Like...for miles in every direction, all I can see are pitchforks, and here I am standing alone on a small hill thinking to myself "Holy shit. That's the Spiderweb software guy. I've played every single one of his games, EVERY SINGLE ONE, and loved all of them."
The graphics in the games are exactly as good as they need to be to make wonderful story-driven RPGs.
You and me both! I thought this thread would have a bit more praise for Jeff's work after all of these years, but it's just a bunch of Debbie Downers taking a collective dump on it just because they don't like the look.
While the style may not be modern, the gameplay and stories tend to be quite good. I would also argue that a game that looks great doesn't necessarily imply that the game is any good. Battlefront 2 is a great looking game that is ultimately a soulless, lootbox filled shitshow with painfully bland gameplay.
Anyone saying that he needs to hire an art director have completely missed the point of his article: his business can only support his family. He has also been able to maintain this business for 20 years, which is a lot more than can be said about any other indies.
Ultimately, this is a style that Jeff likes, and it makes him money. If people don't like it, then they can go play something else. He still has his fan base that keeps him afloat.
I'm with you on the games being excellent examples of a super niche style done well but he's basically writing an article attacking the very concept of art direction as a waste of resources. That comes off a little disrespectful towards people who care.
I think there's no point in making their games looking any different than they do (because it's part of their brand, now) but the correct response to a question of why they don't make a "better" looking game is that they don't care. Or, maybe, it's a taste issue. Flailing your hands about how people totally did not appreciate you going through the trouble of making the graphics isometric or hiring underpaid artists is not the way to go. It's maybe "honest" but it's IMO at best a misunderstanding of and at worst a severe lack of respect for art direction and visual design.
I think I interpreted the article differently from you. I saw this as a cold hard look at what works and the dangers of changing your brand (or rather, the fact that "better X" doesn't always mean more success when you're Forte is Y), not some general argument against the idea of artistic integrity. Doing what Vogel can now do after 20 years and an established audience would lead to ruin for 99.9% of devs today aiming for financial success because the market is very different. And I'm sure he knows that.
This was what I took away from the post as well. The realism was refreshing and to me very positive. It shows there actually can be a middle-ground in indie development and not just the two extremes of “Have a viral hit and earn millions!” and “Spend more than your life savings and go broke!”.
All too often I think people are happy to throw their hands in the air and presume that indie success is just ‘impossible’. This article, for me, added some much-needed nuance to the discussion.
Yes the business reasons were perfectly fine, and he didn't explicitly argue against artistic integrity, it's just that he didn't display any, while making arguments about artistic choices.
There's an interesting unstated major premise here, that "art" exclusively means pictures.
Spiderweb tends to focus on different aspects of game making that are admittedly a lot less visual, but are arguably no less artistic. This is a wildly hyperbolic analogy, but it seems to me that suggesting that Jeff Vogel doesn't care much about art because his games are weak on the visuals is a bit like suggesting that Led Zeppelin didn't care so much about art because their shows didn't offer the same visual spectacle as a GWAR performance.
Steamspy lists their games as having sold [in the millions](https://steamspy.com/dev/Spiderweb+Software). If they wanted to, they absolutely could afford a B+ tier art guy going through the basic steps of making their backgrounds not look like programmer art, for a few months.
You can actually see some decent concept art and character design in their current games but they're drowned out by a stubborn refusal to actually change the overall balance of detail, suffocating those decent artworks in a sea of blurry/noisy backgrounds. It's a colossal waste, really, only explainable by a stubborn refusal to "learn art", which I can respect by itself, but the post comes off as utter denial of that even happening.
It's okay to dismiss art direction and make that some kind of design philosophy, it works for their games. But blaming it on everything but dismissal feels wrong.
Using Steamspy to just declare how much money he has made and that it is enough to support his family, continue development and hire someone for more art direction when the entire article is about he doesn't have enough money to hire someone is exactly why he wrote this article.
People keep posting in the thread that games with "bad art" still look good with "good art direction" but art direction also costs money, which he still doesn't have.
You say they, but it's only one guy as explained. It's not that he sees art direction as a waste of resources, he sees it as a risk to his future. To expend resources in the art direction he would have to hire more people, and try and ensure the same art style. Which would mean he would need more sales. Plus he would have to upfront these expenses and he might not make it back.
It's an extra risk he doesn't want to his lifestyle that has worked for him for 25 years.
Disrespectful ? The dude says his games look like crap. He doesn’t say everyone else’s should. He’s explaining why it makes business sense for him to do so! This is business 101 from a sucessful indie game dev
> he's basically writing an article attacking the very concept of art direction as a waste of resources. That comes off a little disrespectful towards people who care.
Sounds like "people who care" are people that have spent a lot of money on art and need to respond to this post to justify it. Or are artists themselves and need to prove their worth.
If he only was talking about his own art, then fewer people would be rubbed the wrong way. However, at regular intervals throughout this article, he feels the need to accuse his critics of also disliking other games with simple art. I think it's these quotes in particular that are the most pitchfork-worthy of the lot:
- (Screenshot of Ultima V) - "This is what looks normal to me"
- "Queen's Wish has a very retro square-tile top-down view, reminiscent of old Ultima games, old Pokemon games..."
- (Screenshot of Baba is You) - "If a game that looks like this can be a hit, maybe there can be room for me?"
- (Screenshot of Atari Adventure) - "If you don't like it, maybe the problem is you."
Apart from maybe(!) Atari Adventure, all of those games look far better than Queen's Wish. Even Ultima V shades one side of its walls, something none of his games have accomplished based on these screenshots.
It's an insulting strawman to say that the people criticizing his art would also reject these other games with simple art. It's also insulting to the artists who worked on those games, producing better results in a similar budget. Maybe the insult is unintentional, because he genuinely can't tell the difference himself. But if that's the case, he should just admit that, rather than hiding behind his choice to use a top-down perspective.
> Even Ultima V shades one side of its walls, something none of his games have accomplished based on these screenshots.
It's the hundreds of tiny details like this, that make for great design and good art, regardless of how retro the medium is. That's what this guy seems to be utterly blind to, and it really rubs against people who DO like to spend the effort and time on such tiny details to get the design just right ... only for this guy to call it "looks good enough for me" and then imitate it badly.
Just stick to the business explanation, because there's nothing wrong with running a business on shitty art.
There are two problems: 1) the poor art actually causes one significant design fault and 2) I think the problem is actually that his art is too good in places.
1) If you look at Avernum 3 and Queen's Wish, the characters you are supposed to control don't "stick out" visually. I must have looked at the Avernum picture half a dozen times and actually missed the 3 other characters in the picture other than the cloak and the dragon. That's a huge mistake in visual design--and that is the fault of the designer not the artist. QW has similar issues in that the character design isn't very distinctive: without those horrible colored circles you can't tell friend from foe. And the visual design of the characters makes distinguishing classes difficult. Again, that's designer failure--not art failure.
2) If you look at QW, there are 4 different levels of art. The bottom icons are gorgeous and would fit in a AAA game. The portraits look like potato cam from 1999. The characters look like bad pseudo 2.5D from 1993. And the background sprites look like they are from "My First RPG Maker". You can choose any of those, be consistent, and people won't feel too bad. Look at Exile and Avernum--they have a consistent art level across everything and don't strike me as ugly. What you cannot do is mix and match the levels--that's very jarring and people will complain.
> The graphics in the games are exactly as good as they need to be
I feel like "exactly as good as they need to be" would actually be quite a bit simpler and, through lack of clutter, easier to use. See, for example, the Caves of Qud art style - https://i.imgur.com/Tul3mn3.png - which is substantially less visually complex than any of the Spiderweb Software games but, IMO, much easier to interpret.
Could not agree more about simplicity, although I don't think he's using "good" to mean "complicated." Simple, minimalist art can be nearly as difficult as rich, complex art, and these games are neither of those.
"Exactly as good as they need to be" means "graphics and interface are of a sufficient quality to not significantly hamper interaction with the game, but just barely."
For example, a chess board drawn freestyle in crayon with a bunch of black and white poker chips that have "pawn", "knight", etc written on them in sharpie is "exactly as good as it needs to be," but it sure as heck isn't the same thing as an elegantly minimalist chess board.
Looking at the screenshots in the article, I actually liked the graphics in Avernum 3 and even Escape from the Pit, they seemed consistent and actually pretty well done if a bit simple. I understand the complaints about Queen's Wish. They're not necessarily bad, I don't mind a lot of the tiles, but something does seem off with it. That being said, I've seen far worse and if the gameplay's good then it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
I've actually been tempted to buy Avadon the black fortress a few times. It keeps showing up on steam(after reading this I had to double check, for some reason I had a feeling it was one of his games), again i find the graphics to be appealing. I'm just not sure if i want to invest the time into an RPG right now.
It seems like an easy solution would be to allow the tiles in the game to be editable and let people make new ones if they're unhappy with the ones that ship with the game.
> They're not necessarily bad, I don't mind a lot of the tiles, but something does seem off with it.
The problem I have with it is that it all looks really generic -- like default "RPG Maker" tiles or stock art. The old-school Exile art was simple, but it was unique and had its own distinctive style.
I never managed to play any games in the Avadon series, because they don't have as good keyboard shortcuts as the Avernum series. One of the Avadon games even has a Linux port, which wasn't done by Jeff himself
The Linux port is what I've been looking at. I didn't realize it was ported by someone else, it would also explain why that's the only one of his games that comes up.
I haven't played these games, but I've put hundreds of hours into NetHack with pure ASCII graphics, so I totally get it. I briefly tried using some of the graphical versions but didn't end up liking them so much, so back to the ASCII it was.
My first exposure to roguelikes was an Amiga graphical version of Hack in the 80s, so I always felt like they were "supposed to" have something more than ascii. But when I tried Diablo, I was really disappointed. It's not that the polished graphics detracted from anything, but that the depth of interaction was lacking.
I remember seeing a first person shooter after years of ignoring games, and being really impressed by the advances in graphics, but in seconds, I could see it was still a world made of indestructible cardboard, which was very disappointing. I suppose things have improved somewhat, depending on genre, but anyway, the issue is that people are easily distracted by graphics, not that they detract from anything per se.
It's not my understanding that having a fond nostalgia for somebody's works excuses the article's salty tone that basically tells people they're wrong for thinking the games are ugly, coming up with all manner of excuses but never once embracing that the problem is entirely the developer's own and nobody else's; yes, that point is laid out there but it's given as an excuse, not as a justification. There's a fine line.
He is not saying that everyone is wrong. He is saying that some people like it, most people don't, and the ones that do like it are enough to keep his business afloat.
The guy's been getting criticisms for 25 years. I think he's justified in writing a single blog post in defense of his art style. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
What does the 25 years have to do with it? There are developers who've been in the industry for far less time who are much more reactive and responsive to criticism. If anything, that mention of 25 years is an indictment, not anything worse praising.
Also, 'art style' is a stretch.
Finally, yes, if I don't like it, I don't have to read it. Yet, I did, and I'm free to express my dissatisfaction and disagreement with the article's message: if you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
> I think he's justified in writing a single blog post in defense of his art style. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
I think he's justified in writing a blog post about his business decision and should have kept it at that.
But defending this as an "art style" is like making really shitty cheap knockoff "vintage style" furniture and claiming part of the reason is because you love the artistic style of historic wood working. No you do it for the money, and people who actually like vintage historic wood work might get annoyed that you are pushing your work as the same.
I didn't get salty from the article at all. Just an explanation about why their games look the way they do and why they haven't tried to improve it(money and risk).
He's not saying people are wrong for thinking the games are ugly. Quite the opposite, he's very open to the validity of that opinion while also believing they're okay as-is. No, the whole point he's making is simply that, to his judgment, it doesn't make good business sense to invest more in art, and when he did so the results were no different.
I only played one of his game (avalon), but I finished it. As a casual / very hard to please player, finishing a game is a rare event. Congrats to him.
This, for me, is the thing that really distinguishes Spiderweb's games: it seems that nobody else out there is still making CRPGs that I actually finish.
Other games look beautiful, yes, but they also somehow always end up getting kind of boring several hours in.
Same here, very few games hold my attention long enough to finish, and his games do. Jeff's been a very good citizen of the indie game scene for a long time. I have a great deal of admiration for him and what he's accomplished.
The art style is mixed because he reuses most of his graphics. I think his pot sprite is almost 20 years old now. He just doesn't want to commission new art for every game. New objects and skills need new art, and I'd doubt Philip Foglio is still available to draw them.
Yeah, when you write such an abrasive post, literally ending with "haters gonna hate" and basically implying that anyone who doesn't like the art is stupid, I'm not sure what kind of reaction you expect to get.
I don’t understand how that implies people who dislike his art style to be stupid. I’d see the expression more as a reflection of “find your niche, ignore everyone else”
Saying that you're glad people have attacked your art, and hoping that they continue is needlessly combative and reeks of an holier than thou attitude, as does the rest of the article.
It's not. It's not an art style, it's the lack of one. And then he compares it to retro games with an actual art style and says this is "good enough for him". Calling it an art style is an affront to people who DO spend the time and effort on these things. So he explains it makes business sense for him to not care about art direction. Okay fine. But then don't drag other games into it.
I have fond memories of playing Exile II as a 10 or 11 year old. My dad worked at Boeing at the time, and there was some sort of store where the company sold surplus supplies where he bought used Macs for me and my brothers. These were not fast computers so it was thanks to Exile II "looking like crap" that we were able to play it at all!
> There were not fast computers so it was thanks to Exile II "looking like crap" that we were able to play it at all
You're making the mistake of thinking that a game that looks good must use more resources. That doesn't make sense.
If one took the exact same resources and gave them a more consistent art style, keeping the same file sizes or even lowering them, the games could look just fine and yet still fine on a low-end machine.
Better looking graphics or art != larger file sizes.
Cogmind is really cool and really pushes (to a screaming breaking point) what you can do with "ASCII art". It also helps that the developer is a very chill person, for sure.
But to the GP, you should go play his games! Try "Avernum: Escape from the Pit", his remake of his remake of his original game (he's got a system down pat). It's the best game he's made, IMO, and the iPad version is really good if you've got one lying around. PC/Mac version is good too, of course, but I found the touch interface really nice and a refreshing way to play a game I'd already exhaustively completed twice, so I'd hope it'd meet more modern sensibilities pretty well.
It has been a long time since I played his games but I always really enjoyed the original exile games. I haven't gotten into the newer Avalon remakes as much, but that is mostly a time constraint issue as there are many games and so little time. My memories as a kid are that they were great games if you liked rpgs.
On the plus side, this is the top comment, so the silent majority seems to agree with you.
Art just isn't critical to making amazing games... some old BBS games like Tradewars 2002 will always be among my favorites, and their ASCII images barely qualified as art.
Sometimes 'better-but-not-good-enough' is a trap. That's basically what Jeff Vogel is saying about moving up from his poor inconsistent art to slightly better art, but it's also how I feel about moving up from ascii characters to his style of "crappy" art.
AdoM is a fantastic roguelike created by Thomas Biskup, which originally had you as an '@' battling other ascii characters. Later he wanted a nicer interface and went for this kind of pixely tiles, and to be honest, I don't like it (edit: I just checked again, and the art looks far better than I remember. I still prefer the ascii version, though). If you go for bad art, just go all the way, and make it look consistent.
By the way, Baba is You, referenced at the end, is an absolutely brilliant game, and while the art looks cheap like a toddler drew it, it's all animated; they have three versions of every sprite and keep rotating them. That crappy animation arguably makes it look even cheaper, but it also brings the game more alive, and it's certainly more expensive. Most importantly, though: it's a striking and consistent look.
In the end, though: Jeff had been successfully making games he loves for 25 years. Whatever he's doing is clearly working.
Baba is You came to mind for me as well, as a game with incredibly simple graphics that still looks _really_ good. I think a big part of that is the consistency of the design.
The high-contrast simple design also facilitates the gameplay. There's no visual noise, so it's very easy to 'read' the levels and focus on the solutions.
With that said, I think the art is also deceptively good. I don't think I could replicate it quite as well (from memory) even having played the game a fair bit, and I certainly don't think a toddler (or lesser hyperbole) could capture the charm of some of the sprites.
Baba is You is I think a great example of something that looks really simple but is actually really challenging to pull off. It's also probably not something you could reasonably maintain across 25 years using freelance artists. It also helps that the total number of unique objects in Baba is You is rather limited.
