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Comment by jplayer01 | Hacker News Reader

> When I say Jeff needs an art director I mean that Jeff needs to care about art direction and that making a good looking game with his existing constraints is perfectly feasible.

Then say that instead of "Jeff needs an art director", which literally means that Jeff needs an art director. Which means another employee. It doesn't mean "Jeff needs to be an art director". Which he is, but results in the current situation where his games have the art they have, people complain, he writes an article explaining, and people like you criticize him for reasonable justification for why things are the way things are.

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It is a circular problem:

When you care about art, you usually got some sense of aesthetics and feel more likely unable to bring yourself to ship anything that looks simply bad to yourself.

When you don't got the eyes to see bad art as what it is, you also won't see it as a problem that really needs fixing so you care less about it than is good for you.

You have to strike a balance there. Games are visual independend of the style. Yes you play them – but before you even decide to pick a game up, you see screenshots, trailers or game-play-videos. If that doesn't look interesting, you can have the most interesing gameplay in the universe and it wouldn't sell.

A bit like in films, where the best script can be destroyed by bad acting or the best acting can be destroyed by bad scripts as a passionate creator you have to realize that this is a serious issue.

Amateur filmmakers might figure out directing techniques to get top notch acting out of people who never stood in front of a camera before or they might search very patiently till somebody crosses their way who is a natural talent.

The thing is to precisely know your limitations and do the best you can do within them, sometimes even by not copying the best, but by finding glorious short cuts that sometimes create whole new genres.

> When you don't got the eyes to see bad art as what it is,

... then you will also be very bad at hiring a good art director. You could easily end up hiring somebody who is really bad and you wouldn't know.

Even with all the money that Microsoft had in the 90'ies, they couldn't make Windows look good.

I agree that Microsoft's visual design usually leaves a lot to be desired, but I think at one point in the 90s they did succeed for a brief moment – with Windows 95. Compared to its contemporaries like Motif and OS/2 it looks really slick and elegant. (Of course, from the "design is how it works" angle, it's a pretty poor imitation of OS/2's Workplace Shell.)

Jeff needs an art director doesn't imply anything more than that. It could be him, it could be another full time employee or it could be something he has a freelancer develop at the start of the project.

And it seems like he focused more on making sure that his artists were replaceable, even at the price of a hodge-podge style. The criticism is legitimate - it doesn't seem like Jeff has invested in his own ability to direct art.

Yeah and because art has vastly different constraints from coding, wanting to swap out artists is just counterproductive.

Then again, the older I get, the more I think the same should apply to developers. You should never lock knowledge inside one person's head, but the idea that you can take over a project without its original creators doing a years long hand off is naive, and leads to all the expected pathologies.

I remember a new $250k CTO saying he was amazed our code didn't have abandoned parts nobody wanted to touch ... this is how professionals are supposed to work, not something they discover "late" in their career.

> Yeah and because art has vastly different constraints from coding, wanting to swap out artists is just counterproductive.

It's actually really common. Most games take years to make and in my experience at least it's very unusual to ship with the same team that started. Art is also the side of things that most readily gets outsourced, either through bought and modified assets or through freelancers and outsourcing companies. Maintaining consistency is something that has to be managed.

> wanting to swap out artists is just counterproductive

You're saying this like this was one of his design goals from the very beginning when he started 25 years ago. No, it's become a requirement because of how unreliable freelancers can be and how difficult it is to find a replacement that is able or willing to stick to the previous style. Thus generic fantasy stuff has become his solution to this issue that is unavoidable, regardless of whether people agree with him or not.

Perhaps. Or maybe freelance artists are frustrated working with someone who doesn't seem to understand what they like to see in good work, and what gives them a sense of satisfaction in a product they have worked on.

I mean the guy seems incapable of comprehending style if this is what he's putting out 25 years in.

Maybe. Doesn't change the position he's in though. Let's say he is incapable of comprehending style. What do you suggest he's supposed to do now?

I see all this criticism here and I don't see any real solutions that would, on a realistic, concrete level, help him in any way improve his business.

I don't really see the problem. If you're not a visual person, and you don't want to be, you shouldn't make visual decisions. He's already hiring freelancers, so he obviously gets this point. The problem is, he should just give a freelancer a broader brief. Like, 'pick all the colours the game will use'. Or even, 'do the art'. I don't see what the difference is between hiring a freelancer to do direction, and hiring somebody to do a couple of sprites.

Direction is usually a continuous process. Freelancers, as he states, are rarely continuous as they move on to other project etc.

It's common in the advertising world for a company to be paid to produce a design document, that specifies stuff like writing style, colours, photograph guidelines, and so on. The idea is to create a guide for making media that fits the brand. Doesn't need to be complicated - from what I saw of his games, it would be a night-and-day improvement if he just had a decent palette.

I think everyone is missing the point. This was not a call for help. It was an explanation of why things are the way they are and why they will not change. Guy's found a way to make a living with the skillset he has and I say power to him.

> I mean the guy seems incapable of comprehending style if this is what he's putting out 25 years in.

It looks worse than his previous games, so he's gotten worse with time.

Jeff has an art director. And he likes what that art director produces. You don't, but he does.

I don't disagree with that at all and of course Jeff will do what he wants and is welcome to that. I just think the art direction is the encompassing unaddressed point that follows through the article despite the enumerated constraints. Also where he does touch on art direction the things he chooses to highlight are not why his games look bad. Particularly when he highlights games he grew up with like Ultima V which IMO still looks great despite being made with the constraints that existed in 1988. I'm also well aware that it hasn't prevented him running a successful business.

I don't think his liking his games art is a reason not to comment with my take on his blog post about it though.

But what I think you're missing is that in order to have an art director who is capable of delivering on what you're talking about, Jeff would need another person. And he clearly explains why he does not want to risk hiring another person.

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