
Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap - Fr0styMatt88
https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-all-of-our-games-look-like-crap.html
======
ebg13
Oh man. This thread is really something else.

Like...for miles in every direction, all I can see are pitchforks, and here I
am standing alone on a small hill thinking to myself "Holy shit. That's the
Spiderweb software guy. I've played every single one of his games, EVERY
SINGLE ONE, and loved all of them."

The graphics in the games are exactly as good as they need to be to make
wonderful story-driven RPGs.

~~~
zapzupnz
It's not my understanding that having a fond nostalgia for somebody's works
excuses the article's salty tone that basically tells people _they 're_ wrong
for thinking the games are ugly, coming up with all manner of excuses but
never once _embracing_ that the problem is entirely the developer's own and
nobody else's; yes, that point is laid out there but it's given as an excuse,
not as a justification. There's a fine line.

~~~
eridius
> _unprompted_

The guy's been getting criticisms for 25 years. I think he's justified in
writing a single blog post in defense of his art style. If you don't like it,
you don't have to read it.

~~~
zapzupnz
What does the 25 years have to do with it? There are developers who've been in
the industry for far less time who are much more reactive and responsive to
criticism. If anything, that mention of 25 years is an indictment, not
anything worse praising.

Also, 'art style' is a stretch.

Finally, yes, if I don't like it, I don't have to read it. Yet, I did, and I'm
free to express my dissatisfaction and disagreement with the article's
message: if you don't like it, you don't have to read it.

~~~
austhrow743
>What does the 25 years have to do with it?

It means it's not unprompted. It's a reply.

------
mcv
Sometimes 'better-but-not-good-enough' is a trap. That's basically what Jeff
Vogel is saying about moving up from his poor inconsistent art to slightly
better art, but it's also how I feel about moving up from ascii characters to
his style of "crappy" art.

AdoM is a fantastic roguelike created by Thomas Biskup, which originally had
you as an '@' battling other ascii characters. Later he wanted a nicer
interface and went for this kind of pixely tiles, and to be honest, I don't
like it (edit: I just checked again, and the art looks far better than I
remember. I still prefer the ascii version, though). If you go for bad art,
just go all the way, and make it look consistent.

By the way, Baba is You, referenced at the end, is an absolutely brilliant
game, and while the art looks cheap like a toddler drew it, it's all animated;
they have three versions of every sprite and keep rotating them. That crappy
animation arguably makes it look even cheaper, but it also brings the game
more alive, and it's certainly more expensive. Most importantly, though: it's
a striking and consistent look.

In the end, though: Jeff had been successfully making games he loves for 25
years. Whatever he's doing is clearly working.

~~~
Cpoll
Baba is You came to mind for me as well, as a game with incredibly simple
graphics that still looks _really_ good. I think a big part of that is the
consistency of the design.

The high-contrast simple design also facilitates the gameplay. There's no
visual noise, so it's very easy to 'read' the levels and focus on the
solutions.

With that said, I think the art is also deceptively good. I don't think I
could replicate it quite as well (from memory) even having played the game a
fair bit, and I certainly don't think a toddler (or lesser hyperbole) could
capture the charm of some of the sprites.

~~~
eridius
Baba is You is I think a great example of something that _looks_ really simple
but is actually really challenging to pull off. It's also probably not
something you could reasonably maintain across 25 years using freelance
artists. It also helps that the total number of unique objects in Baba is You
is rather limited.

------
meheleventyone
Arrrgh, there are a lot of interesting and good points in the article but for
the most part they miss the wood for the trees. The actual answer is that care
isn't being taken to develop a style that looks good and meets his
constraints. Jeff needs a good art director.

The Ultima V and Baba is You examples are excellent counter-points because
they show how great games with simple styles can look.

~~~
jplayer01
> Jeff needs a good art director.

Did you miss the part where adding an employee would double his required
budget for the game? Which means he needs at least double the sales? Which
means more risk? And there's no guarantee he'll hit that even if the graphics
look better?

He spells out that he's working with freelancers, who often flake out for
(understandable) various reasons.

