I Am the Cheapest Bastard in Indie Games
jeff-vogel.blogspot.com
jeff-vogel.blogspot.com
You are game devs. You are Jeff's peers. You are not representative of his customer base.
Did it ever occur to the critics that Jeff's customers may not actually value the quality of artwork in his games all that much? At least not as much as the storytelling.
Even more importantly is staying consistent with what fans expect. It is called "branding", geniuses. If Jeff all of a sudden released a game with an artsy fartsy style, he'd be gambling his future. He might end up alienating his existing customer base by not giving them what they've come to expect, and his experiment may not work for acquiring new customers.
I am sick of armchair critics. Jeff has been doing this for a long time, and longer than all of these know-it-alls. Your opinions mean nothing. His repeated success does.
It is rare for any indie developer to be making any kind of "a living" from making games. The fact that Jeff does already makes him exceptional.
As a gamer, I could care less about whatever rubbish being claimed about his "technique" and "craftsmanship". His games are entertaining, unique, and better than most indies in my eyes.
It's not that rare. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025672/2014-vs-2018-The-Shape This talk goes over how many games are doing extremely well at any point in time on Steam alone and it's actually hundreds of games. It's mostly a function of time and persistence for any individual developer and given that Steam has only been around for indies in a big way for about 8 years we'll start seeing more and more indie devs making a living over time.
>As a gamer, I could care less about whatever rubbish being claimed about his "technique" and "craftsmanship"
That's great, but your post complained about the actions of other developers towards him. I explained, from the perspective of a developer, why I received his message negatively. It's a message of mediocrity in an important aspect of the craft and it shows his lack of care for it. I couldn't care less about what gamers think, gamers aren't around me when I'm spending 10 hours a day every day in front of the computer coding. To make games you have to love the craft, and I won't think highly of peers who show no interest in the craft itself.
Also, who are you to be the judge of one's technique and craftsmanship?
Apparently enough people enjoy Jeff's technique and craftsmanship to continue buying his games. And that's all that matters.
I think we're just talking past each other. I'm explicitly saying that from a developer's perspective that's precisely not all that matters. From your perspective as a non-game developer you're right, but if you're going to address game developers and say that they're wrong you should consider their perspectives as well.
That is a pretty presumptuous thing to say about someone who has made a life making games which are loved by his fans. What's the skin off your back that this guy has different priorities for what he likes in games than you do? Why is it ok for games to lack a good story but not ok for them to lack good art?
As for priorities, people can have different priorities, but there are a few basics that in my opinion anyone can improve at with minimal effort as long as they try. Developing an aesthetic sense for what works together on a screen and what doesn't is one of those things. It's clear this guy hasn't bothered with this and in my view that makes him a mediocre game developer, which is a kind of developer that I will not look up to if I want to improve.
>Why is it ok for games to lack a good story but not ok for them to lack good art?
This can be a very long discussion but art is the one thing that is immediately visible to anyone. In some ways it's the most important aspect of a game. I don't have the same views on code that I have on art, for instance. With code you can get away with very poor practices and you can be very pragmatic about it because bad code is not nearly as visible as bad art.
Calling his art bad is not presumptuous. Saying his has "extremely poor technique and care for the craft" is.
> in my view that makes him a mediocre game developer, which is a kind of developer that I will not look up to if I want to improve.
You may not want to make games that look like those he makes, but that doesn't mean there isn't something (probably quite a lot) you could learn from him about integrating mechanics and world design.
> In some ways it's the most important aspect of a game.
Visual art may be critical to a game reaching widespread success.
However, as someone who spent a large part of their youth ensconced in MUDs, I disagree whole heartedly that (visual) art is needed to make a good game.
Personally I think that both are okay. Even more so when someone seems to be doing such a good job on one of the aspect.
What's not okay is going around and arguing that you just can't do better than that. He could do better, he just don't care and I repeat, it's alright to not care.
His older post was disrespectful to all people that do take pride in what they do and want to improve it.
Maybe he can't do better than that? Maybe not everyone can get good enough at art to make decent looking modern games on a tight budget? Using contractors well requires artistic skills so that doesn't solve the problem.
And don't come with the bullshit "Everyone can become great at X, it just takes practice, see I sucked once and now I'm great!". Sure you will never be great at something without practice, but it doesn't just take practice it takes a level of talent as well. Some people are just doomed to be mediocre at some things.
> His older post was disrespectful to all people that do take pride in what they do and want to improve it.
No it wasn't. It was about him not being able to make better art on his budget. Not about others not being able to make better art with similar budgets.
That's absurd. It doesn't require artistic skills, all it require is trusting them to do a good job. There's plenty of ways to confirms they are good at what they do.
> It was about him not being able to make better art on his budget.
The thing is, he can do better art with his budget, he just don't want to and don't need to.
He said it himself multiple time that he don't want to invest time in that. He said it himself in this new post that his latest game was much longer to complete because he invested MONTHS in a new engine.
He can do it, he just won't.
He currently uses contractors. What exactly are you arguing? That he is bad at using contractors, but that lack of skill is separate from his lack of skill in art?