"Better could be worse" resonates well with what I was thinking reading the article:
Ever since punk, and possibly longer, recorded music has a growing number of niches where lack of polish is a feature, not a bug. Liking stuff that others find unlikable makes the consumer feel special. All kinds of guitar noise, the absolute undanceability of IDM, cheesy pop music from an country far away. They all have their qualities, but if you infer from some people enthusiastically defying the superficial shortcomings of those styles that their redeeming qualities must be exceptionally high, you are missing the entire niche identity appeal mechanism: they are liked, in a large part, for being disliked by most others, nothing more. Try to move closer to mainstream (here: add better graphics) and you might alienate your acquired taste connoisseurs long before you start appealing to others.
Dwarf Fortress having mod packs is a pretty good idea. It has the text interface by default then people can make their own sprites. Then again most places don’t have the sort of community support Dwarf Fortress has.
Jeff could make his games moddable and then incorporate the most popular mods into the future versions of his games. Free work from fans who understand that they could get credit in the game but not necessarily paid. Or Jeff could just hire them after having already seen their work in his games.
> By the way, Baba is You, referenced at the end, is an absolutely brilliant game, and while the art looks cheap like a toddler drew it
Actually it looks like an artist carefully imitating a child like style instead of saying "good enough". It's fine, good even. It looks simple, but it clearly actually is everything it needs to be.
Wow, burned so many hours on AdoM. Was a very unique rogeulike. Agreed, when the update came out, I just stopped playing it (mainly because I was running Adom-Sage which improved UX considerably).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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"
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)
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.
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.
Haha I love how 90% of the comments are from just exactly the same people who he wrote this blog post for, and they still make the same points again :D
I have an indie game myself (Skyturns on G Play) and if you are not an artist, making good art is simply really hard. Someone says ”this menu is ugly”, and the cognitive load of making it meet their expectations is massive.
I even have graphically skilled people critiquing my game, paying them, but then coming back with more ugly menus. A real skilled professional art director is hard to find, recruit and motivate.
On a small scale its a ton of freedom to just let your game be somewhat ugly and just focus on what you yourself is great at.
For all the 1000 opinions I’ve heard about my games menus, not one of these people have produced something better. That 1001st person who actually knows drawing, colors and UX is the professional art director, which is possible to find, but the energy required to find him/her and pay is also something that can go somewhere else!
> if you are not an artist, making good art is simply really hard
And if you are not a programmer, making a good game is really hard.
But you can learn. If you are willing to put in the effort to develop your own sense of the aesthetic, even a small amount of time can result in huge improvements.
You don't need an "art director" and neither does this guy.
If you think your menus are ugly, find some menus that you don't think are ugly and ask yourself what it is about them that makes them not ugly. When you can answer that question with certainty and apply the answer to your own menus, that's a first step towards improvement.
Hey, believe me I'm working on it, those menus I have are like 10 iterations in! And I'm looking for art help too. Just saying its a cognitive load, both the learning, iteration, , finding people and paying them. I could instead say "fcuk it" and focus ONLY on the things I'm good at, it's an option that I can understand.
Happy to hear you tried and liked the game! Lots of things in the pipeline
I wonder what the sentiment would be if the situation was reversed.
Here we have a developer effectively looking to pay below market rates for artists, and then unsurprisingly not finding many good artists willing to do that long term. Not a judgment on my part, just saying that he's looking to keep the art budget to an absolute minimum.
Instead if it was an artist defending his choice to make relatively simple games because he just can't find good developers willing to work for cheap for long enough to complete a project.
The line that stood out me in this context:
I can't stress this enough: Finding talented, reliable, reasonably priced freelancers is HARD. Cherish them when you find them.
If the context of the discussion was about developers instead of artists, how would HackerNews feel about someone lamenting the fact that they can't get any "affordable" developers to work on their projects?
Also, as an aside:
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." And I can't make that. Not even close.
That seems like a pretty big strawman to me. There is a large grey area between "crap" and "AAA-quality".
> If the context of the discussion was about developers instead of artists, how would HackerNews feel about someone lamenting the fact that they can't get any "affordable" developers to work on their projects?
I'm not sure the reaction would be all that negative, to be honest.
The problem to me isn't when someone says "we want cheap work and we understand it will not be particularly high-quality," but when they say "we want top-quality work but we're not willing to pay for it."
Voegl's expectations here are honest -- refreshingly so. He's openly paying for artists, but he's paying for art to a budget rather than budgeting to art.
> There is a large grey area between "crap" and "AAA-quality".
I think Voegl addresses that in the middle of the "1." section -- he has had games with "improved" art, but the improved art did not increase sales enough to justify the expense. If an epsilon improvement in art did not improve profits, then it suggests he's near a local optimum.
His problem, and you can see from his wording, is that he thinks about "graphics" not "art." Sure he made a 3d game. So what. He doesn't seem to have the same passion for art direction as he does for game design so its not surprising at all that you can throw money at the wrong problem and not get much out.
> He doesn't seem to have the same passion for art direction as he does for game design so its not surprising at all that you can throw money at the wrong problem and not get much out.
I think that's the most robust critical takeaway from this Hacker News thread. Vogel feels as if marginal spending on art assets is unprofitable, but if a root problem is instead artistic consistency then more expensive art is not necessarily (much) more effective art.
That said, this also doesn't negate Vogel's business point, that it's always worth examining what's "good enough" to optimize return. Suppose Vogel doesn't have and can't easily develop a good artistic eye for consistency; it's still probably not worth it to hire someone else to do it for him.
Specifically its more of an art direction problem.
If you have an artist with decent technical skills, enough time, and an excellent art director, you can still achieve great results. Eventually that Artist will learn and become better in what they independently produce.
Plus, the art is visible through a camera, and with post-processing and FX - which are easily controlled or influenced by that same art director. Just tweaking colour, camera angle, and FOV can produce incredibly unique results.
I had a very small budget, and no team, and was able to produce something regarded as reasonably good-looking in 3D for Frontline Zed:
Your game looks great, and so do many other indie games with low budgets like Stardew Valley and Axiom Verge to name just a few examples, even though there are many more.
Vogel just isn't willing to put in time and money into visuals because it's probably a combination of it 1. not being a priority for him and 2. lacking the skill for visual design (not necessarily implementing it, but just having an eye for it) which is probably also due to the point #1
The problem to me isn't when someone says "we want cheap work and we understand it will not be particularly high-quality," but when they say "we want top-quality work but we're not willing to pay for it."
And to me, I read it as he expects more towards the latter than the former. "Talented, reliable" implies an expectation of a specific level of quality beyond "cheap work, not particularly high-quality".
I read "reliable" as "delivers, preferably on time." That's reasonable to ask for from any freelancer, but since Vogel specifically doesn't pay enough to keep artists on retainer I can understand how he doesn't always get it.
I don't have such a high reading of "talented," since others in this thread generally complain that Vogel has a poor eye for quality, and Vogel in this blog post notes he's looking for a basic 'good enough'.
I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, in particular since he understands that not having a reliable cadre of artists is his problem and not that of primadonna artists. The stereotypical out-of-touch manager who asks for "top-quality work on a shoestring budget" also externalizes the blame for failure.
That is: I think many people are responding to this blog post as if it had read "our games look like crap, but that's because we can't find good artists," rather than "... and that's fine by me, we're getting what we want to pay for."
No I'm not. In fact, that just supports my point; he doesn't want to spend much on design because it won't make him more money, but he wants "talented and dependable" designers. You know that old "pick two" saying? Also, something about cake comes to mind.
Don't see why it would. Maybe I am reading too much into that one sentence, I don't know. The whole "talented... for a reasonable price" bit stuck with me though. If all of the talented people want a certain rate, then guess what? That's the market rate.
Yes and he acknowledges that by saying they are "really HARD" to find. Clearly after 25 years in the industry he didn't wait for you to point out that reliable talented artists don't usually come cheap. He's simply decided they are not worth the price tag for his business.
I hadn't noticed that angle, being fully invested in getting kids of my 256-color lawn. However, I feel a little more sympathetic towards Vogel; consistently making money in the games industry is borderline impossible. If, as he suggests early on, he is supporting a family with his small business, investing more than the absolute minimum in art, particularly when he has proven his business model, must look like a serious risk. Cheap art, and he knows he can recover from a failure; blow a lot of money on art, and the game sucks anyway, and he's finished, and has to go and get a day job, and post cantankerous comments on Hacker News during his lunch break. I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
I agree with your aside comment. That quote in the original article really jumped out to me. There are a ton of great indie games that have solid cohesive art direction but wouldn't be considered even close to AAA quality in terms of production effort. Some beloved heavy hitters would include the Steamworld series, Celeste, Undertale, Super Meat Boy. These are games made on a shoestring development team that don't look like garbage.
I think it would be one thing for the author to dig in his heels and make janky looking games because he truly likes them that way, but it sounds from his tone that he'd rather blame external factors for what on some level he knows is his own mediocrity.
JV spends astonishingly little on art because his games don't make very much. His audience is small (I am part of it) and his audience values that particular kind of game way more than it does art--and the marginal return from making it look a little better to appeal to a little wider of a crowd is historically negative. He cited as much, and he's talked about his numbers in concrete terms before.
Every game you listed, every one, has spends at least one FTE or FTE equivalent, either in sweat equity or in cold hard cash, on their art. (And at least in the case of Steamworld, more than one!) JV's games literally don't make enough money to pay that person. What the heck do you expect him to do?
You're only mentioning the successes, what about all the Steam failures? Your post ignores that, unlike most of those relatively-very-expensive indie games that come out, go "plunk", and their developers go back to a real job, JV has successfully kept doing this for twenty-five years. He's had stinkers and still survived. The machine keeps cranking because of a relentless focus on cost control and making the game that somebody like me wants, even if it means that somebody like you adjusts your pince-nez and waxes on about his "mediocrity".
One thing that bothers me in this discussion is the 'business model' justification.
>his audience values that particular kind of game way more than it does art
Isn't that ridiculously self-selecting? If he's always been making ugly games, then it follows that his current customer base will be limited to people who don't care as much about visuals. This will always be true, regardless of what genre games you're making.
It absolutely does not mean that he wouldn't expand his audience by making good-looking games. In fact, if what he said is true and most of his current customers don't care about looks, it's more likely an indicator that the subpar visuals are indeed costing him customers.
I honestly have a hard time grasping that this even passes as an argument. It's like someone who sells shit sandwiches saying their customers don't mind the shit taste.
You might disagree--which is fine--but as one of those folks who've steadily paid his mortgage from his games I don't think the art style is ugly. It's functional. It's not particularly good, nor is it distractingly bad. That's clearly enough for the audience that he, with low-risk projects, makes enough money to get by on.
I assume that you have read the article and read how JV has tried spending more money to update his graphics in an effort to expand his customer base, to little effect. And since I assume you must understand that one can evaluate marginal returns based on cost outlay, I would think that this line of thinking should make sense, even if you disagree with it.
I've said it elsewhere in this thread but I'll say it again: the goal when running a small business is not to take over the world. The goal is to not fail. Expending scarce resources on bets with a ROI ratio under one is not a good way to avoid failure.
>JV has tried spending more money to update his graphics in an effort to expand his customer base, to little effect
I'm sceptical of this for 2 reasons
1. It assumes cause and effect are linear, which I doubt. People are put off because the games look bad. Making a game that looks better, but still bad, doesn't solve this issue. In order for Jeff to be able to properly evaluate the ROI of making his games look not-bad, he would need to have made a not-bad looking game. This is arguably not the case.
2. It's clear from the article that Jeff doesn't really understand what makes a game looks good. As a result, if he's spending extra resources on making the game look better, they're likely not well spent. The money would need to go into foundational efforts like consistent color palettes to make it visually pleasing, consistent lighting so everything feels like it's part of the same world, proper shading so everything looks grounded, making sure everything looks to scale, balancing out the level of detail between pieces to make sure the right things stand out, etc etc. In the article, he stated that he thinks good art = AAA level, so I'm guessing Jeff just paid artists to add more details to faces and monsters - which really isn't going to solve anything.
> the goal when running a small business is not to take over the world. The goal is to not fail. Expending scarce resources on bets with a ROI ratio under one is not a good way to avoid failure.
I can completely respect this decision. He's trying to run a certain kind of business and that imposes a certain set of constraints.
The irony though is that Jeff is the one who's not respecting those constraints.
It's entirely possible to spend little on art and still have a good looking game. Just pick a simple art style that can be executed fast. Alternatively, if you want to have a good looking game in your personally preferred style - that also happens to be more expensive to produce - that's also entirely possible. It will just cost you more.
Both options are fine.
But Jeff is spending little on art and at the same time asking artists to make highly detailed artworks. There's just no chance of that working out well. The poor results are not imposed by his business constraints, but rather from his failing to respect them.
I think the issue is that this particular game look worse than his previous games (of course here YMMV), which were done with lower budgets (not Kickstartered).
I do agree that Queen's Wish looks worse, FWIW. (I think the perspective is maybe not great.) But I don't know if this is actually a significantly higher budget game, though, rather than just one where he has the capital up front. Kickstarter-as-preorder is kinda what it's turned into for games. As such, I totally get the intense focus on not eating the seed corn.
Semi-jokingly: he should just dig up the Exile I tileset he included a screenshot of in the article and go to town. IMO that's the best his games have ever looked, aside from maybe Nethergate (and some of the more artfully done Blades of Exile scenarios, of course, but that wasn't him).
Vogel should peek over the fence at the adjacent roguelike community and do what they've done: custom tileset support. He's clearly not that invested in his games as aesthetic experiences, and that's his prerogative, but in the year 2019 it's actually not that uncommon for game communities to scratch their own itch in that regard when allowed.
I think Exile I's graphics look pretty good, yeah. For me, it's the Exile III version of the Realmz graphics, followed by the original Exile I graphics. (The backported Exile III graphics to Exile I and II look weird to me.) His newer background/tile graphics look just fine to me too, though.
I built a couple full-tileset mods for Blades of Exile back in the day. You can do it with the new Avernum engine too. Of course, he could definitely make it easier.
I kind of understand why the graphics were redone for Exile III, since there was a need to add a lot of aboveground tiles, and also cave tiles were needed for caves that were not Exile proper but just troglodyte dens or whatever. But the gray cave floor never felt as alien to me as what Exile is supposed to be. It bothered me less in Exile III since you spend so little time there, but it was weird backported, as you say. And of course it also ended up affecting BoE.
Now I'm feeling nostalgic. Wonder if I could get BoE running again.
I miss Realmz¹, and until today didn't realize that the developer of Realmz was also the publisher of the Exile series. But I still can't figure out what "the Exile III version of the Realmz" graphics is referring to.
¹My ringtone is actually the Realmz outdoor theme.
Spiderweb Software and the Realmz folks collaborated to buy an art set, which became the Exile III graphics (and fans kinda just call them "the Realmz graphics"). They were then (somewhat) modified and backported to Exile I and II in ways that didn't always work great, which became the Exile I/II versions of those graphics.
Ah, interesting. I loved the heck out of the Exile games but I was unaware of details like this. I didn't even realize Exile I/II got graphics updates.
Interesting -- I actually see three different versions of the splash screen at that first link! (One with red text on a gray background and 1.0 graphics, one with blue text on a gray background and 1.0 graphics, and one with gray text on a gray background and 2.0 graphics.) There's also two different 3D-rendered splash screens.
For each Undertale, how many games do you think there are out there that look good that will never break even?
There are two sides to this: Can you make better games for cheap? Sure you can, many people have. But the second question is: How large a proportion of those who try that would be able to keep churning out profitable games for 25 years?
Or even produce a single profitable game?
There's nothing mediocre about managing to pump out profitable games for 25 years - very, very few people manage to do that successfully. His games may well be mediocre, or at least look mediocre, but in terms of success he's doing far better than most just by still being there.
Undertale had really amateur art but it was cohesive and looked like someone actually cared about it, versus a bunch of parts-bin stock graphics some guy bought on discount.
I don't doubt the guy is successful, but he doesn't really bring up a convincing argument for his position. He could be potentially be MORE successful if he invested a little more in visual aspects of his games. Reading an article about why it isn't a priority for him isn't that interesting to me.
> He could be potentially be MORE successful if he invested a little more in visual aspects of his games.
Covered in the article (and previous blog posts, I think): 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."
The video game market is very different today than it was a decade ago, or two decades ago. I wouldn't compare making and selling a simple game on CD 20 years ago vs today.