~~~
alttab
You would think after 25 years of making games he'd have enough sense to
direct art himself in some way. Seems like he's rationalizing his choices
instead of taking it upon himself to learn from his customer's criticisms and
his own experience.

If I had made that many games over 3 decades I would have at least learned how
to talk to freelance artists in a way that would get better over time. It
seems Jeff has put no effort into it, or gave up too early because he's
protected his choices with rationalizations.

~~~
w0utert
Yes I agree. I almost feel bad for disagreeing with someone who obviously put
so much love in his games and rightfully stands behind them, but I cannot
shake off the feeling that there is a huge potential for improvement there
that does not involve hiring additional people, more expensive artists, etc.

Just investing some of his own time reading up on the fundamentals of art,
visual language, perception, color theory, could vastly improve his judgement.
I try to build games for fun and learning, and I consciously avoid anything
that goes beyond my (non-existing) knowledge about creating 'professional'
game art. In my case I resort to abstract graphics or introduce very strict
voluntary contraints (like: only 8x8 sprites), ie: similar to what games like
Baba is You or boxboxboy are doing. If I were to ever shoot for a game that
required 'professional game art' I would definitely invest time to get better
at it before even considering to start the project.

It's a bit like the programming side of things. Don't try to build your own
engine for your game if you barely know any programming, for example.

~~~
mumblemumble
I suppose, but all of that takes time, and he is only one person, and he only
has so much time. If he directs some of it toward all the things you're
suggesting, he'll necessarily be directing it _away_ from the things that make
a Spiderweb game a Spiderweb game.

I don't think he ever came out and said this directly, but he dances around it
throughout the article: As a very small indie developer, that's a huge risk to
take. He could end up alienating his current fan base, while at the same time
failing to satisfy the tastes of others.

~~~
jofer
That's a really good point that I think a lot of folks are overlooking.
Spiderweb games has been around for a long time and has a dedicated following.
I actually felt pretty alienated when things like Geneforge came out -- It
seemed like a huge step away from the simple sprite-based graphics I loved in
his earlier games. (Not that Geneforge was bad, mind you! Just a big change.)
Spiderweb has always had a very distinct brand of artwork. Call it crappy if
you want, but I've always quite liked it.

Don't underestimate the risk of changing your style, particularly when it's a
defining part of the experience. You will lose at least some customers. It may
be worth it, but it's a significant risk.

~~~
mumblemumble
I'm also thinking here of Telltale games. The original Telltale wasn't ever
going to take over the world. But they had figured out a niche where some
people (largely, admittedly, a nostalgia crowd) liked what they were doing
enough to send a little beer money their way every time they put out a new
episode. It was sustainable.

And then at some point they had a moderate mainstream success, and that got
them thinking that maybe they could grow into a much bigger game company, and
so they started pushing hard at trying to grow. That was the point where me
and a lot of other fairly loyal Telltale fans stopped buying their games. The
effort they put into other things meant that they were no longer putting as
much care into the things that earned them their original fan base. And, at
the same time, they found out that breaking into the mainstream market is a
_lot_ harder than it looks.

And now there's no more Telltale Games.

------
jdance
Haha I love how 90% of the comments are from just exactly the same people who
he wrote this blog post for, and they still make the same points again :D

I have an indie game myself (Skyturns on G Play) and if you are not an artist,
making good art is simply really hard. Someone says ”this menu is ugly”, and
the cognitive load of making it meet their expectations is massive.

I even have graphically skilled people critiquing my game, paying them, but
then coming back with more ugly menus. A real skilled professional art
director is hard to find, recruit and motivate.

On a small scale its a ton of freedom to just let your game be somewhat ugly
and just focus on what you yourself is great at.

