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There is a big gap between "crap" and AAA for sure. But think about this (in today's time): * Half Life 2 looks like crap * Fallout 3 looks like crap * Actua

There is a big gap between "crap" and AAA for sure. But think about this (in today's time): * Half Life 2 looks like crap * Fallout 3 looks like crap * Actually any game from more than a few years back, looks like crap But any of those are hopelessly out of reach for any Indie developer even with today's tools. There is real AAA from earlier days, that still looks good these days, like: * Battlefield 3 * Crysis 2 * Call Of Duty Modern Warfare * etc. But these games have among the highest budget in history of game development and a respectable revenue stream... What the author is trying to say is that most people think most games looks like crap (I think so too). There is no point in making AA games (let's assume he didn't mean actual AAA games) as an Indie developer, because people will still think your game looks like crap. And those people who don't (I for instance really like SNES games still), will also be satisfied with the art he can create. Let's look at Anno 1602 vs. Anno 1800. This is more in the domain of the author. I really like both games and I have to say, Anno 1800 has AMAZING graphics. But the game gets boring after playing it one time to the Investor level... Anno 1602 has graphics that you can probably manage as an Indie developer these days (since you don't need to optimize it at all and have much better tooling). This game never gets old ;). I have more fun playing that one than Anno 1800. Which is another reason why AAA graphics is unneeded. You need shiny graphics if your game sucks. And creating games that suck is what todays AAA industry is all about.