> The thing is, he can do better art with his budget,
How? I am sure he would love to have better art at no cost, so please explain these mysterious methods.
He use contractors to do his graphics, not to do the art direction. He choose how to do them, when to do them and how much effort to put in all of them.
> How? I am sure he would love to have better art at no cost, so please explain these mysterious methods.
I already say it on the following paragraph.
> He said it himself in this new post that his latest game was much longer to complete because he invested MONTHS in a new engine.
Based on his budget, that's quite a bit of money spend for that. It would be easy to take some of that money from his budget and instead invest it on art.
That's also not considering that he most probably pay more than needed for some of its graphics.
The fact that he think it's worthwhile to invest months into a new engine show why an art director will help greatly. As a developer, he knows how building an engine is an investment that will gains more in the long term. In art, he clearly doesn't know much and don't want to know more by is own admission. He don't know what deserve more budget, what deserve less, what can be done to get a good look for less. Another comments gave a link to a picture of someone that did a few tweaks to one of its screenshots and it was already so much better. It was mostly color corrections.
There's so much he could do, that he doesn't. It's not that he can't, it just that he won't.
Again I'll repeat myself from many others comments, there's nothing wrong with not wanting to get better arts (at best it's sad to see that its stories won't be seen by as many people, but that's not a requirement at all). The only thing I believe is wrong is that he act like it's not his choice, that he legitimately can do nothing about it.
Well, someone who made this:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/760330/BYTEPATH/?curator_...
Shouldn't speak so derisively of Jeff's graphics.
This looks like a mediocre attempt of poor craftmanship and amateur graphics. It looks like a paint-over over something like Thrust with crude basic artwork...
See how it cuts both ways?
What's worse, unlike Jeff's games, where the gameplay and story are the important parts, this even has tired old mechanics and a trite shooter gameplay.
>See how it cuts both ways?
Not really. I haven't been in the industry for 25 years and I haven't written articles excusing my game's poor visual quality. I'm aware of my abilities and I'm constantly working on improving them. For instance, you can see the current game I'm working on here https://twitter.com/adnzzzzZ and generally people are responding better to its visuals than they did for my previous game.
If you find me 20 years from now making the same types of games and writing articles about how my games look bad and how it's actually all intentional then maybe you'll have an argument.
No, just comments pissing on the work of others, who have managed to be in the industry for 25 years.
I don't get how somebody who does this:
https://twitter.com/adnzzzzZ/status/1148009596801507329
Gets to complain about the graphics in Jeff's games.
>If you find me 20 years from now making the same types of games and writing articles about how my games look bad and how it's actually all intentional then maybe you'll have an argument.
What if I don't find you 20 years from now, because you didn't make it and quitted the industry?
If someone manages to do something for 25 years they're somehow immune from criticism? I don't think that follows.
>I don't get how somebody who does this: >Gets to complain about the graphics in Jeff's games.
People generally decide to get into a craft like game development because they think they can do it better than what exists out there. This sense is what guides you and what keeps you moving forward. But there's a gap between your sense of what is good and what you can actually create with your current abilities. And this gap can only be diminished by working and creating new things all the time. It takes time and patience.
I'm constantly in the process of improving my abilities and I'm happy with my progress. I know where I am and where I want to go. But when I see another developer simply say that they have given up on this process in some fundamental way I will view that with disdain because I see it as a failure, which it is.
So, you get a free pass at crude graphics because you're "constantly in the process of improving" and will "get better in the future", but veteran developers, with fans, many titles, and 25-year old careers don't, even though they have perfectly good (not to mention objective and spelt out in 2 posts) reasons for not investing in better graphics, and their whole genre is not about graphics but gameplay/story anyway.
This is Dunning-Kruger meets entitlement meets rudeness.
Certainly Jeff’s customers don’t value art too highly – or else they wouldn’t be Jeff’s customers! It’s a self-selected group. The real question is how many potential customers pass over his games because of the graphics.
Yes, the only way to answer that question would be for Jeff to make a big gamble. It makes perfect sense for him to not want to take such a risk. That doesn’t mean we can’t speculate about whether he would win that gamble if he made it. :)
Or the Earth Defense Force games. I think once you get loyalty to a series, if anything change is a net negative. There's a lot more to go wrong than go right. Gamers are conservative by nature; if it works, keep playing it
Jeff's games do not have that same air of quality. It's not just about techniques or style, it's about artistry.
Personally, that's fine. I value a game much, much more for its gameplay than its graphics. But that is certainly not true for the market at large.
And even for myself, if a game doesn't put in the effort to have good art, I assume they didn't put in the effort for the gameplay easier, as its a lot easier to buy good art than good gameplay design.
People do judge books by their covers, and Jeff isn't acknowledging that.
Having said all that, if I ever played any of his games, it was forever ago. I've looked at them and haven't seen or read anything that makes them stand out. People sometimes say they're great, but they never say anything that makes them sound special.
im talking white text on a black background.
the gameplay was and always will be much more important than the graphics.