Among other things, there are much higher expectations on graphics and it's a lot harder to make 3D world and assets than it was to make 2D sprites. Cheap games are also facing a fierce competition from a truckload of other cheap games and previous AAA titles. There are more games than people can play and why buy Game 2019 when Game 2015 is just as good and 75% off.
Actually, he completely owned his mediocrity, and he cited cost and risk, as well as his own comfort with said mediocrity as reasons for continuing with it.
Then he talked about great stories.
Definitely not mediocre.
So, the take away is story can sell to fans of story and game play.
That is not wrong. It has, does, and I suspect, will continue to.
> If the context of the discussion was about developers instead of artists, how would HackerNews feel about someone lamenting the fact that they can't get any "affordable" developers to work on their projects?
That's an interesting way to look at this article. It seems that many solo entrepreneurs have a hard time evaluating the skills of those outside their own domain.
It feels arrogant to criticize someone profitably running their own company for 25 years, but I wonder if he would be better served by hiring a design/UX firm for a day or two to get some guidance on achieving a consistent look while still spending less money.
I'm not sure such a firm exists, for what you're talking about. In games, you often have an art director whose job is to create that consistent look (and such an art director can make freelancer work way, way more cohesive!). But you have to pay that person, and it's an ongoing task.
> If the context of the discussion was about developers instead of artists, how would HackerNews feel about someone lamenting the fact that they can't get any "affordable" developers to work on their projects?
There are plenty of entrepreneurs here that hire all kinds of people, and always try to find good bang for the buck. Isn't that normal? I personally have hired artists, developers, marketers, lawyers, managers, you name it... I don't see why I would deal with any profession any different.
>> 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." And I can't make that. Not even close.
> That seems like a pretty big strawman to me. There is a large grey area between "crap" and "AAA-quality".
And even then, you can have low-budget (like what Vogel is doing) with good-looking art, as in good art direction, which he has already done.
That seems like a pretty big strawman to me. There is a large grey area between "crap" and "AAA-quality".
I'm one of the players that's on the margin between his graphically "good" games, e.g. the Avernum remakes, which use a vaguely consistent colour palette and are comfortable to play, and his graphically awful games, e.g. the first Geneforge, which has an eye-stabbingly bright green border around the game area that's brighter and higher contrast than the actual content, making playing the game fatiguing and uncomfortable.
Jeff's games don't need 3D art or a big budget or even a totally consistent style, they just need a tiny amount of good UX taste and a few hours of photoshop to mess with HSV. Thankfully, the more recent titles do have better UX.
I don't really see the problem. The game may be a nightmare for developers in this theoretical scenario but if the major bugs get kinked out then the audience doesn't care.
I guess it's the same case here. The art isn't as if the entire art pipeline was MS Paint so most people who don't mind graphics may at worst just put up with it for the gameplay they expect from Vogels games.
I don’t think he is looking to pay below market rates. He seems to have realised that if he wants to develop his product to that level, he’d have to massively grow his business, something he says he’s not interested in doing. He says he’s just interested in operating a company that pays his bills. He’s found an audience for his product the way it is.
The question he seems to be answering is “why don’t you try and grow your company”, with his answer being “because I’m happy with the way it is”.
Well, if you saw some of Jeff talks you know that he has a respectable sense of humor. Everything in this post that you are angry at is just plain trolling.
I think you're right. I was thinking almost the same when I was reading the post.
Let me add that, in my opinion, there are more chances of a successful game if you're a competent artist with poor coding skills than the opposite. In fact, lots of solo projects succeed because the author is an artist that happens to be a half decent programmer.
How many indie darlings have simple but unique and striking styles? AAA-quality can be just as bland and boring as an uninspired indie. This is more about lackluster art direction, which you'll never get from freelancers.
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.
> 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,…
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.
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.
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
"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).
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....
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.
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.
> 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.
> >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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 colors onscreen at once in one of the "mid-res" modes - it was used for a game called "DragonFire":
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?
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" :)
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)...
They also tend to age better because they never tried to look realistic in the first place. Cartoonish remains cartoonish, but realistic becomes dated.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"
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.
I think most people in this thread are missing the point.
The point is know your constraints!!! Be willing to say NO to some things! Anything you say YES to has a cost!
If you can do the above, you can find success in most things.
If you apply the author's idea, it would be the same as. Why he has decided to own a small business and not a startup or a big enterprise. "Why my revenue looks like crap, and our growth is not a hockey stick" Most of us on here would be better off making $500k a year working for ourselves than chasing $1 billion valuation. Nothing wrong with that. He has a family to feed. He prefers having a small pie that's a sure thing than trying to go for a large pie that he might not be able to get.
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?
I'm super happy that games that look and feel like those from Spiderweb Software exist. I think it's charming. But the fact that he feels compelled to write an article in defense of the art style is telling to me. I think it's not unreasonable to answer the headline question with "because they're stubborn".
Their games look crap, not because of a lack of resources but because of a disrespect for visual design (it's not even "art", they could make a better looking game with colored squares). There's probably many, many ways to improve the look that have nothing to do with "AAA art". He fails to see how Baba Is You is a better looking game than any of theirs, simply because it's focused and has a good use of color and contrast. Any $10/hour freelance game artist can tell him that the problem with the games is a mismatch in detail, between background and characters, between resolution and texture detail. This makes tiles look either blurry or covered in white noise and together with a sever lack of contrast, makes the game look flat and unlit.
Solving that doesn't require hiring expensive artists, it first involves acknowledging there's an issue at the core that can't be solved by sticking stuff on top of it. I see zero patience or passion for that and that's why their games look the same as 25 years ago (and I could argue, worse, since higher resolution doesn't do them any favors).
Again, I have no problem with their games and them looking like they do but going into defense here is a battle they can't win. Their best move is to acknowledge that they don't care and do so with pride. Everything else just feels at best insecure and at worst somewhat disrespectful towards devs who care.
I did not read that as defending his art style, I saw it as getting at something deeper. His argument is not really about defending the quality of graphics in his games, they are much more about showing the calculus and weighing of his choices.
The first and key point is that there are people (such as myself) who actually like his graphic style and who, above all, prioritize the excellent story telling in his games. These are the people who sustain his business.
The second point is one of niche indie versus AAA or even popular indie. It's a similar sort of argument as between "life-style" businesses versus VC backed businesses. Specifically, in the game industry, the effort into graphics and assets versus reward from customers gained is not a linear function of effort, where small increases result in small gains. It is not even a smooth function where there are small in-between things you can do that will have an impact.
Now, in hackernews style, you believe that there is a simple solution but remember, the issue is not of graphics but getting to a sustainable business. This is someone who has survived making games for 25 years where so many better more consistent looking games have flopped or their parent companies folded. Besides, from my short time working on games, it seems to me you are both overestimating and underestimating the gains from such touchups. The people who care about such things are very exacting and the people who don't care are very forgiving. The upshot is, either the touchups you list will not matter or they will never be enough. Which leads to a key point.
There is a large step function covering not just graphics but also animation and sound quality to where the majority would consider acceptable. He is not complaining that good artists are too expensive, he is stating that the incurred risk required to afford majority acceptable game assets is not worth it, compared to what he is comfortable with and how he wishes to live his life.
He is happy with his current niche and those of us who feel nothing for the latest shiny 3D raytraced games are grateful that developers like him exist.
Those of you who seek to create businesses should consider knowing yourself and what will truly make you happy. Do you want great wealth and acclaim or the freedom to live your life mostly as you please, content without any great material or status need?
What a weird comment. The guy says he likes the style of his games, and that they make a profitable business for him. Why do you insist there's a "problem"?
I thought this was a great article. Why do the games look "ugly"? Because 1) perfect graphics aren't even the point; and 2) this is a way to build a sustainable business.
Your technical complaints about the art entirely miss the point. And I guarantee that there is not a good supply of talented and reliable freelance artists charging $10/hour out there.
> What a weird comment. The guy says he likes the style of his games, and that they make a profitable business for him. Why do you insist there's a "problem"?
The author believes there's a problem, or they wouldn't have written an article about it. I agree with the grandparent comment. The tone of the article isn't "yes, the graphics are bad but it's fine", it's "you just don't appreciate the style". The author lists four things they believe to be the cause of the complaints:
> 1. Queen's Wish has a very retro square-tile top-down view, reminiscent of old Ultima games, old Pokemon games, Spiderweb's first games, tabletop D&D, that sort of thing. For some, that old style is really unfamiliar and/or alienating.
> 2. Queen's Wish uses art made by a lot of different artists. That means that the style is not quite consistent. We've done our best to make it blend well, but it's a little off.
> 3. All the characters only look in diagonal directions. I made this choice because I once thought all the art would be hand-drawn, and I desperately needed to reduce the number of icons I needed. This was a mistake, and I'll probably try to fix it in Queen's Wish 2.
> 4. It's not in 3-D. Some people will only ever be happy with 3-D.
Of these four, two are "you don't like the style" (1 and 4), and one is a technical complaint that the author agrees with (3). But in this comment section, the focus is clearly on point 2 (lack of art direction).
The author has an explanation for point 2 (cost), which most commenters find reasonable (some disagree of course, which is to be expected). But it's the large amount of text spent debating point 1 and 4 (which are unrelated to cost) that people take issue with.
To me, the inclusion of point 1 and 4 come off as deflection from point 2, the point that most complainants actually have an issue with.
> The author believes there's a problem, or they wouldn't have written an article about it.
From the bottom of the article: "I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. You can also follow me on Twitter."
Hah! He knows what he's doing better than anyone here thinks. Here we are discussing his ugly cheap art, browsing through his games, at almost no cost to him (writing a blog post?)
He must have had at least a few hundred sales today, because I saw this blog post on twitter and reddit as well.
He even said his title was click-baity later in the article. He wrote this for the attention, and HN gave it to him. This has at least four times as many comments as most game dev articles I see that get linked here.
Absolutely. I think it's telling that the one piece of artistic criticism he admits he wants to fix is that characters are looking diagonally, which seems trivial compared to other visual design issues in the game.
Part of the problem seems to be that his critics range from the unrealistic "Just™ triple your budget and make it look competitive with AA games" to the more practical "why not think about visual design more coherently and address some of the low-hanging fruit to make your games more approachable and broaden your audience?" and he's lumping everything into one big WONTFIX pile.
But at the end of the day, if he's found an audience and can support his family, more power to him.
> Their best move is to acknowledge that they don't care and do so with pride. Everything else just feels at best insecure and at worst somewhat disrespectful towards devs who care.
You put your finger on exactly what felt wrong for me when I read their post.
They are just trying to find reason to justify their art, while they have none and simply don't care.
I'm not saying it's wrong that they don't care, it's alright, but doing this kind of post is disrespectful for people who cares.
The problem isn't going into defense, it's having an acidic attitude towards it:
> What fascinates me here is that the guy seems to think he is telling me news. Like, I'm smart enough to keep a software company running for 25 years, but I am unable to notice qualities in my games that are instantly obvious to Joe Q. Rando.
Imagine that being said in any other context to realize how uncalled for such an attitude is and how much it undermines any other point the author wants to make.
Microsoft or Apple have indubitably created some of the most successful and valuable businesses that are still at it decades later. Now imagine them giving the response above when faced with criticism. If it would sound awful it's because it is. People who can't take even constructive criticism will have a hard time existing on the internet. And it will show.
You must be quite sensitive to see this as “acidic”. I have seen this guy speak at several conferences and he is absolutely the opposite of “acidic”. Here’s an “acidic” comment for you: He makes great games that people love and he doesn’t owe you a thing.
But have you seen him write? I'm talking about the article and the quote above shows some very aggressive sarcasm. I believe calling it acidic is appropriate.
If I provided the same kind of reply to you it would either be downvoted to hell, flagged, or deleted by mods. Using 2 different moral standards for the same action has a name.
But that is pretty much exactly how Apple responds to criticism of their most asinine product decisions. They double down on them. (And occasionally, years later, quietly come to their senses)
I don't see "doubling down" as analogous to "responding acidly," and I'd actually say that Apple's most common response to criticism isn't "doubling down" as much as "not officially responding at all." You may find their lack of apology for arguably dubious design decisions or out-and-out product flaws to be annoying, and I get it, but it's not as if the tech industry is chock-full of counterexamples.
In any case, the OP's argument for "why all of our games look like crap" is "we're not prioritizing the resources to put into consistent, polished aesthetics." I'm going to bet that if you made a consensus list of the most common complaints with Apple over the last ~5 years, "they just don't pay enough attention to how things look" would not be near the top.
If you know of cases when Apple or MS came with this kind of aggressive sarcasm (read quote above) and moreover, people still found excuses for them I am open to discussing a particular example. Absent such an example I will assume you're just doing what I implied above: judging Apple and MS a lot harsher for a lot less just from strong bias.
And if such an example exists it just strengthens my point that it would sound just as awful and that the only difference is that people will judge MS or Apple with far more bias that this guy, regardless of the actual "crime".
I love Spiderweb Software and the games they produce but I see what you did their Jeff.
Come on guys this is clearly a precisely crafted, controversial traffic increasing blog (ahem advertisement) piece to stir additional attention for his soon to be released latest game. Plus he gets to rant a bit with IMHO reasonable justifications.
As in it has already created salty posts on the front page of hacker news (+ other news outlets). He is turning what is perceived as many as a weakness of his games into another advantage, bloody brilliant and well done sir! =)
I seem to recall stubbornness being the key reason behind the creator refusing to use Steam or other storefronts for so long, too, even though doing so made sales go up substantially.
I grew up playing the Exile series on shareware, then I migrated to Avernum. I have yet to find any series of games that I can get more value out of. The sheer depth in the games Spiderweb software puts out is why I'll buy pretty much everything they make. If I had to pick a gaming hill to die on this developer would be it. The graphics do their job. Could they be flashier? Sure, whatever. Aside from the Elder Scrolls series I can't think of a game that even comes close in time to finish and the sheer amount of replayability. Nothing in the game is a grind. There's always something do do while you're collecting gear, etc.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
A good artist will make anything look good, pixel art, card games, all the way to photo-real 3d (of course depending on the artist). What happens is that in general the first thing to be cut due to budget is probably the art since without function you have no game. Imho, indie games would do better if they "sliced" their game releases differently, such that art was never takes a back-seat as it is probably tempting to do. Many people think you only need good gameplay but in reality the art, aesthetics, music, etc. of any game is the invisible factor that people are influenced and only notice when it's broken.
> A good artist will make anything look good, pixel art, card games, all the way to photo-real 3d (of course depending on the artist).
That's so true. It made me also realize something else, that a good artist can also works with monetary constraint.
He bought graphics, like a product. The thing is, he isn't an artist. It's the artist that should have the liberty to decide whether details is worth it or not.
I think this hold more true to the types of games I play, but a little less so to the types of games this developer makes. It sounds like he is targeting the D&D and retro gaming crowd.
This also holds more true to the generation being targeted. People that grew up on XBox/PlayStation will have a hard time with lesser graphics. People that grew up with Atari will be more open to lesser graphics.
Jeff Vogel has run a successful business for 25 years - making the games he wants to make, living the life he wants to live, and making a lot of people happy in the process.
We should all be so lucky.
People may not like his graphics and that’s totally understandable. But hopefully everyone can at least respect his accomplishments.
So we can't have opinions on public statements of people if they are 'successful'?
The choices are his, but people can still have opinions and voice them.
e.g. Jeff believes marginal revenue increases would not be enough to offset marginal expenses. Others have different opinions, and voice them as a response to a public blogpost. I see nothing wrong with that.
I updated my comment above to remove the negative reaction to the general HN sentiment. Of course anyone is free (and encouraged) to voice their opinions.
For the genre, I find the art style to generally be fitting. It's not a distraction.
I do wonder if a more stylized approach would help sooth some of the complaints. The author obviously talks about why that doesn't work when you're using freelancers, but I wonder if the style could happen not in the art directly, but in a shader or similar. This would also help the art feel more consistent.
I do wonder if the author could retain freelancers better, whether that's by a contract that gives them a minimum promised hours or a better rate, etc.
I definitely think that the insults the author has endured are inappropriate, most certainly the threats are. We as gamers benefit from Indies, and we need to treat them well even if sometimes we don't care for their games. There are plenty of indie games that aren't my preference, but I'm glad to have them in the community and want to support them as artists and developers.
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.
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.
As expected, a lot of people in this thread are giving "valuable" advice about his art style. Jeff's self-ironic way of saying the game looks like crap and calling his art style inconsistent seems to have set the tone of the conversation.