cosarara 7y ago
Half Life doesn't look like crap. It looks dated. There is a huge gap between the way the OP's games look and how half life looks, because even though the 3D tech was worse and the textures lower res in half life, it had a proper art team behind it. A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for it. Fair enough. But just getting someone to look over the art all together and making it a bit more cohesive would be a huge improvement. The thing is, it seems he's paying different people to do different pieces and just putting it all together without any sense of direction. I think it's alright if you want to pay A to draw this and that, and then when A leaves pay B to draw this and that, but you should have B take a look at the tileset as a whole and ask him to make the pieces look alright together. Because right now it's a huge mess.
- Phrodo_00 7y ago
  Yeah, I think the biggest problem with his games (and I only know them from the screenshots) is in art direction. He compares it to Baba is You, and while that game's art is technically simple, its consistent aesthetic and style sells it. Meanwhile, in his screenshots, the visuals seem dated and inconsistent. I don't think it's a problem with the quality of the assets, but in art direction, and like he said, that's on the developer.
  - djur 7y ago
    When playing Avadon I recognized assets that were reused from the Exile series. Literally decades-old art. This is all minor stuff like leather gloves and other items, but it contributes to the lack of consistency.
- eropple 7y ago
  > A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for it. Can't. The word you're looking for here is can't. The unit economics of making the sorts of games that JV makes completely preclude it. It would be way easier to spend the money he doesn't make to get better art talent. This is true. It is also not very meaningful. And it's not that there is minimal sense of direction just for funsies--it's that you don't have that luxury when we're talking about the rates he's working at. I spent a decent amount of money, in the ballpark of what JV probably spends on third-party work for a game, trying to get freelancers--reasonably priced or, in reality, not so--to work towards a cohesive art style. That I did not ship that game (which is still in a 75%-ish complete state in my graveyard, it's my fuck-you-money project) is largely due to the difficulty of getting art to a standard I felt comfortable with. JV ships because that standard is lower than I was able to stomach. His games also happen to be really good, too.
  - nimblegorilla 7y ago
    > Can't. The word you're looking for here is can't. I think the real term is "Not Invented Here Syndrome". This site has thousands of open sourced game assets: https://opengameart.org https://opengameart.org Here is an asset pack of 65 fantasy icons for $5: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/icons/fantasy-rpg-icon-set-42707 https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/icons/fantasy-r... I suspect someone spending $200 and a day of searching could probably find most of the art needed for Queen's Wish. There's really no need for him to be hiring freelancers in the first place.
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
> people will still think your game looks like crap. And those people who don't (I for instance really like SNES games still), will also be satisfied with the art he can create. I like Spiderweb games, but most SNES games looked better than this. Some NES games looked better than this. You can have cheap, low-res art that is coherent and pleasing to the eye, but this isn't it.
- djur 7y ago
  He includes a picture of Ultima V for DOS, which looks better than his current games. Hell, he includes a picture of the original art for Exile, which IMO looked better than the later Exile III tileset (which was ported back to releases of Exile I). The problem with the aesthetics of his latest game is not resolution and it isn't that it's in a classic 2D tile-based style. That said, I see where he's coming from. The audience for games like his is very small, even when the graphics are good. I think he should add support for custom tilesets. It's common in the roguelike world, and at this point his audience is closer to the hobbyist/roguelike scene than the average indie studio.
  - neutronicus 7y ago
    Swapping out a tile set would have been pretty trivial on the old SW games on Windows (on Mac you had to meet with the Resource Fork). It was all just images in folders.
    - djur 7y ago
      I used to go and snag cool-looking NPC/monster graphics from the monster spritesheet and Blades of Exile scenarios and paste them into the PC spritesheet so I could use those graphics for my party members. I always really wanted BoE to support Vahnatai party members.
jayd16 7y ago
>But any of those are hopelessly out of reach for any Indie developer even with today's tools. This just isn't true. It only a question of money and/or time.
- johnnyanmac 7y ago
  Yes, I think that's exactly what that comment meant. I'm sure a 2 man experienced team consisting of a programer and an artist can recreate the vault intro sequence of F3 in a few months. They wouldn't be able to expand thst into the full 2007 game without years of man-hours. Because F3 itself took thousands of man hours. It'd take a lot less time with modern tools, but not enough to offset the work of hundreds of developers.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    You're not going to get hundreds of man hours of content for free but setting up Source or Unreal or Unity to get a modern engine with every feature those games had does not take months.
    - NateEag 7y ago
      An engine that's roughly equivalent, in absentia the actual games' data, is not remotely equivalent to those games.
      - jayd16 7y ago
        The same could be said for gameplay data though. My point is it isn't some insurmountable cliff. You get out what you put in.
        NateEag 7y ago
        And if it takes one person all that time to build the roughly-equivalent engine, that person does not have time to design and build the game's assets, nor design and playtest the levels. You do get out what you put in, but one person can only put in so much.
nothis 7y ago
I get a little annoyed at how graphics tech is often equated with art direction. Anno 1602 has matching colors, good contrast, perfectly proportioned tile art, consistent balance of detail and good lighting. Its mountains look majestic, its forests lush, its buildings picturesque. All things you could get if you spent money on letting someone actually do some art direction on the game rather than just commissioning concept art and sticking it on top of flat background textures.
a1369209993 7y ago
There's quite a fine line between "crap" and AAA actually, as evidenced by "any game from more than a few years back, looks like crap". And if you extend that line out to infinity, good art is on the crap side of it. AAA | ------+--------------------------------------+------ crap | | good AAA and crap have more in common with each other than with good art. Queen's Wish looks like Diablo-I-era AAA art, done poorly.

cosarara 7y ago

Half Life doesn't look like crap. It looks dated. There is a huge gap between the way the OP's games look and how half life looks, because even though the 3D tech was worse and the textures lower res in half life, it had a proper art team behind it. A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for it. Fair enough. But just getting someone to look over the art all together and making it a bit more cohesive would be a huge improvement. The thing is, it seems he's paying different people to do different pieces and just putting it all together without any sense of direction. I think it's alright if you want to pay A to draw this and that, and then when A leaves pay B to draw this and that, but you should have B take a look at the tileset as a whole and ask him to make the pieces look alright together. Because right now it's a huge mess.