For all the 1000 opinions I’ve heard about my games menus, not one of these
people have produced something better. That 1001st person who actually knows
drawing, colors and UX is the professional art director, which is possible to
find, but the energy required to find him/her and pay is also something that
can go somewhere else!

~~~
aardshark
> if you are not an artist, making good art is simply really hard

And if you are not a programmer, making a good game is really hard. But you
can learn. If you are willing to put in the effort to develop your own sense
of the aesthetic, even a small amount of time can result in huge improvements.

You don't need an "art director" and neither does this guy.

If you think your menus are ugly, find some menus that you don't think are
ugly and ask yourself what it is about them that makes them not ugly. When you
can answer that question with certainty and apply the answer to your own
menus, that's a first step towards improvement.

PS: I spent 10 minutes on your game. It's fun.

~~~
jdance
Hey, believe me I'm working on it, those menus I have are like 10 iterations
in! And I'm looking for art help too. Just saying its a cognitive load, both
the learning, iteration, , finding people and paying them. I could instead say
"fcuk it" and focus ONLY on the things I'm good at, it's an option that I can
understand.

Happy to hear you tried and liked the game! Lots of things in the pipeline

------
Goronmon
I wonder what the sentiment would be if the situation was reversed.

Here we have a developer effectively looking to pay below market rates for
artists, and then unsurprisingly not finding many good artists willing to do
that long term. Not a judgment on my part, just saying that he's looking to
keep the art budget to an absolute minimum.

Instead if it was an artist defending his choice to make relatively simple
games because he just can't find good developers willing to work for cheap for
long enough to complete a project.

The line that stood out me in this context:

 _I can 't stress this enough: Finding talented, reliable, reasonably priced
freelancers is HARD. Cherish them when you find them._

If the context of the discussion was about developers instead of artists, how
would HackerNews feel about someone lamenting the fact that they can't get any
"affordable" developers to work on their projects?

Also, as an aside:

 _The key problem here is that, when most people say, "Your art looks bad,"
what they mean is, "I want art that is good." They mean, "I want AAA-quality
art." And I can't make that. Not even close._

That seems like a pretty big strawman to me. There is a large grey area
between "crap" and "AAA-quality".

~~~
Majromax
> If the context of the discussion was about developers instead of artists,
> how would HackerNews feel about someone lamenting the fact that they can't
> get any "affordable" developers to work on their projects?

I'm not sure the reaction would be all that negative, to be honest.

The problem to me isn't when someone says "we want cheap work and we
understand it will not be particularly high-quality," but when they say "we
want top-quality work but we're not willing to pay for it."

Voegl's expectations here are honest -- refreshingly so. He's openly paying
for artists, but he's paying for art to a budget rather than budgeting to art.

> There is a large grey area between "crap" and "AAA-quality".

I think Voegl addresses that in the middle of the "1." section -- he has had
games with "improved" art, but the improved art did not increase sales enough
to justify the expense. If an epsilon improvement in art did not improve
profits, then it suggests he's near a local optimum.

~~~
jayd16
His problem, and you can see from his wording, is that he thinks about
"graphics" not "art." Sure he made a 3d game. So what. He doesn't seem to have
the same passion for art direction as he does for game design so its not
surprising at all that you can throw money at the wrong problem and not get
much out.

~~~
LoSboccacc
it's more of a taste problem than a budget problem, plenty games go low fi and
are amusing both to play and look at, i.e. Celeste

~~~
Richard_East
Specifically its more of an art direction problem.

If you have an artist with decent technical skills, enough time, and an
excellent art director, you can still achieve great results. Eventually that
Artist will learn and become better in what they independently produce.

Plus, the art is visible through a camera, and with post-processing and FX -
which are easily controlled or influenced by that same art director. Just
tweaking colour, camera angle, and FOV can produce incredibly unique results.

I had a very small budget, and no team, and was able to produce something
regarded as reasonably good-looking in 3D for Frontline Zed:

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/915490/Frontline_Zed/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/915490/Frontline_Zed/)

~~~
chaostheory
Your game looks great, and so do many other indie games with low budgets like
Stardew Valley and Axiom Verge to name just a few examples, even though there
are many more.

Vogel just isn't willing to put in time and money into visuals because it's
probably a combination of it 1. not being a priority for him and 2. lacking
the skill for visual design (not necessarily implementing it, but just having
an eye for it) which is probably also due to the point #1

------
cousin_it
Jeff, the art problems of your games have nothing to do with low-res. Baba is
You (or Downwell) are just as low-res, but manage to look good because they
use fewer colors and choose them well. I recommend learning that skill, it
will make your games look way better and it honestly doesn't take that much
time.