There's 13 people listed as working on graphics. That's legitimately pretty small for professional games... but it's still huge compared to what Spiderweb can afford.
Thing is, the target market for his games is not "the average gamer".
Sure I am. I buy and play a lot of indie games. My steam and PS4 libraries have hundreds of Indie games in them. The vast majority are pixel art or other low budget graphics. I commented in the previous thread saying that I don’t require fancy or expensive art. Hell, I’m perfectly cool with programmer art, but it needs consistency in style, colour and lighting. His art isn’t terrible, but its also not great and I actually did pass over some of his games in the past because the look just felt a little off.
The ones who buy these games are the people not turned off by the “style, color and lighting” deficiencies.
I looked at his games for the first time after the earlier post and am also not representative of his customer base.
This isn't a complaint, really - I have plenty to fill my time - just surfacing my experience. The art has never been an issue.
These days, though, I prefer the iPad versions when available.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
That said, I would not fault the makers of Planetary Annihilation for prioritizing bugs according to the size of their customer bases.
Maybe. And more to the point, even if it were often viable it might not be in a particular case, and the developers likely have a better sense of that then I do. Which is one part of why I'm not complaining.
> Planetary Annihilation made a Linux version and despite representing only <0.1% of sales Linux users accounted for >20% of bug reports[0]. That's pretty damning.
Damning of what?
Daming of the economics? Those numbers could hold despite it being tremendously profitable - it depends on how many bug reports there are relative to sales, how much you're spending per bug report, etc. It's fundamentally looking at the wrong thing. What portion of Linux users had issues? If it's high, maybe that's a big reason you didn't get more Linux sales.
Damning of the platform? Insofar as it's the fault of the platform. It's true that there's fragmentation. It's also true that less effort is often put into the Linux ports, and there are nonetheless plenty of games that I can play without problems.
Damning of Linux gamers? Submitting a bug report is a virtue, not a vice.
Damning of the developers? I don't think that's what you were saying.
Go on one of the colour palette generators and create a colour palette to stick to for each level. Or use one of those photo to colour palette tools. He doesn’t have to learn about colours himself, he can rely on the tools to get him a palette.
Pick a position for the sun/light source and draw shadows on the opposite side of objects consistently.
His style is already consistent enough so those two would probably be all he needs to do.
Then again, if he’s happy with his sales figures and doesn’t need to expand into the almost-customers then fine, it’s his game and his call after all.
"Picking out a few colors" is not something that's easy if you are not an experienced artist.
Sure, he could probably learn to do it, if he spent some time learning how to do it, but he needs to budget his time, and he decided that story / gameplay is more important than fancy graphics.
You only expand sales if you have the money/time to invest in doing the things to expand your sales. And even then, it's a risk (they might not expand).
I am not surprised and there are certainly more people like you. The issue is that, as he says:
> I am still super-bad at art. Always have been.
He knows his writing and game design can sell games. It is totally reasonable for him to stick to his strengths.
It would be nice to see better support for custom tilesets / assets built into his games, but that also takes time / money.
I've been buying Spiderweb Software games since the Exile: Escape from the Pit shareware days.
For instance, he mentioned their games were popular with folks who were blind or couldn't see well. They'd focus on non-visual aspects more than visual. There's another crowd that likes the visual style of the game. Then, there might be some that don't like it but like it's other aspects. What the spread is on this would have a major impact on whether investing in better graphics would increase sales. They'd lose a bunch of money for nothing if the first, two categories were majority of buyers.
That was a joke. (He was implying that his customers must be blind to not realize how ugly the game was.) His games are all turn-based, tile-based RPGs with a heavy emphasis on combat and exploration -- they're completely unplayable without vision.
I am pretty sure the critics are not so much other game developers. It's armchair developers and people who don't actually sell games for a living.
Indie game developers that make a living from their games have a huge tendency to give other developers the benefit of the doubt.
I don't think people get that making something a little less sucky doesn't really result in appreciable sales. Even if he improves the graphics a little, it's still going to be a dated text-heavy PC RPG that is based on a certain time. Like, if you don't enjoy retro styling, the difference between a game like The End is Nigh and Iconcolasts isn't really going to draw you in, nor would End's simpler graphics be an issue. Maybe a huge stylistic increase like Hollow Knight might though.
Coherent art would cost him more than 3 times his current art budget.
You can't argue with that!
> Your opinions mean nothing. his success does.
The opinion of the consumer is everything, and... graphics are easily the most important element of a game. This is just obvious common sense, even if game devs don't want to admit it. And posting a screen shot of dwarf fortress doesn't disprove that. If DF had graphics and a normal UI, it would have been a minecraft level success, even with the insane amount of bugs it has.
Graphics are the most important element of a game for you, perhaps. Nethack's tile sets all make the game worse than its ASCII version.
Actually I'd say that not only they're not "representative of his customer base", but they're also not game devs.
Most people complaining are unrelated to the industry (devs, but not game devs, graphic designers, etc), and don't understand the costs and tradeoffs.
I also see a game dev badmouthing Jeff's graphics in the comments here, when theirs are equally if not more crude.