Having played through the Avernum trilogy last year, I don't think the art style is inconsistent at all, especially considering how old some of the assets are. Please have a closer look at some actual screenshots from a recent Avernum game[1] before providing your invaluable input on how he should manage his game art.
The Avernum remakes look fine. That isn't what the article is talking about, though. It's his new game, which looks substantially worse and consists mostly of new art. He even includes an image of Avernum 3 with this caption: "Our previous game, Avernum 3: Ruined World. Why didn't I just write another game that looks like this? Because I didn't want to. Nyeah!"
The article is about more than just his new game. All the criticism that he addresses is about his previous games, and even the title of the article is "Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap". I'm quite certain that the comment in the Avernum 3 caption was about changing the perspective from isometric.
It seems like there is so much he could do that doesn't require paying for new assets or more expensive artists.
For example lighting and shadows can be generated dynamically (currently they're baked into the assets, meaning they are inconsistent or completely missing). Or generate edges between ground textures procedurally so things don't look so blocky. Add a particle system for weather and atmospheric effects.
If he did that then he'd be able to carry that work forward into future games, and achieve a consistency of look and feel that extends beyond what he can get by trying to match artwork.
This is along the lines of what I wanted to say. Going from the main screenshot, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (in addition to what you said) that could be done programmatically like making the ground tiles look non-uniform or adding some "noise" to the land/water boundaries. Even some decals such as rocks or flowers on the ground would do wonders. The point is that there is big-bang-for-the-buck things that game developers can do with existing assets and I feel this may have been missed in the discussion.
I think it's great that they are able to be profitable in a great niche (25 years!).
As an ex - videogame developer I've shipped several titles from simple 'kids' games to AAA titles. Here's my take:
You CAN make good looking games on an indie budget. Plenty of indie developers do it. However this requires an Artistic Director which oversees the visual style and coherence for the game.
Some programmers (very few I know) have both technical talent and have a very good 'eye' artistically. They are able to make games and make them look good. It's once again still about style and visual coherence.
Obviously the writer of the post is not an artist so he might not necessarily have the time or inclination to dwell on such visual coherence and direction. That's fine, he accepts that.
But I can't agree with the fact that being and indie makes it harder to have a pleasing visual aesthetic. That is simply a question of choice, which you can rationalize with any type of arguments.
That being said I'm really impressed with their success and hope them all the best for the next 25 years!
I think the main take away is Jeff is just not passionate about art and so it gets cut. Even when talking about art he seems to mostly be talking about technically advanced graphics and still not the art you can achieve with those graphics. This is fine. Play to your strength.
The rest of the blog post is one of those soliloquies more to reassure yourself than anything, I'd say.
Perhaps irrelevant, but I found the original message posted to reddit, and it ended with:
> Please don't take this the wrong way, I know it has been a contention for years, and you are probably very aware of it. I just think you could be reaching a lot more new fans and I feel sad about the lost opportunity.
which was (IMO unfairly) omitted from the original post. Totally goes against the authors suggestion that "What fascinates me here is that the guy seems to think he is telling me news".
The vast majority of games which I have sunk serious amounts of play time into often look mediocre, or worse. Its not that I don't enjoy high fidelity graphics, its just that those GFX's often come at the cost of mechanics, or replay ability. Not a fair trade in my mind.
Anyway, to make this useful here are some moderately or lesser known low-fi (ish) games that are basically responsible for me not having a PhD in something:
-Rimworld
-Starsector
-Neo Scavanger
-Gary Grigsby's War in the East/West
-DCS Barbarossa
-KSP (Kerbal)
-Factorio
-Xenonauts
-Rimworld again, but this time with excessive modding :)
My brother and I have been working our way through the Exile series, and while they’re old and rough, the game content is really good. They make you feel like smart figuring out some tough optional puzzle, and there is a great sense of exploration and internal mapping.
Funny enough I never played any of Vogel’s games past Blades of Exile, and honestly, it’s because I think they look bad, aesthetically. I never felt this way about Exile, or even old Ultima games. The problem here isn’t “these games don’t have good graphics” but rather “these games don’t have good art direction/style/aesthetic”. Vogel says in the post he has used multiple artists with conflicting art styles, and it shows. As the games got higher resolution the problems just got more apparent.
>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.
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?"
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.
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).
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?
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.
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)
"Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the level of entrepreneurship actually has declined in recent years. That is, the number of self-employed in the U.S. has dropped notably. Incorporated self-employed fell from 5.78 million in 2008 to 5.13 million in 2011. It climbed back to 5.64 million in 2016. So, after eight years, the number of incorporated self-employed remains well short of the 2008 level. Unfortunately, the news is even worse when it comes to the larger measure of unincorporated self-employed. The number of unincorporated self-employed declined from 10.59 million in 2006 to 9.36 million in 2014."
I wonder how much of that is due to our messed up healthcare system. If we fixed that, I bet we'd see a substantial boost because it's one of the most difficult aspects of starting and running a small business.
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.
The first games I bought online were Spiderweb games (Exile 2,3). I had to convince my parents to let me use their credit card. I got the code back in email to unlock the game, and I got to play the second half of the game! I remember agonizing over stats of things like the waveblades and halberds.
The way I knew I absolutely had to go to bed was when I lost over an hour's worth of progress due to forgetting to save.
I remember reading The Story of the Baby on IronyCentral back in 2002. [0] The Baby is now almost an adult.
The Spiderweb Software forums were my first major forum presence.
Oh wow, are you me? I also remember being young enough to think I could just find a way around the Shareware Demon (lol) if I tried hard enough.
I remember the brief but super fun Blades of Exile scenario community back then, there were some really fun inventive things people did with a pretty barebones engine.
I think at one point someone made a fanservice scenario with a lot of people from the forums and I got a cameo. Good childhood memories.
An incredibly good point is made by a user on Twitter that I hope is taken to heart by Jeff.
A better quality visual experience could be delivered at near zero additional cost / complexity with basic technical hacks - eg faux shading / lighting - see the before / after below:
Feels like Jeff would benefit from a consultation with a technical art director or similar.
Every point he makes about economy, style, preference would still stand but could also address a considerable amount of the visual criticism (and hence, lost sales opportunities)
Something that never seems to come up when one of Jeff's art defense posts come up is that an RPG has a considerably higher asset load than most types of games, not just graphically but all around.
And historically, the genre has responded to this by sacrificing some aspect of polish - typically animation, but also often by just telling you about a thing with text.
What Jeff has done by stocking up and reusing generic assets is essentially a way of reducing that load so that the game actually gets produced on his microbudget targets. And what's really lost in that is any sort of "wow" moment where a distinctive scene, magic item or character design can make an impression visually.
However, I do think he could stand to leverage technology better. 3D might not be nostalgic, but it is the overwhelming preference of devs trying to use generic assets, since it gives you so much more utility(take the sword model and reskin it - new sword! same building with different decor - new scene!) and even puts some stock animation within reach, when relying on Mixamo or similar.
Jeff is already using these kinds of stock assets in the new game, it's just that faithfully implementing them into an old-style 2D tile renderer system makes them look worse than they actually are, since it guarantees that they look inconsistent in scale, perspective, lighting etc.
One productive way to respond to his challenge would be to give him an A/B: license his existing work to a small self-funded team, have them remake it aesthetically without changing how it plays. Have it launch on consoles and mobile. Then we'd really know if the assertions match the reality.
If he was making huge money on these games, why wouldn't he invest I having better artists? Are you saying that the ROI for having better art is so high that he’s in a self perpetuating cycle so to speak? By keeping his games ugly he has no choice but to microbudget and on and on it goes?
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.
On the one hand, I totally get the business explanation he gave in the second half of this post. That's a perfectly fine reason and if this is how he makes his business run for all these years, that is impressive and more power to him.
On the other hand, he should have led with that, and probably also kept it to that. Because defending this style as if it's somehow a valid choice design-wise ... yeah no. It's pretty obvious that the guy has no sense about design, colour use, or the aesthetic aspects that make retro look "cool", how they differ from the aesthetic aspects in old games with good art versus those with bad art, and how to make choices and combine that knowledge to actually celebrate the look of retro art that he loves so much.
Saying it looks like this because he likes the look of retro art, is kind of dismissive of .. well basically studying graphics design in general. Because he somehow equates not spending the effort on making it look good, to the aesthetic of these old games. But a lot of effort was spent to make them look good within the limitations of those machines/displays.
Just applying those limitations isn't going to get you the quality. It's just like those furniture stores that sell vintage-looking stuff, that is actually just things made badly (crooked) with artificially aged wood, pretending to be a porch on a beach house, I dunno. It wants to be vintage cool, but it turns out to be vintage crap.
But I get it for the business reasons. I just hate it when people come up with the excuse of "actually I think it's prettier this way" ...
I largely agree with the post, but using "Baba is you" as an example I think actually goes against the authors point. The art in "Baba is you" is very simple, and would likely not take much money to create, yet the game still looks very nice (in my eyes, at least). It uses simple graphics very effectively, while the author seems to use more complex graphics, and as a result the game as a whole actually looks worse and less consistent.
> That means we have to double our sales to make up for it.
I don't agree. You need enough money to pay an artist, but you don't need to give the artist a 50% cut of your studio!
Full Disclosure: I personally think the art is bad, but I see the retro appeal. The mismatching styles and low quality definitely is reminiscent of old D&D manuals which had monsters drawn by Gary Gygax himself... and which looked really bad too.
I don't know the business considerations for this little niche Jeff has carved out for himself, so I'll just trust that he knows what he's talking about.
The art really does look bad though. I wonder if what he needs is actually worse art. I'm sure there are corners he could cut, like instead of having a full set of sprites for each race×class combo (I don't know anything about his games, I'm just assuming), each facing four different directions, he could have just one sprite per race with a symbol in the corner indicating its class and an arrow pointing which way it's facing. I'm not sure that the downgrade would result in turning off too many players, I think nearly all the players that care about art style are already turned off from his games. Maybe that would leave more room in the budget for the aspects where his games really shine (which I assume they do, given that he can make a living off of them despite how bad of a visual first impression they leave).
I would rather modern games look a bit more "like crap" and have even a 10th of the gameplay depth and quality of Spiderweb games than his games getting any better. I guess I'm also one of those people who grew up on the SNES and on Avernum and etc., but i know many younger people who feel the same as i do!
> I would rather modern games look a bit more "like crap" and have even a 10th of the gameplay depth and quality of Spiderweb games than his games getting any better.
That's what I was thinking. One of the things about games from back in the old days (I'm thinking 1980s) is that they had to be fun to play, because they didn't offer much else. Today there is an emphasis on looking good, but the game itself usually isn't great.
My hypothesis is that selling good-looking games that suck is more profitable. The graphics sell the game. Then the kids get tired of it and buy a new one. If the game is good, they'll just keep playing it and not open their wallet.
This is really common with indie devs. Rimworld is another example. Gets heaps of complaints about the art style - surely it should be easy to improve the art? Yes - but at considerable cost in money and time and also to the ability to mod the game, which was also one of its core strengths.
To come here and see more of the entitled gamer viewpoint - your business reality doesn't matter, do XYZ anyway! - is disappointing.
Making games is hard, making a living from games as a self-run studio is uber-hard. Dude deserves kudos, not criticism. Don't like the art: don't play the games - no-one's forcing you. But this is his life, this is how he pays his bills - his business reality trumps your 'gee wouldn't it be nicer in puce'
This article worked like advertising to me. I feel enticed to buy his games now :)
I like games like NetHack and Baldur's Gate. I was quite disappointed when I bought Pillars of Eternity and its dull story couldn't keep me interested at all.
I would choose a nice story over nice graphics anytime.
I don't particularly like the art that his games use (and I also grew up on Ultima) but I'm 100% behind the idea that if "trying for better art" (and note that "better" in no way guarantees "something people will call good") means putting the entire business at risk, only someone with no sense of responsibility and no understanding of the value of a dollar would take that risk. Not in year one, and still not in year 25.
One of the curses of games is that they start to feel “old” quickly; the faster you can develop new content, the better. It is a lot faster to add content with simpler art (and cheaper, with better consistency, etc. as article says).
Now compare something ultra-realistic like FFXV. Undoubtedly cool. Took them 10 years though, and even then they almost released it too soon. Gamers still blew through all available content in no time. Except now, the developers can’t just add a bunch of new stuff in no time: every change has an absurdly-high quality bar to meet. That means extremely high cost, and probably more time spent than they’d like.
Honestly this rubbed me the wrong way. Almost like its a point of pride that his art is bad.
I think the real question is:
If he made the games look better would he sell enough more to justify the cost? He feels strongly not. But one has to wonder, how many people look at say pass, without even trying. Or go the other way an just do a "Dwarf Fortress" and go straight to ascii.
I guess the economics work for him, as is.
People are fickle, and do infact judge books by their covers to some extent and in a crowded market. If you went to but something from a website that had a late 90s web ascetic, you might choose to go to one that looks a little more modern.
I wonder how easy it would for modders to replace the art in those games, just like how people made texture packs for minecraft and tilesets for dwarf fortress. Sometimes a fan with free time is all it takes.
So, this firm has customers that want better graphics, but they’re not willing to invest in that.
It also seems the games aren’t easily modded (at least, the blog post nor this HN discussion mention it).
I’m sure it won’t be enough for all or even most critics, but that, to me, seems a missed opportunity. Looking at the games, the look of the tiles won’t affect gameplay (as I tight if, for example, the programs do a flood-fill of the map at some time) so it shouldn’t be hard to, at startup, check for the presence of a ‘tiles.png’ or ‘tiles.bmp’ file, and read tiles from it, if present.
Gosh the images and text on this page is so small. I know I can make it bigger in my browser, but consider bringing the font size (and image size) up a bit on the page too.
Can anyone recommend books/blogs/courses about how to make game (or any complicated piece of software actually) look good?
As a software developer and entrepreneur, I understand concept of ergonomics very well - things should be easy to read, hard to misinterpret, responsive, familiar, easy to click. But I struggle with aesthetics all the time - something feels off, but I can't pinpoint why and how to fix it.
This thread reminds me of patio11's thread "What I'd Do If I Ran Tarsnap" where Colin took a strong contrarian stance and everyone raged against it and in the end Colin won from all of the exposure.
In case you didn't read the end note: "I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror." I'd say he succeeded pretty well in that aim!
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 respect that. Crappiness is an underrated quality. I watched an interview with Barry Jenkins recently where he talked about his first short film. He talked about how the film had bad exposure, scratches on the film, weird color, etc. But at the same time, he still loved it, simply due to its uniqueness and rawness.
There's this assumption that every artist wants to mimic the big budget people. Or not even big budget, just medium budget. That filmmakers want to make movies which are shiny and polished. But a filmmaker who tries to imitate a big budget production with a shoestring budget isn't going to get a polished film at a tenth the budget. They're gonna get a weird uncanny valley, kinda good looking film that isn't quite indie, isn't quite mainstream. And trust me, as a begrudging attendee of many small film festivals, it's not a good look.
Contrast that to say, Stranger Than Paradise, which is remarkably simple and very obviously low budget. It's in black and white. The acting is a little rough around the edges. The sets are extraordinarily simple. The camera doesn't do anything fancy. Yet it works because it takes full advantage of its crappiness. It doesn't half ass quality, it full asses crappiness.
As he says repeatedly in his posts if you don't like his art style or games you're free to find other games.
He's been supporting himself successfully this way for over 25 years despite the criticism. Clearly there is a community of people who favor his style of games depsite "the old school art style"
I'd probably call Spiderweb games one template, with some variations. Not much has advanced in the twenty odd years I've looked at them from time to time. First one was OK, all others I've tried for a few minutes and been pretty underwhelmed with the progress.
Somewhat off topic, but what's the closest thing to Avernum - a big, sprawly, kitchen sink RPG with a ton of backstory and fiddly combat - that I can play on my phone? (Not a tablet.)
Growing up Spiderweb games were some of my all time favorites and I'd love one on the go.
Maybe I'm just an old man at this point, but I find "imperfection" rather charming. Realism can be cool, but games and cartoons that are "crappy" have character and allow me to use my imagination to believe in different worlds. One of the reasons that I still love Nintendo 64 games is that they look clunky compared to today's games, and they look that way because the artists had to work within the constraints of the hardware and come up with game assets that look close enough but don't destroy the FPS. If a game looks consistently crappy, I can buy into its universe with my imagination.
I forget who said it, but I think there's a saying that great art is borne through limitation. When an a good artist only has a limited set of tools, or maybe not even the best ones, it brings out the best in their abilities.
