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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 the

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".

rubbingalcohol 7y ago
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.
- vidarh 7y ago
  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.
  - rubbingalcohol 7y ago
    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.
    - zimpenfish 7y ago
      > 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."
      - tripzilch 7y ago
        They really did look better, it's just that the vast majority of people didn't think so. Sounds like someone who worked at all the wrong things to "improve" because they don't listen to feedback.
    - duskwuff 7y ago
      > Undertale had really amateur art Not sure I can agree with that. Undertale had lo-fi art, but there was a lot of care put into it.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    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.
- eropple 7y ago
  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".
  - baud147258 7y ago
    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).
    - eropple 7y ago
      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.
      - djur 7y ago
        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.
- ddingus 7y ago
  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.
magashna 7y ago
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.
nimblegorilla 7y ago
> 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.
- eropple 7y ago
  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.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  He doesn't sound willing to take outside advice on visual aspects of his games.
Majromax 7y ago
> 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.
- jayd16 7y ago
  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.
  - LoSboccacc 7y ago
    it's more of a taste problem than a budget problem, plenty games go low fi and are amusing both to play and look at, i.e. Celeste
    - Richard_East 7y ago
      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: https://store.steampowered.com/app/915490/Frontline_Zed/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/915490/Frontline_Zed/
baud147258 7y ago
>> 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.
reidrac 7y ago
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.
mighty_bander 7y ago
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.
johnnyanmac 7y ago
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.
- pawelmurias 7y ago
  It's worse than MS Paint.
skywhopper 7y ago
Sounds like you missed the point of the article.
repomies691 7y ago
> 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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
AmericanChopper 7y ago
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”.
dmitripopov 7y ago
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.
strken 7y ago
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.

rubbingalcohol 7y ago

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.

vidarh 7y ago
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.
- rubbingalcohol 7y ago
  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.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    > 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."
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      They really did look better, it's just that the vast majority of people didn't think so. Sounds like someone who worked at all the wrong things to "improve" because they don't listen to feedback.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    > Undertale had really amateur art Not sure I can agree with that. Undertale had lo-fi art, but there was a lot of care put into it.
- user5994461 7y ago
  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.
eropple 7y ago
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".
- baud147258 7y ago
  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).
  - eropple 7y ago
    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.
    - djur 7y ago
      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.
ddingus 7y ago
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.

magashna 7y ago

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.

nimblegorilla 7y ago

> 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.

eropple 7y ago
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.
tripzilch 7y ago
He doesn't sound willing to take outside advice on visual aspects of his games.

Majromax 7y ago

> 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.

jayd16 7y ago
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.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  it's more of a taste problem than a budget problem, plenty games go low fi and are amusing both to play and look at, i.e. Celeste
  - Richard_East 7y ago
    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: https://store.steampowered.com/app/915490/Frontline_Zed/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/915490/Frontline_Zed/

baud147258 7y ago

>> 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.

reidrac 7y ago

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.

mighty_bander 7y ago

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.

johnnyanmac 7y ago

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.

pawelmurias 7y ago
It's worse than MS Paint.

skywhopper 7y ago

Sounds like you missed the point of the article.

repomies691 7y ago

> 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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

AmericanChopper 7y ago

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”.

dmitripopov 7y ago

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.

strken 7y ago

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.