweb games has been around for a long time and has a dedicated following. I actually felt pretty alienated when things like Geneforge came out -- It seemed like a huge step away from the simple sprite-based graphics I loved in his earlier games. (Not that Geneforge was bad, mind you! Just a big change.) Spiderweb has always had a very distinct brand of artwork. Call it crappy if you want, but I've always quite liked it.
Don't underestimate the risk of changing your style, particularly when it's a defining part of the experience. You will lose at least some customers. It may be worth it, but it's a significant risk.
I'm also thinking here of Telltale games. The original Telltale wasn't ever going to take over the world. But they had figured out a niche where some people (largely, admittedly, a nostalgia crowd) liked what they were doing enough to send a little beer money their way every time they put out a new episode. It was sustainable.
And then at some point they had a moderate mainstream success, and that got them thinking that maybe they could grow into a much bigger game company, and so they started pushing hard at trying to grow. That was the point where me and a lot of other fairly loyal Telltale fans stopped buying their games. The effort they put into other things meant that they were no longer putting as much care into the things that earned them their original fan base. And, at the same time, they found out that breaking into the mainstream market is a lot harder than it looks.
As mentioned in the article though, he did take steps to improve the art once, only to again hear complaints about it looking bad. How much effort should he be expected to expend chasing those consumers? Will the cost make up for it? His own reasoning is no, it won't, and it is difficult to disagree when people complain that 720p resolution is "unplayable".
I was just giving my perspective, not trying to draw any comparisons between my for-fun side projects, and game development for a living. That said, I don’t see any context were either investing time getting better at things you know are a weakness, or recognizing and avoiding them, would be considered bad advice. 25 years is a long time.
Some people just have no aptitude for aesthetics. It's one thing to know what you like personally, another thing entirely to understand what other people may or may not like.
Besides which, it feels like you're missing the larger point that he really doesn't care what other people like, which he can afford to do because he's making a comfortable living. I think it's great that he's making a living doing things that he enjoys without having to add stress by adding extra layers of complexity in the process - which would help how? More money? He clearly feels that he doesn't need more.
Seems like you're rationalizing your assumptions instead of taking it upon yourself to understand the experience he's trying to convey.
> It seems Jeff has put no effort into it
From the article: "I have had games where I worked very hard to improve the graphics, spending a lot of time and money"
> he'd have enough sense to direct art himself in some way
He does direct art himself in some way: "That is why all of my games have a more generic fantasy style. I have to work with a lot of different artists. It's the nature of the business. Thus I have to write games in a way that the artists can be replaced. The generic style this requires is not ideal, but it is necessary."
> If I had made that many games over 3 decades I would have at least
Yeah, but you have not.
Maybe Jeff having a single minded focus – maybe even bordering ignorance – is a huge part of the reason why he, in fact, has done it and keeps on going after 3 decades.
Considering different choices, could he be more successful? He probably could, but considering the immense improbability of the level of success he enjoyed over a couple of decades in this particular profession (indie game maker), it seems far more likely that any big change could have made it all crash and burn somewhere along the way a long time ago.
But it has, that's what many people are commenting on. His last two games looked much better than his current game. It could just be the luck of the draw with regards to which artists showed up rather than a conscious choice, but his new game clearly has a different look than his previous game.
Yes, I hadn't seen any pictures of his new game, so I thought he was talking about Avadon, the Avernum re-remakes, and so on, all of which look fine despite having a decent amount of re-used art and being iso 2D. The screenshots for the new game look worse than any game he's previously released.
>Seems like he's rationalizing his choices instead of taking it upon himself to learn from his customer's criticisms and his own experience.
The thing about Jeff is that he very much accepts "good enough". Could he make more or do better? Maybe. But that entails risk. Why bring on risk when you're already doing what you love doing and living off it? To make more money? Jeff's not motivated by money except insofar as it's necessary. He just wants to do what he loves and enjoy his life and family, and the "good enough" pace he's set delivers on that.
His art does nothing for me, either, but I do admire his willingness to settle for "good enough" in order to focus on what really matters to him.
Maybe, maybe not. You'd think after spending over 12 years or so trying to read through untranslated Japanese games that I'd get some sense of reading the language. I can't point out some kanji and even read some common sentences by myself but the fact of the matter is I'm not gonna be native anytime soon without focused study.
I imagine it's the same case here. There may be some passive knowledge gained over the years but not enough to be a competent art director compared to if he even spent 6 months dedicating himself to learning.
> You would think after 25 years of making games he'd have enough sense to direct art himself in some way.
It might simply be that he isn't particularly interested in learning it. If he isn't motivated by being an art director, then it would very likely lead to burnout.
He says at the outset that he’s responsible for the art and everything is done to his specifications.
Maybe art just isn’t where his talent lies.
I actually wonder if he couldn’t make 2x or more by investing in the art. His previous efforts went from terrible to merely bad. It would be interesting to see what could happen if he crossed the threshold into acceptable.
Then again, I don’t know the total market size for this genre. Maybe even fantastic looking games don’t make enough to support two full timers?
You miss the point: many games have used lots of freelancers, but come out looking good because the one in charge of placing and paying for art has a good aestetic sense for what will look good together. They have an art director.
Being that they don't have budget for a new position, they just have to train someone to get better at art directing.
>they just have to train someone to get better at art directing.
You're missing the point: the author is happy with the games and the success they've brought to him and his family, and he doesn't "need" random tips from anonymous message-board posters, most of whom have shipped precisely zero games.
I think Jeff is a treasure to the games industry but this discussion is nothing to do with giving him tips but critique of an article that was posted publically. It's fair to read it and disagree with it in a place specifically setup to comment on such things.
I read it more as an explanation of why it the suggestions does not work for him.
Sure, it's fair to disagree, but it's also very easy to disagree when giving the suggestions does not put at risk a business that has sustained his family for a quarter century in a business where very few even large game studios have survived that long.
For what it's worth, I clicked the comment thread here before looking at the article. And without recognizing the author's name, my first thought from what people were saying about it was "It sounds like we're talking about Avernum."
I played the demo of one of his games on a bondi blue iMac back in the early 2000's. The graphics then looked ok. But it's 2019 and new titles don't look better.
I've wondered before who the userbase is for these; is it just fans from back in the day when game development was a smaller thing and the competition didn't have great artists either? Because I can't see getting into them as a new player.
Being able to sell 2x by having a more consistent and up to date art style honestly sounds low to me. Even as someone who's played my share of RPGs, had a Mac back in the day, and know that Spiderweb Software exists, that's the main thing holding me back from checking it out seriously.
But if he's getting by with what he's doing and spending more to try and reach a broader market is a risk he doesn't want to take, that's his call.
Except his competition isn't other indie developers,it's fully staffed studios in india/china/europe that earn the same amount of money with 3 or 4 times the developers. He has to be the best in a certain metric(he seems to have chosen story for this according to the limited time i've played his latest game) and he certainly is head and shoulders above his competition there.
>Did you miss the part where adding an employee would double his required budget for the game? Which means he needs at least double the sales?
How does that mean he needs to double the sale? That's not how any of this works unless he wasn't making a profit before.
Assuming his budget was $50k, and he made $250k in sales. Now if he increases budget to $100k, he sure as hell doesn't need $500k in sales to justify the decision, in fact as long as his sale goes beyond $300k, or a 20% increase, then it pays for the increased budget.
According to one old article[0], Geneforge 4 was $3,000 in the hole three years after launch. The current article sounds like he's supporting his family, but not by any great margin. Certainly not by enough of a margin to pay for a second salary out of profit.
He does address this in the article: Hiring more people means he directly needs to make more sales, which (I also know from experience) is very difficult to do. Hiring dead weight like an "art director" probably means hiring even more people to carry out the directions of the art director, since they're unlikely to be a can-do person themselves.
I think you have some odd preconceptions about what an art director role on a small indie team would be like. For the kind of thing Jeff is talking about I'd not even suggest it be an in-house role and would definitely expect them to be producing art.
Additionally it helps to have a unique, well thought out and recognizable style in a game when you want to convince your audience that you are making good games and you are not some guy who tried out a game editor for the first thime with that generic texture pack he found on the internet.
People are very visual and your game can be amazing in terms of story or programming, but you also need to sell them visually. That doesn't mean every game has to go for amazing graphics, but it must make sense and look interesting. E.g. nethack looks more interesting without generic sprite package, till somebody developes one with a consistent style.
It takes years to get good at this, unless you did it since you were born. You pay good artists exactly for these years.
The guy is doing well, relative to his own aims and objectives, and has found a way to work within his limitations to hit a sweet spot that allows him to support his family in a happy life and provide games enjoyed by a loyal fanbase.
What do we discover from HN? He's a lazy bugger that hasn't put any real effort in to respond to his customer's complaints and has failed to learn key lessons regarding his own business (that he has successfully run for twenty-five years).
This is what I said in a different comment: there are people like that in film too – they make films their whole life, found a certain level that they feel comfortable with and settle there. That is a perfectly fine choice and in no way should anybody talk bad about it.
The only thing that bugs me however is when they try to come up with excuses why their works don't live up to the standard of other artists judge themselves by. Jeff listed some quite compelling arguments for his decision, most of them economical, but it still feels like an excuse of somebody who knows they could do better, which is kinda sad.
Why is that sad? He seems to be perfectly content, maybe except for about the fact that some people criticize him.
You don't have to always strive to be among the world elite at everything. Often, mediocrity in some areas of life (professional or otherwise) is a perfectly valid choice that will lead to greater happiness in the end.
Why should he expend effort getting better at something he doesn't really care that much about when he can spend his time getting better at things he does? People like you always seem to miss the thing about time being a scarce resource.
"People like me" are uttering these things, because "people like me" are facing the same or similar questions themselves. You are right about time being a scarce resource. This is precisely the reason why one shouldn't skimp on $IMPORTANT_THING: because it can greatly reduce the value of all the time put into the thing already.
So you got me 180° wrong – if his motives were purely economical, I'd completely understand his arguments. But because it is not purely economical I see this as a vague sign that he might not value the time he put into it himself enough, which is never a good thing in the long term.
Why does the sum of the value of his time have to be expressed purely in profit? That's ridiculous. Way I see it, he's optimized for the amount of enjoyment he gets out of what he does while still being able to pay the bills with it. We could all hope to be so lucky.
Well if you make games, and visuals are a part of a game, then knowing when your visuals need improvement is a crucial skill.
Jeff doesn't needs to be an expert in everything, he needs to see what doesn't work and fix it, let others fix it or decide this is as good as it gets.
And it reads like and excuse to himself, which is probably the reason for the reaction on HN. A bit like a film maker who says: "If only I had the budget, Hollywood has, I could totally do better films than them".
Don't get me wrong, good art doesn't necessarily need a lot of money or resources. It needs the right eyes that know when it works and when it doesn't. He seems to aknowledge he doesn't have them and explains why he can't hire someone, all perfectly fine. But also sad, because if he could he clearly would.
No he's not saying he could make better games than AAA if he had funding, he's outright stating that his games are top notch in his niche(as per his belief and shown by his customer's faith in his products)
> good art doesn't necessarily need a lot of money or resources
Having spent at least as much money, out of pocket, on a game that never shipped as JV spends to ship something consistent that feeds his family, I can assure you that this is not the case. Art is far-and-away the most expensive part of any game that wants mass market appeal. It just is. It doesn't matter if you're using a bunch of freelancers from countries that lost all their vowels along the way, it's still expensive.
The solution, then, is to build a long-tail audience that'll buy your stuff because it scratches that itch, even if it doesn't to people who are just window shopping. You know--what JV has done.
I think you overread the "necessarily" part of my quote. Good art can cost a ton and it does so for a reason. I (among other things) worked as a freelance designer, so I know.
What I meant however is that depending on the genre you might find solutions that you can do yourself far easier with equally good (or better) results. You could work with one-color abstract shapes and give them a good feel by using the right deformation and stick some eyes on them. Minimal styles can work in your favour at times etc. Filmmakers also use similar ideas – can't afford to show thing A? Let the protagonist tell us about it in a internal monologue and use it to your advantage. That kind of stuff.
This approach obviously won't work for every game or genre, depending on the scope, but I didn't say it would.
I didn't miss that "necessarily", I disregarded it as stakes-free theorycrafting. I know how much art costs and I know from personal experience how quickly art people flake if you aren't paying enough money to keep them in line. (Which is something people here take for granted amongst developers, but for some reason nobody else.)