~~~
masklinn
> Jeff, the art problems of your games have nothing to do with low-res. Baba
> is You (or Downwell) are just as low-res, but manage to look good because
> they use fewer colors and choose them well.

I expect they're also less busy, and more stylised.

Looking at the Queen’s Wish's screenshot, it doesn't look lower resolution
than Dungeons of Dredmor, just worse, the backgrounds are way too busy, the
colors are inconsistent, too subdued so their kind-of meld into one another
making things less legible, the lighting is odd, the level of details seems to
vary from one sprite to another,…

Compare

[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tV0QOWTjVOM/XV23pI64tQI/AAAAAAAAB...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tV0QOWTjVOM/XV23pI64tQI/AAAAAAAABJ0/cTClB88yTnEMMnhu1aB-8H_pmVJx140qACLcBGAs/s1600/QW%2BSS.jpg)

to

[http://i.imgur.com/tc3rt.png](http://i.imgur.com/tc3rt.png)

~~~
cousin_it
I think this looks more consistent than both:
[https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-
content/uploads/2018/...](https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-
content/uploads/2018/10/python_roguelike_temple_of_torment.png)

------
Aaargh20318
> People who grew up with Nintendo and Sega really like pixel art.

As one of those people, I really don't like pixel art at all.

Today's pixel art looks nothing like games did back in the day. The simple
reason is that those Nintendo and Sega games weren't played on 27" 4k LCD
monitors or 65" OLED TV's but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We
didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry. It had a way
softer look than todays pixel art does.

To me, the whole pixel art craze looks like false nostalgia. People longing
back to something that never existed that way.

this image demonstrates it nicely:
[http://i.imgur.com/lQFPG14.png](http://i.imgur.com/lQFPG14.png)

~~~
systemtest
For me, pixel art is a technical limitation. I don't see the point of
romanticising a technical limitation. What limitation are we going to do next?
Retro low-poly 3D models? A soundtrack consisting of six songs only?
Distributing the game on 13 floppy disks? Games that never get updates? Low
quality collision objects? Null-model cable multiplayer? game_demo.exe file
download from CNET.com? Anti-piracy methods by having to look up words from a
book?

~~~
mysterydip
low-poly (and often untextured) 3D models is already a style being used in
indie gamedev, seeme like it came into vogue a year or two ago.

chiptunes are also a stylistic choice some games make over full hi def sounds
and music.

~~~
usrusr
Going off on a tangent, I'd really love to see a game that pushed production
values within the artificial constraint of zero texture, just flat shaded
geometry, while maxing out modern hardware. That would be the computer
graphics style I dreamt of while growing up between X-Wing on the PC and Money
for Nothing on MTV.

~~~
cr0sh
If you've ever watched any of the "Mind's Eye" CGI videos (which were just
older CGI of the 70s, 80s, and some early 90s set to music) - you can get an
idea of what your fantasy might look like in full motion.

Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied
on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while
still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we
aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how
to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with
the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one
of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone).

Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some
form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they
relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can
hide low-count vertex polys).

The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I
recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not
sure)...

------
tempsolution
There is a big gap between "crap" and AAA for sure. But think about this (in
today's time):

* Half Life 2 looks like crap

* Fallout 3 looks like crap

* Actually any game from more than a few years back, looks like crap

But any of those are hopelessly out of reach for any Indie developer even with
today's tools.

There is real AAA from earlier days, that still looks good these days, like:

* Battlefield 3

* Crysis 2

* Call Of Duty Modern Warfare

* etc.

But these games have among the highest budget in history of game development
and a respectable revenue stream...

What the author is trying to say is that most people think most games looks
like crap (I think so too). There is no point in making AA games (let's assume
he didn't mean actual AAA games) as an Indie developer, because people will
still think your game looks like crap. And those people who don't (I for
instance really like SNES games still), will also be satisfied with the art he
can create.

Let's look at Anno 1602 vs. Anno 1800. This is more in the domain of the
author. I really like both games and I have to say, Anno 1800 has AMAZING
graphics. But the game gets boring after playing it one time to the Investor
level... Anno 1602 has graphics that you can probably manage as an Indie
developer these days (since you don't need to optimize it at all and have much
better tooling). This game never gets old ;). I have more fun playing that one
than Anno 1800. Which is another reason why AAA graphics is unneeded. You need
shiny graphics if your game sucks. And creating games that suck is what todays
AAA industry is all about.