No one is talking about "artsy fartsy", whatever that means (are Jeff's RPG stories "roley poley"?); they are talking about coherent colors and style and uncluttered non-distracting layout. Many/most successful indie games look decent not ugly, and not "artsy fartsy".
> His repeated success does.
Nobody is questioning that at all. What we were questioning was his last post.
He was trying to justify not making better art using wrong reasons. The only reason he actually had was "I don't want to invest time into finding someone good with art and the market I want to target doesn't care for it either", but didn't want to say that.
This new post isn't better, he push even further, pushing with even bolder claims, $150000-180000 for an artist? Sure... At least he confirm how he works and that explains why the art is so bad.
This guy is clearly a genius in game design and development, it's sad that it's spend alone like that micromanaging the art, but at the end of the day, what matters is that he does what he likes and that's fine.
What's not fine is him that art isn't worth it, that it would means everything will go down, etc... while it's just that he don't care about it and neither does his market.
> You are game devs. You are Jeff's peers. You are not representative of his customer base.
You don't really think any of the people criticizing him online are game devs with a track record as long as his, do you? People falling into that very, very small category know exactly why he operates as he does, the niche his games fill, the financial tradeoffs involved, and so on.
In the previous thread, someone made a good point - his newer games, with more resources spent on them, look worse than the old ones. Someone else applied pixelization/palletization to the screenshot of his new game, and the degraded quality made it look better: https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg
Of course neither point is addressed, and he keeps pretending that the only way to improve is to expend more resources.
As also pointed out in the previous discussion, that's because he simply doesn't have an eye for art. He compares his game to the consistent-and-pleasant-to-look-at Baba Is You, because he can't see the difference, and so he doesn't even see there's a problem to be solved. We might as well try to explain the difference between blue and red to a blind person. That's why he can show a picture of dwarf fortress without realizing it looks better than his game. Going for a Caves of Qud look would also probably save him money - but he simply can't see that it looks better.
>he simply doesn't have an eye for art
and
>he keeps pretending that the only way to improve is to expend more resources.
But he says:
>By the way, for people who asked me why I don't just learn to do better art myself, this is why. To learn to do better art, I'd need to spend at least 6-12 months. (To think it takes less is insulting to artists.) I just don't have the time to not be writing games.
It seems correct that for him to develop an eye for art, would require him to expend resources.
How is he supposed to develop an eye for art? Listen to all the comments on his posts? I don't think so, random internet comments are rarely a good source of advice. Developing a taste for art that will actually improve his games will take time and study and possibly even trial and error. And applying that taste once it's developed will take even more time. And it seems totally plausible to me that he can't afford to spend those resources.
His argument is very specific to his own situation. But it seems likely to be correct about his own situation.
I'm not sure he can develop an eye for art, however. He writes "To learn to do better art" - but it's not the doing that's the problem, but the seeing. How do you teach a sense of aesthetics? It seems to me more a matter of taste - you find a picture pleasing, or not. You may be able to learn why you find it pleasing, but the subjective experience itself is not a product of any kind of knowledge.
You need to start from first principles, though. In music this is done eg by learning to logically develop independent harmonically coherent voices (rather than thinking in “chords”).
I'm not familiar with Jeff's code, but I do work in game development, and something like this would likely be a huge undertaking, and would affect pretty much every aspect of the game.
Optimisation #0 for loading times is compress a gigantic pile of stuff into a giant binary blob, and index it at runtime. Undoing that to support custom content would be a huge time investment on any of the games I've worked on.
That's such a strawman. He doesn't need to be a top-tier artist. He just needs to know enough to not suck at art. Diminishing returns means that he could spend much less time than that.
> That's such a strawman. He doesn't need to be a top-tier artist. He just needs to know enough to not suck at art. Diminishing returns means that he could spend much less time than that.
Becoming a top-tier artist takes much longer even when the talent is there (intuitively, I would say a decade). The 6-12 months of intensive learning that Jeff Vogel claims seems to me a good estimate for the time that is required not to suck at art.
It won't take 6-12 months. Maybe an hour?
But what he needs is to understand a few simple principles he can apply by rote. This is much easier and quicker.
- The width of his grids are inconsistent. It looks like crap because he somtimes uses a gradient only on one side. Either make your lines single-pixeled or force gradients on both sides of a line.
- Talking about gradients, his fog of war could use some, that's where you want it, not on the abstract lines.
- The labels "Blessing" "Haste" overlap and create an ugly black line when they do.
- Actually having two labels of characters next to each other overlapping is bad design, not art related. A bit of thinking could probably solve it (replace it with small icons? Change the font for something smaller, typically a non-serif font? use a color code + mouse-over instead?)
But I have been there, thinking I was hopelessly art-blind and unable to improve the quality of my graphics. I just want to address one of the fallacies I used to fall for:
> To learn to do better art, I'd need to spend at least 6-12 months. (To think it takes less is insulting to artists.) I just don't have the time to not be writing games.
He does not need to do better art to make his games look better. He needs to spend a few days doing GFX improvement. The first time I indulged in not adding features to a 3D project I am doing but at solving the various graphic incoherence I saw (solving that transparency bug, finding a better skybox, tinkering with the lighting) after one day, that looked like a totally different program.
