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> good art doesn't necessarily need a lot of money or resources Having spent at least as much money, out of pocket, on a game that never shipped as JV spends t

> good art doesn't necessarily need a lot of money or resources Having spent at least as much money, out of pocket, on a game that never shipped as JV spends to ship something consistent that feeds his family, I can assure you that this is not the case. Art is far-and-away the most expensive part of any game that wants mass market appeal. It just is. It doesn't matter if you're using a bunch of freelancers from countries that lost all their vowels along the way, it's still expensive. The solution, then, is to build a long-tail audience that'll buy your stuff because it scratches that itch, even if it doesn't to people who are just window shopping. You know--what JV has done.

atoav 7y ago
I think you overread the "necessarily" part of my quote. Good art can cost a ton and it does so for a reason. I (among other things) worked as a freelance designer, so I know. What I meant however is that depending on the genre you might find solutions that you can do yourself far easier with equally good (or better) results. You could work with one-color abstract shapes and give them a good feel by using the right deformation and stick some eyes on them. Minimal styles can work in your favour at times etc. Filmmakers also use similar ideas – can't afford to show thing A? Let the protagonist tell us about it in a internal monologue and use it to your advantage. That kind of stuff. This approach obviously won't work for every game or genre, depending on the scope, but I didn't say it would.
- eropple 7y ago
  I didn't miss that "necessarily", I disregarded it as stakes-free theorycrafting. I know how much art costs and I know from personal experience how quickly art people flake if you aren't paying enough money to keep them in line. (Which is something people here take for granted amongst developers, but for some reason nobody else.) "Depending on the genre"--JV makes Ultima-alikes. So by this theorycrafting he should stop making the games that make him money because people like me will buy all of them so he can go make different games that might be more amenable to cheaper art and not have a built-in customer base that is highly consistent and predictable? JV makes his games the way he does because people like me already follow him and will buy them. His entire business model is built on not taking risks. What is the obsession around here with disregarding that?
  - atoav 7y ago
    Ah okay, that's where our misunderstanding stems from: to me JV is some guy who wrote a blog post and my statement was not meant as a response specifically to him, but as general advice to not choose a art style that is hard to implement given your existing means of production (be it your own time, skill or the money you have for hiring people). For you it was specifically about that one guy whose games you like as they are and I didn't mean to critizise them. The relativizations uttered by me like "depending on the genre" or "necessarily" were meant to act as hints, that I was talking in a more general sense here. Maybe what he wrote is great advice for other devs who create ultima-alikes, I can't really judge that.
  - jpindar 7y ago
    How much does it cost to flip a sprite so the light in a scene is all coming from the same direction?

atoav 7y ago

I think you overread the "necessarily" part of my quote. Good art can cost a ton and it does so for a reason. I (among other things) worked as a freelance designer, so I know. What I meant however is that depending on the genre you might find solutions that you can do yourself far easier with equally good (or better) results. You could work with one-color abstract shapes and give them a good feel by using the right deformation and stick some eyes on them. Minimal styles can work in your favour at times etc. Filmmakers also use similar ideas – can't afford to show thing A? Let the protagonist tell us about it in a internal monologue and use it to your advantage. That kind of stuff. This approach obviously won't work for every game or genre, depending on the scope, but I didn't say it would.

eropple 7y ago
I didn't miss that "necessarily", I disregarded it as stakes-free theorycrafting. I know how much art costs and I know from personal experience how quickly art people flake if you aren't paying enough money to keep them in line. (Which is something people here take for granted amongst developers, but for some reason nobody else.) "Depending on the genre"--JV makes Ultima-alikes. So by this theorycrafting he should stop making the games that make him money because people like me will buy all of them so he can go make different games that might be more amenable to cheaper art and not have a built-in customer base that is highly consistent and predictable? JV makes his games the way he does because people like me already follow him and will buy them. His entire business model is built on not taking risks. What is the obsession around here with disregarding that?
- atoav 7y ago
  Ah okay, that's where our misunderstanding stems from: to me JV is some guy who wrote a blog post and my statement was not meant as a response specifically to him, but as general advice to not choose a art style that is hard to implement given your existing means of production (be it your own time, skill or the money you have for hiring people). For you it was specifically about that one guy whose games you like as they are and I didn't mean to critizise them. The relativizations uttered by me like "depending on the genre" or "necessarily" were meant to act as hints, that I was talking in a more general sense here. Maybe what he wrote is great advice for other devs who create ultima-alikes, I can't really judge that.
- jpindar 7y ago
  How much does it cost to flip a sprite so the light in a scene is all coming from the same direction?