"Depending on the genre"--JV makes Ultima-alikes. So by this theorycrafting he should stop making the games that make him money because people like me will buy all of them so he can go make different games that might be more amenable to cheaper art and not have a built-in customer base that is highly consistent and predictable?
JV makes his games the way he does because people like me already follow him and will buy them. His entire business model is built on not taking risks. What is the obsession around here with disregarding that?
Ah okay, that's where our misunderstanding stems from:
to me JV is some guy who wrote a blog post and my statement was not meant as a response specifically to him, but as general advice to not choose a art style that is hard to implement given your existing means of production (be it your own time, skill or the money you have for hiring people).
For you it was specifically about that one guy whose games you like as they are and I didn't mean to critizise them. The relativizations uttered by me like "depending on the genre" or "necessarily" were meant to act as hints, that I was talking in a more general sense here. Maybe what he wrote is great advice for other devs who create ultima-alikes, I can't really judge that.
That would be my guess too. Another guess would be that for him visuals have simply never been a thing that was all that important – otherwise he would have tried to learn a thing or two about this important part of games on his journey.
The thing people need to realize is that in compound arts like games, films, theatre every part is important. You can do a film with poor lighting if every other aspect is great and there is a reason why the poor lighting adds to the film as a whole. But you can't make films for 25 years and decide sound isn't all that important – unless you want to look like a complete amateur.
Visuals are an important part of games and independent of the style (photo realism, toon, purely ascii, ...) a game is much more interesting to pick up and play when you feel somebody actually cared about what they put in front of your eyeballs.
If you see a trailer of a film, filmed on a shaky phone with bad light and indistinguishable dialoge, you might decide to never watch it, even if it would've been the most interesting and moving story of all times. But that would've been the fault of the film maker, because they failed to convince you why you need to watch this film despite the technical flaws.
That means you need to see the thing as a whole, only then you can decide which role each part ought to play.
Limited visuals just enhance your judgement of everything else in the game - as long as you're willing to move beyond the limited visuals. Some people are, despite the tone of the haters.
> But you can't make films for 25 years and decide sound isn't all that important – unless you want to look like a complete amateur.
Given that he's making a living with his current strategy, and has been for twenty-five years, he is by definition not an amateur, let alone a complete one.
Indeed, the amateur is more likely the person who insists on making every aspect match their aesthetic ideal. They are not giving thought to what could make them profitable, instead focusing on building something that is precisely what they want.
Very much this. It's hard to find a middle ground in software. You either bootstrap mom & pop, in which case you have limited output and limited options for development, but with a bit of luck and skill you can keep a solid lifestyle business running.
Or you try and hop on the unicorn train and start looking for external funding - which will invariably start trying to run your business for you, in ways which you may not want.
The big money is in the latter, but not everyone wants to deal with the proto-corporate bullshit that goes with it.
Occasionally you can find niches - usually B2B, because high-worth bootstrap B2C is very hard - which bring in enough to allow solid growth without huge upfront spending on people and offices.
But they're very rare. And apart from the odd flash-in-the-pan one offs, small games are not usually one of those niches.
Yet some small developers have managed to build visually stunning games, like Brigadier. Enter The Gungeon, Stardew Valley, Dungeons Of The Endless, were all developed by very small teams.
I forgot to mention Prison Architect which takes the cake. At a first glance it look like horrendous programmer-art, but soon it dawns that it is all fully animated and it is just a joy to watch a prison humming along, with every character doing their thing.
It is still horrendous. You are just getting positive associacions with it. Same way if you delve deep into Exile you think "OMG A Dragon! How huge!" not "damn, that's ugly bunch of pixels"
I think it is partially a skill set issue. I can appreciate good pixel art but I am at a total loss for how to create it, which has been a major reason I haven't making my own game (and pixel art packs are each too small and feel too distinct to be able to mix). Some people just go with the graphics they can do, don't care about looks, and focus on making the games good in other ways. It probably prevents them from being as massive a hit, but that is likely a better place to be than where I am, still too unsure to get off the ground level and actually make something.
They had such a bundle a week ago and I was kinda left wondering who would make use of such a pack. To have the skills to integrate such a pack would imply having enough skills to not have use for such a pack.
Maybe for slightly better placeholder art for a game before they are ready to invest in an art upgrade?
> Yet some small developers have managed to build visually stunning games,
That's Voegl's point 3. There, he admits he probably could develop a more impressive-looking single game, but doing so would make him dependent on the freelancer responsible for the art style (risky) or on paying much more for other art to match the style (expensive).
At least one of those games--Brigadier--failed so hard that the team fell apart. The others don't take into account that for every one of those successes there are ten or twenty failures.
JV isn't trying to be a runaway success, he's trying to not be a failure. I don't quite get why that's so hard for folks here to parse.
Nah. I mean, I want Jeff to have a good art director because I find the visuals distracting and a bit unpleasant part of games I otherwise might enjoy, but it's pretty clear he doesn't need one.
ITT: lots of people missing the point that he doesn't actually believe his games look like crap, he's just made a conscious (and profitable) decision to go retro. He likes his games' visual style and values the freelancers who produce the art. I didn't think this is a difficult point but apparently it is.
I don't dislike retro games, actually love the art style of Streets of Rogue and KeeperRL, for example, and I agree it's a great way for indies to get budget under control - it's easy to be tempted to just get better art, but then animation, collisions, interactions etc still need to be coded and contribute significantly to development time.
that said, what makes these game look at least weird is the combination of very retro tiles (say, 1994is, master of magic level) with late retro higher def sprites (say, 1998ish?, baldur's gate level)
while going retro style is not a bad decision for indies, the graphic and ux suffer from being mixed styles, and that's imho a valid criticism.
> that said, what makes these game look at least weird is the combination of very retro tiles (say, 1994is, master of magic level) with late retro higher def sprites (say, 1998ish?, baldur's gate level)
They look way higher res than BG to me, more early or pseudo-3D sprites, they're reminiscent of Van Buren's sprites.
There are better and worse ways to make retro looking games, and there are ways to care about the look of your game without having it noticeably effect your budget.
The most confusing part of the whole story is that his latest game looks noticeably worse than his two previous games. So there seems to be something more going on beyond that he just wants to go low budget and retro. The problem doesn't seem to primarily be the budget or the quality of the art per se, but a lack of care when it comes to art direction.
this tells me that AAA studios could do really well to produce "indie games" with AAA-quality graphics. Gamers _want_ the originality and interesting indie games, but they don't want or don't care for low-quality aesthetics in their graphics (even when the graphics doesn't matter).
The issue is that the art direction of this game is way inferior to his previous games, which were made with more limitations (and even more limited budgets, since they weren't Kickstartered).
> lots of people missing the point ... he's just made a conscious (and profitable) decision to go retro
And in turn I think you're missing the point somewhat - people's point is that retro doesn't have to mean inconsistent art style and bad colours. There are lots of examples of beautiful retro games.
The question then is how many of them are from developers that have been able to consistently live off it for 25 years.
His point is not that it can't be better, but that he believes he can't do better without taking financial risks he does not believe to be worthwhile given that his current model works for him, and that his games look good relative to the constraints.
I think you're both right. As a businessman he's decided he does not need to do better in order to maintain whatever profit he requires to fund his livelihood. That's a perfectly valid decision. Who are we on HN to advise otherwise?? There are tons of examples of entrepreneurs who make "lifestyle businesses" that are good enough to put their kids through school. I'm not going to tell them they're doing something wrong!
The one thing I disagree with is that the graphics are not "retro". They're just bad. It doesn't look like someone sat down and planned a complete set of artwork having a deliberate retro style, with a consistent palette, lighting, etc. It looks like someone hired a bunch of rando one-off artists and threw together whatever they came up with--which is essentially what OP wrote that he does! It's working for him, so why change it?
I agree it's "bad", but it's also clearly "retro". It's just not consistent, good retro. But making the decision of going with lo res, pixelated art is probably the right thing if you're not willing to take the risk of spending more on it. The inconsistencies are likely to be less obvious within those constraints than without them.
I don't think people are missing the point. There's 2 aspects to this: style (retro) and execution (the actual graphics).
Gamers generally like the style. The Venn diagram of his target audience and people who like retro game visuals is likely near a perfect circle.
What makes the games look unpleasing is the execution. It's just all over the place, to the point where it looks like a mashup of free assets collected from various websites.
People are pointing out that his otherwise amazing games are being held back by their subpar graphics. Unfortunately, instead of taking the criticism fairly, he sets up a strawman to deflect any blame, claiming that anyone who doesn't like the execution just dislikes the style.
There's multiple points in the article where this shows, for example this one:
>The key problem here is that, when most people say, "Your art looks bad," what they mean is, "I want art that is good." They mean, "I want AAA-quality art."
Big jumps there Jeff.
He shows his lack of knowledge about making good art when he says he can't afford the extra man power to solve the issue. No one here would claim that, to fix bad code, you have to hire more programmers. Art works in the same way. The problems are foundational and don't require more employees or more hours to get right - just a better approach.
The argument that this is not possible with freelancers is silly. He gives the example of a freelancer creating a super niche style that no other artist can replicate. No one is asking him to create award-winning art. People are simply asking for games that are not-ugly. There's plenty of artstyles that fit all his requirements, while still being not-ugly and reproducible by other artists.
I don't doubt that it's hard to find good artists when you never took the time to study what makes good art.
The truth seems to be that after his 25 years of game development Jeff still doesn't know how to make good looking games. He has every right to do as he wants - just as anyone else is free to comment on the look of games. But this article is nothing more than one big list of poor justifications, which is why it's getting a lot of flak.
I think it's unfair to claim that addressing the problem doesn't require more man hours, though. If you were (or maybe you are, I don't know) unable to program, how would you solve a programming need?
Either by hiring someone to do it for you, obviosuly adding man hours, or by changing your own skill set and the distribution of your focus which either takes time outright (which translates to man hours, as you learn new skills) or changes the distribution of hours, taking effort away from other areas of the game, such as writing.
If _all_ he had said was that he had made a conscious decision to go retro, well, a lot of people _are_ responding to that. "It's possible to go retro without looking bad" is a common sentiment in this thread.
But more importantly, that's not even all he said. He also defended his decision by pointing to games like Pokémon and Baba Is You, and saying "these games also look ugly, therefore there's nothing wrong with my games looking ugly", which means that _he's_ missing a really important point, which is that those games don't look ugly.
I completely understand if he can't afford to hire anyone with design sense, and that he doesn't want to learn basic design. But a lot of the rest of what he's saying is outright wrong, and belies a complete misunderstanding of what people mean when they say his games are ugly.
Probably the best counterexample is Kingdom of Loathing:
Kingdom of Loathing isn't ugly. It's possible to draw very low-effort art without a game looking ugly. It's much more understanding basic principles like consistency and clarity, than effort or budget.
I think the problem is that the game is in Uncanny Valley.
It's trying to achieve a certain level of detail/realism, but it's falling short of expectations.
This might be completely intentional, to evoke a feel for games from an era that did the same thing, but comparing to Baba is You highlights the developer doesn't understand that.
Baba is You has gone completely in the opposite direction in terms of graphical detail, come out of the Uncanny Valley, and is now sitting atop Cuteness Peak.
The dev needs to decide where he wants the game to sit and why.
But his games don't sit where he thinks they sit. It's baffling as there's a huge market for "retro" looking indie games, and has been for a decade or so. Plenty of successful and influential indie games made by a small team (or even a solo developer) in the past decade have been really successful despite looking like they could run on an NES or a Commodore 64, with limited palettes and chunky graphics. But there's a difference between that and what appears to be placeholder programmer art.
I'm not saying he's not successful. He's implying you either have shoddy graphics, or spend big money on AAA graphics. But they're not the only two choices, and that's proven - there are successful games without AAA graphics that also don't look bad. If he's feeding his family on his games, changing his attitude to their appearance could expand his audience significantly for relatively minor effort.
> He's implying you either have shoddy graphics, or spend big money on AAA graphics.
He really is not. The article goes into the details of the nuance of where his games are graphically.
Not to mention he specifically addresses what you're talking about.
The next step up in art quality is to add one person to his permanent team, which roughly doubles each game's budget and roughly doubles the sales needed to support that budget. That's a big step and he's not willing to take that risk. Not sure who would be in a better position than him and his wife to assess the risk for that, so it's very hard to argue with that judgement.
I think others have pointed out that this belief that he'd have to hire someone is a fallacy. There are some pretty basic techniques that he could learn from literally watching a few YouTube videos that could be applied to his existing graphics that would just take them to the next level. He's leaving money on the table because he's too stubborn to admit that visuals matter to a lot of people and the basics of design aren't so complicated that they'd eat his dev time/budget.