Phrodo_00 7y ago
Yeah, I think the biggest problem with his games (and I only know them from the screenshots) is in art direction. He compares it to Baba is You, and while that game's art is technically simple, its consistent aesthetic and style sells it. Meanwhile, in his screenshots, the visuals seem dated and inconsistent. I don't think it's a problem with the quality of the assets, but in art direction, and like he said, that's on the developer.
- djur 7y ago
  When playing Avadon I recognized assets that were reused from the Exile series. Literally decades-old art. This is all minor stuff like leather gloves and other items, but it contributes to the lack of consistency.
eropple 7y ago
> A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for it. Can't. The word you're looking for here is can't. The unit economics of making the sorts of games that JV makes completely preclude it. It would be way easier to spend the money he doesn't make to get better art talent. This is true. It is also not very meaningful. And it's not that there is minimal sense of direction just for funsies--it's that you don't have that luxury when we're talking about the rates he's working at. I spent a decent amount of money, in the ballpark of what JV probably spends on third-party work for a game, trying to get freelancers--reasonably priced or, in reality, not so--to work towards a cohesive art style. That I did not ship that game (which is still in a 75%-ish complete state in my graveyard, it's my fuck-you-money project) is largely due to the difficulty of getting art to a standard I felt comfortable with. JV ships because that standard is lower than I was able to stomach. His games also happen to be really good, too.
- nimblegorilla 7y ago
  > Can't. The word you're looking for here is can't. I think the real term is "Not Invented Here Syndrome". This site has thousands of open sourced game assets: https://opengameart.org https://opengameart.org Here is an asset pack of 65 fantasy icons for $5: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/icons/fantasy-rpg-icon-set-42707 https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/icons/fantasy-r... I suspect someone spending $200 and a day of searching could probably find most of the art needed for Queen's Wish. There's really no need for him to be hiring freelancers in the first place.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago

> people will still think your game looks like crap. And those people who don't (I for instance really like SNES games still), will also be satisfied with the art he can create. I like Spiderweb games, but most SNES games looked better than this. Some NES games looked better than this. You can have cheap, low-res art that is coherent and pleasing to the eye, but this isn't it.

djur 7y ago
He includes a picture of Ultima V for DOS, which looks better than his current games. Hell, he includes a picture of the original art for Exile, which IMO looked better than the later Exile III tileset (which was ported back to releases of Exile I). The problem with the aesthetics of his latest game is not resolution and it isn't that it's in a classic 2D tile-based style. That said, I see where he's coming from. The audience for games like his is very small, even when the graphics are good. I think he should add support for custom tilesets. It's common in the roguelike world, and at this point his audience is closer to the hobbyist/roguelike scene than the average indie studio.
- neutronicus 7y ago
  Swapping out a tile set would have been pretty trivial on the old SW games on Windows (on Mac you had to meet with the Resource Fork). It was all just images in folders.
  - djur 7y ago
    I used to go and snag cool-looking NPC/monster graphics from the monster spritesheet and Blades of Exile scenarios and paste them into the PC spritesheet so I could use those graphics for my party members. I always really wanted BoE to support Vahnatai party members.

jayd16 7y ago

>But any of those are hopelessly out of reach for any Indie developer even with today's tools. This just isn't true. It only a question of money and/or time.

johnnyanmac 7y ago
Yes, I think that's exactly what that comment meant. I'm sure a 2 man experienced team consisting of a programer and an artist can recreate the vault intro sequence of F3 in a few months. They wouldn't be able to expand thst into the full 2007 game without years of man-hours. Because F3 itself took thousands of man hours. It'd take a lot less time with modern tools, but not enough to offset the work of hundreds of developers.
- jayd16 7y ago
  You're not going to get hundreds of man hours of content for free but setting up Source or Unreal or Unity to get a modern engine with every feature those games had does not take months.
  - NateEag 7y ago
    An engine that's roughly equivalent, in absentia the actual games' data, is not remotely equivalent to those games.
    - jayd16 7y ago
      The same could be said for gameplay data though. My point is it isn't some insurmountable cliff. You get out what you put in.
      - NateEag 7y ago
        And if it takes one person all that time to build the roughly-equivalent engine, that person does not have time to design and build the game's assets, nor design and playtest the levels. You do get out what you put in, but one person can only put in so much.

nothis 7y ago

I get a little annoyed at how graphics tech is often equated with art direction. Anno 1602 has matching colors, good contrast, perfectly proportioned tile art, consistent balance of detail and good lighting. Its mountains look majestic, its forests lush, its buildings picturesque. All things you could get if you spent money on letting someone actually do some art direction on the game rather than just commissioning concept art and sticking it on top of flat background textures.

a1369209993 7y ago

There's quite a fine line between "crap" and AAA actually, as evidenced by "any game from more than a few years back, looks like crap". And if you extend that line out to infinity, good art is on the crap side of it. AAA | ------+--------------------------------------+------ crap | | good AAA and crap have more in common with each other than with good art. Queen's Wish looks like Diablo-I-era AAA art, done poorly.