Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When I made another Monkey Island

grumpygamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 215 posts

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#81

Post by hitpointdrew »

stuckinhell wrote: post #63
hitpointdrew wrote: post #42

I love this post. I know a decent amount of indie devs, I also have done some hobby game development myself. I see this alarming trend of devs and small studios that are, what I would call, hyper engaging with their players. I get it, the players are important, you want to sell the game, you want people to play it. But, the entitlement and feedback I have seen from some players is just ridiculous. Most players don't…

Indie game development isn't a hobby these days. Hence the hyper engagement, even big companies like Wendy's hyper engage people on twitter.

I don't think the level of engagement is helpful, in the end it makes a terrible hodgepodge product that no one really wants, especially the dev who had an idea for a game that has been co-opted into something very different by their "customers".

I am not saying devs shouldn't get feedback, I just don't think they should be taking feedback from EVERYONE.

Personally if I ever wanted to release a game I would never have a public discord where people could contact me. Would I have a private discord where some other indie devs I know are invited for feedback and play testing? Absolutely. But, I wouldn't just let anyone in there.

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#82

Post by cptskippy »

jaimebuelta wrote: post #65
darkwater wrote: post #12

When you read posts like this, and also the previous, linked one [1], you can clearly see that Ron is a smart and humble guy. I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game. > Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of- the-art tech and art. This is SO true, and as much as I loved those games, as much as I stopped…

The interesting bit about this kind of games is that you don't need state-of-the-art tech, and art at this point is mostly about choices, not necessarily about what's technically feasible. The best example is the usage of orchestral music, according to the post. I mean, for an 2D adventure game, you are basically animating characters. The objective is to create something like an animation movie, in whatever art style…

> The interesting bit about this kind of games is that you don't need state-of-the-art tech, and art at this point is mostly about choices, not necessarily about what's technically feasible.

Certain types of games exist and thrive due to what's technically feasible at the time they're created, just like any other form of art.

An example, Cuphead isn't radically different from something like Metroid in terms of gameplay and yet Cuphead was technically impossible when Metroid was all the rage. Similarly Metroid's asthetic is a product of it's era and wouldn't be received today in the same way.

Games are art, they simultaneously drive the medium while being limited by it.

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#83

Post by legitster »

stuckinhell wrote: post #64

I just played thimbleweed park, and yikes what a horrible ending. I'm very worried about Monkey Island now. Some authors NEED editors. I think Ron Gilbert needs the original team to help him on what works and what doesn't. Even the original Chrono Trigger was going to be super depressing, if the original writer had his way on everything. I would have hated his version of it.

This worries me a bit too.

I have a lot of fondness for Monkey Island, but more often than not - giving a creative person complete creative controls is less likely to produce something good.

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#84

Post by hadjian »

PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #73

It's a bit ironic that he says he was not really a fan of Day of the Tentacle's "Chuck Jones" art style, when the screenshots for his upcoming Return to Monkey Island are all very specifically that 90's-infused Chuck Jones style - multiple skewed perspective lines in a scene, extreme avoidance of curves (rendered instead as polygonal outlines, so to speak). The art style for his new game is rather ironically nostalgi…

I thought exactly the same! I remember, seeing screenshots of DotT for the first time and the new screens of RtMI invoke the same feeling. Love it!

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#85

Post by tom_ »

vanderZwan wrote: post #13
Sharlin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I have the special edition and after about ten minutes of playing I switched to the original graphics and music and didn't really look back. They really have aged quite well, even though of course they look much blockier on a 24" TFT compared to the original 15"ish CRT experience...

Which is kinda strange because the "pixel" art of those days was never intended to be rendered as blocky pixels, but designed to make use of the CRT's softness.

The pixels were very obvious at 320x200 on most late 80s CRTs with RGB input! (Standard for PC, very common on Amiga and ST.)

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#86

Post by madarco »

Ron says "I never liked the art in DotT...never liked the wacky Chuck Jones style" but the first screens of RTMI looks exactly like that!

Not that I don't like that style, but I don't think it's a surprise for Lucas Art fans. Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Fullthrottle weren't that far away (except with a lower resolution)

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#87

Post by [deleted] »

ykonstant wrote: post #56
rob74 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was special about the first two Monkey Island games (at least for me) was the atmosphere . I mean, just look at this screenshot: https://www.adventurecorner.de//uploads/images/games/monkey1... Parts 1 and 2 had this effect on me, with part 3 the magic was mostly gone unfortunately. If Return to Monkey Island manages to recapture some of that, I don't care if it's pixel art or whatever else...

Oh! I am glad to see the atmosphere aspect of MI emphasized! I played these games as a preteen, and much of the humor went above my head (non-native speaker). It was the atmosphere, the setting and the characters that made me love the games, especially the first one. I spent so much time on Melee Island; the eerie forest, the voodoo lady, the jail, the docks... these places and people made a tremendous impression on…

[deleted]

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#89

Post by interpol_p »

rob74 wrote: post #28
darkwater wrote: post #12

When you read posts like this, and also the previous, linked one [1], you can clearly see that Ron is a smart and humble guy. I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game. > Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of- the-art tech and art. This is SO true, and as much as I loved those games, as much as I stopped…

What was special about the first two Monkey Island games (at least for me) was the atmosphere . I mean, just look at this screenshot: https://www.adventurecorner.de//uploads/images/games/monkey1... Parts 1 and 2 had this effect on me, with part 3 the magic was mostly gone unfortunately. If Return to Monkey Island manages to recapture some of that, I don't care if it's pixel art or whatever else...

I don't think the atmosphere is quite there in this new one, here's Melee Island from The Verge's screenshot. The art doesn't sit well with me: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dQbYIfWFh5WfWwby87FoHyI8uog=...

In the modern version the town is no longer twinkling and glittering. It appears smaller due to the large buildings. The strong purple tints (especially on the horizon) gives the scene an uneasy feeling. And the lookout point is no longer forlorn, it appears close to the town due to the way the whole island appears downscaled because of the larger town elements. We have also lost the reflection of the lights in the water, making the island appear to sit on the ground rather than in the waves

I'm still going to play the game and hope to love it. But the art style seems to feature very strong colours and intense gradients. When animated the motion seems too fluid, with characters deforming like in a Flash animation

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#90

Post by bob1029 »

YakBizzarro wrote: post #74

About the art, I think another perfect example is Grim Fandango. It was the first Lucasarts 3D adventure, at a time when the 3D (late '90) was a graphically inferior solution to 2D. However, they exploited the low polygon number, to give a special character to the models, like paper dolls. So the heresy of moving from 2D was instead a conscious artistic choice, strictly linked to the then-modern technologies.

> So the heresy of moving from 2D was instead a conscious artistic choice, strictly linked to the then-modern technologies.

This is how it should have been all along. The only reason modern GPUs are in such demand is because we forgot to apply art before shiny tech. I don't know why things like polygon count and texture resolution turned into a metric for fun.

To this day I can have way more fun in older games like Minecraft than super polished AAA titles like RDR2 or Cyberpunk 2077. The graphics used to get me interested back when we thought photorealism was going to make shit way more fun, but the reality of artistic expression turned out to be much more complex than this...

Post reply on HN