Oh, and another one as well:
"So, if I'm lucky, I get this pillar done for $50. Yay! One terrain type down. 999 more to go. But for Queen's Wish, I want 4 different pillars, to give distinct looks to four different cultures."
That's not being the "Cheapest Bastard In Indie Games". The trick in indie game is to reuse and remix as much as possible. Adding a sprite, changing the palette or the lighting, can easily give different styles to the same sprite. These are tricks that were used widely through all history of video games. Making 250 tiles and multiplying it by the number of cultures you have seems like a waste, especially when you admit that your game looks like crap. How adding more variety of crap will make it less crappier? Focus on other things!
Which is exactly why the CEO of Ubisoft has quite an eye for art (he actually may have an eye for art, but my point is he don't have to...).
You can hire someone to do this, even part time, you can find someone to collaborate with that can do it too.
His arguments aren't correct argument. His actual argument is that he don't care and don't want to have better art. That's all.
He didn’t write this blog post to address any of the criticisms; this guy comes across as a “my way or the highway” kind of guy (and hey, if he’s successful in business, good for him).
But he found a topic that makes people want to comment and upvote a lot, giving him tons of exposure, so he would be silly to not keep milking that as much as he can.
That’s something we all should be wary of.
http://www.ironycentral.com/scorchedearth.html
Keep on truckin’, Jeff.
Even then, it's not like prolific game developers are excused from this or that by reputation alone. I don't remember Peter Molyneux coming out smelling of roses after that Kickstarter thing; just one blip in a lifetime of a prodigal career can be very damaging.
I'm not saying that example and Jeff's posts are even remotely comparable, I just wanted to make the point.
What I'm saying is that "Molyneux" is a rather uncommon name and that the bad fame of Stefan (for those not in the know, someone whose I hope are not true) might be rubbing off on Peter.
Stranger things have happened.
I can only speak for myself, but assuming the bottom SS is the real one, it looks the best to me.
My main problem with his games is that the interface feels clunky.
The middle one changes the meaning of the green liquid next to the building. The original uses a bright saturated green, which is the standard visual code for "harmful to touch" (e.g. acid or radioactive waste). The modified version merely looks like dirty water. I haven't played the game so I don't know which is correct.
I can’t tell which of those is supposed to be the “better” and which is the “worse.”
Which I suppose goes to show that this isn’t an issue for everyone
That said, there are some things that are improved. The inconsistent shadows and harsh differences in level of detail are very clear in the bottom one and not so much in the top one.
So I'm with you, I can guess which one is the original, but I couldn't pick a "better" one.
I think that's pretty illustrative of Jeff's point actually. I, for one, can barely see any difference at all between these images and none of them look particularly "better" to me than the others.
The most cogent criticism of the original post, I think, was that he was conflating cheap art with bad art. You can (and some indies do) have very cheap lo-fi art that still looks good in context. He does not, which is fine, because it is hard.
His response to the critics was basically to double down on conflating cheap and bad. Which is a bit odd! How many times can you include a screenshot of a game with cheap, minimal (or even zero!) art that people still think looks good, and complain that people like how those games but not yours, and not realise that maybe there's something that sets them apart?
Again, it's not the quality of the art, it's the overall aesthetic, and that does not require buying more art, buying better art, or learning to do better art personally. Angband and ADOM are lovely games that do not have a pixel of art (or didn't originally, at any rate; I guess there's tilesets now or something?), and I'd a dozen times rather stare at ADOM than at one of Vogel's games.
That being said, he's still ultimately right. He is a one man shop, he has an established fan base, he's turning a profit, he's doing fine. He's quite right that hiring an artist (or maybe more relevantly, an art director) to try and fix the art problem is an unreasonable gamble. So...just stand up and own it. They're ugly games, the end. He's been very successful; he doesn't need to defend himself.
Some devs make very pretty games with terrible story and gameplay, and that's fine. They don't need to post rambling defences about how their game is really just like Dwarf Fortress if you just squint hard enough. Not every game has to be good at everything!
You are conflating lo-fi art with cheap and/or bad lo-fi art. "Cheap lo-fi art that looks good" is not a thing, because the talent that can make something lo-fi also look good and, more importantly, provide good art direction for an extensive project is not cheap.
We are not talking a screen full of pixels or two. These games would require thousands upon thousands of art tiles, that all aim for a distinguishable, consistent and unique in overall style.
As you said, it's hard. That makes it expensive, in either time or money, or both.
Dwarf Fortress was literally an exhibit in MOMA; it can look downright beautiful, despite being nothing but ASCII letters in different shades of colors:
https://www.moma.org/media/W1siZiIsIjI1NTc0MSJdLFsicCIsImNvb...
And I would say you are conflating art with design/art direction. :)
> We are not talking a screen full of pixels or two. These games would require thousands upon thousands of art tiles, that all aim for a distinguishable, consistent and unique in overall style.