Gameplay is way more important than graphics. Source: played a lot of fun but crap-looking games in the 90s on a 320×200 four-shades-of-amber screen. Or what about the 160×144 Gameboy screen that also supported 2-bit color?
How good a game looks is not simply a function of the number of pixels and colors the screen can display. There where great looking games on the Gameboy and there are terrible looking games running at 4K on the latest GPUs.
Good art is expensive and he makes niche games. My gut feeling is that if he just improved the art without making sure the games appealed to a wider audience it would fail financially.
Bought all of his games and have to say I respect his decision. In small business you have to find the local maximum and stay there until it's drain dried and change course then.
it's nice to see something like this. im personally of the mind that graphics really don't matter in video games; they are certainly nice, but you don't need state of the art, AAA high def rendering to make a video game compelling. i think ultimately the hallmark of an enjoyable game is how engaging and immersive it is, and how fluidly it exposes its mechanics to you and allows you a playground to exploit those mechanics.
Constraints ensure simplicity where there could have been excess.
If you have less pixels to work with, it helps you edit your design to what is clear and truly necessary. It prevents bad patterns from emerging in the UI and game interactions.
I applaud this developer for sticking to their guns, finding their niche and really making it shine.
There is nothing wrong with building around a practical and dare I say it, nostalgic design aesthetic.
"Make games you would want to play" is one of the mantras I repeat to myself whenever I'm tinkering with a game prototype.
Clearly Jeff understands all of this and follows through with the delivery.
This article was very good for me. It made me fully understand why I never liked Minecraft and why I will never like it. I would rather replay Gothic series for 11th time then start playing Minecraft. My kids play Minecraft on daily basis, when free time is allowed of course, the only game I never played with them.
And graphics disappear from your enjoyment of a game after about an hour typically, aside from those fleeting moments in "world" games where you get stunning vistas...
Hiring s full time employee would more than double his budget. Since his company is a husband-wife team they share expenses and probably live off the equivalent of 1.5 salaries (or maybe 1.0?)
enjoying watching people making the same arguments countered in the article without actually adressing the counterpoints -
the square peg of 'maximizing superficial appeal for the most short term popularity irrespective of the personal cost' is so deeply implanted in some people's minds that they literally cannot comprehend doing things in any other 'round hole' sort of way.
Speaking of looking like crap, I was recently going through my old backups, and ran across an ancient forgotten installer for "The Sims Steering Committee" dated June 4, 1998, an early pre-release version of The Sims that we distributed internally at EA shortly after they bought Maxis, more than a year and a half before we released The Sims in March 2000.
Here's a screen recording of a demo I made in a VM, which walks through the scenarios, objects, and tools, and also shows some of the "SimAntics" behavior tree code behind the different levels.
It's got a "sketchy" user interface, a dot above the selected character's head instead of the iconic spinning plumb-bob, a horrifically crude and ugly object placement tool with yellow squares and big red X's when you can't place an object (but that gladly lets you place bathtubs on hills), and a bare minimal number of crappy objects, some of which have astoundingly terrible graphics and prototypically implemented behaviors.
Especially @ 24:25: the vintage Stereo with colorful musical notes dancing above it, the stinky Fish Tank (permanently attached to its own table), the unbelievably nasty Pink Flamingo, the goofy looking Flower (also growing out of a pot on its own table), and the blue bakelite Telephone (glued to its own table as well) which looks like it has Halloween Candy Corn springing out when it rings @ 12:45, then the caller asks you if you'd like your fingers chewed off by rabid ferrets for $42. It has pixelated censoring @ 13:31, which attempts to disguise the embarrassing fact that they shit and shower with their pants on. Also @ 2:00 it has weird pie menus with placeholder programmer art, and the original characters, including Archie Bunker permanently holding a burning cigar in his hand! Also there's some unfortunately worded dialog text that probably wouldn't have made it past the ESRB @ 40:50.
As ugly as it was, it was just playable enough to convince The Sims Steering Committee at EA not to cancel our project, and to give us another year and a half to complete it.
Here's an interview with Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims, in which she describes "Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion".
Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion
>The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".
>Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.
>The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!
>In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.
>If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!
>Q: On paper, a game where you simulate daily life doesn't sound that interesting. Yet The Sims is really fun to play, so much so that it is now the biggest-selling PC game ever. Although any development team working with Will Wright has to feel confident in the product they are creating, has the unbelievable popularity of the franchise shocked even the development team?
>A: Absolutely. When I was first assigned to The Sims, it was not-very-affectionately-known within the company as "the toilet game." Will Wright had tremendous stamina for the risk involved with trying something very new, but there were certainly a lot of head-scratchers both on the team and outside of it. In all honesty, the gameplay didn't start to really come together until a couple of months before ship. Being involved in that tuning process, and seeing the game take shape from what had previously been a mass of separate components, was one of the most powerful experiences of my career.
There is a big gap between "crap" and AAA for sure. But think about this (in today's time):
* Half Life 2 looks like crap
* Fallout 3 looks like crap
* Actually any game from more than a few years back, looks like crap
But any of those are hopelessly out of reach for any Indie developer even with today's tools.
There is real AAA from earlier days, that still looks good these days, like:
* Battlefield 3
* Crysis 2
* Call Of Duty Modern Warfare
* etc.
But these games have among the highest budget in history of game development and a respectable revenue stream...
What the author is trying to say is that most people think most games looks like crap (I think so too). There is no point in making AA games (let's assume he didn't mean actual AAA games) as an Indie developer, because people will still think your game looks like crap. And those people who don't (I for instance really like SNES games still), will also be satisfied with the art he can create.
Let's look at Anno 1602 vs. Anno 1800. This is more in the domain of the author. I really like both games and I have to say, Anno 1800 has AMAZING graphics. But the game gets boring after playing it one time to the Investor level... Anno 1602 has graphics that you can probably manage as an Indie developer these days (since you don't need to optimize it at all and have much better tooling). This game never gets old ;). I have more fun playing that one than Anno 1800. Which is another reason why AAA graphics is unneeded. You need shiny graphics if your game sucks. And creating games that suck is what todays AAA industry is all about.
Half Life doesn't look like crap. It looks dated. There is a huge gap between the way the OP's games look and how half life looks, because even though the 3D tech was worse and the textures lower res in half life, it had a proper art team behind it. A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for it. Fair enough. But just getting someone to look over the art all together and making it a bit more cohesive would be a huge improvement. The thing is, it seems he's paying different people to do different pieces and just putting it all together without any sense of direction. I think it's alright if you want to pay A to draw this and that, and then when A leaves pay B to draw this and that, but you should have B take a look at the tileset as a whole and ask him to make the pieces look alright together. Because right now it's a huge mess.
> A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for it.
Can't. The word you're looking for here is can't. The unit economics of making the sorts of games that JV makes completely preclude it. It would be way easier to spend the money he doesn't make to get better art talent. This is true. It is also not very meaningful.
And it's not that there is minimal sense of direction just for funsies--it's that you don't have that luxury when we're talking about the rates he's working at. I spent a decent amount of money, in the ballpark of what JV probably spends on third-party work for a game, trying to get freelancers--reasonably priced or, in reality, not so--to work towards a cohesive art style. That I did not ship that game (which is still in a 75%-ish complete state in my graveyard, it's my fuck-you-money project) is largely due to the difficulty of getting art to a standard I felt comfortable with.
JV ships because that standard is lower than I was able to stomach.
That costs extra money. If he were to do that, that money would come directly out of his ability to provide for his family. And he's not convinced that it would increase sales enough to make up for it. Maybe he's wrong, and it would, but at first blush I'd trust him to have the best instincts about his own business.
We don't have numbers on the table, so we can't really talk about money. I am presenting what I think would be an efficient use of the money. Not paying a full time artist, not hiring an art director, just having someone with some sense of art fix up the whole asset directory a bit instead of simply asking people to do things generic like he says he does in the article. How much time will depend on the budget. This is just my idea, of course. Maybe he already tried it a bit and it doesn't give as much of a result as I think.
I don't know JV's numbers, but I know mine and a high-quality visual artist who speaks fluent/first-language English and has the sort of willingness to play nice with others' art can be $50/hour. And for a game like these, you're talking quite a few hours, you know?
You can go offshore for cheaper, but then you introduce risk, and if nothing else, JV's model is to minimize risk as much as is possible.
Their current game raised just shy of $100k on Kickstarter [0]. Presumably there have been additional presales via other platforms such as Steam as well. Given that, $10-20k as an art budget doesn't seem unreasonable to me, though I have no idea how to estimate how long it would take to do the art for one of his games and if that would be enough budget (probably not at $50/hour, but maybe at $25-30/hour).
$100K is more like $93K after Kickstarter's cut. Further, I can't speak to the tax implications though I would assume they're nontrivial. And he has to pay himself enough to live for a year or more to get the game done and out the door.
This stuff is really raw and really hard at the margins and tolerances we are talking about here.
I recall that post (I've been a fan of JV's work, and his blog, for a long time!) but that's ten years old now and the market has gotten more competitive. I think that post is actually pre-Steam, though might push it the other way--I recall that he did really well for himself early on after going to Steam.
I suspect someone spending $200 and a day of searching could probably find most of the art needed for Queen's Wish. There's really no need for him to be hiring freelancers in the first place.
Dude...have you ever tried to use OpenGameArt or asset packs in anger? The quality is at best "uneven", you'll still have the exact same "but they're inconsistent" complaints, and then on top of that you get people whining that you used off-the-shelf art. (Rather like "oh it's an RPG Maker" game, which is something that Zeboyd Games, another low-budget indie developer, gets all the time; they don't use RPG Maker, but that's another story).
You can't make everybody happy. JV is going to more reliably make money by making his audience, like me, happy. Why should he change it?
Indie dev here who was been working solo on games for the last 3 years (nights and weekends) using the resources you're describing. You can get a lot of mileage out of those assets for not much money, but it takes a huge amount of time and skill to turn them into something consistent and usable. You can usually find art similar to what you want, but almost never:
- in the correct aesthetic
- the right size
- with the proper animations
It's a full-time job to find this art in the first place, to resize, to animate, to recolor, and apply effects to the art to help it match your desired aesthetic. And then it still is never good enough.
There's a lot to be said for having someone produce art to your requests in a consistent style, even if the quality of the art is not extremely high.
Working with purchased assets is not so simple; there is no consistent art direction when you buy things from different sources. This usually requires an artists to do a pass and make all these disparate assets work together.
Simply saying "just buy cheap assets" completely misses the point here.
Everyone already acknowledges the current art has no consistent direction. It makes no sense to pay extra money for bespoke artwork that looks worse than what you can get by just going to what's already available.
When you change your focus from a loyal customer base and change key aspects of your product they prefer in order to chase a competitor's customers you risk losing your own base and still not picking up a substantial portion of the rest of the market.
Yeah, I think the biggest problem with his games (and I only know them from the screenshots) is in art direction.
He compares it to Baba is You, and while that game's art is technically simple, its consistent aesthetic and style sells it.
Meanwhile, in his screenshots, the visuals seem dated and inconsistent. I don't think it's a problem with the quality of the assets, but in art direction, and like he said, that's on the developer.
When playing Avadon I recognized assets that were reused from the Exile series. Literally decades-old art. This is all minor stuff like leather gloves and other items, but it contributes to the lack of consistency.
> people will still think your game looks like crap. And those people who don't (I for instance really like SNES games still), will also be satisfied with the art he can create.
I like Spiderweb games, but most SNES games looked better than this. Some NES games looked better than this. You can have cheap, low-res art that is coherent and pleasing to the eye, but this isn't it.
He includes a picture of Ultima V for DOS, which looks better than his current games. Hell, he includes a picture of the original art for Exile, which IMO looked better than the later Exile III tileset (which was ported back to releases of Exile I). The problem with the aesthetics of his latest game is not resolution and it isn't that it's in a classic 2D tile-based style.
That said, I see where he's coming from. The audience for games like his is very small, even when the graphics are good. I think he should add support for custom tilesets. It's common in the roguelike world, and at this point his audience is closer to the hobbyist/roguelike scene than the average indie studio.
Swapping out a tile set would have been pretty trivial on the old SW games on Windows (on Mac you had to meet with the Resource Fork). It was all just images in folders.
I used to go and snag cool-looking NPC/monster graphics from the monster spritesheet and Blades of Exile scenarios and paste them into the PC spritesheet so I could use those graphics for my party members. I always really wanted BoE to support Vahnatai party members.
I get a little annoyed at how graphics tech is often equated with art direction. Anno 1602 has matching colors, good contrast, perfectly proportioned tile art, consistent balance of detail and good lighting. Its mountains look majestic, its forests lush, its buildings picturesque. All things you could get if you spent money on letting someone actually do some art direction on the game rather than just commissioning concept art and sticking it on top of flat background textures.
There's quite a fine line between "crap" and AAA actually, as evidenced by "any game from more than a few years back, looks like crap". And if you extend that line out to infinity, good art is on the crap side of it.
AAA |
------+--------------------------------------+------
crap | | good
AAA and crap have more in common with each other than with good art. Queen's Wish looks like Diablo-I-era AAA art, done poorly.
Yes, I think that's exactly what that comment meant.
I'm sure a 2 man experienced team consisting of a programer and an artist can recreate the vault intro sequence of F3 in a few months. They wouldn't be able to expand thst into the full 2007 game without years of man-hours. Because F3 itself took thousands of man hours. It'd take a lot less time with modern tools, but not enough to offset the work of hundreds of developers.
You're not going to get hundreds of man hours of content for free but setting up Source or Unreal or Unity to get a modern engine with every feature those games had does not take months.
And if it takes one person all that time to build the roughly-equivalent engine, that person does not have time to design and build the game's assets, nor design and playtest the levels.
You do get out what you put in, but one person can only put in so much.
There's a secret to art this person hasn't realized.
Art doesn't have to be detailed to look good. Minimalism proves this. Those Geneforge games have just enough detail to look like shit. It's possible to scale back and keep the art good with less effort but better design sense.
Take the game: Thomas was alone. The guy probably didn't hire a single artist yet that game looks way better than any gene-forge game. It's all in the style. The author of this article really just doesn't have a sense of style.
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.
Nowhere in the article does he entertain the notion of finding an artist willing to join as a partner and go 50-50 (or 80-20) on equity/revshare. He only frets about the cost of hiring employees on wage.
I’ve been playing GTA 5 recently. It looks great because they painstakingly built an incredible, immersive world. Sorry but it’s pretty important to me how a game looks, I wouldn’t play something like this.
> It achieved financial success (among the blind, apparently)
That reminds me: I guess not even a game like NetHack can be realistically played by a blind person, so I wonder if this was some failed kind of joke or if the author actually considers that audience.
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.
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)_/¯".
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... :)
> 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.
Like...for miles in every direction, all I can see are pitchforks, and here I am standing alone on a small hill thinking to myself "Holy shit. That's the Spiderweb software guy. I've played every single one of his games, EVERY SINGLE ONE, and loved all of them."
The graphics in the games are exactly as good as they need to be to make wonderful story-driven RPGs.
While the style may not be modern, the gameplay and stories tend to be quite good. I would also argue that a game that looks great doesn't necessarily imply that the game is any good. Battlefront 2 is a great looking game that is ultimately a soulless, lootbox filled shitshow with painfully bland gameplay.
Anyone saying that he needs to hire an art director have completely missed the point of his article: his business can only support his family. He has also been able to maintain this business for 20 years, which is a lot more than can be said about any other indies.
Ultimately, this is a style that Jeff likes, and it makes him money. If people don't like it, then they can go play something else. He still has his fan base that keeps him afloat.
EDIT: grammar
I think there's no point in making their games looking any different than they do (because it's part of their brand, now) but the correct response to a question of why they don't make a "better" looking game is that they don't care. Or, maybe, it's a taste issue. Flailing your hands about how people totally did not appreciate you going through the trouble of making the graphics isometric or hiring underpaid artists is not the way to go. It's maybe "honest" but it's IMO at best a misunderstanding of and at worst a severe lack of respect for art direction and visual design.
All too often I think people are happy to throw their hands in the air and presume that indie success is just ‘impossible’. This article, for me, added some much-needed nuance to the discussion.
Spiderweb tends to focus on different aspects of game making that are admittedly a lot less visual, but are arguably no less artistic. This is a wildly hyperbolic analogy, but it seems to me that suggesting that Jeff Vogel doesn't care much about art because his games are weak on the visuals is a bit like suggesting that Led Zeppelin didn't care so much about art because their shows didn't offer the same visual spectacle as a GWAR performance.