>The next step up in art quality is to add one person to his permanent team, which roughly doubles each game's budget and roughly doubles the sales needed to support that budget.
That's just simply not true. He just needs to increase revenue by the additional budget to support the budget. So unless he was only break even before with revenue == budget, he doesn't need to double the revenue.
The art doesn't even need more detail or realism, it just needs consistent detail.
Even just a simple palettization/pixelation preprocessing for every sprite could be enough - https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg
And making sure light is consistent. In the first picture some objects like banners, notice board, bathtub shaped thing have clear shadow below them, others like fence, green plant, mushroom don't. Buckets have light coming from left side hay stack from right, other from top. I wonder if it would look better if some objects were flipped horizontally.
That's at least 50% of it, if he had given his artists any direction it should be this: Light coming from top left, soft shadows. Give the artists a palette and let them create. When you don't have any limits, your creativity is unbounded, and that can be bad for delivering something on a time budget.
That is a surprisingly good result. It literally changed my perception of those screenshots from "that is some gross and sloppy artwork, I'm keeping my money" to "hey not bad, I might buy that"
Simple graphics open up for imagination as juskrey post here said. That couple with a great story can be good enough. A good book does not need to contain picture we imagine the content, a RPG can be the same. That said better looking graphics could be sourced from Chinese graphic artist, there is an industry which makes better game graphics quite cheaply.
I have been really enjoying the way games are being stylized nowadays. We reached a level of fidelity that is really expensive to maintain I think, and so game studios are leaning in on really solid art direction instead. It makes for much more interesting worlds and longer lasting art.
For example, LA Noire looks dated (though still excellent in many ways), while Borderlands looks as good as when it was released.
LA Noire while it feels a bit dated, the characters don't really hit uncanny valley thanks to the facial motion capture technology. I am still aware they are a video game character, just a very emotive one.
It makes me think there is a peak realism we should chase, after which improved graphics wouldn't really add much. I wonder if maybe we aren't already there.
Many games suffer from high detail but lack of clarity. We are still working with a 2D screen with limited dynamic range after all. So that means when there is higher detail it can get overly busy. Lacking contrast, making it hard to decipher what you are looking at quickly, especially if it is moving. Stylized games can add visual contrast in their lighting and art, improving clarity overall. Having said that, I think games could leanr some tricks from cinema in this regard. Just capturing what is real doesn't make good cinema, you have to engineer the scene and the shot.
Did that facial capture technology end up anywhere? I still remember how amazing the facial animations looked in that game and can't think of any other game since where it's been that noticeable. Although maybe that was just because of how much better they were than anything else out there at the time?
IMO even games that go for realistic graphics end up stylized, mainly because the technical limitations do force those styles (e.g. many PS2 games tried to be realistic but the lack of pixel shaders means they had to paint the lighting on the textures and the low resolution meant that they had to exaggerate some thinner shapes and both of those nowadays give a more cartoony look). The closer to "today" you go, the harder is to see this, but it becomes apparent when you see games from the 80s, 90s and (to a lesser extent, since they are more recent) 2000s. If you can say that a game looks like a $X game (e.g. a NES game or ZX Spectrum game or SNES game or PS1 game, or N64 game or PS2 game or PS3 game) that is because its appearance has aspects that are common with other games on $X - which is exactly what make that a style.
So with that in mind, "dated" is simply a realistic style that isn't old enough to have become distinct from the current peak.
Also FWIW "stylistic" doesn't necessarily imply cartoony or exaggerated, this is just a kind of style you can have but certainly not the only one. And of course the "styles" i mentioned above are treated as just guidelines, many NES-styled or ZX Spectrum-styled or PS1-styled games wont work on real NES/ZX Spectrum/PS1 (or even even strictly follow the visual limitations - e.g. many ZX Spectrum-styled games use single colored chunky sprites with bold outlines but they do not do attribute clash and similarly many NES-styled games use the resolution and palette of NES but ignore sprite or VRAM limitations). After all it is giving the impression that matters, not adhering to strict hardware limitations (though for some that may also be part of the appeal).
In the AAA game industry a Look Dev Artist would help here. Focusing on the in-universe elements of the game (as opposed to the UI), they set goals and restrictions that lead to consistent, appealing, and cheap-to-produce art styles.
Queen's Wish looks ugly in a quaint way. I might buy it for that reason, as it makes me think: "Indie creators usually feel there's something about their game that'll make it sell -- it's clearly not the art style or the music in this case, so it must be the gameplay and/or the story, right?"
As far as games with simple but nice art go, there’s also prison architect, stardew valley, Celeste, risk or rain, terraria, sword and sworcery, factorio... and many many more. It doesn’t need to be high res or super fancy, just consistent with a a nice colour palette.
I think it's unfair to compare Minecraft with the screenshots shown in this article, as it'd always had a pretty consistent art style. That old neon-green grass was pretty weird though.
Jeff, the art problems of your games have nothing to do with low-res. Baba is You (or Downwell) are just as low-res, but manage to look good because they use fewer colors and choose them well. I recommend learning that skill, it will make your games look way better and it honestly doesn't take that much time.
Completely agree that it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they are low res. However, it's not just the colors. For me it's mostly that the lighting across artwork is very inconsistent. The artwork separately is quite good, but because some stuff is much lighter than the rest it feels like it's gathered from multiple separate games and put together in one.
The article explains why this is so. Arguably with some art direction from Jeff himself he can make art that is more easily replicable, but the reasoning seems to be that "I have to be able to swap artists out."
Instead of learning enough about game art over 25 years to direct some consistency across artists for his games, he rationalizes it as an explicit business choice.
I think he's missing an opportunity to learn more about art himself. After making so many games for so long you think there would be some learning/mastery of low-res art. Seems like Jeff is taking the easier route of "that's my style."
No where in the article does Jeff talk about any effort he's put in to learn about palettes, lighting, or generic styles that can be emulated. He only talks about swapping out artists.
I don't think you can develop more universally palatable sense of esthetic even over 25 years. You like the stuff you like. You can hire people to have sense of esthetic for you. But you need money for that so....
"I have to be able to swap artists out” is, in my opinion, a really bad reason as it leads to an inconsistent messy looking final product. I’d rather have repetitive art (due to not finding another artist who can match the previous ones work and therefore having to reuse assets) than an inconsistent one.
I play a lot of games with low resolution, cheap or crude graphics and that never bothers me, but I find inconsistent art really difficult to ignore to the point where I probably wouldn’t play this game.
Keeping art generic, boring and inconsistent to swap out artists is akin to using a lowest common denominator language and framework so you can swap out programmers. Maybe it makes business sense, but it leads to uninspired boring results.
I’m sorry at how negative this comment turned out, so if the author reads it I hope he takes it constructively and considers how to improve the consistency of the art.
EDIT: I don't think the art looks terrible, but it could be improved a lot with relatively minor changes (consistent shadows would be a great start).
It was used on the Gameboy Color to colorize the grayshaded Gameboy games.
You can choose what palette to use by pressing a combination of buttons on most start screens.
See this example of Super Mario Land: http://i.imgur.com/HupBY.png
Yes! It's clear the consensus is that he needs art direction to get consistency, but this is how you actually put that into action. He needs style guides 100%. It's also potentially a good longer term investment, you can re-use and adapt them.
The guide also needs to include lighting, which he has diddly-squat of.
Baba Is You and Downwell are a totally different kind of retro. They're trying to look like NES games. John's games are retro as well, but they channel the very different style of 90s Windows games, which had so many colors (256) they didn't know what to do with them all.
I was going to say exactly this, but you nailed it.
The 90s game style saw more powerful chips and higher color depths as a chance to do realistic art and skeuomorphic interfaces.[1] I'm sure they looked good to people then, but the reason they look so dated now is that realism as a design goal is better accomplished with modern graphics technologies than anything they had available then. Anything that still looks "good" does so because it was able to carve out a stylistic niche that didn't depend on having a more realistic interface as the end goal.
Pixel art games look timeless (to me) precisely because their limitations meant that designers had to find a style that worked for the particular game. To be sure, there are 80s games with bad art, but I think on the whole the older art was better (and is now more iconic) because the limitations pushed creativity.
I still love to play low-res games (including new ones like VVVVVV[2]), but most of them are in an older art style than John's games, which (if I'm being honest) look (visually) kind of crappy to me.
[1] The poor font rendering in most 90s games doesn't help matters either.
> Jeff, the art problems of your games have nothing to do with low-res. Baba is You (or Downwell) are just as low-res, but manage to look good because they use fewer colors and choose them well.
I expect they're also less busy, and more stylised.
Looking at the Queen’s Wish's screenshot, it doesn't look lower resolution than Dungeons of Dredmor, just worse, the backgrounds are way too busy, the colors are inconsistent, too subdued so their kind-of meld into one another making things less legible, the lighting is odd, the level of details seems to vary from one sprite to another,…
Honest question, where does one learn that skill? If it doesn't take that much time, how long it usually takes? I have no clue about art, design, and stuff. Where does I even start?
I made a minimalistic game requiring only 3 colors, then spent a month making different palettes for it. Started with terrible color sense, ended up with this: https://imgur.com/a/boc29
This is missing the point entirely. The point is much closer to: don't worry about art and focus on making the game.
People will always get upset about graphics, and will always have their own "suggestions" on how to make your art not terrible. If you listen to one person, you might just alienate every other player that doesn't like that person's style.
Honestly I think it's a shame when people are so picky about graphics. Some of the best games I've ever played were purely ASCII-based. I'm talking about various BBS games, or MUD-based games. There were also some really novel interfaces like like mTrek [0], and BattleTech 3030 MUX [1]. So much fun to play.
It's not so much being picky but that from a design perspective aesthetics should add to rather than detract from the experience. For a modern ASCII example take a look at Cogmind:
https://i.imgur.com/lUpcTmF.gif
From a commercial point of view the aesthetics are used by consumers as (perhaps unfairly) a judge of quality.
The aesthetics of that game make me want to go buy it right away just from that gif you linked, it just looks so interesting and unique!
And I don't think it's unfair to use aesthetics as a judge of quality. First of all, as you mentioned, nice aesthetics do enhance the experience. And second of all, it's a way to signal strength - a team not capable of making a good game will often not be capable of making it look interesting either, especially for indie games.
And it doesn't have to be that expensive either. There's a game I'm slightly affiliated with (but not in any monetary way) that has been made with a budget of $0 by volunteers (mostly highschoolers) and I think it looks good just because of the insane attention-to-detail and meticulousness of everyone involved. Here's [0] what it looks like for reference.
What is looking good? To me it's that the hues and colours don't hide relevant features of the game, or hurt my eyes.
I've played on-line games that have camera shake when you make a hit, bits spray everywhere, shadows cast where they conceal relevant stuff, none of this helps me enjoy it, it just gets in the way of what I need to see. It gets turned off ASAP.
In other cases I'd rather have the characters not act like dicks (stand around when there's a fight starting, get attacked by monsters and not defend themselves). The gameplay is so frustrating sometimes. (edit: point is graphics are low on my list of bothersome)
Art is going mad, like the floppy hair that nvidia GPUs are boasting about - who cares, really?
(Did play a demo of Vogel's game and liked it, the only problem being that I didn't pick up any threatening atmosphere in areas where there should have been. Still, recommended and good fun)
The Avernum trilogy, starting with Escape from the Pit[1] is a remake of the original Exile-trilogy. I highly recommend especially the first game in the trilogy.
I think there’s also something to be said for simple art that forces you to use your imagination. Especially in the role playing genre.
One of my favorite games of all time was Legends of Kesmai[1] - a graphical multi-user dungeon that even for its time in the dial-up AOL days had horribly outdated and simplistic graphics. Something about those basic graphics just got my imagination going in a way that no other game has, and I found myself completely immersed exploring that world.
So for me there is a lot of appeal in the Spiderweb graphical style.
Eh, i don't really think the art is what made Braid interesting, or even contributed to that. Honestly, I think in my case it may have even detracted from my enjoyment of it a little because it felt so out of place with the gameplay in some subconscious way I'm unable to adequately describe.
Besides, ask Jon how much he spent on assets for it. It is clear that Jeff is uninterested in spending a ton of money on a portion of the final product that he doesn't really think is that important.
Aesthetics are such a poor/difficult topic to discuss, unless you want to go the academic/philosophical route.
In fact, as soon someone feels the need to defend aesthetics in the first place, I'm starting to feel twitchy - for the same reason you don't want to discuss the quality of light with a blind person (not that I deny any blind person the right to know how I experience it).