I mean, one of the examples given was ADOM: https://i.imgur.com/d0RpSnY.png
There's a lot of ways of solving this particular problem.
I saw some people suggesting this last time, but I actually found the games referenced looked worse than his games.
I mean, you tell me...
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/691830/ss_d499ccc...
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O4qcf4H_x1k/XWRVHrVMvII/AAAAAAAAB...
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IBv08R44oKE/XWRSJefoKxI/AAAAAAAAB...
Stuff like this is pure opinion.
Especially if you compare to say, his latest Avernum series, I find this is the case. Personally, I'm kind of sick of pixel art and I find his style generally pretty good, if occasionally a little inconsistent, it doesn't distract from gameplay. Many of the referenced screenshots are against this upcoming title which has gone to a different style, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes.
Undertale has really basic art in certain sections (like in the provided screenshot), but it really ups the detail in a lot of areas (especially certain boss fights) that again, make it look modern and better then the authors games.
The trouble with those effects is that they run at high resolution, which calls attention to the low resolution of rest of the art. I much prefer a consistent art style like Shovel Knight (still the best looking modern pixel-art game IMO), where it's all low resolution. Celeste also uses that hideous cartoon style for the characters, where the noses are solid red. It looks like they have a contagious disease.
Undertale has the same problem with inconsistent styles, but the inconsistencies are less frequent, and the character designs are better, so I prefer it to Celeste, but I still wouldn't call it good. It's like an inferior version of Earthbound, and Earthbound was criticized for its primitive graphics 24 years ago.
That was also a one man production with outsourced art.
What would be examples of indie games that are "pretty" but have terrible gameplay?
Given the choice I'd opt for Jeff's games over something pretty and unplayable.
And what he's doing now works, so he keeps doing it.
Personally I see people post screenshots on here and I just can't tell what their point is or why it would matter, I also completely lack an eye for art.
He's happy, his wife is happy, his customers are happy, his rent gets paid.
So why is everybody trying to sprout off about how they have the solution to a "problem" he doesn't have?
It's easy to say, "Just hire an artist" without understanding the complexities in finding that artist, negotiating a contract, ensuring they are delivering to your expectations, tracking their progress, ensuring they meet your creative vision, and recouping the money in sales to actually pay them.
He’s presumably happy, his customers are presumably happy, yet we insist on giving him obvious advice about a 25 year old venture. It’s honestly hilarious to see the immense amount of time collectively wasted armchairing over it!
Sure. Nobody thinks otherwise.
>He's happy, his wife is happy, his customers are happy, his rent gets paid.
Good for him.
>So why is everybody trying to sprout off about how they have the solution to a "problem" he doesn't have?
Because he posted an open letter to the general public on the topic. If you don't want responses, don't post. Internet 101.
Hardcore wargames (e.g. Combat mission, Graviteam tactics, Grigsby's War in the *, etc.) are a very niche market. Even popular ones make a fraction of the sales that more popular titles bring in. Thus, it's not uncommon for the developers of these games to be 2-3 man shops, or even one-person companies.
The consequence is that these games either have to cut down on quality or jack up prices. Why do modules in DCS often cost $60-$70 for just one plane? Because the small numbers of sales means that they will need to have a higher revenue per sale to break even. Why do so many wargames use 2d counters and hex grids? Because 3d art is expensive, and they need to keep costs low.
Some people bring up color palette, and that this dev just doesn't have a good eye for art. Maybe that's the case, but the fundamental market principles still apply. He could spend money to hire an artist or spend time improving his art skills, but resources do not permit it.
There are no ugly games, only markets. People should listen closely to him as he gives very sound advice. I read nobody in here stating: "Well I am also 25 years successfully in the business and here is my experience switching from ugly to artsy games." So why bother?
Jeff is right when he says that he focusses only on the buyers and not on the haters. Haters drive the bad news, which is good news for Jeff. He will never be ignored nor forgotten.
Rock on, Jeff!
His post wasn't about the way that works, it was about the "only way that works".
If that was a post about how he made games, I would have made an amazing comment on it, congratulating him on working so hard, most probably saying how I wouldn't have though there was so much works behind the scene, even more so on new engine on such an old looking games, etc...
It wasn't that kind of post though... it was a post that said that art doesn't matter, that you just can't make it works (even though there so many games that does it).
He just don't want to make it works. It's fine, it's not different than me that am a simple employee.
> [snip]
> If I'm lucky enough to find a good person, with bonuses and benefits and so on, I might be able to get this person for $150000-180000.
His link seems to suggest that "top" (90th percentile) game artists make $62k/year. Lets round up the extra costs to the employer (payroll tax, health insurance, retirement benefits, etc) and call that $75k/year. If so, that suggests $150k would be nearly 2 full time years of a top-tier artist.
I love Jeff's games and have bought and played many of them going back nearly 2 decades. But, I'm not convinced that the next step up from status quo is 2 fulltime years of a top tier artist. According to the same site, a median artist is $51k/year (with benefits/etc, lets say $65k/yr). Would hiring that person for a full year justify that extra $25k over his current $40k budget? I think so.
