"Aesthetics"

[Manco]

Yes, but my last point was referring to the fact that you don't need a budget to create a good looking game. If someone has zero creative skill, a load of money isn't going to fix that.
And don't give me anything about hiring staff, either. There's plenty of skilled people on places like Newgrounds looking to be part of a team for nothing.

Points taken. Although I do take issue with freeloading off people with skill – pay your damn staff!

In regards to your first point, no. Nobody lacks ALL aesthetic skill.
Look at stuff like World's Hardest Game. It shows what it needs to and it isn't an eyesore. The way it did its visuals was probably the best possible way, so it's not like somebody with zero talent in art couldn't create something passable or pleasant to look at.

There are people who lack any meaningful aesthetic skill though – you could easily create a game which completely assaults the eye. World’s Hardest Game may not be artistically all that great but it demonstrates a good use of color, line and shape to identify the different gameplay elements.

I like how Manco clearly isn't much into serious game programming, and he assumes he's the expert on what makes a good game engine

I like how you tried to tell me the measure of a good game engine is how many polys and textures it can render at once. It doesn’t take a programmer to call that bullshit.

Well he's right that it's the builder that matters and not his tools, but that doesn't change the fact that there are objectively bad engines and objectively good ones.

There are definitely bad engines out there, but Unity isn’t one of them.

[Varrok]

I like how you tried to tell me the measure of a good game engine is how many polys and textures it can render at once. It doesn’t take a programmer to call that bullshit.

That was just one of many things Unity gets wrong. There's an actual reason no big companies use it, after all. The only exception was Grow Home, but it turned out very mediocre

[Phylum]

Grow Home was a tech demo that got a full release, and from the little I've played is a very fun "chilled out" game. You just kind of run around and explore. It's very minimal, and actually works well for me when I'm too tired/weak to play anything that you actually have to think about.

I think it provides a very enjoyable experience, without qualifying as a "great game" of the generations.

[Crashpunk]

You might like Tormentum.

That game looks amazing. Too bad I'm not a big fan of Point and Clicks. But I'll have to check it out regardless.

[STM]

God that looks gorgeous.

>Art direction/inspiration from Zdzisław Beksiński.

100/10

[Phylum]

Also Varrok, I don't think Unity is targeted at big devs. I mean shit, from their website:

THEY MADE IT WITH UNITY. SO CAN YOU

Yes, there is a reason big devs don't use it though. I guess you have to look at it from the perspective of an indie developer who can't afford to write their own complete tool set from scratch, or license an expensive one. From that perspective it's pretty damn good.

But yeah UE4 is a much better choice, if you know C++.

e: I think the thing that bugs me most is just outright calling an engine good or bad. Different engines are good and bad for different things in different situations. Unity is good for being free and fast to get into, if you have no experience making 3D games.

[Varrok]

Does it bug you guys when somebody calls pizzas from restaurants better than cheap frozen pizzas from supermarkets?

I mean, they're cheaper and faster to get into (your stomach, you just unfroze it and vioula)

[Manco]

Yes, there is a reason big devs don't use it though. I guess you have to look at it from the perspective of an indie developer who can't afford to write their own complete tool set from scratch, or license an expensive one. From that perspective it's pretty damn good.

Exactly. Big studios don’t license an engine when they already have one: EA has Frostbite, Ubisoft has Anvil/Ubiart/Dunia, Bethesda has Creation Engine, Valve has Source, and nearly everyone else uses some Unreal Engine. Why are they gonna drop the time/resources invested in those to use something else?

Even then, they have licensed Unity for smaller projects: Hitman GO and Lara Croft GO, Mobius Final Fantasy, Fallout Shelter.

[Nepsotic]

Points taken. Although I do take issue with freeloading off people with skill – pay your damn staff!

What? Nobody's getting paid in that scenario, unless they actually sell the game, then profit get's shared out between all of them. That's how I'd do it, anyway.

[Jordan]

I've never actually worked with Unity so I don't have first hand experience of its features, but I wouldn't say it's a shite engine.

Currently UE4 is the go to next gen engine because of it's graphical capabilities. It looks outstanding, and of course it's free so everyone has it at their fingertips.

Although Unity doesn't reach the graphical capabilities of UE4, it shouldn't be disregarded. It's a very powerful engine for creating specific types of games, especially for the mobile market. It just works well in terms of actual game design.

[Manco]

What? Nobody's getting paid in that scenario, unless they actually sell the game, then profit get's shared out between all of them. That's how I'd do it, anyway.

Well you never really described a particular scenario. Making a game for practice, or just for fun? Sure, nobody’s getting paid, go for it. Making a game to sell? You should be paying people for their work, regardless of profit.

[Nepsotic]

Yeah of course, but I've never really seen that scenario. It probably happens but it's not like I was advocating for it or anything. I was just making the point that you don't need a budget to make good looking games.

[Job McYossie]

Wow I leave for two days and it becomes pick-on-manco thread.
That being said now it's my turn

That’s called marketing. You can’t sell a game by saying how “yeah we made it look this way because we couldn’t afford to do it better”, you have to sell how everything is a deliberate choice made to create the best possible experience.

This is unfortunately true, but I wish they'd still just not bring it up then.

