i have an earnest question and i’m sorry for being embarrassing and naive
can you just “design” “art”
something like, can you make a UI that is so tight and aerodynamic that it changes a user’s life?
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I think design work is problem-solving. Beautiful design is therefore design that solves problems in clever, elegant ways.
That’s not very poetic or romantic, as much as designers, the product designers and web designers and game designer and all the rest, like to think it is and lie to us that it is. It’s a craft.
I think beauty in games comes outside, or broader than design. It’s created when the themes and mechanics that reinforce it and serve the version are an act of creation broader than ‘design’, and when the act of playing creates an aesthetic that communicates intent. That needs everyone involved (including the player) to work together.
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I really liked BustedAstromech’s separating design into questions vs answers, and it maps well to another dichotomy I’m fond of. I would say “art” (in the narrow sense) is the question and “craft” is the answer to that question.
Most games include some mixture of fresh questions and fresh answers, but to look at illustrative extremes, I note that game-jam-style experimentation asks questions without answering them and cookie-cutter AAA games answer the same questions that have already been answered a million times. The former is pure “art” and the latter is pure “craft”.
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i think this is a yes, or at least i hope so.
ui is a framing device, and that can provide a specific perspective that has artistic value more than just being functional.
(this is something i’ve been thinking about a lot recently too, and have multiple projects in production that are working with these ideas)
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re:animation
The divide you’re seeing is a fight that’s been waged for thirty years over whether games should look realistic or look animated. Hand-keyed animation adhering to the principles of animation and bounce and stretch and anticipation and all the rest vs. strict realism.
Capcom and Japanese development in general have been on the side of traditional animation principles and the divide with western studios has only gotten sharper in the last decade. It’s a big reason why Japanese action games so often feel better.
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this response made me happy because i had a statement typed up which basically said “you can’t design art” but i stopped and then posed it as a question instead because i realized i really wasn’t sure about that after all
i especially think about it a lot as i’m working on 1980s macintosh stuff
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I don’t think that inter-animation debate is waged on stylization vs realism as much as the virtues of certain constraints, which even the practitioners of limited animation discard in certain aspects. The amount of Akira that’s on 1s is astounding
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Another thought based on emphasis on the value of “questions” ITT
It would a lot of fun to take this rhetorical question as a literal challenge and trying to, somehow, make that game. What a premise
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sb L4D2 play group let’s go
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totally tangential but I loved the way the Mushi-shi anime used different animation rates to indicate a sort of liminal unreality: the titular mushishi were animated on the 1s, whereas human character animation shifted between 2s and 3s, and with a lot of thought put into frame pacing to max out the vibe they were going for.
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Jeez, I definetely need to stop playing souls for a bit… but I cannot have enough ahah
They aren’t souls, but I was going to try Monster Hunter Rise and Dragon’s Dogma on the Switch… but I am afraid they could make me feel nostalgia for Demon’s Souls somehow! Maybe I have to wait to avoid some unpleasant comparisons (even if they aren’t the same thing)?
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Unfortunately, this may be true of almost every game you play from now on.
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Speaking of, what is the best Imitation Souls game? I’ve played all the FROM ones and at this point I’m ready for some mystery meat as long as it hits some of that same flavor.
I think I am going to play God Hand ahaha
It’s the first time (I only played 10 minutes at a friend’s place) and I know that, instead of nostalgia, it will put a huge smile on my face
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my kneejerk response to this was to scream “play nioh!!!” but i think ‘imitation souls game’ sells it short and it’s doing many different things: vastly more emphasis on builds, a diablo loot system you can kinda-sorta ignore, bite-sized individual ‘missions’ that wouldn’t feel out of place on a handheld etc.
still, play nioh!!!
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By the same token, I was instantly disappointed by Nioh because it lacks many of the distinctive strengths of Souls games, for example satisfying space geometry with careful enemy placement is not really Nioh’s thing in the way that it is From’s thing.
I think for Nioh the Souls comparison is not productive on any level, it seems like a basically unrelated third-person game that just happened to be the first game to copy a few elements from Souls. Which is not really worth mentioning anymore now that we live in a world where it sometimes feels like 2/3rds of all games imitate Souls in some detail or other.
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Nioh’s the local optima on the closest-to-Souls and actually-good plot.
God of War (2018) is the best post-Souls western game, with all the good and bad that implies. It’s as significant a step from Demon’s Souls as Sekiro in its combat model but that’s absolutely the starting point.
Hollow Knight may be the best 2D interpretation? I don’t really get along with Salt and Sanctuary or Blasphemous but people like them. Hollow Knight adopts the mood and a lot of the encounter theory of a Souls game into a Metroid structure. It’s a very approachable brand of morose which grates on me but many find appealing.
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i found nioh 1 a really miserable facsimile of the how dark souls is discussed in the mainstream games media, but nioh 2 really clicked for me. im not sure whether the games changed much, or i just approached 2 with the mindset of wanting a soulslike diablo, but that’s really what those games are. nioh 2 also has a character creator, which i think is essential.
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Nioh is just Ninja Gaiden with RPG elements, and I love it for that.
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