~~~
cosarara
Half Life doesn't look like crap. It looks dated. There is a huge gap between
the way the OP's games look and how half life looks, because even though the
3D tech was worse and the textures lower res in half life, it had a proper art
team behind it. A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for
it. Fair enough. But just getting someone to look over the art all together
and making it a bit more cohesive would be a huge improvement. The thing is,
it seems he's paying different people to do different pieces and just putting
it all together without any sense of direction. I think it's alright if you
want to pay A to draw this and that, and then when A leaves pay B to draw this
and that, but you should have B take a look at the tileset as a whole and ask
him to make the pieces look alright together. Because right now it's a huge
mess.

~~~
eropple
_> A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for it._

 _Can 't_. The word you're looking for here is _can 't_. The unit economics of
making the sorts of games that JV makes completely preclude it. It would be
way easier to spend the money he doesn't make to get better art talent. This
is true. It is also not very meaningful.

And it's not that there is minimal sense of direction just for funsies--it's
that you don't have that luxury when we're talking about the rates he's
working at. I spent a decent amount of money, in the ballpark of what JV
probably spends on third-party work for a game, trying to get freelancers--
reasonably priced or, in reality, not so--to work towards a cohesive art
style. That I did not ship that game (which is still in a 75%-ish complete
state in my graveyard, it's my fuck-you-money project) is largely due to the
difficulty of getting art to a standard I felt comfortable with.

JV ships because that standard is lower than I was able to stomach.

His games also happen to be really good, too.

~~~
nimblegorilla
> Can't. The word you're looking for here is can't.

I think the real term is "Not Invented Here Syndrome".

This site has thousands of open sourced game assets:
[https://opengameart.org](https://opengameart.org)

Here is an asset pack of 65 fantasy icons for $5:
[https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/icons/fantasy-r...](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/icons/fantasy-
rpg-icon-set-42707)

I suspect someone spending $200 and a day of searching could probably find
most of the art needed for Queen's Wish. There's really no need for him to be
hiring freelancers in the first place.

~~~
eropple
Dude...have you ever tried to use OpenGameArt or asset packs in anger? The
quality is at best "uneven", you'll still have the exact same "but they're
_inconsistent_ " complaints, and then on top of that you get people whining
that you used off-the-shelf art. (Rather like "oh it's an RPG Maker" game,
which is something that Zeboyd Games, another low-budget indie developer, gets
all the time; they don't use RPG Maker, but that's another story).

You can't make everybody happy. JV is going to more reliably make money by
making his audience, like me, happy. Why _should_ he change it?

~~~
nimblegorilla
Dude... I have and am using asset packs. If your design schtick is looking as
cheap as possible then it's not very hard to get what you need.

------
glenvdb
I think the problem is that the game is in Uncanny Valley.

It's trying to achieve a certain level of detail/realism, but it's falling
short of expectations.

This might be completely intentional, to evoke a feel for games from an era
that did the same thing, but comparing to Baba is You highlights the developer
doesn't understand that.

Baba is You has gone completely in the opposite direction in terms of
graphical detail, come out of the Uncanny Valley, and is now sitting atop
Cuteness Peak.

