We’ve been writing indie games for a living for 25 years. My wife and I run a humble little mom-and-pop business. We make retro low-budget role-playing games that have great stories and design and are a lot of fun.
Also, they look like crap.
The first game I released, in January of 1995, looked like crap. It achieved financial success (among the blind, apparently), which funded many more games that looked like crap, enabling me to build a solid reputation.
The good thing about pixel art is that both programmers and artists can make it. The bad thing about pixel art is programmers don’t know what the difference between their art and the artist’s is.
I would say if he wants to make games for the sake of introducing his dreams into the world, rather than to make money, then the art does matter. But he then says that this is the aesthetic he likes, so I don’t think it’s a money vs ideals thing.
I think World of Warcraft looks really bad, now at least. Like, deformed cartoons with uncanny valley movements and animations, insanely stretched FoV, everything super saturated and brights and darks scattered randomly, blurred textures. But there are a lot of people who think WoW looks absolutely amazing.
For people who actually play games and not just gaze upon them from the sidelines, I think unfortunately the issue with the art is mainly perception - these people have internalized “ugly games look like this” and “pretty games look like this” without any real critical discrimination. It’s the opposite the problem the developer has.
Avernum 3 looks decent, but the new one, Queen’s Whatever, just looks dreadful. I suppose I’m not the target here, though, but man, those 3D face models.
I just looked up Queen’s Wish, and lol, wtf Jeff Vogez? I got it when he was making 10x games using the same general art. But like, that art was reusable. It is very suspect that he’ll be able to reuse this art style for more games. MAYBE it’ll help kick off because it looks different than the new 3/4 view AAA RPGs, but like…
I love spiderweb software but his games look like dogshit because they don’t have an immediately readable and interesting style, it just comes across as “pre-rendered 3d ultima” which is I think the objectively ugliest possible art scheme you could have. Some emphasis towards a house style that isn’t just aping the worst of early CRPG graphics in a nostalgic way would be nice.
To be clear, I think the individual art assets look fine. I just hate his house art style. The more fidelity he injects into his games, the worse they look.
Also his older games look better than his newer ones lol. Exile has a much more distinctive and cool look than Avernum
I actually am mostly on Voegel’s side here because I love a plurality of shonky aesthics.
But if he made his game in a super low rez style that looked like Ultima 1 it would probably be just as easy to put together and be way more aesthetically coherent and maybe even get press for having a unique retro art style.
Also it would look better if he choose low Rez pixel folks or made all the environmental graphics out of like, screenshotted unity assets instead of the super weird mix I’m seeing here.
actually, yeah it would be really fucking cool if jeff literally just made stuff that looks like exile 1-3 again
i am trying not to bash Queen’s Wish because it does actually look pretty neat mechanically but it also has extremely garish aesthetics, it’s pretty much impossible for me to actually like that style
Like I’ve seriously given thought to making an RPG maker game in Ultima 1-3 style because it would be really easy to create an evocative weird fantasy world at low resolution.
Jeff if you’re literally just aggressively trolling people with your grafix you can just say so, that’s what the little niche audience that you are cultivating wants to hear anyway
psychological realism will never come as close to the meat of human subjectivity as a good, radically indeterminate fairy-tale metaphor. See how he rails against ‘the dreadful cobbling-together of disparate elements that loosely make for characters in novels of an inferior sort,’ thrown together with ‘the repulsive crust of the psychologically palpable completing the mannequin.’ Children’s stories, and tales more generally, knew how to present things ‘dry, so to speak, drained of all psychological motivation,’ and ‘they lost nothing as a result.’
This is something I’ve been on about for years but have trouble convincing people I work with; the value of strong outlines that allow for interpretation and incorporation over the distinct othering of sharply drawn characters. As in all aesthetics I don’t desire supremacy for my tastes but it’s so hard to rip people out of a common acceptance that psychological realism is strictly better.
There’s something bubbling in my brain about how this applies to tabletop roleplaying that I can’t yet quite put clearly, but I will say that @tulpa has explicitly said many times that they model their tabletop worlds at least partially on fairy tales and that’s one of the reasons they’re so vivid while still being pliable.
the dreadful cobbling-together of disparate elements that loosely make for characters in novels of an inferior sort
I think of this as like Doctor Who or JJBA characterization and it sucks so much that its become the default mode for mainstream media
This kind of… character-building is the ‘realist’ equivalent to worldbuilding in a dreadful setting like forgotten realms. The thinking is that a character is just a timeline of experiences, and a collection of likes and dislikes. It’s directly analogous to dreadful nerds writing fantasy fiction who think a fantasy or sci fi world is just a timeline of events and a bunch of incidental consistent details. The sort of cuisinart consistency of it ruins storytelling for me whether we’re talking about characters or places in stories.
It leaves no gaps for the reader, or player, or what have you. It explicitly forbids metaphor or any kind of reflexivity. It reduces everyone to marvel movie paper cutouts of personalities.
Fairy tales deal with encounters with the unknowable. In a fairy tale, the places are beyond the fields we know as are the people. We can see the surface, and the surface is so curious that we are left to animate the insides within our own imaginations. A metaphor is truer than an observation of fact.