No, he plainly states it is a cost issue. He can't afford to hire the people who could create truly "good" art for his games.
You can actually see some decent concept art and character design in their current games but they're drowned out by a stubborn refusal to actually change the overall balance of detail, suffocating those decent artworks in a sea of blurry/noisy backgrounds. It's a colossal waste, really, only explainable by a stubborn refusal to "learn art", which I can respect by itself, but the post comes off as utter denial of that even happening.
It's okay to dismiss art direction and make that some kind of design philosophy, it works for their games. But blaming it on everything but dismissal feels wrong.
People keep posting in the thread that games with "bad art" still look good with "good art direction" but art direction also costs money, which he still doesn't have.
It's an extra risk he doesn't want to his lifestyle that has worked for him for 25 years.
Sounds like "people who care" are people that have spent a lot of money on art and need to respond to this post to justify it. Or are artists themselves and need to prove their worth.
Money talks.
- (Screenshot of Ultima V) - "This is what looks normal to me"
- "Queen's Wish has a very retro square-tile top-down view, reminiscent of old Ultima games, old Pokemon games..."
- (Screenshot of Baba is You) - "If a game that looks like this can be a hit, maybe there can be room for me?"
- (Screenshot of Atari Adventure) - "If you don't like it, maybe the problem is you."
Apart from maybe(!) Atari Adventure, all of those games look far better than Queen's Wish. Even Ultima V shades one side of its walls, something none of his games have accomplished based on these screenshots.
It's an insulting strawman to say that the people criticizing his art would also reject these other games with simple art. It's also insulting to the artists who worked on those games, producing better results in a similar budget. Maybe the insult is unintentional, because he genuinely can't tell the difference himself. But if that's the case, he should just admit that, rather than hiding behind his choice to use a top-down perspective.
It's the hundreds of tiny details like this, that make for great design and good art, regardless of how retro the medium is. That's what this guy seems to be utterly blind to, and it really rubs against people who DO like to spend the effort and time on such tiny details to get the design just right ... only for this guy to call it "looks good enough for me" and then imitate it badly.
Just stick to the business explanation, because there's nothing wrong with running a business on shitty art.
1) If you look at Avernum 3 and Queen's Wish, the characters you are supposed to control don't "stick out" visually. I must have looked at the Avernum picture half a dozen times and actually missed the 3 other characters in the picture other than the cloak and the dragon. That's a huge mistake in visual design--and that is the fault of the designer not the artist. QW has similar issues in that the character design isn't very distinctive: without those horrible colored circles you can't tell friend from foe. And the visual design of the characters makes distinguishing classes difficult. Again, that's designer failure--not art failure.
2) If you look at QW, there are 4 different levels of art. The bottom icons are gorgeous and would fit in a AAA game. The portraits look like potato cam from 1999. The characters look like bad pseudo 2.5D from 1993. And the background sprites look like they are from "My First RPG Maker". You can choose any of those, be consistent, and people won't feel too bad. Look at Exile and Avernum--they have a consistent art level across everything and don't strike me as ugly. What you cannot do is mix and match the levels--that's very jarring and people will complain.
I feel like "exactly as good as they need to be" would actually be quite a bit simpler and, through lack of clutter, easier to use. See, for example, the Caves of Qud art style - https://i.imgur.com/Tul3mn3.png - which is substantially less visually complex than any of the Spiderweb Software games but, IMO, much easier to interpret.
"Exactly as good as they need to be" means "graphics and interface are of a sufficient quality to not significantly hamper interaction with the game, but just barely."
For example, a chess board drawn freestyle in crayon with a bunch of black and white poker chips that have "pawn", "knight", etc written on them in sharpie is "exactly as good as it needs to be," but it sure as heck isn't the same thing as an elegantly minimalist chess board.
I've actually been tempted to buy Avadon the black fortress a few times. It keeps showing up on steam(after reading this I had to double check, for some reason I had a feeling it was one of his games), again i find the graphics to be appealing. I'm just not sure if i want to invest the time into an RPG right now.
It seems like an easy solution would be to allow the tiles in the game to be editable and let people make new ones if they're unhappy with the ones that ship with the game.
The problem I have with it is that it all looks really generic -- like default "RPG Maker" tiles or stock art. The old-school Exile art was simple, but it was unique and had its own distinctive style.
I don't think it'll run on a modern Linux system without a lot of hacking, though.
I remember seeing a first person shooter after years of ignoring games, and being really impressed by the advances in graphics, but in seconds, I could see it was still a world made of indestructible cardboard, which was very disappointing. I suppose things have improved somewhat, depending on genre, but anyway, the issue is that people are easily distracted by graphics, not that they detract from anything per se.
The guy's been getting criticisms for 25 years. I think he's justified in writing a single blog post in defense of his art style. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
Also, 'art style' is a stretch.
Finally, yes, if I don't like it, I don't have to read it. Yet, I did, and I'm free to express my dissatisfaction and disagreement with the article's message: if you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
It means it's not unprompted. It's a reply.
I think he's justified in writing a blog post about his business decision and should have kept it at that.
But defending this as an "art style" is like making really shitty cheap knockoff "vintage style" furniture and claiming part of the reason is because you love the artistic style of historic wood working. No you do it for the money, and people who actually like vintage historic wood work might get annoyed that you are pushing your work as the same.
Uh, no, he freely concedes his games are ugly. The title of the article is "Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap".
And the graphism are good enough imo.
Other games look beautiful, yes, but they also somehow always end up getting kind of boring several hours in.
https://i.imgur.com/rZozQHD.png
You're making the mistake of thinking that a game that looks good must use more resources. That doesn't make sense.
If one took the exact same resources and gave them a more consistent art style, keeping the same file sizes or even lowering them, the games could look just fine and yet still fine on a low-end machine.
Better looking graphics or art != larger file sizes.
But to the GP, you should go play his games! Try "Avernum: Escape from the Pit", his remake of his remake of his original game (he's got a system down pat). It's the best game he's made, IMO, and the iPad version is really good if you've got one lying around. PC/Mac version is good too, of course, but I found the touch interface really nice and a refreshing way to play a game I'd already exhaustively completed twice, so I'd hope it'd meet more modern sensibilities pretty well.
Art just isn't critical to making amazing games... some old BBS games like Tradewars 2002 will always be among my favorites, and their ASCII images barely qualified as art.
AdoM is a fantastic roguelike created by Thomas Biskup, which originally had you as an '@' battling other ascii characters. Later he wanted a nicer interface and went for this kind of pixely tiles, and to be honest, I don't like it (edit: I just checked again, and the art looks far better than I remember. I still prefer the ascii version, though). If you go for bad art, just go all the way, and make it look consistent.
By the way, Baba is You, referenced at the end, is an absolutely brilliant game, and while the art looks cheap like a toddler drew it, it's all animated; they have three versions of every sprite and keep rotating them. That crappy animation arguably makes it look even cheaper, but it also brings the game more alive, and it's certainly more expensive. Most importantly, though: it's a striking and consistent look.
In the end, though: Jeff had been successfully making games he loves for 25 years. Whatever he's doing is clearly working.
The high-contrast simple design also facilitates the gameplay. There's no visual noise, so it's very easy to 'read' the levels and focus on the solutions.
With that said, I think the art is also deceptively good. I don't think I could replicate it quite as well (from memory) even having played the game a fair bit, and I certainly don't think a toddler (or lesser hyperbole) could capture the charm of some of the sprites.
Ever since punk, and possibly longer, recorded music has a growing number of niches where lack of polish is a feature, not a bug. Liking stuff that others find unlikable makes the consumer feel special. All kinds of guitar noise, the absolute undanceability of IDM, cheesy pop music from an country far away. They all have their qualities, but if you infer from some people enthusiastically defying the superficial shortcomings of those styles that their redeeming qualities must be exceptionally high, you are missing the entire niche identity appeal mechanism: they are liked, in a large part, for being disliked by most others, nothing more. Try to move closer to mainstream (here: add better graphics) and you might alienate your acquired taste connoisseurs long before you start appealing to others.
Actually it looks like an artist carefully imitating a child like style instead of saying "good enough". It's fine, good even. It looks simple, but it clearly actually is everything it needs to be.
The Ultima V and Baba is You examples are excellent counter-points because they show how great games with simple styles can look.
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.
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 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.
so basically you aren't selling your games? Are you even posting them on itch.io? Your constraint set is WILDLY different
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.
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.
> 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."
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
Key here is "teams". It's really hard for one person to bring all of those skills to the table.
And at least choose a decent font (looking at the first screenshot on the blog post)
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.
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
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.
I have an indie game myself (Skyturns on G Play) and if you are not an artist, making good art is simply really hard. Someone says ”this menu is ugly”, and the cognitive load of making it meet their expectations is massive.
I even have graphically skilled people critiquing my game, paying them, but then coming back with more ugly menus. A real skilled professional art director is hard to find, recruit and motivate.
On a small scale its a ton of freedom to just let your game be somewhat ugly and just focus on what you yourself is great at.
For all the 1000 opinions I’ve heard about my games menus, not one of these people have produced something better. That 1001st person who actually knows drawing, colors and UX is the professional art director, which is possible to find, but the energy required to find him/her and pay is also something that can go somewhere else!
And if you are not a programmer, making a good game is really hard. But you can learn. If you are willing to put in the effort to develop your own sense of the aesthetic, even a small amount of time can result in huge improvements.
You don't need an "art director" and neither does this guy.
If you think your menus are ugly, find some menus that you don't think are ugly and ask yourself what it is about them that makes them not ugly. When you can answer that question with certainty and apply the answer to your own menus, that's a first step towards improvement.
PS: I spent 10 minutes on your game. It's fun.
Happy to hear you tried and liked the game! Lots of things in the pipeline
Here we have a developer effectively looking to pay below market rates for artists, and then unsurprisingly not finding many good artists willing to do that long term. Not a judgment on my part, just saying that he's looking to keep the art budget to an absolute minimum.
Instead if it was an artist defending his choice to make relatively simple games because he just can't find good developers willing to work for cheap for long enough to complete a project.
The line that stood out me in this context:
I can't stress this enough: Finding talented, reliable, reasonably priced freelancers is HARD. Cherish them when you find them.
If the context of the discussion was about developers instead of artists, how would HackerNews feel about someone lamenting the fact that they can't get any "affordable" developers to work on their projects?
Also, as an aside:
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." And I can't make that. Not even close.
That seems like a pretty big strawman to me. There is a large grey area between "crap" and "AAA-quality".
I'm not sure the reaction would be all that negative, to be honest.
The problem to me isn't when someone says "we want cheap work and we understand it will not be particularly high-quality," but when they say "we want top-quality work but we're not willing to pay for it."
Voegl's expectations here are honest -- refreshingly so. He's openly paying for artists, but he's paying for art to a budget rather than budgeting to art.
> There is a large grey area between "crap" and "AAA-quality".
I think Voegl addresses that in the middle of the "1." section -- he has had games with "improved" art, but the improved art did not increase sales enough to justify the expense. If an epsilon improvement in art did not improve profits, then it suggests he's near a local optimum.
I think that's the most robust critical takeaway from this Hacker News thread. Vogel feels as if marginal spending on art assets is unprofitable, but if a root problem is instead artistic consistency then more expensive art is not necessarily (much) more effective art.
That said, this also doesn't negate Vogel's business point, that it's always worth examining what's "good enough" to optimize return. Suppose Vogel doesn't have and can't easily develop a good artistic eye for consistency; it's still probably not worth it to hire someone else to do it for him.
If you have an artist with decent technical skills, enough time, and an excellent art director, you can still achieve great results. Eventually that Artist will learn and become better in what they independently produce.
Plus, the art is visible through a camera, and with post-processing and FX - which are easily controlled or influenced by that same art director. Just tweaking colour, camera angle, and FOV can produce incredibly unique results.
I had a very small budget, and no team, and was able to produce something regarded as reasonably good-looking in 3D for Frontline Zed:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/915490/Frontline_Zed/
Vogel just isn't willing to put in time and money into visuals because it's probably a combination of it 1. not being a priority for him and 2. lacking the skill for visual design (not necessarily implementing it, but just having an eye for it) which is probably also due to the point #1
And to me, I read it as he expects more towards the latter than the former. "Talented, reliable" implies an expectation of a specific level of quality beyond "cheap work, not particularly high-quality".
I don't have such a high reading of "talented," since others in this thread generally complain that Vogel has a poor eye for quality, and Vogel in this blog post notes he's looking for a basic 'good enough'.
I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, in particular since he understands that not having a reliable cadre of artists is his problem and not that of primadonna artists. The stereotypical out-of-touch manager who asks for "top-quality work on a shoestring budget" also externalizes the blame for failure.
That is: I think many people are responding to this blog post as if it had read "our games look like crap, but that's because we can't find good artists," rather than "... and that's fine by me, we're getting what we want to pay for."
He wants the talent, but he finds talented artists to demand an unreasonable amount of money. To me it's him that comes off as unreasonable.
I think it would be one thing for the author to dig in his heels and make janky looking games because he truly likes them that way, but it sounds from his tone that he'd rather blame external factors for what on some level he knows is his own mediocrity.
Every game you listed, every one, has spends at least one FTE or FTE equivalent, either in sweat equity or in cold hard cash, on their art. (And at least in the case of Steamworld, more than one!) JV's games literally don't make enough money to pay that person. What the heck do you expect him to do?
You're only mentioning the successes, what about all the Steam failures? Your post ignores that, unlike most of those relatively-very-expensive indie games that come out, go "plunk", and their developers go back to a real job, JV has successfully kept doing this for twenty-five years. He's had stinkers and still survived. The machine keeps cranking because of a relentless focus on cost control and making the game that somebody like me wants, even if it means that somebody like you adjusts your pince-nez and waxes on about his "mediocrity".
>his audience values that particular kind of game way more than it does art
Isn't that ridiculously self-selecting? If he's always been making ugly games, then it follows that his current customer base will be limited to people who don't care as much about visuals. This will always be true, regardless of what genre games you're making.
It absolutely does not mean that he wouldn't expand his audience by making good-looking games. In fact, if what he said is true and most of his current customers don't care about looks, it's more likely an indicator that the subpar visuals are indeed costing him customers.
I honestly have a hard time grasping that this even passes as an argument. It's like someone who sells shit sandwiches saying their customers don't mind the shit taste.
I assume that you have read the article and read how JV has tried spending more money to update his graphics in an effort to expand his customer base, to little effect. And since I assume you must understand that one can evaluate marginal returns based on cost outlay, I would think that this line of thinking should make sense, even if you disagree with it.
I've said it elsewhere in this thread but I'll say it again: the goal when running a small business is not to take over the world. The goal is to not fail. Expending scarce resources on bets with a ROI ratio under one is not a good way to avoid failure.
I'm sceptical of this for 2 reasons
1. It assumes cause and effect are linear, which I doubt. People are put off because the games look bad. Making a game that looks better, but still bad, doesn't solve this issue. In order for Jeff to be able to properly evaluate the ROI of making his games look not-bad, he would need to have made a not-bad looking game. This is arguably not the case.
2. It's clear from the article that Jeff doesn't really understand what makes a game looks good. As a result, if he's spending extra resources on making the game look better, they're likely not well spent. The money would need to go into foundational efforts like consistent color palettes to make it visually pleasing, consistent lighting so everything feels like it's part of the same world, proper shading so everything looks grounded, making sure everything looks to scale, balancing out the level of detail between pieces to make sure the right things stand out, etc etc. In the article, he stated that he thinks good art = AAA level, so I'm guessing Jeff just paid artists to add more details to faces and monsters - which really isn't going to solve anything.
> the goal when running a small business is not to take over the world. The goal is to not fail. Expending scarce resources on bets with a ROI ratio under one is not a good way to avoid failure.
I can completely respect this decision. He's trying to run a certain kind of business and that imposes a certain set of constraints.
The irony though is that Jeff is the one who's not respecting those constraints.
It's entirely possible to spend little on art and still have a good looking game. Just pick a simple art style that can be executed fast. Alternatively, if you want to have a good looking game in your personally preferred style - that also happens to be more expensive to produce - that's also entirely possible. It will just cost you more.
Both options are fine.
But Jeff is spending little on art and at the same time asking artists to make highly detailed artworks. There's just no chance of that working out well. The poor results are not imposed by his business constraints, but rather from his failing to respect them.
Vogel should peek over the fence at the adjacent roguelike community and do what they've done: custom tileset support. He's clearly not that invested in his games as aesthetic experiences, and that's his prerogative, but in the year 2019 it's actually not that uncommon for game communities to scratch their own itch in that regard when allowed.
