Pyrian on 4/1/2017 at 00:04
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Pyrian, sad but unavoidable. With so much shovelware out there, having nice visuals is important for sticking out of the crowd.
But how do you tell the difference between feedback that is useful and necessary, and feedback that won't go away without spending millions?
Quote Posted by Yakoob
I admit even I look down on a project when I see things on Greenlight, TigSource or even the steam store that have clearly half-assed art assets.
Part of my problem is that I think a lot of the ones that are praised for their appearance look terrible. Does Headliner look any worse than Papers Please?
Nameless Voice on 4/1/2017 at 02:07
Surely Papers, Please! wasn't praised for its visuals, but rather for its thought-provoking concept?
Yakoob on 4/1/2017 at 21:36
Quote Posted by Pyrian
But how do you tell the difference between feedback that is useful and necessary, and feedback that won't go away without spending millions?
No one really knows, and there are whole degrees and job positions for it. It's called Marketing and User Research.
And clearly, I am very bad at it :laff:
Quote:
Part of my problem is that I think a lot of the ones that are praised for their appearance look terrible. Does Headliner look any worse than Papers Please?
Yes. Papers Please was simple pixely but highly stylize with consistency and matching pallete. Headliner is sort of all over the place, mainly due to its prototypical status. You'll notice each scene (office, street, home) uses completely different style - deliberate choice to prototype 3 different approaches (plus limitation on what assets I could find and produce myself).
While it gave me ideas, it might have been a marketing equivalent of shooting myself in the foot. I think a big lesson I am learning (one that I should have learned from Karaski to be honest) is making the art style, well, have consistent style.
WingedKagouti on 4/1/2017 at 21:54
Quote Posted by Yakoob
I think a big lesson I am learning (one that I should have learned from Karaski to be honest) is making the art style, well, have consistent style.
I'd say that's game development 102.
As long as the game doesn't have a cohesive art style, it doesn't matter if you're using pixel art, FMVs or the best 3D graphics available. Your game will still be percieved as looking bad. That doesn't mean different elements can't look noticably different, it just means the art in one section needs to look like it could fit into another part without. Take something like the hacking mini-game in DX:HR. It doesn't look anything like the FPS part of the game, but it is styled in the same way as the HUD and looks like something that could be seen on a monitor.
There are of course exceptions to this, like something that is supposed to look out of place or a weird alternate dimension/acid trip. But you'd need to communicate this to the player somehow.
Yakoob on 5/1/2017 at 03:40
Yea consistency itself is elementary, but what I didn't realize is how unforgiving players are towards work-in-progress projects when presented with "placeholder assets" in inconsistent styles. Even with a clear notice the art is not final. I hoped they'd let it slide given the prototypical and replaceable nature of it, but nope!
Pyrian on 5/1/2017 at 04:11
From a marketing perspective, it's far better to have a beautiful game with no gameplay. But from a prototyping perspective, it's a lot easier to have a handle on what art you need when the design is locked down. Who wants to throw out perfectly good art assets because the relevant gameplay doesn't work?
WingedKagouti on 5/1/2017 at 11:18
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Yea consistency itself is elementary, but what I didn't realize is how unforgiving players are towards work-in-progress projects when presented with "placeholder assets" in inconsistent styles. Even with a clear notice the art is not final. I hoped they'd let it slide given the prototypical and replaceable nature of it, but nope!
As a rule of thumb, if you're presenting a project to someone who isn't actively part of developing it, you're marketing it in their eyes. The average gamer, even the type who goes for unfinished stuff, is much more likely to be distracted by an inconsistent art style than someone who is used to work on games themselves. Even if you make it abundantly clear that you're just looking for input on which art style to use, if it doesn't look cohesive you're going to attract less useful feedback and more feedback about it just looking bad.
Nameless Voice on 5/1/2017 at 12:54
I'll sometimes look through discovery queues on Steam, and I must admit that I usually make a decision on whether to skip something very quickly, usually based on what I see in the first displayed screenshot.
If the graphics look terrible, I'm likely to just skip it immediately, without giving it a chance.
To be fair, a part of that is that I prefer games with realistic settings, which tends to mean realistic-style graphics (e.g. not pixel art, intentionally retro, overly cartoon/anime themed), and also favour first-person games in general.
Still, the first impression is important, and considering that the first thing about a game that you'll often see is a screenshot of the gameplay, graphics are a huge part of that first impression.
Pyrian on 9/1/2017 at 22:11
Fun With Bugs: Items in use in Glade Raid are primarily accessed through a bit-masked value that was created as 32 bits. It was designed to fail if any requests came in for items above #31. But I recently added a bunch of items, pushing the total to 37 (including "Empty Slot" at bit 0). I sent my other programmer (who wrote the bit-code) a request to extend it into a 64 bit, and didn't worry about it at first because I wasn't working on the last 6 items.
Welp, the fail-over didn't work. Instead of failing, it just tested any items with indexes above 31 as if they were index 0. So, any unit with at least one open inventory slot always counted as having the 6 most powerful items in the game. Suddenly, all my guys could walk on water, cast enormous fireballs, knock down opponents with every strike, and more! Fun times.
Yakoob on 10/1/2017 at 02:09
Haha! Reminds me of the old SNES JRPGs (I think FF6 and before) where each stat was just 1 byte. So if you manage to boost it to 255 and leveled up, it'd wrap around back to 0 :laff:
