10 ms·

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

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.

Beltiras 7y ago
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.
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  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.
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    > 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.
    - meheleventyone 7y ago
      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.
      - alttab 7y ago
        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.
        cotelletta 7y ago
        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.
        meheleventyone 7y ago
        > 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.
        jplayer01 7y ago
        > 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.
    - atoav 7y ago
      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 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.
      - silvestrov 7y ago
        > 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.
        ptx 7y ago
        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.)
  - hnal943 7y ago
    ...if he were a different person, perhaps.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Well, he cares a lot about story. It takes time to care. 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.
- adnzzzzZ 7y ago
  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.
  - HelloNurse 7y ago
    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.
zelos 7y ago
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)
jplayer01 7y ago
> 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.
- alttab 7y ago
  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.
  - dagw 7y ago
    It seems Jeff has put no effort into it 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.
  - w0utert 7y ago
    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.
rwmj 7y ago
> Jeff needs a good art director. 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.
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  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.
atoav 7y ago
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.
- alttab 7y ago
  Jeff has had 25 years to get good at it. Based on the reasoning in his article, it seems like he didn't try.
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    >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 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - sfg 7y ago
      I'm so glad somebody sane has shown up. 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.
scotty79 7y ago
For me the actual message is that he doesn't have money to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, and he's not going to risk going into debt.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  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.
- billfruit 7y ago
  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.
  - billfruit 7y ago
    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.
    - scotty79 7y ago
      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"
LaGrange 7y ago
> Jeff needs a good art director. 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.
kirstenbirgit 7y ago
I just don't think he has good taste. You don't necessarily need a bunch of resources to make things look nice, but you need to know what you want.
castlecrasher2 7y ago
> Jeff needs a good art director. 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

Beltiras 7y ago

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.

meheleventyone 7y ago
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.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  > 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.
  - meheleventyone 7y ago
    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.
    - alttab 7y ago
      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.
      - cotelletta 7y ago
        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.
        meheleventyone 7y ago
        > 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.
        jplayer01 7y ago
        > 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.
  - atoav 7y ago
    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 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.
    - silvestrov 7y ago
      > 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.
      - ptx 7y ago
        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.)
- hnal943 7y ago
  ...if he were a different person, perhaps.
- ddingus 7y ago
  Well, he cares a lot about story. It takes time to care. 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.
adnzzzzZ 7y ago
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.
- HelloNurse 7y ago
  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.

zelos 7y ago

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)

jplayer01 7y ago

> 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.

alttab 7y ago
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.
- dagw 7y ago
  It seems Jeff has put no effort into it 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.
- w0utert 7y ago
  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.

rwmj 7y ago

> Jeff needs a good art director. 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.

meheleventyone 7y ago
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.

atoav 7y ago

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.

alttab 7y ago
Jeff has had 25 years to get good at it. Based on the reasoning in his article, it seems like he didn't try.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >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 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - sfg 7y ago
    I'm so glad somebody sane has shown up. 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.

scotty79 7y ago

For me the actual message is that he doesn't have money to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, and he's not going to risk going into debt.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
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.
billfruit 7y ago
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.
- billfruit 7y ago
  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.
  - scotty79 7y ago
    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"

LaGrange 7y ago

> Jeff needs a good art director. 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.

kirstenbirgit 7y ago

I just don't think he has good taste. You don't necessarily need a bunch of resources to make things look nice, but you need to know what you want.

castlecrasher2 7y ago

> Jeff needs a good art director. 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