The dev needs to decide where he wants the game to sit and why.

~~~
haversine02
The art doesn't even need more detail or realism, it just needs consistent
detail. Even just a simple palettization/pixelation preprocessing for every
sprite could be enough -
[https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg)

~~~
Karliss
And making sure light is consistent. In the first picture some objects like
banners, notice board, bathtub shaped thing have clear shadow below them,
others like fence, green plant, mushroom don't. Buckets have light coming from
left side hay stack from right, other from top. I wonder if it would look
better if some objects were flipped horizontally.

~~~
spiderxxxx
That's at least 50% of it, if he had given his artists any direction it should
be this: Light coming from top left, soft shadows. Give the artists a palette
and let them create. When you don't have any limits, your creativity is
unbounded, and that can be bad for delivering something on a time budget.

------
segmondy
I think most people in this thread are missing the point.

The point is know your constraints!!! Be willing to say NO to some things!
Anything you say YES to has a cost!

If you can do the above, you can find success in most things.

If you apply the author's idea, it would be the same as. Why he has decided to
own a small business and not a startup or a big enterprise. "Why my revenue
looks like crap, and our growth is not a hockey stick" Most of us on here
would be better off making $500k a year working for ourselves than chasing $1
billion valuation. Nothing wrong with that. He has a family to feed. He
prefers having a small pie that's a sure thing than trying to go for a large
pie that he might not be able to get.

------
bipson
Aesthetics are such a poor/difficult topic to discuss, unless you want to go
the academic/philosophical route.

In fact, as soon someone feels the need to defend aesthetics in the first
place, I'm starting to feel twitchy - for the same reason you don't want to
discuss the quality of light with a blind person (not that I deny any blind
person the right to know how _I_ experience it).

I think a lot of commenters are right on point, when they argue that none of
"retro", low budget, or indie imply shabby graphics. Just as many commenters
completely miss the point about "shabby" graphics. Reduced or no graphics at
all are not "shabby". Obviously you will have a hard time criticizing the
aesthetics of text-based adventures (font-choice, spacing and layout maybe?).
Also, just moving from retro to contemporary you won't automatically get
"great looks", right? Thus can we finally remove the whole retro aspect from
the line of argument?

If you produce art (we do consider game graphics to be some kind of art,
right?), and you are criticized for the aesthetics, make of it what you wish.
Defending it won't increase your sales. Let the success of the game speak for
itself.

And if you cannot understand what people mean when they criticize you, ask
them (or others) what could be wrong and how to improve.

~~~
ryandrake
Art is one of the [many] reasons I could never be an indie game developer--I
preferred to stick to apps and use the OS's native toolkits. You can't just
write more tests to help ensure good art like you can for software. There's no
compiler warnings to tell you it's not going to look good. There's no API spec
to consult when you don't know if your character should have bigger or smaller
eyes.

I don't even know how I'd even start to interview an artist or art director.
You can't ask them to spend 10 minutes developing a 32x32 character on a
whiteboard, can you? I doubt they'd do a 2-day HackerRank style take-home
test. I guess you have to heavily rely on their portfolio and whether you like
the look.

I empathize with the OP and really, seeing as he's made a successful living
for 25 years writing games with crappy art, why does anyone think he needs
advice from the HN or Reddit brain trust?

------
nothis
I'm super happy that games that look and feel like those from Spiderweb
Software exist. I think it's charming. But the fact that he feels compelled to
write an article in _defense_ of the art style is telling to me. I think it's
not unreasonable to answer the headline question with "because they're
stubborn".

Their games look crap, not because of a lack of resources but because of a
disrespect for visual design (it's not even "art", they could make a better
looking game with colored squares). There's probably many, many ways to
improve the look that have nothing to do with "AAA art". He fails to see how
Baba Is You is a better looking game than any of theirs, simply because it's
focused and has a good use of color and contrast. Any $10/hour freelance game
artist can tell him that the problem with the games is a mismatch in detail,
between background and characters, between resolution and texture detail. This
makes tiles look either blurry or covered in white noise and together with a
sever lack of contrast, makes the game look flat and unlit.

Solving that doesn't require hiring expensive artists, it first involves
acknowledging there's an issue at the core that can't be solved by sticking
stuff on top of it. I see zero patience or passion for that and that's why
their games look the same as 25 years ago (and I could argue, _worse_ , since
higher resolution doesn't do them any favors).

