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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 te

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.
  - kcbanner 7y ago
    Working with purchased assets is not so simple; there is no consistent art direction when you buy things from different sources. This usually requires an artists to do a pass and make all these disparate assets work together. Simply saying "just buy cheap assets" completely misses the point here.
    - nimblegorilla 7y ago
      Everyone already acknowledges the current art has no consistent direction. It makes no sense to pay extra money for bespoke artwork that looks worse than what you can get by just going to what's already available.
  - eropple 7y ago
    Dude...have you ever tried to use OpenGameArt or asset packs in anger? The quality is at best "uneven", you'll still have the exact same "but they're inconsistent" complaints, and then on top of that you get people whining that you used off-the-shelf art. (Rather like "oh it's an RPG Maker" game, which is something that Zeboyd Games, another low-budget indie developer, gets all the time; they don't use RPG Maker, but that's another story). You can't make everybody happy. JV is going to more reliably make money by making his audience, like me, happy. Why should he change it?
    - nimblegorilla 7y ago

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.
- kcbanner 7y ago
  Working with purchased assets is not so simple; there is no consistent art direction when you buy things from different sources. This usually requires an artists to do a pass and make all these disparate assets work together. Simply saying "just buy cheap assets" completely misses the point here.
  - nimblegorilla 7y ago
    Everyone already acknowledges the current art has no consistent direction. It makes no sense to pay extra money for bespoke artwork that looks worse than what you can get by just going to what's already available.
- eropple 7y ago
  Dude...have you ever tried to use OpenGameArt or asset packs in anger? The quality is at best "uneven", you'll still have the exact same "but they're inconsistent" complaints, and then on top of that you get people whining that you used off-the-shelf art. (Rather like "oh it's an RPG Maker" game, which is something that Zeboyd Games, another low-budget indie developer, gets all the time; they don't use RPG Maker, but that's another story). You can't make everybody happy. JV is going to more reliably make money by making his audience, like me, happy. Why should he change it?
  - nimblegorilla 7y ago