I think a lot of commenters are right on point, when they argue that none of "retro", low budget, or indie imply shabby graphics. Just as many commenters completely miss the point about "shabby" graphics. Reduced or no graphics at all are not "shabby". Obviously you will have a hard time criticizing the aesthetics of text-based adventures (font-choice, spacing and layout maybe?). Also, just moving from retro to contemporary you won't automatically get "great looks", right? Thus can we finally remove the whole retro aspect from the line of argument?
If you produce art (we do consider game graphics to be some kind of art, right?), and you are criticized for the aesthetics, make of it what you wish. Defending it won't increase your sales. Let the success of the game speak for itself.
And if you cannot understand what people mean when they criticize you, ask them (or others) what could be wrong and how to improve.
Art is one of the [many] reasons I could never be an indie game developer--I preferred to stick to apps and use the OS's native toolkits. You can't just write more tests to help ensure good art like you can for software. There's no compiler warnings to tell you it's not going to look good. There's no API spec to consult when you don't know if your character should have bigger or smaller eyes.
I don't even know how I'd even start to interview an artist or art director. You can't ask them to spend 10 minutes developing a 32x32 character on a whiteboard, can you? I doubt they'd do a 2-day HackerRank style take-home test. I guess you have to heavily rely on their portfolio and whether you like the look.
I empathize with the OP and really, seeing as he's made a successful living for 25 years writing games with crappy art, why does anyone think he needs advice from the HN or Reddit brain trust?
Unfortunately I think the graphics look like that typical windows 95 style game, where the lighting is inconsistent, the style is inconsistent, the colour choices are drab and the fonts are just the first default picks from MS word.
There's a lot of work that needs to be done to pick a consistent style, because at the moment it's a mixture of everything and it all clashes.
The fact that you identify "that typical windows 95 style game" as being a thing implies that it is a style, whether or not you like the style. Building games that look like that today is just a specific kind of retro.
The screenshots of John's games make me feel nostalgic in the same way that I'm sure NES and Arcade style games make 80s kids feel nostalgic. The Windows 95 style is retro now, even if it still feels current to us!
I wish more games look terrible in a 1995 kind of a way. Mostly for the sake of nostalgia, I loved playing crappy shareware games and terrible demos from floppy/CD magazines when I was a kid.
If one doesn't care about art, why not just use ascii art? I quite like the style of Nethack or Cogmind. If he cares about art (which he claims to), why not just make it look good and consistent? No one is expecting AAA type art and there are tons of indie developers who make beautiful games with beautiful art and it wasn't that expensive. I've never played any of his games but looking at the screenshots, they put me off. They look like all the art was found online on free asset stores. It all looks inconsistent and uses too many colors and tries to be too realistic. It looks gross I would have hard time playing the games.
It seems like all his games could be using ascii art instead, and honestly, they probably would look a lot better.
> People who grew up with Nintendo and Sega really like pixel art.
As one of those people, I really don't like pixel art at all.
Today's pixel art looks nothing like games did back in the day. The simple reason is that those Nintendo and Sega games weren't played on 27" 4k LCD monitors or 65" OLED TV's but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry. It had a way softer look than todays pixel art does.
To me, the whole pixel art craze looks like false nostalgia. People longing back to something that never existed that way.
Eh, i played NES games on my grandparents' ~24" TV, those pixels were clearly visible (though not so visible on my own monochrome TV). Also while "pixel art" is often associated with NES/SEGA by the people who grew up with those systems, it is was also very common in home computers where image clarity was much better than on TV - especially with most games being 320x200 that appeared double scanned on pretty much every EGA and VGA monitor. Even the shitty monochrome 14" VGA monitor that my 386 had had enough clarity to distinguish individual pixels at 640x480
I have several CRTs and pixel art looks pretty much the same in them as it does in modern flat panel displays (blurry pixels is the result of hardware issues and badly configured focus which in many cases it can be fixed). The biggest difference is scaling of low resolution video modes though the integer scaling that is being introduced recently in new drivers should address that (at least as best as possible on a fixed resolution display).
I grew up playing DOS games on a VGA CRT, most of which were line-doubled 320x200 resolution. The pixels were much sharper than you'd see on a cheap SD TV, and not far from the sharp edges of nearest-neighbor upscaling, which is my preferred style. I also point out that some official artwork for old console games showed sharp pixels (e.g. the Super Mario Bros. cover art). Calling it "false nostalgia" is making assumptions about the hardware of the time and the artist's intentions that aren't universally true.
It doesn't have to be 100% authentic to the period to be genuinely nostalgic. Retrowave still 'sounds like' the 80s even though the cyberpunk 80s it harks back to never quite existed.
> >Current technology isn't even close to being enough to replicate this with real-time physics.
The claim on that page, that those detailed cloth animations were superior and somehow lost in the transition to 3D games, is bunk though. Modern games are very detailed, e.g. https://youtu.be/ot_sYoqe_2w?t=2355
Perhaps the point should be that we lost sense for a particular aesthetic during the transition to 3d graphics techniques.
I think this mirrors the transition from painting to photography over a century ago. As photography grew to dominate everyday images, painters had to go in a different direction to distinguish themselves. It's no coincidence that art became more and more abstract as photography grew.
There's probably a certain amount of truth to that. It seems like those animations sit in some kind of sweet spot between 'realism', 'beauty' and 'being visibly pixellated'. Since pixellation seems to mostly be used for the nostalgia factor as opposed to either realism or beauty such animations really must be a niche interest
I don't think that's true. While physics for clothing have gotten a lot better, it's a lot of visual flash that seem easier to work like scarves, coat tails, pieces that hang down, etc. I can't recall seeing the kind of bounce that those old school pixel art pants have. Those Aladdin/MC Hammer pants have a weight and shape that I imagine is still really difficult to replicate well. But maybe I just haven't seen such an example yet.
In the few recent fighting games I can think of, Tekken 7 and Mortal Kombat 11, even with relatively light use of physics based fabrics I still see a lot of wonky movement/fabric clipping and getting stuck inside bodies. I definitely don’t think we’re quite there yet.
Consumer hardware probably isn't fast enough to have that level of natural movement and detailed lighting in real time for physics-based clothing. So I agree that the claim is true.
Of course, the animated clothing in those pants wasn't from a physics engine. I'm sure similar results can be accomplished in 3D if they're not phsyics-based.
The 2d animations look fluid and realistic. The Horizon Zero Dawn clip you linked looks simplistic in comparison - floppy 2d textures glued onto a character. The detail is much higher of course, but the realism is much worse. It's interesting how 2d animators could capture things that existing 3d tech can't even scratch the surface of.
I also grew up with pixel art. What I do like about pixel art was that it forced you to use your imagination more to complete the scene. That has driven me towards modern games made entirely in ASCII or text, however, not towards more pixel art.
I highly recommend Brogue or Cogmind for people that want an example of a beautiful looking contemporary game made with ASCII/ANSI. The developer of Cogmind open-sourced his ASCII-art making tool![0]
It wasn’t until I started working on my own game that I realized just how important readability was for pixel & ascii games. Producing readable high resolution art, 3D or 2D, is actually extremely hard. I like ascii art a lot, but I’m not sure how much of that is a nostalgia issue for me and how much reflects what a new player would see.
It can be easier to set up a photorealistic level using PBR materials in Unreal now than to design a readable level from the ground up. I suspect more developers are going to use photo realism to mask larger problems in their games, and to some extent they already have.
I love pixel art. For me is not only a hint at nostalgia but an art form in itself and that is alright. I like the aesthetics of it, I like the way it looks and I can admire the professionals that work with that kind of art.
If you run your games on an emulator you can throw on an NTSC filter (even with CRT curved distortion if so inclined!) and you get a little bit closer to to that old experience.
It's just a different medium and plenty of people love it nostalgia or not. I bet a ton of people who never grew up with pixel art games enjoy them today and there would be no nostalgia for them.
When I first played Super Mario Maker 2 with my 65" OLED TV, it was mind-blowing. Mario never looked this good. So much color, the graphics really pop off and help you with the platforming.
Maybe it's not nostalgia, but actually just looks very nice.
Good pixel artists aim for the peaks of mid-90s arcade, the Saturn, PS1, and GBA. With a proper monitor/TV and cables (or just the GBA), you were looking at sharp pixels and vivid colors.
Most (not all) people going for NES-inspired graphics are just amateur artists who try passing off their lack of skill for “retro style”. And frankly, it can work. Amateur artists can make good low res art.
The real problem is people who just draw on a small canvas and call it pixel art. They lack the fine details.
I’m no artist but making games seems fun so I’ve been dabbling. I make vector art, and write scripts to make raster animations at low resolution. This isn’t terribly different than how some of the more beloved 16 bit styles were made. I just haven’t moved into 3D modeling (and I’m also a bad artist).
Not everything has to be intricately hand drawn to look good, and even elicit nostalgia.
What a weird, sweeping, broad brush claim. There are pixel artists of all levels of skill making pixel art inspired by all eras of technology, often a mixture of them, and sometimes not related to any historical limitation at all.
For me, pixel art is a technical limitation. I don't see the point of romanticising a technical limitation. What limitation are we going to do next? Retro low-poly 3D models? A soundtrack consisting of six songs only? Distributing the game on 13 floppy disks? Games that never get updates? Low quality collision objects? Null-model cable multiplayer? game_demo.exe file download from CNET.com? Anti-piracy methods by having to look up words from a book?
They also tend to age better because they never tried to look realistic in the first place. Cartoonish remains cartoonish, but realistic becomes dated.
Going off on a tangent, I'd really love to see a game that pushed production values within the artificial constraint of zero texture, just flat shaded geometry, while maxing out modern hardware. That would be the computer graphics style I dreamt of while growing up between X-Wing on the PC and Money for Nothing on MTV.
If you've ever watched any of the "Mind's Eye" CGI videos (which were just older CGI of the 70s, 80s, and some early 90s set to music) - you can get an idea of what your fantasy might look like in full motion.
Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone).
Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can hide low-count vertex polys).
The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not sure)...
A technical limitation itself is insufficient, but a lot of art is on purpose limited in order to force focus on certain things.
E.g. black and white photography is often used to emphasise composition and lighting more. Specific palettes. Specific sets of instruments - a classical composition will not usually be for "some random number and set of musicians" but written for or arranged for, say, a quartet or a symphony orchestra. Both visual art and music tends to follow a whole range of rules to match certain styles.
And yes, reducing size is also a choice - the demo scene takes that very seriously for a good reason: it again forces a different focus. A non-size constrained demo category emphasizes cooperation and teams working on different parts, and project management and is a totally different thing than, say, a 4K demo where you have to focus on reducing a single concept to its essence.
A direct size constraint may not be that important for most games (though for some it is: people still develop cartridge games for the Commodore 64 for example), but resolution and palette constraints do act as implicit size constraints too to a great extent.
Well done pixel art is just a form of minimalism in art that focuses on shading and composition and exploiting patterns and how we interpret pictures. Just reducing resolution of a picture almost always produces bad pixel art. E.g. r/pixelart on Reddit includes this rule:
Art must be comprised mostly of pixel art using pixel-level manipulation.
Color reductions, index painting, computer generated, oekaki, aliased
digital painting etc. are not permitted unless they have been cleaned up
by hand afterwards or were posted with the [WIP] tag.
And people there get very picky about this, to the point that some people object to even fairly basic paint application tools (I've argued with people who claimed that a pixel based "spray" tool is not suitable for pixel art, for example, because there's not sufficient thought behind each pixel placement; I don't agree with that, but I do agree with the overall idea that you need to pay attention on a pixel level, and tweak things that does not look right). Taking e.g. a photography and color reducing it and reducing the resolution does not result in good pixel art - it results in pictures that are messy and unclear and that often lose a lot more detail vs. a proper pixel art rendition of the same scene.
Similarly reduced palettes forces much more conscious thinking about composition to make it make sense.
Modern pixel art, like modern chip tunes of course have different motivations from "authentic" art made because the constraints were real constraints of the hardware, but it's really no different from people who e.g. choose to compose for piano even though they could compose for a synth and be free to include sounds no piano can reproduce. We have not entirely abandoned piano music just because we now have more flexible instruments available.
There's a major gap between 'technically superior' and 'subjectively superior'. You sound pretty out of touch here in a time when LPs and casettes have made a comeback, chiptunes are pretty hip, some artists have literally released albums on floppy disk, and, as already mentioned, contrary to your own sarcasm low-poly graphics are already a an indie game trope.