I built a couple full-tileset mods for Blades of Exile back in the day. You can do it with the new Avernum engine too. Of course, he could definitely make it easier.
Now I'm feeling nostalgic. Wonder if I could get BoE running again.
(Are you...the Djur? ;) )
(Guilty as charged, I'm afraid! Been a long time.)
What do you mean by this?
I miss Realmz¹, and until today didn't realize that the developer of Realmz was also the publisher of the Exile series. But I still can't figure out what "the Exile III version of the Realmz" graphics is referring to.
¹My ringtone is actually the Realmz outdoor theme.
http://i10.tinypic.com/2lbkruv.png
New Exile graphics:
https://lparchive.org/Exile-2-Crystal-Souls/Update%2018/1-01...
Here's the OG splash screen: http://macintoshgarden.org/games/exile-escape-from-the-pit
And here's the update: http://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/s...
There are two sides to this: Can you make better games for cheap? Sure you can, many people have. But the second question is: How large a proportion of those who try that would be able to keep churning out profitable games for 25 years?
Or even produce a single profitable game?
There's nothing mediocre about managing to pump out profitable games for 25 years - very, very few people manage to do that successfully. His games may well be mediocre, or at least look mediocre, but in terms of success he's doing far better than most just by still being there.
I don't doubt the guy is successful, but he doesn't really bring up a convincing argument for his position. He could be potentially be MORE successful if he invested a little more in visual aspects of his games. Reading an article about why it isn't a priority for him isn't that interesting to me.
Covered in the article (and previous blog posts, I think): 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."
Sounds like someone who worked at all the wrong things to "improve" because they don't listen to feedback.
Not sure I can agree with that. Undertale had lo-fi art, but there was a lot of care put into it.
Among other things, there are much higher expectations on graphics and it's a lot harder to make 3D world and assets than it was to make 2D sprites. Cheap games are also facing a fierce competition from a truckload of other cheap games and previous AAA titles. There are more games than people can play and why buy Game 2019 when Game 2015 is just as good and 75% off.
Then he talked about great stories.
Definitely not mediocre.
So, the take away is story can sell to fans of story and game play.
That is not wrong. It has, does, and I suspect, will continue to.
That's an interesting way to look at this article. It seems that many solo entrepreneurs have a hard time evaluating the skills of those outside their own domain.
It feels arrogant to criticize someone profitably running their own company for 25 years, but I wonder if he would be better served by hiring a design/UX firm for a day or two to get some guidance on achieving a consistent look while still spending less money.
There are plenty of entrepreneurs here that hire all kinds of people, and always try to find good bang for the buck. Isn't that normal? I personally have hired artists, developers, marketers, lawyers, managers, you name it... I don't see why I would deal with any profession any different.
> That seems like a pretty big strawman to me. There is a large grey area between "crap" and "AAA-quality".
And even then, you can have low-budget (like what Vogel is doing) with good-looking art, as in good art direction, which he has already done.
I'm one of the players that's on the margin between his graphically "good" games, e.g. the Avernum remakes, which use a vaguely consistent colour palette and are comfortable to play, and his graphically awful games, e.g. the first Geneforge, which has an eye-stabbingly bright green border around the game area that's brighter and higher contrast than the actual content, making playing the game fatiguing and uncomfortable.
Jeff's games don't need 3D art or a big budget or even a totally consistent style, they just need a tiny amount of good UX taste and a few hours of photoshop to mess with HSV. Thankfully, the more recent titles do have better UX.
I guess it's the same case here. The art isn't as if the entire art pipeline was MS Paint so most people who don't mind graphics may at worst just put up with it for the gameplay they expect from Vogels games.
The question he seems to be answering is “why don’t you try and grow your company”, with his answer being “because I’m happy with the way it is”.
Let me add that, in my opinion, there are more chances of a successful game if you're a competent artist with poor coding skills than the opposite. In fact, lots of solo projects succeed because the author is an artist that happens to be a half decent programmer.
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
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.
Then swapping out artists will be easier and the game will look more consistent.
The guide also needs to include lighting, which he has diddly-squat of.
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
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).
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 :)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 love pixel art! So much creativity squeezed out of such limited hardware.
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://thimbleweedpark.com/
http://www.alonsomartin.mx/hfa/
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.
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 colors onscreen at once in one of the "mid-res" modes - it was used for a game called "DragonFire":
http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/dragonfire.html
Lately, people have used these tricks and such to do some weird stuff with the CoCo:
https://hackaday.com/2011/04/21/tandy-color-computer-coco3-c...
Then of course, you also have the possibilities offered by CGA on a composite monitor:
https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...
Which is also a good primer on artifacting itself. And of course:
https://int10h.org/blog/2015/08/8088-mph-final-old-vs-new-cg...
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65371
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
Ok - enough of that - downvote this nostalgia trip - I'm sorry...
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" :)
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)...
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.
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.
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.
The point is know your constraints!!! Be willing to say NO to some things! Anything you say YES to has a cost!
If you can do the above, you can find success in most things.
If you apply the author's idea, it would be the same as. Why he has decided to own a small business and not a startup or a big enterprise. "Why my revenue looks like crap, and our growth is not a hockey stick" Most of us on here would be better off making $500k a year working for ourselves than chasing $1 billion valuation. Nothing wrong with that. He has a family to feed. He prefers having a small pie that's a sure thing than trying to go for a large pie that he might not be able to get.
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?
Their games look crap, not because of a lack of resources but because of a disrespect for visual design (it's not even "art", they could make a better looking game with colored squares). There's probably many, many ways to improve the look that have nothing to do with "AAA art". He fails to see how Baba Is You is a better looking game than any of theirs, simply because it's focused and has a good use of color and contrast. Any $10/hour freelance game artist can tell him that the problem with the games is a mismatch in detail, between background and characters, between resolution and texture detail. This makes tiles look either blurry or covered in white noise and together with a sever lack of contrast, makes the game look flat and unlit.
Solving that doesn't require hiring expensive artists, it first involves acknowledging there's an issue at the core that can't be solved by sticking stuff on top of it. I see zero patience or passion for that and that's why their games look the same as 25 years ago (and I could argue, worse, since higher resolution doesn't do them any favors).
Again, I have no problem with their games and them looking like they do but going into defense here is a battle they can't win. Their best move is to acknowledge that they don't care and do so with pride. Everything else just feels at best insecure and at worst somewhat disrespectful towards devs who care.
The first and key point is that there are people (such as myself) who actually like his graphic style and who, above all, prioritize the excellent story telling in his games. These are the people who sustain his business.
The second point is one of niche indie versus AAA or even popular indie. It's a similar sort of argument as between "life-style" businesses versus VC backed businesses. Specifically, in the game industry, the effort into graphics and assets versus reward from customers gained is not a linear function of effort, where small increases result in small gains. It is not even a smooth function where there are small in-between things you can do that will have an impact.
Now, in hackernews style, you believe that there is a simple solution but remember, the issue is not of graphics but getting to a sustainable business. This is someone who has survived making games for 25 years where so many better more consistent looking games have flopped or their parent companies folded. Besides, from my short time working on games, it seems to me you are both overestimating and underestimating the gains from such touchups. The people who care about such things are very exacting and the people who don't care are very forgiving. The upshot is, either the touchups you list will not matter or they will never be enough. Which leads to a key point.
There is a large step function covering not just graphics but also animation and sound quality to where the majority would consider acceptable. He is not complaining that good artists are too expensive, he is stating that the incurred risk required to afford majority acceptable game assets is not worth it, compared to what he is comfortable with and how he wishes to live his life.
He is happy with his current niche and those of us who feel nothing for the latest shiny 3D raytraced games are grateful that developers like him exist.
Those of you who seek to create businesses should consider knowing yourself and what will truly make you happy. Do you want great wealth and acclaim or the freedom to live your life mostly as you please, content without any great material or status need?
I thought this was a great article. Why do the games look "ugly"? Because 1) perfect graphics aren't even the point; and 2) this is a way to build a sustainable business.
Your technical complaints about the art entirely miss the point. And I guarantee that there is not a good supply of talented and reliable freelance artists charging $10/hour out there.
The author believes there's a problem, or they wouldn't have written an article about it. I agree with the grandparent comment. The tone of the article isn't "yes, the graphics are bad but it's fine", it's "you just don't appreciate the style". The author lists four things they believe to be the cause of the complaints:
> 1. Queen's Wish has a very retro square-tile top-down view, reminiscent of old Ultima games, old Pokemon games, Spiderweb's first games, tabletop D&D, that sort of thing. For some, that old style is really unfamiliar and/or alienating.
> 2. Queen's Wish uses art made by a lot of different artists. That means that the style is not quite consistent. We've done our best to make it blend well, but it's a little off.
> 3. All the characters only look in diagonal directions. I made this choice because I once thought all the art would be hand-drawn, and I desperately needed to reduce the number of icons I needed. This was a mistake, and I'll probably try to fix it in Queen's Wish 2.
> 4. It's not in 3-D. Some people will only ever be happy with 3-D.
Of these four, two are "you don't like the style" (1 and 4), and one is a technical complaint that the author agrees with (3). But in this comment section, the focus is clearly on point 2 (lack of art direction).
The author has an explanation for point 2 (cost), which most commenters find reasonable (some disagree of course, which is to be expected). But it's the large amount of text spent debating point 1 and 4 (which are unrelated to cost) that people take issue with.
To me, the inclusion of point 1 and 4 come off as deflection from point 2, the point that most complainants actually have an issue with.
I don't think he does[1] it's just that it comes up every time they release a game[2].
[1] https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-indie-games-can-... - specifically lauding "cheap" graphics.
[2] e.g. RPS interview from 2013 commenting on it: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-v... ; IGN have been mentioning the "graphics from a decade ago" since 2007 ;
From the bottom of the article: "I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. You can also follow me on Twitter."
He must have had at least a few hundred sales today, because I saw this blog post on twitter and reddit as well.
That's really quite brilliant.
Part of the problem seems to be that his critics range from the unrealistic "Just™ triple your budget and make it look competitive with AA games" to the more practical "why not think about visual design more coherently and address some of the low-hanging fruit to make your games more approachable and broaden your audience?" and he's lumping everything into one big WONTFIX pile.
But at the end of the day, if he's found an audience and can support his family, more power to him.
You put your finger on exactly what felt wrong for me when I read their post.
They are just trying to find reason to justify their art, while they have none and simply don't care.
I'm not saying it's wrong that they don't care, it's alright, but doing this kind of post is disrespectful for people who cares.
> What fascinates me here is that the guy seems to think he is telling me news. Like, I'm smart enough to keep a software company running for 25 years, but I am unable to notice qualities in my games that are instantly obvious to Joe Q. Rando.
Imagine that being said in any other context to realize how uncalled for such an attitude is and how much it undermines any other point the author wants to make.
Microsoft or Apple have indubitably created some of the most successful and valuable businesses that are still at it decades later. Now imagine them giving the response above when faced with criticism. If it would sound awful it's because it is. People who can't take even constructive criticism will have a hard time existing on the internet. And it will show.
But have you seen him write? I'm talking about the article and the quote above shows some very aggressive sarcasm. I believe calling it acidic is appropriate.
If I provided the same kind of reply to you it would either be downvoted to hell, flagged, or deleted by mods. Using 2 different moral standards for the same action has a name.
In any case, the OP's argument for "why all of our games look like crap" is "we're not prioritizing the resources to put into consistent, polished aesthetics." I'm going to bet that if you made a consensus list of the most common complaints with Apple over the last ~5 years, "they just don't pay enough attention to how things look" would not be near the top.
And if such an example exists it just strengthens my point that it would sound just as awful and that the only difference is that people will judge MS or Apple with far more bias that this guy, regardless of the actual "crime".
Come on guys this is clearly a precisely crafted, controversial traffic increasing blog (ahem advertisement) piece to stir additional attention for his soon to be released latest game. Plus he gets to rant a bit with IMHO reasonable justifications.
As in it has already created salty posts on the front page of hacker news (+ other news outlets). He is turning what is perceived as many as a weakness of his games into another advantage, bloody brilliant and well done sir! =)
I stopped downloading desktop games when they hit 3 gigs.
I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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.
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?
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.
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
Windows 3.11 16 color default palette retro
>and profitable
so profitable he cant even hire someone with basic art sense
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.
That's so true. It made me also realize something else, that a good artist can also works with monetary constraint.
He bought graphics, like a product. The thing is, he isn't an artist. It's the artist that should have the liberty to decide whether details is worth it or not.
This also holds more true to the generation being targeted. People that grew up on XBox/PlayStation will have a hard time with lesser graphics. People that grew up with Atari will be more open to lesser graphics.
We should all be so lucky.
People may not like his graphics and that’s totally understandable. But hopefully everyone can at least respect his accomplishments.
The choices are his, but people can still have opinions and voice them.
e.g. Jeff believes marginal revenue increases would not be enough to offset marginal expenses. Others have different opinions, and voice them as a response to a public blogpost. I see nothing wrong with that.
I do wonder if a more stylized approach would help sooth some of the complaints. The author obviously talks about why that doesn't work when you're using freelancers, but I wonder if the style could happen not in the art directly, but in a shader or similar. This would also help the art feel more consistent.
I do wonder if the author could retain freelancers better, whether that's by a contract that gives them a minimum promised hours or a better rate, etc.
I definitely think that the insults the author has endured are inappropriate, most certainly the threats are. We as gamers benefit from Indies, and we need to treat them well even if sometimes we don't care for their games. There are plenty of indie games that aren't my preference, but I'm glad to have them in the community and want to support them as artists and developers.
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.
[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
Having played through the Avernum trilogy last year, I don't think the art style is inconsistent at all, especially considering how old some of the assets are. Please have a closer look at some actual screenshots from a recent Avernum game[1] before providing your invaluable input on how he should manage his game art.
[1] https://www.gog.com/game/avernum_escape_from_the_pit
Maybe I'm biased having played the original Avernum games when I was a kid though.
For example lighting and shadows can be generated dynamically (currently they're baked into the assets, meaning they are inconsistent or completely missing). Or generate edges between ground textures procedurally so things don't look so blocky. Add a particle system for weather and atmospheric effects.
If he did that then he'd be able to carry that work forward into future games, and achieve a consistency of look and feel that extends beyond what he can get by trying to match artwork.
As an ex - videogame developer I've shipped several titles from simple 'kids' games to AAA titles. Here's my take:
You CAN make good looking games on an indie budget. Plenty of indie developers do it. However this requires an Artistic Director which oversees the visual style and coherence for the game.
Some programmers (very few I know) have both technical talent and have a very good 'eye' artistically. They are able to make games and make them look good. It's once again still about style and visual coherence.
Obviously the writer of the post is not an artist so he might not necessarily have the time or inclination to dwell on such visual coherence and direction. That's fine, he accepts that.
But I can't agree with the fact that being and indie makes it harder to have a pleasing visual aesthetic. That is simply a question of choice, which you can rationalize with any type of arguments.
That being said I'm really impressed with their success and hope them all the best for the next 25 years!
The rest of the blog post is one of those soliloquies more to reassure yourself than anything, I'd say.
> Please don't take this the wrong way, I know it has been a contention for years, and you are probably very aware of it. I just think you could be reaching a lot more new fans and I feel sad about the lost opportunity.
which was (IMO unfairly) omitted from the original post. Totally goes against the authors suggestion that "What fascinates me here is that the guy seems to think he is telling me news".
Anyway, to make this useful here are some moderately or lesser known low-fi (ish) games that are basically responsible for me not having a PhD in something:
-Rimworld
-Starsector
-Neo Scavanger
-Gary Grigsby's War in the East/West
-DCS Barbarossa
-KSP (Kerbal)
-Factorio
-Xenonauts
-Rimworld again, but this time with excessive modding :)
-Everything Ssethtzeentach has reviewed
Funny enough I never played any of Vogel’s games past Blades of Exile, and honestly, it’s because I think they look bad, aesthetically. I never felt this way about Exile, or even old Ultima games. The problem here isn’t “these games don’t have good graphics” but rather “these games don’t have good art direction/style/aesthetic”. Vogel says in the post he has used multiple artists with conflicting art styles, and it shows. As the games got higher resolution the problems just got more apparent.
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.
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.
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?"
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).
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.
