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Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

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Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

#81

Post by cotelletta »

alttab wrote: post #65
meheleventyone wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff needs an art director doesn't imply anything more than that. It could be him, it could be another full time employee or it could be something he has a freelancer develop at the start of the project.

And it seems like he focused more on making sure that his artists were replaceable, even at the price of a hodge-podge style. The criticism is legitimate - it doesn't seem like Jeff has invested in his own ability to direct art.

Yeah and because art has vastly different constraints from coding, wanting to swap out artists is just counterproductive.

Then again, the older I get, the more I think the same should apply to developers. You should never lock knowledge inside one person's head, but the idea that you can take over a project without its original creators doing a years long hand off is naive, and leads to all the expected pathologies.

I remember a new $250k CTO saying he was amazed our code didn't have abandoned parts nobody wanted to touch ... this is how professionals are supposed to work, not something they discover "late" in their career.

Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

#82

Post by mruts »

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.

Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

#83

Post by atoav »

alttab wrote: post #64
atoav wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Jeff has had 25 years to get good at it. Based on the reasoning in his article, it seems like he didn't try.

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.

Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

#84

Post by Aaargh20318 »

> 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.

this image demonstrates it nicely: http://i.imgur.com/lQFPG14.png

Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

#85

Post by freetime2 »

huhtenberg wrote: post #55

To each his own, of course, but a great art can really elevate game to a completely new level - 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.

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.

[1]https://s.blogcdn.com/massively.joystiq.com/media/2012/03/ke...

Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

#86

Post by [deleted] »

navigatesol wrote: post #73
alttab wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff has had 25 years to get good at it. Based on the reasoning in his article, it seems like he didn't try.

> it seems like he didn't try. 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.

[deleted]

Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

#87

Post by w0utert »

alttab wrote: post #63
jplayer01 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jeff needs a good art director. 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…

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.

Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

#89

Post by masklinn »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #13
m0nty wrote: post #10

ITT: lots of people missing the point that he doesn't actually believe his games look like crap, he's just made a conscious (and profitable) decision to go retro. He likes his games' visual style and values the freelancers who produce the art. I didn't think this is a difficult point but apparently it is.

I don't dislike retro games, actually love the art style of Streets of Rogue and KeeperRL, for example, and I agree it's a great way for indies to get budget under control - it's easy to be tempted to just get better art, but then animation, collisions, interactions etc still need to be coded and contribute significantly to development time. that said, what makes these game look at least weird is the combination of v…

> 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.

Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap

#90

Post by cousin_it »

alttab wrote: post #59
JelteF wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He could first pay an artist to create a style guide like this: https://66.media.tumblr.com/f055b014e1db777c9ebd54579691cda0...

Then swapping out artists will be easier and the game will look more consistent.

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