Just because something has more impressive metrics doesn't make it fun.
Art is not functional. All things you listed are things no one is bringing back. If linen became obsolete hundreds of years ago why do people still wear it?
True, but that technical limitation inadvertently created a "style" and some people like that style even if the technology now exists to make art with more detail.
For example, just because the technology exists to make a virtually unlimited range of sounds and effects doesn't mean that we should abolish simple acoustic music... some people like that style, which originally existed because that's all the technology that was available.
Some limitations are very useful for creating innovative art styles.
If Muslim artists weren't restricted from painting people and animals they wouldn't create the decorative motives they created. If early sound chips in personal computers weren't restricted chiptune genre wouldn't be created. And you can certainly make art using restrictions that aren't enforced on you - restrictions often inspire people and make it easier to create.
That being said while I love chip tunes and I like some old games made with pixel art I don't particulary like it in the new games, but that's just my opinion, lots of people have different preferences.
Also from gamedev POV pixel art allowed many modern indie games to be created which wouldn't be created otherwise. That's a plus in my book.
> Low quality collision objects?
Funny that you mentioned this - some collision detection bugs in starcraft 2 were introduced on purpose to mimic bugs in starcraft 1 because these bugs increased the skill cap (people learnt to abuse them to get ahead of their opponents and community liked that because it was another thing you had to learn to master the game). See "mineral walk" :)
Id also argue that pixel art is the default fallback for people who don’t like 3d engine graphics, which I personally can’t stand. I love to see evolution of 2d graphics using our latest and greatest tech.
That's happening too. Lots of popular 2d games aren't really pixelart. Cuphead, Hollow Knight, or Ori and the Blind Forest, Child of Light etc aren't going for a particularly pixelart look and really advancing the aesthetic instead. So there is plenty of non pixelart stuff too if you want. However, fidelity is expensive, and sometimes, a small creator has better things to invest in.
I happen to have gained considerable experience with TVs growing up.
Am able to take most vintage sets, align and calibrate them to perform much better than that image. In some cases, modifying the set does even more.
I love pixel art. Back then, I definitely saw the pixels.
Some of my sets were comparable in performance to what people seek for retro today, the PVR.
And I have a PVR, because they are cheap right now. Actually. I have two, but one will need service before I use it. Can still definitely see the pixels.
I think you mean you hate BAD pixel art. Thing about the critical modern successes is that they try to recreate that feel for modern hardware. In the process that naturally means they use more resources to pull off the visual look because 1) there's more resolution so more work needed and 2) it's usually being applied to a modern pipeline (computational lighting, for instance. Something NES games lacked)
"Pixel art" nowadays is a very very wide term. There's huge variable and hundreds of different "art styles" within pixel art. There are games with fairly simple graphics like Stardew Valley or Terraria, games with much better art direction like Celeste, and games with "high res" pixel art like Owlboy. Just to say it's "pixel art" doesn't mean much anymore.
I played LOOM on a smallish 640x480 CRT from the 80s. The pixels are clearly visible. In particular, since the color palette is so restricted, a lot of large surfaces are dithered -- and you can easily see the grid of little alternating squares.
And the games it's evoking would have been mostly experienced with crisp pixels, since they were late enough in the home computer era that people had dedicated monitors rather than TVs.
> The simple reason is that those Nintendo and Sega games weren't played on 27" 4k LCD monitors or 65" OLED TV's but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry. It had a way softer look than todays pixel art does.
My GB/GBC/GBA games were very rarely played on a 14" CRT.
> To me, the whole pixel art craze looks like false nostalgia. People longing back to something that never existed that way.
Its certainly could be helped by nostalgia, but that pixel art never existed because you only saw it on a blurry CRT? Yeah keep burying your head into the ground like only your taste existed.
I think you had a maladjusted TV or something. On a good TV or composite monitor, pixel art should have fairly sharp edges. Most televisions had adjustment controls for various thing (sharpness, contrast, tint, color, etc); so many people didn't know how to properly adjust them, though.
My first video game system was a cheapo b/w pong clone knockoff thing from radio shack. My second was an Atari 2600. Later my parents bought me a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16K (which eventually got upgraded to 32, then 64K), and then still later a Color Computer 3. An NES was in there somewhere, and I played on friend's Sega Genesis systems and C=64 computers (plus Apple IIe, PCjr, and others).
Pixel art (back then, they were just "sprites" or "tiles" to us - I'm not sure if the term "pixel art" was a thing then - I never heard it, but it doesn't mean it wasn't) wasn't fuzzy or soft, unless things weren't adjusted right.
The only other time it might be a little funky was if the machine in question was trying to use artifacting in some manner:
As you can see - artifacting could introduce a certain level of "fuzziness" to graphics; but scroll to the bottom of that page, to see what the CoCo 2 could do in the hands of someone competent with the effect.
The CoCo 2 got 4 colors on an effectively black/white screen mode by interleaving black and white values - spaced close together on the screen, the NTSC system would render alternate colors - red/blue instead, depending on certain other factors - there was an alternate color mode (green/black) that got you purple and grey or something like that as well - this kind of thing didn't work with PAL CoCo systems (or Dragon 32 - also PAL).
The CoCo 3 could simulate certain "extra colors" on a TV or composite monitor if you dropped into the 640x200 screen (4 colors) and played with pixel patterns. What wasn't widely known then (one guy figured it out - but published his results in Hot CoCo magazine, which wasn't as widely read as The Rainbow magazine was - and so his efforts went mostly unnoticed!) was that with the right pixel patterns over 4 pixels (thus reducing the actual resolution to 160x200 - an almost square "screen"), and using the 4 grayscales available on the CoCo 3 (black, white, and a dark gray and light gray) - you could generate (again, using NTSC artifacting) hundreds of colors!
This was rediscovered long after the CoCo 3 was out to pasture so to speak - in the 2000s; it's kinda sad, as it is almost the rumored (likely false) "256-color" mode in practice, and might have done wonders for games back in the day had it been fully utilized, vs the 320x200 16 color mode that was available (there was also a 160x200 16 color mode); these modes were out of a total of 64 colors (which could also be displayed simultaneously if the processor was doing nothing else, by swapping the palette on the horizontal retrace at the right moments - but it wasn't used for more than still images at best; some image displayers for digitizers also used it to swap r/g/b patches of palette on the vertical retrace to get a very flickery form of high-color for special digitized pictures - also, there was a similar way of doing things on the CoCo 2 to get all 8 of it's col...
There's always one guy saying this, but CRTs aren't supposed to look like that. You can clearly see the pixels; they're certainly not emphasized, but if they're that blurry, it's because you need glasses.
Both of the above look far more like the picture on the left than the right. I actually don't even know what your "blurry" picture is supposed to be a picture of, I don't see the scanlines I'd expect on a CRT.
Grrrr! People who like things I don't like are dumb and confused!
Pixel art is just a style like any other. I like it for the same reason people like pointillism or [insert art style here]. A lot of interesting art, music, and creativity in general stems from self-imposed arbitrary constraints. It's super lazy thinking to blanket disregard an entire sub-genre as people who are either confused about what it "should" look like given some viewing conditions, or simply blinded by nostalgia.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadSo...did these freelancers not communicate with each other at all? When I saw the first screenshot on the page, of the newest game, I thought it was composed entirely of assets purchased from an asset store and built in RPG Maker and I expected the body of the article to be centered on why it's ok to buy assets when what you're focusing on is gameplay. I feel like this dev is really being taken advantage of by his cadre of artists because the other games on the page don't actually look bad. Maybe a hair generic, but not bad. The newest one, though, damn. That looks like someone's homework.
I guess there's an argument to be made that he could focus on better and better specifications for those artists so, over time, the style stays consistent. But I dont know anything about that. Seems doable?
I remember an old style guide written by MS for Windows XP that outlined in great detail how icons in the default theme style meed achieve their look. It gave technical details like the exact location of the vanishing point for perspectively drawn icons. So coming up with an art style specification should be doable once the style has been developed.
Exile: Escape From the Pit looks OK, it uses bold colors and a pretty consistent palette, it could be improved (the texturing attempts on the wooden elements) is bleh and the perspective is a bit odd) but the world area at least is fine.
Reading between the lines I think he is also not paying his artists very much, and not offering them any other perks that would make them want to come back for another fun Spiderweb gig on the side.
Kind of sad to see the playership has been in decline for the last 10 years though :(.
I miss websites which look like this
It seems like Fantasoft published the first Spiderweb game (and looking at screenshots there are definitely some shared assets) so there is actually a connection there.
Disclaimer: I'm not a business owner and don't work in the games industry. My opinions are that of a layman from the (sometimes similar) maze of the development agency sector.
Lesson 1 is correct. Perfectionism will always be there.
Lesson 2 has a false premise that the amount of effort and cost to increase art quality is more than the value gained in sales and profit. It's not wrong that hiring more people will be a bit of a gamble, but also putting more time in it to iron out kinks is an alternative step. If you're a business owner then long hours are the norm, no?
Lesson 3 is just putting the blame on the freelancers. Yes it's hard to find talent and yes it's hard to afford it, but that shouldn't be an excuse to just give up on trying to strive for better.
Lesson 4 I agree with. One should follow their strengths. However that doesn't mean stagnating at one level.
He has an entire section dedicated to this issue though. Which boils down to the fact that improving the graphics sufficiently for enough people to not say "this looks like crap" far outstrips the budget and team he has available. His take:
> I have had games where I worked very hard to improve the graphics, spending a lot of time and money, and they really did look better! But when I released those games, the vast majority of people who had said, "Your games look bad." STILL said, "Your games look bad."
I get his position and I don't see a problem here. Gamers are incredibly fickle and I wouldn't want to be subject to the whims of the gaming community's opinions on graphics. Of course, he's choosing to limit his audience to an extent but ... that's fine. He wants to focus on everything else that can make a game good and valuable and it seems that's something that his business has continued to survive on.
The solution isn't to go 3D, or add more details - it's to get one artist responsible for the overall style and refactor art relentlessly so that it all fits together. It should be entirely within his budget.
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766174
It would be nicer if the remarks in this thread were presented as questions, rather than absolute convictions...
I'm impressed that out of everyone who read the article none have lost their nerve and started responding to every zomg-bad-art-hire-an-art-director poster asking which indy game company they've been profitably running for the past twenty years. Or maybe it's only me feeling that compulsion... :)
The article reads to me like, "would-be customers complain about X, I gather that A, B, C are the causes of X, but I won't address them; moreover, I won't address the issues Y and Z (which happen to be the true causes of X) either; so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯".
What was the point of that article again?
As a business owner, you have to do some kind of de-risking to your production process. If that includes not relying on freelancers so you can hit deadlines, that's fine. It's a completely valid excuse.
The Ultima V and Baba is You examples are excellent counter-points because they show how great games with simple styles can look.
Then say that instead of "Jeff needs an art director", which literally means that Jeff needs an art director. Which means another employee. It doesn't mean "Jeff needs to be an art director". Which he is, but results in the current situation where his games have the art they have, people complain, he writes an article explaining, and people like you criticize him for reasonable justification for why things are the way things are.
Then again, the older I get, the more I think the same should apply to developers. You should never lock knowledge inside one person's head, but the idea that you can take over a project without its original creators doing a years long hand off is naive, and leads to all the expected pathologies.
I remember a new $250k CTO saying he was amazed our code didn't have abandoned parts nobody wanted to touch ... this is how professionals are supposed to work, not something they discover "late" in their career.
It's actually really common. Most games take years to make and in my experience at least it's very unusual to ship with the same team that started. Art is also the side of things that most readily gets outsourced, either through bought and modified assets or through freelancers and outsourcing companies. Maintaining consistency is something that has to be managed.
You're saying this like this was one of his design goals from the very beginning when he started 25 years ago. No, it's become a requirement because of how unreliable freelancers can be and how difficult it is to find a replacement that is able or willing to stick to the previous style. Thus generic fantasy stuff has become his solution to this issue that is unavoidable, regardless of whether people agree with him or not.
I mean the guy seems incapable of comprehending style if this is what he's putting out 25 years in.
I see all this criticism here and I don't see any real solutions that would, on a realistic, concrete level, help him in any way improve his business.
It looks worse than his previous games, so he's gotten worse with time.
I don't think his liking his games art is a reason not to comment with my take on his blog post about it though.
When you care about art, you usually got some sense of aesthetics and feel more likely unable to bring yourself to ship anything that looks simply bad to yourself.