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)
"Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the level of entrepreneurship actually has declined in recent years. That is, the number of self-employed in the U.S. has dropped notably. Incorporated self-employed fell from 5.78 million in 2008 to 5.13 million in 2011. It climbed back to 5.64 million in 2016. So, after eight years, the number of incorporated self-employed remains well short of the 2008 level. Unfortunately, the news is even worse when it comes to the larger measure of unincorporated self-employed. The number of unincorporated self-employed declined from 10.59 million in 2006 to 9.36 million in 2014."
In this comment thread: "Fuck your choice. It'd be nebulously better if you made a different choice."
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.
The way I knew I absolutely had to go to bed was when I lost over an hour's worth of progress due to forgetting to save.
I remember reading The Story of the Baby on IronyCentral back in 2002. [0] The Baby is now almost an adult.
The Spiderweb Software forums were my first major forum presence.
I love Jeff Vogel's crappy looking games.
0. http://www.ironycentral.com/babymain.html
I remember the brief but super fun Blades of Exile scenario community back then, there were some really fun inventive things people did with a pretty barebones engine.
I think at one point someone made a fanservice scenario with a lot of people from the forums and I got a cameo. Good childhood memories.
A better quality visual experience could be delivered at near zero additional cost / complexity with basic technical hacks - eg faux shading / lighting - see the before / after below:
https://twitter.com/RavenmoreArt/status/1164447066300588033
Feels like Jeff would benefit from a consultation with a technical art director or similar.
Every point he makes about economy, style, preference would still stand but could also address a considerable amount of the visual criticism (and hence, lost sales opportunities)
And historically, the genre has responded to this by sacrificing some aspect of polish - typically animation, but also often by just telling you about a thing with text.
What Jeff has done by stocking up and reusing generic assets is essentially a way of reducing that load so that the game actually gets produced on his microbudget targets. And what's really lost in that is any sort of "wow" moment where a distinctive scene, magic item or character design can make an impression visually.
However, I do think he could stand to leverage technology better. 3D might not be nostalgic, but it is the overwhelming preference of devs trying to use generic assets, since it gives you so much more utility(take the sword model and reskin it - new sword! same building with different decor - new scene!) and even puts some stock animation within reach, when relying on Mixamo or similar.
Jeff is already using these kinds of stock assets in the new game, it's just that faithfully implementing them into an old-style 2D tile renderer system makes them look worse than they actually are, since it guarantees that they look inconsistent in scale, perspective, lighting etc.
One productive way to respond to his challenge would be to give him an A/B: license his existing work to a small self-funded team, have them remake it aesthetically without changing how it plays. Have it launch on consoles and mobile. Then we'd really know if the assertions match the reality.
For example https://retrostylegames.com/about-game-art/
On the other hand, he should have led with that, and probably also kept it to that. Because defending this style as if it's somehow a valid choice design-wise ... yeah no. It's pretty obvious that the guy has no sense about design, colour use, or the aesthetic aspects that make retro look "cool", how they differ from the aesthetic aspects in old games with good art versus those with bad art, and how to make choices and combine that knowledge to actually celebrate the look of retro art that he loves so much.
Saying it looks like this because he likes the look of retro art, is kind of dismissive of .. well basically studying graphics design in general. Because he somehow equates not spending the effort on making it look good, to the aesthetic of these old games. But a lot of effort was spent to make them look good within the limitations of those machines/displays.
Just applying those limitations isn't going to get you the quality. It's just like those furniture stores that sell vintage-looking stuff, that is actually just things made badly (crooked) with artificially aged wood, pretending to be a porch on a beach house, I dunno. It wants to be vintage cool, but it turns out to be vintage crap.
But I get it for the business reasons. I just hate it when people come up with the excuse of "actually I think it's prettier this way" ...
I don't agree. You need enough money to pay an artist, but you don't need to give the artist a 50% cut of your studio!
Full Disclosure: I personally think the art is bad, but I see the retro appeal. The mismatching styles and low quality definitely is reminiscent of old D&D manuals which had monsters drawn by Gary Gygax himself... and which looked really bad too.
The art really does look bad though. I wonder if what he needs is actually worse art. I'm sure there are corners he could cut, like instead of having a full set of sprites for each race×class combo (I don't know anything about his games, I'm just assuming), each facing four different directions, he could have just one sprite per race with a symbol in the corner indicating its class and an arrow pointing which way it's facing. I'm not sure that the downgrade would result in turning off too many players, I think nearly all the players that care about art style are already turned off from his games. Maybe that would leave more room in the budget for the aspects where his games really shine (which I assume they do, given that he can make a living off of them despite how bad of a visual first impression they leave).
That's what I was thinking. One of the things about games from back in the old days (I'm thinking 1980s) is that they had to be fun to play, because they didn't offer much else. Today there is an emphasis on looking good, but the game itself usually isn't great.
My hypothesis is that selling good-looking games that suck is more profitable. The graphics sell the game. Then the kids get tired of it and buy a new one. If the game is good, they'll just keep playing it and not open their wallet.
I like games like NetHack and Baldur's Gate. I was quite disappointed when I bought Pillars of Eternity and its dull story couldn't keep me interested at all.
I would choose a nice story over nice graphics anytime.
I don't particularly like the art that his games use (and I also grew up on Ultima) but I'm 100% behind the idea that if "trying for better art" (and note that "better" in no way guarantees "something people will call good") means putting the entire business at risk, only someone with no sense of responsibility and no understanding of the value of a dollar would take that risk. Not in year one, and still not in year 25.
Now compare something ultra-realistic like FFXV. Undoubtedly cool. Took them 10 years though, and even then they almost released it too soon. Gamers still blew through all available content in no time. Except now, the developers can’t just add a bunch of new stuff in no time: every change has an absurdly-high quality bar to meet. That means extremely high cost, and probably more time spent than they’d like.
I think the real question is:
If he made the games look better would he sell enough more to justify the cost? He feels strongly not. But one has to wonder, how many people look at say pass, without even trying. Or go the other way an just do a "Dwarf Fortress" and go straight to ascii.
I guess the economics work for him, as is.
People are fickle, and do infact judge books by their covers to some extent and in a crowded market. If you went to but something from a website that had a late 90s web ascetic, you might choose to go to one that looks a little more modern.
It also seems the games aren’t easily modded (at least, the blog post nor this HN discussion mention it).
I’m sure it won’t be enough for all or even most critics, but that, to me, seems a missed opportunity. Looking at the games, the look of the tiles won’t affect gameplay (as I tight if, for example, the programs do a flood-fill of the map at some time) so it shouldn’t be hard to, at startup, check for the presence of a ‘tiles.png’ or ‘tiles.bmp’ file, and read tiles from it, if present.
Gosh the images and text on this page is so small. I know I can make it bigger in my browser, but consider bringing the font size (and image size) up a bit on the page too.
As a software developer and entrepreneur, I understand concept of ergonomics very well - things should be easy to read, hard to misinterpret, responsive, familiar, easy to click. But I struggle with aesthetics all the time - something feels off, but I can't pinpoint why and how to fix it.
In case you didn't read the end note: "I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror." I'd say he succeeded pretty well in that aim!
[1] https://www.gog.com/game/avernum_escape_from_the_pit
There's this assumption that every artist wants to mimic the big budget people. Or not even big budget, just medium budget. That filmmakers want to make movies which are shiny and polished. But a filmmaker who tries to imitate a big budget production with a shoestring budget isn't going to get a polished film at a tenth the budget. They're gonna get a weird uncanny valley, kinda good looking film that isn't quite indie, isn't quite mainstream. And trust me, as a begrudging attendee of many small film festivals, it's not a good look.
Contrast that to say, Stranger Than Paradise, which is remarkably simple and very obviously low budget. It's in black and white. The acting is a little rough around the edges. The sets are extraordinarily simple. The camera doesn't do anything fancy. Yet it works because it takes full advantage of its crappiness. It doesn't half ass quality, it full asses crappiness.
As he says repeatedly in his posts if you don't like his art style or games you're free to find other games.
He's been supporting himself successfully this way for over 25 years despite the criticism. Clearly there is a community of people who favor his style of games depsite "the old school art style"
Growing up Spiderweb games were some of my all time favorites and I'd love one on the go.
Seriously, it’s possible to make low-budget art that looks good. This isn’t it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gy9hJauXns
I forget who said it, but I think there's a saying that great art is borne through limitation. When an a good artist only has a limited set of tools, or maybe not even the best ones, it brings out the best in their abilities.
I wonder if there are non obvious economic factors that make it possible for them.
Constraints ensure simplicity where there could have been excess.
If you have less pixels to work with, it helps you edit your design to what is clear and truly necessary. It prevents bad patterns from emerging in the UI and game interactions.
I applaud this developer for sticking to their guns, finding their niche and really making it shine.
There is nothing wrong with building around a practical and dare I say it, nostalgic design aesthetic.
"Make games you would want to play" is one of the mantras I repeat to myself whenever I'm tinkering with a game prototype.
Clearly Jeff understands all of this and follows through with the delivery.
Great article!
Developer: nuh-uh, it's you who's wrong! hAtErS gOnNa HaTe!
And then return to hack hack slash shoot.
the square peg of 'maximizing superficial appeal for the most short term popularity irrespective of the personal cost' is so deeply implanted in some people's minds that they literally cannot comprehend doing things in any other 'round hole' sort of way.
Here's a screen recording of a demo I made in a VM, which walks through the scenarios, objects, and tools, and also shows some of the "SimAntics" behavior tree code behind the different levels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY
It's got a "sketchy" user interface, a dot above the selected character's head instead of the iconic spinning plumb-bob, a horrifically crude and ugly object placement tool with yellow squares and big red X's when you can't place an object (but that gladly lets you place bathtubs on hills), and a bare minimal number of crappy objects, some of which have astoundingly terrible graphics and prototypically implemented behaviors.
Especially @ 24:25: the vintage Stereo with colorful musical notes dancing above it, the stinky Fish Tank (permanently attached to its own table), the unbelievably nasty Pink Flamingo, the goofy looking Flower (also growing out of a pot on its own table), and the blue bakelite Telephone (glued to its own table as well) which looks like it has Halloween Candy Corn springing out when it rings @ 12:45, then the caller asks you if you'd like your fingers chewed off by rabid ferrets for $42. It has pixelated censoring @ 13:31, which attempts to disguise the embarrassing fact that they shit and shower with their pants on. Also @ 2:00 it has weird pie menus with placeholder programmer art, and the original characters, including Archie Bunker permanently holding a burning cigar in his hand! Also there's some unfortunately worded dialog text that probably wouldn't have made it past the ESRB @ 40:50.
As ugly as it was, it was just playable enough to convince The Sims Steering Committee at EA not to cancel our project, and to give us another year and a half to complete it.
Here's an interview with Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims, in which she describes "Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion".
Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion
https://web.archive.org/web/20110408034710/https://www.donho...
>The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".
>Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.
>The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!
>In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.
>If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!
Chris Trottier (Sims Online) Q&A
https://web.archive.org/web/20111211182436/http://www.armcha...
>Q: On paper, a game where you simulate daily life doesn't sound that interesting. Yet The Sims is really fun to play, so much so that it is now the biggest-selling PC game ever. Although any development team working with Will Wright has to feel confident in the product they are creating, has the unbelievable popularity of the franchise shocked even the development team?
>A: Absolutely. When I was first assigned to The Sims, it was not-very-affectionately-known within the company as "the toilet game." Will Wright had tremendous stamina for the risk involved with trying something very new, but there were certainly a lot of head-scratchers both on the team and outside of it. In all honesty, the gameplay didn't start to really come together until a couple of months before ship. Being involved in that tuning process, and seeing the game take shape from what had previously been a mass of separate components, was one of the most powerful experiences of my career.
* Half Life 2 looks like crap
* Fallout 3 looks like crap
* Actually any game from more than a few years back, looks like crap
But any of those are hopelessly out of reach for any Indie developer even with today's tools.
There is real AAA from earlier days, that still looks good these days, like:
* Battlefield 3
* Crysis 2
* Call Of Duty Modern Warfare
* etc.
But these games have among the highest budget in history of game development and a respectable revenue stream...
What the author is trying to say is that most people think most games looks like crap (I think so too). There is no point in making AA games (let's assume he didn't mean actual AAA games) as an Indie developer, because people will still think your game looks like crap. And those people who don't (I for instance really like SNES games still), will also be satisfied with the art he can create.
Let's look at Anno 1602 vs. Anno 1800. This is more in the domain of the author. I really like both games and I have to say, Anno 1800 has AMAZING graphics. But the game gets boring after playing it one time to the Investor level... Anno 1602 has graphics that you can probably manage as an Indie developer these days (since you don't need to optimize it at all and have much better tooling). This game never gets old ;). I have more fun playing that one than Anno 1800. Which is another reason why AAA graphics is unneeded. You need shiny graphics if your game sucks. And creating games that suck is what todays AAA industry is all about.
Can't. The word you're looking for here is can't. The unit economics of making the sorts of games that JV makes completely preclude it. It would be way easier to spend the money he doesn't make to get better art talent. This is true. It is also not very meaningful.
And it's not that there is minimal sense of direction just for funsies--it's that you don't have that luxury when we're talking about the rates he's working at. I spent a decent amount of money, in the ballpark of what JV probably spends on third-party work for a game, trying to get freelancers--reasonably priced or, in reality, not so--to work towards a cohesive art style. That I did not ship that game (which is still in a 75%-ish complete state in my graveyard, it's my fuck-you-money project) is largely due to the difficulty of getting art to a standard I felt comfortable with.
JV ships because that standard is lower than I was able to stomach.
His games also happen to be really good, too.
You can go offshore for cheaper, but then you introduce risk, and if nothing else, JV's model is to minimize risk as much as is possible.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/619141553/queens-wish-t...
This stuff is really raw and really hard at the margins and tolerances we are talking about here.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam... covers "Geneforge 4: Rebellion" (tl;dr: average performer, $120k budget, almost in the black after 3 years.)
He has a really good GDC talk that goes into more detail and might shed light on why he operates the way he does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs
I think the real term is "Not Invented Here Syndrome".
This site has thousands of open sourced game assets: https://opengameart.org
Here is an asset pack of 65 fantasy icons for $5: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/icons/fantasy-r...
I suspect someone spending $200 and a day of searching could probably find most of the art needed for Queen's Wish. There's really no need for him to be hiring freelancers in the first place.
You can't make everybody happy. JV is going to more reliably make money by making his audience, like me, happy. Why should he change it?
It's a full-time job to find this art in the first place, to resize, to animate, to recolor, and apply effects to the art to help it match your desired aesthetic. And then it still is never good enough.
There's a lot to be said for having someone produce art to your requests in a consistent style, even if the quality of the art is not extremely high.
Simply saying "just buy cheap assets" completely misses the point here.
When you change your focus from a loyal customer base and change key aspects of your product they prefer in order to chase a competitor's customers you risk losing your own base and still not picking up a substantial portion of the rest of the market.
He compares it to Baba is You, and while that game's art is technically simple, its consistent aesthetic and style sells it.
Meanwhile, in his screenshots, the visuals seem dated and inconsistent. I don't think it's a problem with the quality of the assets, but in art direction, and like he said, that's on the developer.
I like Spiderweb games, but most SNES games looked better than this. Some NES games looked better than this. You can have cheap, low-res art that is coherent and pleasing to the eye, but this isn't it.
That said, I see where he's coming from. The audience for games like his is very small, even when the graphics are good. I think he should add support for custom tilesets. It's common in the roguelike world, and at this point his audience is closer to the hobbyist/roguelike scene than the average indie studio.
This just isn't true. It only a question of money and/or time.
I'm sure a 2 man experienced team consisting of a programer and an artist can recreate the vault intro sequence of F3 in a few months. They wouldn't be able to expand thst into the full 2007 game without years of man-hours. Because F3 itself took thousands of man hours. It'd take a lot less time with modern tools, but not enough to offset the work of hundreds of developers.
You do get out what you put in, but one person can only put in so much.
Art doesn't have to be detailed to look good. Minimalism proves this. Those Geneforge games have just enough detail to look like shit. It's possible to scale back and keep the art good with less effort but better design sense.
Take the game: Thomas was alone. The guy probably didn't hire a single artist yet that game looks way better than any gene-forge game. It's all in the style. The author of this article really just doesn't have a sense of style.
It seems like all his games could be using ascii art instead, and honestly, they probably would look a lot better.
maybe toon shaded.
That reminds me: I guess not even a game like NetHack can be realistically played by a blind person, so I wonder if this was some failed kind of joke or if the author actually considers that audience.
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
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?
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... :)
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.