Again, I have no problem with their games and them looking like they do but
going into defense here is a battle they can't win. Their best move is to
acknowledge that they don't care and do so with pride. Everything else just
feels at best insecure and at worst somewhat disrespectful towards devs who
care.

~~~
close04
The problem isn't going into defense, it's having an acidic attitude towards
it:

> What fascinates me here is that the guy seems to think he is telling me
> news. Like, I'm smart enough to keep a software company running for 25
> years, but I am unable to notice qualities in my games that are instantly
> obvious to Joe Q. Rando.

Imagine that being said in any other context to realize how uncalled for such
an attitude is and how much it undermines any other point the author wants to
make.

Microsoft or Apple have indubitably created some of the most successful and
valuable businesses that are still at it decades later. Now imagine them
giving the response above when faced with criticism. If it would sound awful
it's because it is. People who can't take even constructive criticism will
have a hard time existing on the internet. And it will show.

~~~
vkou
But that is pretty much exactly how Apple responds to criticism of their most
asinine product decisions. They double down on them. (And occasionally, years
later, quietly come to their senses)

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I don't see "doubling down" as analogous to "responding acidly," and I'd
actually say that Apple's most common response to criticism isn't "doubling
down" as much as "not officially responding at all." You may find their lack
of apology for arguably dubious design decisions or out-and-out product flaws
to be annoying, and I get it, but it's not as if the tech industry is chock-
full of counterexamples.

In any case, the OP's argument for "why all of our games look like crap" is
"we're not prioritizing the resources to put into consistent, polished
aesthetics." I'm going to bet that if you made a consensus list of the most
common complaints with Apple over the last ~5 years, "they just don't pay
enough attention to how things look" would not be near the top.

------
cannonedhamster
I grew up playing the Exile series on shareware, then I migrated to Avernum. I
have yet to find any series of games that I can get more value out of. The
sheer depth in the games Spiderweb software puts out is why I'll buy pretty
much everything they make. If I had to pick a gaming hill to die on this
developer would be it. The graphics do their job. Could they be flashier?
Sure, whatever. Aside from the Elder Scrolls series I can't think of a game
that even comes close in time to finish and the sheer amount of replayability.
Nothing in the game is a grind. There's always something do do while you're
collecting gear, etc.

~~~
Narishma
The issue is not that the graphics aren't flashy, whatever that means, it's
that they are inconsistent.

------
m0nty
ITT: lots of people missing the point that he doesn't actually believe his
games look like crap, he's just made a conscious (and profitable) decision to
go retro. He likes his games' visual style and values the freelancers who
produce the art. I didn't think this is a difficult point but apparently it
is.

~~~
polk
I don't think people are missing the point. There's 2 aspects to this: style
(retro) and execution (the actual graphics).

Gamers generally like the style. The Venn diagram of his target audience and
people who like retro game visuals is likely near a perfect circle.

What makes the games look unpleasing is the execution. It's just all over the
place, to the point where it looks like a mashup of free assets collected from
various websites.

People are pointing out that his otherwise amazing games are being held back
by their subpar graphics. Unfortunately, instead of taking the criticism
fairly, he sets up a strawman to deflect any blame, claiming that anyone who
doesn't like the execution just dislikes the style.

There's multiple points in the article where this shows, for example this one:

>The key problem here is that, when most people say, "Your art looks bad,"
what they mean is, "I want art that is good." They mean, "I want AAA-quality
art."

Big jumps there Jeff.

He shows his lack of knowledge about making good art when he says he can't
afford the extra man power to solve the issue. No one here would claim that,
to fix bad code, you have to hire more programmers. Art works in the same way.
The problems are foundational and don't require more employees or more hours
to get right - just a better approach.

The argument that this is not possible with freelancers is silly. He gives the
example of a freelancer creating a super niche style that no other artist can
replicate. No one is asking him to create award-winning art. People are simply
asking for games that are not-ugly. There's plenty of artstyles that fit all
his requirements, while still being not-ugly and reproducible by other
artists.