When you don't got the eyes to see bad art as what it is, you also won't see it as a problem that really needs fixing so you care less about it than is good for you.
You have to strike a balance there. Games are visual independend of the style. Yes you play them – but before you even decide to pick a game up, you see screenshots, trailers or game-play-videos. If that doesn't look interesting, you can have the most interesing gameplay in the universe and it wouldn't sell.
A bit like in films, where the best script can be destroyed by bad acting or the best acting can be destroyed by bad scripts as a passionate creator you have to realize that this is a serious issue.
Amateur filmmakers might figure out directing techniques to get top notch acting out of people who never stood in front of a camera before or they might search very patiently till somebody crosses their way who is a natural talent.
The thing is to precisely know your limitations and do the best you can do within them, sometimes even by not copying the best, but by finding glorious short cuts that sometimes create whole new genres.
... then you will also be very bad at hiring a good art director. You could easily end up hiring somebody who is really bad and you wouldn't know.
Even with all the money that Microsoft had in the 90'ies, they couldn't make Windows look good.
If he also cares about art more, then the other thing he cares about, namely; his one family, are denied that time.
Everything costs something.
And at least choose a decent font (looking at the first screenshot on the blog post)
Did you miss the part where adding an employee would double his required budget for the game? Which means he needs at least double the sales? Which means more risk? And there's no guarantee he'll hit that even if the graphics look better?
He spells out that he's working with freelancers, who often flake out for (understandable) various reasons.
If I had made that many games over 3 decades I would have at least learned how to talk to freelance artists in a way that would get better over time. It seems Jeff has put no effort into it, or gave up too early because he's protected his choices with rationalizations.
While I agree with your assessment, his argument from experience seems to be that none of that will affect his sales, so why bother. I'm sure he knows more about that than I do.
Just investing some of his own time reading up on the fundamentals of art, visual language, perception, color theory, could vastly improve his judgement. I try to build games for fun and learning, and I consciously avoid anything that goes beyond my (non-existing) knowledge about creating 'professional' game art. In my case I resort to abstract graphics or introduce very strict voluntary contraints (like: only 8x8 sprites), ie: similar to what games like Baba is You or boxboxboy are doing. If I were to ever shoot for a game that required 'professional game art' I would definitely invest time to get better at it before even considering to start the project.
It's a bit like the programming side of things. Don't try to build your own engine for your game if you barely know any programming, for example.
I don't think he ever came out and said this directly, but he dances around it throughout the article: As a very small indie developer, that's a huge risk to take. He could end up alienating his current fan base, while at the same time failing to satisfy the tastes of others.
Don't underestimate the risk of changing your style, particularly when it's a defining part of the experience. You will lose at least some customers. It may be worth it, but it's a significant risk.
And then at some point they had a moderate mainstream success, and that got them thinking that maybe they could grow into a much bigger game company, and so they started pushing hard at trying to grow. That was the point where me and a lot of other fairly loyal Telltale fans stopped buying their games. The effort they put into other things meant that they were no longer putting as much care into the things that earned them their original fan base. And, at the same time, they found out that breaking into the mainstream market is a lot harder than it looks.
And now there's no more Telltale Games.
so basically you aren't selling your games? Are you even posting them on itch.io? Your constraint set is WILDLY different
So you're a dilettante? That's fine. So am I. But I don't wonder about my future if my game doesn't sell (or doesn't even ship). He does.
Perhaps you should consider being a little more generous in your thinking.
Besides which, it feels like you're missing the larger point that he really doesn't care what other people like, which he can afford to do because he's making a comfortable living. I think it's great that he's making a living doing things that he enjoys without having to add stress by adding extra layers of complexity in the process - which would help how? More money? He clearly feels that he doesn't need more.
> It seems Jeff has put no effort into it
From the article: "I have had games where I worked very hard to improve the graphics, spending a lot of time and money"
> he'd have enough sense to direct art himself in some way
He does direct art himself in some way: "That is why all of my games have a more generic fantasy style. I have to work with a lot of different artists. It's the nature of the business. Thus I have to write games in a way that the artists can be replaced. The generic style this requires is not ideal, but it is necessary."
Yeah, but you have not.
Maybe Jeff having a single minded focus – maybe even bordering ignorance – is a huge part of the reason why he, in fact, has done it and keeps on going after 3 decades.
Considering different choices, could he be more successful? He probably could, but considering the immense improbability of the level of success he enjoyed over a couple of decades in this particular profession (indie game maker), it seems far more likely that any big change could have made it all crash and burn somewhere along the way a long time ago.
His art direction just doesn’t match the tastes of a large number of folks. Neither did H.R. Geiger’s. Nothing wrong with that.
But it has, that's what many people are commenting on. His last two games looked much better than his current game. It could just be the luck of the draw with regards to which artists showed up rather than a conscious choice, but his new game clearly has a different look than his previous game.
The thing about Jeff is that he very much accepts "good enough". Could he make more or do better? Maybe. But that entails risk. Why bring on risk when you're already doing what you love doing and living off it? To make more money? Jeff's not motivated by money except insofar as it's necessary. He just wants to do what he loves and enjoy his life and family, and the "good enough" pace he's set delivers on that.
His art does nothing for me, either, but I do admire his willingness to settle for "good enough" in order to focus on what really matters to him.
The definition of armchair criticism, if I ever show one.
From someone with no experience on that front whatsoever, and who doesn't even get the financial constraints clearly spelt in the article...
I imagine it's the same case here. There may be some passive knowledge gained over the years but not enough to be a competent art director compared to if he even spent 6 months dedicating himself to learning.
It might simply be that he isn't particularly interested in learning it. If he isn't motivated by being an art director, then it would very likely lead to burnout.
Maybe art just isn’t where his talent lies.
I actually wonder if he couldn’t make 2x or more by investing in the art. His previous efforts went from terrible to merely bad. It would be interesting to see what could happen if he crossed the threshold into acceptable.
Then again, I don’t know the total market size for this genre. Maybe even fantastic looking games don’t make enough to support two full timers?
Being that they don't have budget for a new position, they just have to train someone to get better at art directing.
You're missing the point: the author is happy with the games and the success they've brought to him and his family, and he doesn't "need" random tips from anonymous message-board posters, most of whom have shipped precisely zero games.
Sure, it's fair to disagree, but it's also very easy to disagree when giving the suggestions does not put at risk a business that has sustained his family for a quarter century in a business where very few even large game studios have survived that long.
I played the demo of one of his games on a bondi blue iMac back in the early 2000's. The graphics then looked ok. But it's 2019 and new titles don't look better.
I've wondered before who the userbase is for these; is it just fans from back in the day when game development was a smaller thing and the competition didn't have great artists either? Because I can't see getting into them as a new player.
Being able to sell 2x by having a more consistent and up to date art style honestly sounds low to me. Even as someone who's played my share of RPGs, had a Mac back in the day, and know that Spiderweb Software exists, that's the main thing holding me back from checking it out seriously.
But if he's getting by with what he's doing and spending more to try and reach a broader market is a risk he doesn't want to take, that's his call.
How does that mean he needs to double the sale? That's not how any of this works unless he wasn't making a profit before.
Assuming his budget was $50k, and he made $250k in sales. Now if he increases budget to $100k, he sure as hell doesn't need $500k in sales to justify the decision, in fact as long as his sale goes beyond $300k, or a 20% increase, then it pays for the increased budget.
[0] http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam...
He does address this in the article: Hiring more people means he directly needs to make more sales, which (I also know from experience) is very difficult to do. Hiring dead weight like an "art director" probably means hiring even more people to carry out the directions of the art director, since they're unlikely to be a can-do person themselves.
People are very visual and your game can be amazing in terms of story or programming, but you also need to sell them visually. That doesn't mean every game has to go for amazing graphics, but it must make sense and look interesting. E.g. nethack looks more interesting without generic sprite package, till somebody developes one with a consistent style.
It takes years to get good at this, unless you did it since you were born. You pay good artists exactly for these years.
He got good at other things he cared more about it.
Maybe he should hang out on HackerNews more, so he can be an expert on everything.
The guy is doing well, relative to his own aims and objectives, and has found a way to work within his limitations to hit a sweet spot that allows him to support his family in a happy life and provide games enjoyed by a loyal fanbase.
What do we discover from HN? He's a lazy bugger that hasn't put any real effort in to respond to his customer's complaints and has failed to learn key lessons regarding his own business (that he has successfully run for twenty-five years).
Sometimes this place is completely ridiculous.
The only thing that bugs me however is when they try to come up with excuses why their works don't live up to the standard of other artists judge themselves by. Jeff listed some quite compelling arguments for his decision, most of them economical, but it still feels like an excuse of somebody who knows they could do better, which is kinda sad.
You don't have to always strive to be among the world elite at everything. Often, mediocrity in some areas of life (professional or otherwise) is a perfectly valid choice that will lead to greater happiness in the end.
So you got me 180° wrong – if his motives were purely economical, I'd completely understand his arguments. But because it is not purely economical I see this as a vague sign that he might not value the time he put into it himself enough, which is never a good thing in the long term.
Jeff doesn't needs to be an expert in everything, he needs to see what doesn't work and fix it, let others fix it or decide this is as good as it gets.
He just wrote a very long article explaining just that.
Don't get me wrong, good art doesn't necessarily need a lot of money or resources. It needs the right eyes that know when it works and when it doesn't. He seems to aknowledge he doesn't have them and explains why he can't hire someone, all perfectly fine. But also sad, because if he could he clearly would.
Having spent at least as much money, out of pocket, on a game that never shipped as JV spends to ship something consistent that feeds his family, I can assure you that this is not the case. Art is far-and-away the most expensive part of any game that wants mass market appeal. It just is. It doesn't matter if you're using a bunch of freelancers from countries that lost all their vowels along the way, it's still expensive.
The solution, then, is to build a long-tail audience that'll buy your stuff because it scratches that itch, even if it doesn't to people who are just window shopping. You know--what JV has done.
What I meant however is that depending on the genre you might find solutions that you can do yourself far easier with equally good (or better) results. You could work with one-color abstract shapes and give them a good feel by using the right deformation and stick some eyes on them. Minimal styles can work in your favour at times etc. Filmmakers also use similar ideas – can't afford to show thing A? Let the protagonist tell us about it in a internal monologue and use it to your advantage. That kind of stuff.
This approach obviously won't work for every game or genre, depending on the scope, but I didn't say it would.
"Depending on the genre"--JV makes Ultima-alikes. So by this theorycrafting he should stop making the games that make him money because people like me will buy all of them so he can go make different games that might be more amenable to cheaper art and not have a built-in customer base that is highly consistent and predictable?
JV makes his games the way he does because people like me already follow him and will buy them. His entire business model is built on not taking risks. What is the obsession around here with disregarding that?
For you it was specifically about that one guy whose games you like as they are and I didn't mean to critizise them. The relativizations uttered by me like "depending on the genre" or "necessarily" were meant to act as hints, that I was talking in a more general sense here. Maybe what he wrote is great advice for other devs who create ultima-alikes, I can't really judge that.
The thing people need to realize is that in compound arts like games, films, theatre every part is important. You can do a film with poor lighting if every other aspect is great and there is a reason why the poor lighting adds to the film as a whole. But you can't make films for 25 years and decide sound isn't all that important – unless you want to look like a complete amateur.
Visuals are an important part of games and independent of the style (photo realism, toon, purely ascii, ...) a game is much more interesting to pick up and play when you feel somebody actually cared about what they put in front of your eyeballs.
If you see a trailer of a film, filmed on a shaky phone with bad light and indistinguishable dialoge, you might decide to never watch it, even if it would've been the most interesting and moving story of all times. But that would've been the fault of the film maker, because they failed to convince you why you need to watch this film despite the technical flaws.
That means you need to see the thing as a whole, only then you can decide which role each part ought to play.
Given that he's making a living with his current strategy, and has been for twenty-five years, he is by definition not an amateur, let alone a complete one.
Indeed, the amateur is more likely the person who insists on making every aspect match their aesthetic ideal. They are not giving thought to what could make them profitable, instead focusing on building something that is precisely what they want.
Or you try and hop on the unicorn train and start looking for external funding - which will invariably start trying to run your business for you, in ways which you may not want.
The big money is in the latter, but not everyone wants to deal with the proto-corporate bullshit that goes with it.
Occasionally you can find niches - usually B2B, because high-worth bootstrap B2C is very hard - which bring in enough to allow solid growth without huge upfront spending on people and offices.
But they're very rare. And apart from the odd flash-in-the-pan one offs, small games are not usually one of those niches.