(if youre american and youve ever had to pay for insurance out of pocket you probably know how expensive it is. When I lefta previous job it was 400/mo to continue my insurance, and some of my friends with families have to pay thousands)
He could get an acceptable 2d artist from another country for like 2-3k per month total. Then he could buy a bunch of existing tilesets from the unity asset store, or many other places, and have that person modify them. 1000 terrain icons is not even really very many.
With 120k he could have an entire team of 2d artists if he wanted. He isn't some AAA studio that needs all custom top of the line handmade assets.
If dude just said "hiring one of my contractors full time would cost me $40k/year and i don't want to pay that" it'd be a reasonable argument. Instead he makes up all these unnecessary requirements that sound like they'd actually make the arrangement worse for him, and points to them as why he can't do it.
The goal is to avoid this. Him having to do art direction at the moment is a necessity due to relying on a variety of ever changing contractors. He doesn't seem to view it as a strength noting that it would take more time than he's willing to put in to get good at it.
Neither of his articles need be written if this just boils down to him not wanting his art to change because he thinks he's doing a bang up job.
>for a full time artist, this would be micromanaging and isn't really conducive to a great working relationship.
For anyone, artist or not, it would be hell. My last two employers were owner/managers of businesses with ~20 employees and it was enough to make me think "never again". Working every day in a tiny office with just the two business owners, neither of which apparently understand what I do? Just put a bullet in me now. He absolutely should not hire someone to work full time in person, even if he suddenly decided his absurd $140k/year employee idea is worth it, simply because it would lead to terrible work and micromanagement.
>Add in remoting and it gets even weirder. What are you going to do, mail them every hour for updates?
No, you're going to leave them largely alone.
62k -> 87k and 51k -> 72k
So adding in the flat extra work (a lot of which isn't necessarily money based as it's simply just time dealing with things), it probably comes out to 80k, which is doubling his art budget.
The claim that changes like these take 12 months to learn and $11.0000 to implement, is incompetent at best or dishonest at worst.
1) Need to be "cheap", i.e. to save a lot for daily spending and others, and definitely try to get as many free stuffs as possible. Because whence we go indie, we have to pay our own insurances and benefits.
2) Try to find a niche market, best if it doesn't require expensive investment. E.g. flight simulation is also a niche market, but we definitely need a LOT of investment to make it work. For Jeff's games it is tile-map (easy to replicate and make new maps for), small size and interesting story and game system.
3) Stay WITHIN comfortable zone but evaluate our situation every year. If we can stay in comfortable zone and make easy money, why not? Players pick an easy table in poker if they are professional. They don't play for fame or excitement, but for monetary reasons ONLY. Indie gaming is one area that are pretty sticky and our users usually don't go away unless we make bad games, so evaluation once per year should be good enough.
4) Like any other business, better know something before diving into. Jeff is lucky. He started early and had the talent. Most people are not that lucky so some industry experience would be appreciated.
I don't really understand why more people don't go this route. It confuses me to see things like people living in places like Seattle/San Francisco when it's not strictly necessary. The amenities and interesting folks you find in these cities are not unique to these cities. The only things that seem very unique to them, in my experience, are the rather high salaries which, consequently, leads to an extremely high local cost of living as everything inflates in price in response to the salaries. Makes it a reasonable decision if you're drawing on these salaries, but if you're not...?
I'm not going to play one of his ugly games, because I'm not his target audience, but I might buy one just to support him.
I've bought a whole bunch of them to support him - I don't mind the graphics but RPG just isn't my thing.
Learn to draw.
It's a lot of work, and it's not for everyone. But I taught myself the basics of art so that I could have art for my game projects. It may not be the greatest art in the world, but it will accurately reflect my vision.
That said, I also find resources like OpenGameArt terrific -- as inspiration. If I want to create, say, a tile set for a particular scene, I might go look up someone else's tile set, and then create a similar one from scratch.
but his point stands - there are lots of great games that are free. Games whose graphical style and production value vastly out-weight his games.
And yes, it does play into their budgeting/planning calculus as well. There's a reason there are so many franchise games these days...
Same with TV/Movies. I watch what Netflix and Prime have, and generally don't buy a series or movie (unless it's something really special.)
Are they perfectly interchangeable? No, of course not. I'm sure there's a musician/author/tv show out there that would be my most favorite of all time and I'll never know it because I won't be exposed to it. I don't get hung up on that, and enjoy that I have a lot of pretty good options at any given time.
I don't think there's much general learning to be gained here other than maybe some budget numbers if you've never thought to price it out. As Jeff admits, the competition makes the art budget work. Its really just a production decision on what you're looking to make and what expertise you have access to.
I really don't think they are - people have ragged on the graphics for at least a decade and he's stuck by his guns (profitably, for 25 years!) These posts are about promoting the new game - he knows how to play the internet outrage machine for marketing.
It feels like there are two separate discussions happening, some people saying that there are beautiful games with next to no art budget and that the author should adopt some basic principles of design, with the other camp focussing on the fact that game devs shouldn't be expected to become artists.