I was just gonna reply with “technically it’s primarily an interactive medium”, but that got me thinking about the possibilities of games based purely on non-visual cues. I could see a game based entirely on audio, for example, although it would be tougher to sell to a wide audience.

Like that blind guy who played through Abe's Oddysee audio.

Filmmakers also use software nowadays – in fact there are even movies made entirely with CG, just like games! And just like games, a movie isn't made arbitrarily better or worse by how well its makers know the software.

Unless it's a full CGI movie, you still have to purchase a camera, and even if it's CGI, you need actors.

Intimate knowledge and ability to use software does not automatically make one capable of creating “fantastic looking and fantastic playing games”. It’s entirely possible for someone to have vast technical knowledge and zero creative skill.

Then learn how to be creative. If you're gonna make a game learn basic art direction.

Being able to find free tutorials and knowledgebases for software does not necessarily make one better at using them. Game development in particular is complicated as shit, and while good reference material will lower the barrier for entry it isn’t going to stop plenty of people simply finding it too hard, too stressful or too time-consuming.

It being hard isn't an excuse for making something bad, it still coulda been done better with the available materials.

As far as anything varrok said, I think I'd need to make another thread for how much I wanna say so I'm just going to not.
.
.
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And you all made fun of my thread for not being active and having no content.

[Nepsotic]

You're thread is shit and you're shit.

[Varrok]

I'd just like to add that, regarding that marketing honesty topic, Undertale's Steam page Reviews section has listed the disadvantages of the game and I think It sold very well, still. I also think the description was pretty honest.

[Mac Sirloin]

Best post. Breast post, even.

[STM]

I love you, Mac Kastloin,

[MeechMunchie]

I appreciate low-fi art styles as a way for devs of limited time/budget/artistic talent (presumably compensated for in other areas) to get their work out there. What I will say is abstract and simple =/= big pixels. Using a limited palette like NightSky, or block colours like the Another World remaster, can save just as much time, and while it doesn't look any "better" or "worse", it's sure as fuck less overexposed. This actually applies to 3D, too, in Kairo, FRACT and their ilk - flat textures, low complexity models.

And if anyone thinks "I'd get sick of silhouettes and paper cutout styles pretty fast too", remember that the point isn't to find some "perfect" aesthetic for every penniless indie dev to use, it's just to have enough variety that none of them start taking flak individually for being too popular. Because ultimately, that's the only sin that the sterotypical Retro Indie Platformer ever really committed.

You guys are all behind the times, anyway. First-Person Jumpscare Horrors are the hot thing to hate right now.

[Job McYossie]

lo-fi is usually fine. sometimes when the animation is super shit I have issues. The game that made me make this thread was "Realm of the Mad God", which is just shit

[moxco]

lo-fi is usually fine. sometimes when the animation is super shit I have issues. The game that made me make this thread was "Realm of the Mad God", which is just shit

Yeah, Realm of the mad god looks shit. It's a "pixel" art game where objects have black outlines smaller than the "pixels" and the "pixels" of different objects don't run orthogonal to each other. I don't get it because these graphics aren't technically impressive, nor do they invoke any nostalgia. They just look crap.



There's an elegance in how basic and lightweight pixel art is. I wonder how many thousands of times more cpu intensive rendering those graphics are.

[Phylum]

I don't have a problem with games that use blocky graphics that are aligned to higher resolution grids, but you have to do it right. Mario Maker does a good job of that, but that's part of it's self-aware design - it knows it's a level editor and uses drop shadow in a way that makes me think of stick puppets.

RotMG has poor graphical design though, for sure. It's a pity they sold out, the game used to have a certain charm to it. It was endgame grind: the game, but grinding was a high-risk challenge and skill was the deciding factor in how good you were at it. Unless you played Rogue.

But if can be done well, like any other style. It's just very easy to do badly.

[Varrok]

Rep for MoxCo for mentioning Castlevania artstyle.

There's an elegance in how basic and lightweight pixel art is. I wonder how many thousands of times more cpu intensive rendering those graphics are.

According to Steam page for RotMG: 2.33GHz CPU required. Divide that by 1.79 MHz of NES CPU speed and you got about 1302 times.

Now, we *could* try to isolate from 2.33Ghz the power needed for operation system, but I don't wanna

[Phylum]

How did they generate that minimum required spec though? Also NES games were usually written assembly, compared to RotMG which was either made using either Java or Flash if memory serves.

You can't compare like that. It just isn't meaningful.

And even then all you prove is that good artists can do good things in spite of limitations, which I'm fairly sure everyone ever knows.

e: Also the NES hardware was specifically designed with pallet based sprite rendering in mind.

[moxco]

tbh, you can't easily compare cpu requirements when the cpus themselves have different instruction sets.

[Varrok]

I wasn't comparing what would happen if RotMG was written in bytecode, because it didn't happen. What did happen, however, was the game requiring Windows/Mac and >2,0Ghz processor.

you can't easily compare cpu requirements when the cpus themselves have different instruction sets.

Why not? Instructions sets have an influence on the processing power, but processing power is basically what I was comparing. In this game and that game.

I mean, it's not accurate, but not very far from accurate. It's not like the preponderance won't be overwhelmingly high