Hard to disagree with that. I have a few from Humble bundles and can't even use them in prototypes. They're just a grab bag of junk.
Maybe for slightly better placeholder art for a game before they are ready to invest in an art upgrade?
That's Voegl's point 3. There, he admits he probably could develop a more impressive-looking single game, but doing so would make him dependent on the freelancer responsible for the art style (risky) or on paying much more for other art to match the style (expensive).
JV isn't trying to be a runaway success, he's trying to not be a failure. I don't quite get why that's so hard for folks here to parse.
Key here is "teams". It's really hard for one person to bring all of those skills to the table.
Nah. I mean, I want Jeff to have a good art director because I find the visuals distracting and a bit unpleasant part of games I otherwise might enjoy, but it's pretty clear he doesn't need one.
The article can be summed into two points:
1) I'm not a good art director 2) Having better art is on my "won't do" list
that said, what makes these game look at least weird is the combination of very retro tiles (say, 1994is, master of magic level) with late retro higher def sprites (say, 1998ish?, baldur's gate level)
while going retro style is not a bad decision for indies, the graphic and ux suffer from being mixed styles, and that's imho a valid criticism.
They look way higher res than BG to me, more early or pseudo-3D sprites, they're reminiscent of Van Buren's sprites.
maybe I'm remembering the enhanced edition
but yeah you get the point: they have that "3d model to sprites" style while the background looks like straight pixel art
The most confusing part of the whole story is that his latest game looks noticeably worse than his two previous games. So there seems to be something more going on beyond that he just wants to go low budget and retro. The problem doesn't seem to primarily be the budget or the quality of the art per se, but a lack of care when it comes to art direction.
And in turn I think you're missing the point somewhat - people's point is that retro doesn't have to mean inconsistent art style and bad colours. There are lots of examples of beautiful retro games.
His point is not that it can't be better, but that he believes he can't do better without taking financial risks he does not believe to be worthwhile given that his current model works for him, and that his games look good relative to the constraints.
The one thing I disagree with is that the graphics are not "retro". They're just bad. It doesn't look like someone sat down and planned a complete set of artwork having a deliberate retro style, with a consistent palette, lighting, etc. It looks like someone hired a bunch of rando one-off artists and threw together whatever they came up with--which is essentially what OP wrote that he does! It's working for him, so why change it?
Windows 3.11 16 color default palette retro
>and profitable
so profitable he cant even hire someone with basic art sense
Gamers generally like the style. The Venn diagram of his target audience and people who like retro game visuals is likely near a perfect circle.
What makes the games look unpleasing is the execution. It's just all over the place, to the point where it looks like a mashup of free assets collected from various websites.
People are pointing out that his otherwise amazing games are being held back by their subpar graphics. Unfortunately, instead of taking the criticism fairly, he sets up a strawman to deflect any blame, claiming that anyone who doesn't like the execution just dislikes the style.
There's multiple points in the article where this shows, for example this one:
>The key problem here is that, when most people say, "Your art looks bad," what they mean is, "I want art that is good." They mean, "I want AAA-quality art."
Big jumps there Jeff.
He shows his lack of knowledge about making good art when he says he can't afford the extra man power to solve the issue. No one here would claim that, to fix bad code, you have to hire more programmers. Art works in the same way. The problems are foundational and don't require more employees or more hours to get right - just a better approach.
The argument that this is not possible with freelancers is silly. He gives the example of a freelancer creating a super niche style that no other artist can replicate. No one is asking him to create award-winning art. People are simply asking for games that are not-ugly. There's plenty of artstyles that fit all his requirements, while still being not-ugly and reproducible by other artists.
I don't doubt that it's hard to find good artists when you never took the time to study what makes good art.
The truth seems to be that after his 25 years of game development Jeff still doesn't know how to make good looking games. He has every right to do as he wants - just as anyone else is free to comment on the look of games. But this article is nothing more than one big list of poor justifications, which is why it's getting a lot of flak.
Either by hiring someone to do it for you, obviosuly adding man hours, or by changing your own skill set and the distribution of your focus which either takes time outright (which translates to man hours, as you learn new skills) or changes the distribution of hours, taking effort away from other areas of the game, such as writing.
But more importantly, that's not even all he said. He also defended his decision by pointing to games like Pokémon and Baba Is You, and saying "these games also look ugly, therefore there's nothing wrong with my games looking ugly", which means that _he's_ missing a really important point, which is that those games don't look ugly.
I completely understand if he can't afford to hire anyone with design sense, and that he doesn't want to learn basic design. But a lot of the rest of what he's saying is outright wrong, and belies a complete misunderstanding of what people mean when they say his games are ugly.
Probably the best counterexample is Kingdom of Loathing:
https://www.kingdomofloathing.com/
Kingdom of Loathing isn't ugly. It's possible to draw very low-effort art without a game looking ugly. It's much more understanding basic principles like consistency and clarity, than effort or budget.
It's trying to achieve a certain level of detail/realism, but it's falling short of expectations.
This might be completely intentional, to evoke a feel for games from an era that did the same thing, but comparing to Baba is You highlights the developer doesn't understand that.
Baba is You has gone completely in the opposite direction in terms of graphical detail, come out of the Uncanny Valley, and is now sitting atop Cuteness Peak.
The dev needs to decide where he wants the game to sit and why.
He makes indie games for 25 years. They feed him and his family. That sounds very successful to me.
He really is not. The article goes into the details of the nuance of where his games are graphically.
Not to mention he specifically addresses what you're talking about.
The next step up in art quality is to add one person to his permanent team, which roughly doubles each game's budget and roughly doubles the sales needed to support that budget. That's a big step and he's not willing to take that risk. Not sure who would be in a better position than him and his wife to assess the risk for that, so it's very hard to argue with that judgement.
That's just simply not true. He just needs to increase revenue by the additional budget to support the budget. So unless he was only break even before with revenue == budget, he doesn't need to double the revenue.
For example https://retrostylegames.com/about-game-art/
For example, LA Noire looks dated (though still excellent in many ways), while Borderlands looks as good as when it was released.
LA Noire while it feels a bit dated, the characters don't really hit uncanny valley thanks to the facial motion capture technology. I am still aware they are a video game character, just a very emotive one.
It makes me think there is a peak realism we should chase, after which improved graphics wouldn't really add much. I wonder if maybe we aren't already there.
Many games suffer from high detail but lack of clarity. We are still working with a 2D screen with limited dynamic range after all. So that means when there is higher detail it can get overly busy. Lacking contrast, making it hard to decipher what you are looking at quickly, especially if it is moving. Stylized games can add visual contrast in their lighting and art, improving clarity overall. Having said that, I think games could leanr some tricks from cinema in this regard. Just capturing what is real doesn't make good cinema, you have to engineer the scene and the shot.
So with that in mind, "dated" is simply a realistic style that isn't old enough to have become distinct from the current peak.
Also FWIW "stylistic" doesn't necessarily imply cartoony or exaggerated, this is just a kind of style you can have but certainly not the only one. And of course the "styles" i mentioned above are treated as just guidelines, many NES-styled or ZX Spectrum-styled or PS1-styled games wont work on real NES/ZX Spectrum/PS1 (or even even strictly follow the visual limitations - e.g. many ZX Spectrum-styled games use single colored chunky sprites with bold outlines but they do not do attribute clash and similarly many NES-styled games use the resolution and palette of NES but ignore sprite or VRAM limitations). After all it is giving the impression that matters, not adhering to strict hardware limitations (though for some that may also be part of the appeal).
Queen's Wish looks ugly in a quaint way. I might buy it for that reason, as it makes me think: "Indie creators usually feel there's something about their game that'll make it sell -- it's clearly not the art style or the music in this case, so it must be the gameplay and/or the story, right?"
You don't need great graphics to make games that people really enjoy.
https://imgur.com/a/wS3Pt
https://imgur.com/a/xdDzg
As far as games with simple but nice art go, there’s also prison architect, stardew valley, Celeste, risk or rain, terraria, sword and sworcery, factorio... and many many more. It doesn’t need to be high res or super fancy, just consistent with a a nice colour palette.
Instead of learning enough about game art over 25 years to direct some consistency across artists for his games, he rationalizes it as an explicit business choice.
I think he's missing an opportunity to learn more about art himself. After making so many games for so long you think there would be some learning/mastery of low-res art. Seems like Jeff is taking the easier route of "that's my style."
No where in the article does Jeff talk about any effort he's put in to learn about palettes, lighting, or generic styles that can be emulated. He only talks about swapping out artists.
I play a lot of games with low resolution, cheap or crude graphics and that never bothers me, but I find inconsistent art really difficult to ignore to the point where I probably wouldn’t play this game.
Keeping art generic, boring and inconsistent to swap out artists is akin to using a lowest common denominator language and framework so you can swap out programmers. Maybe it makes business sense, but it leads to uninspired boring results.
I’m sorry at how negative this comment turned out, so if the author reads it I hope he takes it constructively and considers how to improve the consistency of the art.
EDIT: I don't think the art looks terrible, but it could be improved a lot with relatively minor changes (consistent shadows would be a great start).
Then swapping out artists will be easier and the game will look more consistent.
You can choose what palette to use by pressing a combination of buttons on most start screens. See this example of Super Mario Land: http://i.imgur.com/HupBY.png
The guide also needs to include lighting, which he has diddly-squat of.
The 90s game style saw more powerful chips and higher color depths as a chance to do realistic art and skeuomorphic interfaces.[1] I'm sure they looked good to people then, but the reason they look so dated now is that realism as a design goal is better accomplished with modern graphics technologies than anything they had available then. Anything that still looks "good" does so because it was able to carve out a stylistic niche that didn't depend on having a more realistic interface as the end goal.
Pixel art games look timeless (to me) precisely because their limitations meant that designers had to find a style that worked for the particular game. To be sure, there are 80s games with bad art, but I think on the whole the older art was better (and is now more iconic) because the limitations pushed creativity.
I still love to play low-res games (including new ones like VVVVVV[2]), but most of them are in an older art style than John's games, which (if I'm being honest) look (visually) kind of crappy to me.
[1] The poor font rendering in most 90s games doesn't help matters either.
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/VVVVVV_-...
On the contrary: It will take all your life :)
I expect they're also less busy, and more stylised.
Looking at the Queen’s Wish's screenshot, it doesn't look lower resolution than Dungeons of Dredmor, just worse, the backgrounds are way too busy, the colors are inconsistent, too subdued so their kind-of meld into one another making things less legible, the lighting is odd, the level of details seems to vary from one sprite to another,…
Compare
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tV0QOWTjVOM/XV23pI64tQI/AAAAAAAAB...
to
http://i.imgur.com/tc3rt.png
People will always get upset about graphics, and will always have their own "suggestions" on how to make your art not terrible. If you listen to one person, you might just alienate every other player that doesn't like that person's style.
[0] http://randsinrepose.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/mtrek.pn... [1] http://bt-thud.sourceforge.net/thud/big/bigpicture.jpg
From a commercial point of view the aesthetics are used by consumers as (perhaps unfairly) a judge of quality.
And I don't think it's unfair to use aesthetics as a judge of quality. First of all, as you mentioned, nice aesthetics do enhance the experience. And second of all, it's a way to signal strength - a team not capable of making a good game will often not be capable of making it look interesting either, especially for indie games.
And it doesn't have to be that expensive either. There's a game I'm slightly affiliated with (but not in any monetary way) that has been made with a budget of $0 by volunteers (mostly highschoolers) and I think it looks good just because of the insane attention-to-detail and meticulousness of everyone involved. Here's [0] what it looks like for reference.
[0]: https://youtu.be/Uryrdj-DUcA?t=4
I've played on-line games that have camera shake when you make a hit, bits spray everywhere, shadows cast where they conceal relevant stuff, none of this helps me enjoy it, it just gets in the way of what I need to see. It gets turned off ASAP.
In other cases I'd rather have the characters not act like dicks (stand around when there's a fight starting, get attacked by monsters and not defend themselves). The gameplay is so frustrating sometimes. (edit: point is graphics are low on my list of bothersome)
Art is going mad, like the floppy hair that nvidia GPUs are boasting about - who cares, really?
(Did play a demo of Vogel's game and liked it, the only problem being that I didn't pick up any threatening atmosphere in areas where there should have been. Still, recommended and good fun)
[1] https://www.gog.com/game/avernum_escape_from_the_pit
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Braid-art-1.j...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2e/Braid-art-2.j...
Yes, it is an expense and so it's also a risk, but not taking any risks means never trying to get out of your comfort zone.