Obviously both camps are right and the author is right in basically saying "I'm fine with my games being ugly, they're still successful despite being ugly..." but then he goes and follows that up with "... just like all indie games,"
That being said..
What he's saying works for him. If you don't have an audience yet, and you don't really know what numbers your game is going to pull in, it makes sense to focus on having a more coherent art style. And the thing is, I think you could do the same style games he does with much better art without it costing much more, you just need an art style that isn't, for lack of better way of putting it, pseudo-photographic (I don't want to say "realistic" because it's obviously not going for that, but, there's no specific "style" to what he has other than "smaller versions of real things"). I think if you were to do a much simpler/more cartoony style, with an emphasis on choosing a nice color palette and nice lighting, you could actually make something nice looking without breaking out the bank. (Again not saying that's what he should do, he has something that works, just that I'm doubtful that "make games that look like they're from 1995 shareware" is a viable strategy to follow).
Getting the first artist to lay down an art bible, with colours, sizes etc means the next one can work to the same style.
Just setting some limitations, at the start of the game, like a colour palette etc would make it easier for him as worked.
Small business is tough and you have to purchase insurance and benefit for yourself, plus store some money to brace for winters. Many of my friends own small business due to their immigrant status, but few of them succeed.
The bottom line is, he actually does not need to explain anything to outsiders if he wants. But his posts are very helpful for newbies in indie so I appreciate what he says. Plus I like his games and purchased each one of them except Queen's Wish.
I'm also a cheap bastard and only buy on deep discount (66%+ off)...
What about a contractor for 3-6 months?
You can get good artists for far cheaper if you want though. He even says so in his posts. He's always praising his contractors and he pays them $25/hr.
It seems to me that for indie game devs, you will always have games driven by what the developer is good at. Great artist, great looking game, great writer, well written game and so on.
Just look at all the mods and assets available on e.g. Steam marketplace or Mod DB, some of them entire games like Black Mesa: Source or Enderal. There already exist reskins of videogames (like the various Minecraft texture mods) and graphical improvement mods (like GTA V's "NaturalVision Remastered") some of which is done without any sort of official API.
(One would probably call this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_labor, but I strongly dislike the term due to its association with big$ milking fans.)
Given some thought about a general framework for this the ability to reskin might be a nice thing to have.
After watching his recent very interesting GDC talk* - he mentioned high six-figures income ($800K+). I guess he spends a lot :)
Looks like a very specific number to misspeak in the talk. It's in the slides.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20765521
Posted a few days ago.
If that's true and he's good at those things, then why doesn't the product sell well enough to hire people to make the next game not look like a game design student's homework assignment?
He doesn't know - but he feels he does not need to take the risk to find out because the stakes are too high for him (since he'll need to borrow from a bank or his retirement savings).
I'm sure those who feel strongly about the potential on HN, reddit and elsewhere could band together and crowdfund/formally pitch Jeff on an investment in an artist for a subsequent game and capture the upside while shouldering the risk - he probably would be happy to take the money; he's not ready to put up his.
Then that should have been the main crux of his argument, without the need to start making up questionable numbers and making comparisons with other titles; particularly when it's an open letter on a subject nobody really seemed to care about prior to the previous article.
It seems his audience, his customerbase, is so extraordinarily specific that the letter would really have been better addressed to his fans and nobody else; instead, the two posts come off as unsolicited whining which I believe is what is rubbing people the wrong way.
They are sound business advice from someone who knows what he talks about (because he has had a successful business for a long time). Far better than the usual "hey, I'm a unicorn startup and obviously I will change the world" which will then implode a few weeks or month later, when their "revolutionary" idea and/or business opportunity turns out to be useless.
It seems to me that if, in 25 years, this guy is quibbling over whether he has the money or not to improve the look of his assets, something repeatedly said not to necessarily have any cost at all, whilst other small indie development teams (even those with only one or two people) manage to make breakthrough hits that reach as wide as possible an audience and look good, sometimes on multiple platforms including console, there's plenty to say that perhaps any business advice one could extrapolate is not the gold standard that his defenders are holding it up to be.
You'll note part of his reason for wanting to stay small is that he's an introvert who likes to work by himself - not everyone wants to build a sprawling empire. So sure, if you want to gamble big at a shot at massive success you probably shouldn't listen to him. If you want to be able to be independent and work for yourself, he has worthwhile lessons about focusing on what pays your bills and where your skills are that are worthwhile not just for people who wants to do games.
Conservatively, I'd be surprised if you could put that all together for less than $50,000 if you were paying a contractor to deliver them for you.
The average steam game sells about 30,000 copies. That's the average, including the super big hits from AAA devs. I don't have the data for indie games, but I'd guess it's probably closer 3,000 copies.
So, amortized, you are looking at raising your prices by $2 per copy. Except remember that your platform is gonna take 30%, so you need to raise your prices by $3/copy.
Some of those 3,000 copies sold are going to come from discounted sales, which means if you want to break even on art, you need to push the full price up a bit more so you don't lose too much on sale prices. $4 is a lot of money to ask, relative to the price of the game. It's at least a 10% increase in cost, probably considerably more.