Great piece, but it comes off as a misdirected attempt at a defense when you look at the actual images from their game. The characters look amazing in isolation

Great piece, but it comes off as a misdirected attempt at a defense when you look at the actual images from their game. The characters look amazing in isolation, but thrown into that horribly flat homogeneous board with the ugly interface components in clashing colors with harsh edges and it all just looks completely off. And if they truly were not aiming at retro what’s up with the horrible 80ies gradient font that clashes as well? And yes I’d describe it as pixelated, because it doesn’t look like this is intentional on the interface, it looks like a bad compression of a thrown in overlay by someone who recently started playing around with photoshop. With so much effort spent individually on the characters it’s confusing why the end product looks that bad. My first instinct is that it feels like a case of having an amazing artist on the characters and a new inexperienced artist in the interface and board, with no intercommunication and an inexperienced manager overseeing both just going “the interface with nothing in it looks ok” “The characters on a blank background look ok” “let’s ship”. It’s not enough that individual parts look good when you focus on them. You need the sum-product to look great and that means the visual styles and elements need to fit together. That just does not seem to be the case for Auro. With the great focus on character art and animation by the author In the article it makes you wonder if the interface was just an afterthought to them.