One of my favorite games of all time was Legends of Kesmai[1] - a graphical multi-user dungeon that even for its time in the dial-up AOL days had horribly outdated and simplistic graphics. Something about those basic graphics just got my imagination going in a way that no other game has, and I found myself completely immersed exploring that world.
So for me there is a lot of appeal in the Spiderweb graphical style.
[1]https://s.blogcdn.com/massively.joystiq.com/media/2012/03/ke...
Besides, ask Jon how much he spent on assets for it. It is clear that Jeff is uninterested in spending a ton of money on a portion of the final product that he doesn't really think is that important.
In fact, as soon someone feels the need to defend aesthetics in the first place, I'm starting to feel twitchy - for the same reason you don't want to discuss the quality of light with a blind person (not that I deny any blind person the right to know how I experience it).
I think a lot of commenters are right on point, when they argue that none of "retro", low budget, or indie imply shabby graphics. Just as many commenters completely miss the point about "shabby" graphics. Reduced or no graphics at all are not "shabby". Obviously you will have a hard time criticizing the aesthetics of text-based adventures (font-choice, spacing and layout maybe?). Also, just moving from retro to contemporary you won't automatically get "great looks", right? Thus can we finally remove the whole retro aspect from the line of argument?
If you produce art (we do consider game graphics to be some kind of art, right?), and you are criticized for the aesthetics, make of it what you wish. Defending it won't increase your sales. Let the success of the game speak for itself.
And if you cannot understand what people mean when they criticize you, ask them (or others) what could be wrong and how to improve.
I don't even know how I'd even start to interview an artist or art director. You can't ask them to spend 10 minutes developing a 32x32 character on a whiteboard, can you? I doubt they'd do a 2-day HackerRank style take-home test. I guess you have to heavily rely on their portfolio and whether you like the look.
I empathize with the OP and really, seeing as he's made a successful living for 25 years writing games with crappy art, why does anyone think he needs advice from the HN or Reddit brain trust?
There's a lot of work that needs to be done to pick a consistent style, because at the moment it's a mixture of everything and it all clashes.
The screenshots of John's games make me feel nostalgic in the same way that I'm sure NES and Arcade style games make 80s kids feel nostalgic. The Windows 95 style is retro now, even if it still feels current to us!
I wish more games look terrible in a 1995 kind of a way. Mostly for the sake of nostalgia, I loved playing crappy shareware games and terrible demos from floppy/CD magazines when I was a kid.
It seems like all his games could be using ascii art instead, and honestly, they probably would look a lot better.
As one of those people, I really don't like pixel art at all.
Today's pixel art looks nothing like games did back in the day. The simple reason is that those Nintendo and Sega games weren't played on 27" 4k LCD monitors or 65" OLED TV's but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry. It had a way softer look than todays pixel art does.
To me, the whole pixel art craze looks like false nostalgia. People longing back to something that never existed that way.
this image demonstrates it nicely: http://i.imgur.com/lQFPG14.png
I have several CRTs and pixel art looks pretty much the same in them as it does in modern flat panel displays (blurry pixels is the result of hardware issues and badly configured focus which in many cases it can be fixed). The biggest difference is scaling of low resolution video modes though the integer scaling that is being introduced recently in new drivers should address that (at least as best as possible on a fixed resolution display).
I don't like pixel art either. I assume it is easier to make pixel art than good looking sprites. I think the article touches on this.
but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry.
This is true for consoles, but not really for arcade games of the era, which have very crisp, very pixelated graphics, like the Link on the left.
Sure, but the author specifically mentions "People who grew up with Nintendo and Sega"
https://www.resetera.com/threads/animation-excellence-a-eulo...
I'd say today's pixel art generally doesn't hit the heights that it did in SF3 or some of the mid KoF games
> >Current technology isn't even close to being enough to replicate this with real-time physics.
The claim on that page, that those detailed cloth animations were superior and somehow lost in the transition to 3D games, is bunk though. Modern games are very detailed, e.g. https://youtu.be/ot_sYoqe_2w?t=2355
Perhaps the point should be that we lost sense for a particular aesthetic during the transition to 3d graphics techniques.
I think this mirrors the transition from painting to photography over a century ago. As photography grew to dominate everyday images, painters had to go in a different direction to distinguish themselves. It's no coincidence that art became more and more abstract as photography grew.
Of course, the animated clothing in those pants wasn't from a physics engine. I'm sure similar results can be accomplished in 3D if they're not phsyics-based.
Detailing them is one thing, replicating them with physics is another (false equivalence from the author).
I highly recommend Brogue or Cogmind for people that want an example of a beautiful looking contemporary game made with ASCII/ANSI. The developer of Cogmind open-sourced his ASCII-art making tool![0]
[0] - https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/
It can be easier to set up a photorealistic level using PBR materials in Unreal now than to design a readable level from the ground up. I suspect more developers are going to use photo realism to mask larger problems in their games, and to some extent they already have.
I love pixel art! So much creativity squeezed out of such limited hardware.
For a counter voice, as one of those people, I adore pixel art. I also hate how everything has to be 3D.
Maybe it's not nostalgia, but actually just looks very nice.
Most (not all) people going for NES-inspired graphics are just amateur artists who try passing off their lack of skill for “retro style”. And frankly, it can work. Amateur artists can make good low res art.
The real problem is people who just draw on a small canvas and call it pixel art. They lack the fine details.
Not everything has to be intricately hand drawn to look good, and even elicit nostalgia.
chiptunes are also a stylistic choice some games make over full hi def sounds and music.
Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone).
Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can hide low-count vertex polys).
The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not sure)...
https://gamasutra.com/view/news/248019/How_5_years_of_burnin...
E.g. black and white photography is often used to emphasise composition and lighting more. Specific palettes. Specific sets of instruments - a classical composition will not usually be for "some random number and set of musicians" but written for or arranged for, say, a quartet or a symphony orchestra. Both visual art and music tends to follow a whole range of rules to match certain styles.
And yes, reducing size is also a choice - the demo scene takes that very seriously for a good reason: it again forces a different focus. A non-size constrained demo category emphasizes cooperation and teams working on different parts, and project management and is a totally different thing than, say, a 4K demo where you have to focus on reducing a single concept to its essence.
A direct size constraint may not be that important for most games (though for some it is: people still develop cartridge games for the Commodore 64 for example), but resolution and palette constraints do act as implicit size constraints too to a great extent.
Well done pixel art is just a form of minimalism in art that focuses on shading and composition and exploiting patterns and how we interpret pictures. Just reducing resolution of a picture almost always produces bad pixel art. E.g. r/pixelart on Reddit includes this rule:
And people there get very picky about this, to the point that some people object to even fairly basic paint application tools (I've argued with people who claimed that a pixel based "spray" tool is not suitable for pixel art, for example, because there's not sufficient thought behind each pixel placement; I don't agree with that, but I do agree with the overall idea that you need to pay attention on a pixel level, and tweak things that does not look right). Taking e.g. a photography and color reducing it and reducing the resolution does not result in good pixel art - it results in pictures that are messy and unclear and that often lose a lot more detail vs. a proper pixel art rendition of the same scene.Similarly reduced palettes forces much more conscious thinking about composition to make it make sense.
Modern pixel art, like modern chip tunes of course have different motivations from "authentic" art made because the constraints were real constraints of the hardware, but it's really no different from people who e.g. choose to compose for piano even though they could compose for a synth and be free to include sounds no piano can reproduce. We have not entirely abandoned piano music just because we now have more flexible instruments available.
Just because something has more impressive metrics doesn't make it fun.
For example, just because the technology exists to make a virtually unlimited range of sounds and effects doesn't mean that we should abolish simple acoustic music... some people like that style, which originally existed because that's all the technology that was available.
If Muslim artists weren't restricted from painting people and animals they wouldn't create the decorative motives they created. If early sound chips in personal computers weren't restricted chiptune genre wouldn't be created. And you can certainly make art using restrictions that aren't enforced on you - restrictions often inspire people and make it easier to create.
That being said while I love chip tunes and I like some old games made with pixel art I don't particulary like it in the new games, but that's just my opinion, lots of people have different preferences.
Also from gamedev POV pixel art allowed many modern indie games to be created which wouldn't be created otherwise. That's a plus in my book.
> Low quality collision objects?
Funny that you mentioned this - some collision detection bugs in starcraft 2 were introduced on purpose to mimic bugs in starcraft 1 because these bugs increased the skill cap (people learnt to abuse them to get ahead of their opponents and community liked that because it was another thing you had to learn to master the game). See "mineral walk" :)
Am able to take most vintage sets, align and calibrate them to perform much better than that image. In some cases, modifying the set does even more.
I love pixel art. Back then, I definitely saw the pixels.
Some of my sets were comparable in performance to what people seek for retro today, the PVR.
And I have a PVR, because they are cheap right now. Actually. I have two, but one will need service before I use it. Can still definitely see the pixels.
https://thimbleweedpark.com/
http://www.alonsomartin.mx/hfa/
My GB/GBC/GBA games were very rarely played on a 14" CRT.
> To me, the whole pixel art craze looks like false nostalgia. People longing back to something that never existed that way.
Its certainly could be helped by nostalgia, but that pixel art never existed because you only saw it on a blurry CRT? Yeah keep burying your head into the ground like only your taste existed.
My first video game system was a cheapo b/w pong clone knockoff thing from radio shack. My second was an Atari 2600. Later my parents bought me a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16K (which eventually got upgraded to 32, then 64K), and then still later a Color Computer 3. An NES was in there somewhere, and I played on friend's Sega Genesis systems and C=64 computers (plus Apple IIe, PCjr, and others).
Pixel art (back then, they were just "sprites" or "tiles" to us - I'm not sure if the term "pixel art" was a thing then - I never heard it, but it doesn't mean it wasn't) wasn't fuzzy or soft, unless things weren't adjusted right.
The only other time it might be a little funky was if the machine in question was trying to use artifacting in some manner:
http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-overlooked-a...
As you can see - artifacting could introduce a certain level of "fuzziness" to graphics; but scroll to the bottom of that page, to see what the CoCo 2 could do in the hands of someone competent with the effect.
The CoCo 2 got 4 colors on an effectively black/white screen mode by interleaving black and white values - spaced close together on the screen, the NTSC system would render alternate colors - red/blue instead, depending on certain other factors - there was an alternate color mode (green/black) that got you purple and grey or something like that as well - this kind of thing didn't work with PAL CoCo systems (or Dragon 32 - also PAL).
The CoCo 3 could simulate certain "extra colors" on a TV or composite monitor if you dropped into the 640x200 screen (4 colors) and played with pixel patterns. What wasn't widely known then (one guy figured it out - but published his results in Hot CoCo magazine, which wasn't as widely read as The Rainbow magazine was - and so his efforts went mostly unnoticed!) was that with the right pixel patterns over 4 pixels (thus reducing the actual resolution to 160x200 - an almost square "screen"), and using the 4 grayscales available on the CoCo 3 (black, white, and a dark gray and light gray) - you could generate (again, using NTSC artifacting) hundreds of colors!
http://www.coco3.com/community/2009/12/composite-artifacting...
http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-little-known-color-c...
This was rediscovered long after the CoCo 3 was out to pasture so to speak - in the 2000s; it's kinda sad, as it is almost the rumored (likely false) "256-color" mode in practice, and might have done wonders for games back in the day had it been fully utilized, vs the 320x200 16 color mode that was available (there was also a 160x200 16 color mode); these modes were out of a total of 64 colors (which could also be displayed simultaneously if the processor was doing nothing else, by swapping the palette on the horizontal retrace at the right moments - but it wasn't used for more than still images at best; some image displayers for digitizers also used it to swap r/g/b patches of palette on the vertical retrace to get a very flickery form of high-color for special digitized pictures - also, there was a similar way of doing things on the CoCo 2 to get all 8 of it's col...
Super Mario Bros (NES): https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LgO7CNdQx0A/maxresdefault.jpg
A Link to the Past (SNES): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C0qPvqpVIAAoEz4.jpg
Both of the above look far more like the picture on the left than the right. I actually don't even know what your "blurry" picture is supposed to be a picture of, I don't see the scanlines I'd expect on a CRT.
Pixel art is just a style like any other. I like it for the same reason people like pointillism or [insert art style here]. A lot of interesting art, music, and creativity in general stems from self-imposed arbitrary constraints. It's super lazy thinking to blanket disregard an entire sub-genre as people who are either confused about what it "should" look like given some viewing conditions, or simply blinded by nostalgia.