521–530 of 550 posts
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?
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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 an…
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.
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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 an…
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)
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".
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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…
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 updat…
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.
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It is a circular problem: 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…
> When you don't got the eyes to see bad art as what it is, ... 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.
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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 wh…
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 aimin…
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.
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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
Way back in the day (like, around 2000), there was a Linux port of Exile 3: https://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/exile3/linuxexile3.html I don't think it'll run on a modern Linux system without a lot of hacking, though.
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" ...
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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 wh…
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 aimin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wh…
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