I don't doubt that it's hard to find good artists when you never took the time
to study what makes good art.

The truth seems to be that after his 25 years of game development Jeff still
doesn't know how to make good looking games. He has every right to do as he
wants - just as anyone else is free to comment on the look of games. But this
article is nothing more than one big list of poor justifications, which is why
it's getting a lot of flak.

~~~
svrtknst
I think it's unfair to claim that addressing the problem doesn't require more
man hours, though. If you were (or maybe you are, I don't know) unable to
program, how would you solve a programming need?

Either by hiring someone to do it for you, obviosuly adding man hours, or by
changing your own skill set and the distribution of your focus which either
takes time outright (which translates to man hours, as you learn new skills)
or changes the distribution of hours, taking effort away from other areas of
the game, such as writing.

------
hartror
Jeff is an enjoyable speaker, his latest GDC talk is fantastic (and a better
version of this blog post).
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs)

------
huhtenberg
To each his own, of course, but a great art can _really_ elevate game to a
completely new level -

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Braid-
art-1.j...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Braid-art-1.jpg)

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2e/Braid-
art-2.j...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2e/Braid-art-2.jpg)

Yes, it is an expense and so it's also a risk, but not taking any risks means
never trying to get out of your comfort zone.

~~~
freetime2
I think there’s also something to be said for simple art that forces you to
use your imagination. Especially in the role playing genre.

One of my favorite games of all time was Legends of Kesmai[1] - a graphical
multi-user dungeon that even for its time in the dial-up AOL days had horribly
outdated and simplistic graphics. Something about those basic graphics just
got my imagination going in a way that no other game has, and I found myself
completely immersed exploring that world.

So for me there is a lot of appeal in the Spiderweb graphical style.

[1][https://s.blogcdn.com/massively.joystiq.com/media/2012/03/ke...](https://s.blogcdn.com/massively.joystiq.com/media/2012/03/kesmai.jpg)

------
proc0
A good artist will make anything look good, pixel art, card games, all the way
to photo-real 3d (of course depending on the artist). What happens is that in
general the first thing to be cut due to budget is probably the art since
without function you have no game. Imho, indie games would do better if they
"sliced" their game releases differently, such that art was never takes a
back-seat as it is probably tempting to do. Many people think you only need
good gameplay but in reality the art, aesthetics, music, etc. of any game is
the invisible factor that people are influenced and only notice when it's
broken.

~~~
dwild
> A good artist will make anything look good, pixel art, card games, all the
> way to photo-real 3d (of course depending on the artist).

That's so true. It made me also realize something else, that a good artist can
also works with monetary constraint.

He bought graphics, like a product. The thing is, he isn't an artist. It's the
artist that should have the liberty to decide whether details is worth it or
not.

------
freetime2
Jeff Vogel has run a successful business for 25 years - making the games he
wants to make, living the life he wants to live, and making a lot of people
happy in the process.

We should all be so lucky.

People may not like his graphics and that’s totally understandable. But
hopefully everyone can at least respect his accomplishments.

~~~
PeterStuer
So we can't have opinions on public statements of people if they are
'successful'?

The choices are his, but people can still have opinions and voice them.

e.g. Jeff believes marginal revenue increases would not be enough to offset
marginal expenses. Others have different opinions, and voice them as a
response to a public blogpost. I see nothing wrong with that.

~~~
freetime2
I updated my comment above to remove the negative reaction to the general HN
sentiment. Of course anyone is free (and encouraged) to voice their opinions.

~~~
PeterStuer
My comment above now no longer makes sense in he context of your edits, but I
can't change it anymore.

------
vorpalhex
For the genre, I find the art style to generally be fitting. It's not a
distraction.

I do wonder if a more stylized approach would help sooth some of the
complaints. The author obviously talks about why that doesn't work when you're
using freelancers, but I wonder if the style could happen not in the art
directly, but in a shader or similar. This would also help the art feel more
consistent.

I do wonder if the author could retain freelancers better, whether that's by a
contract that gives them a minimum promised hours or a better rate, etc.

I definitely think that the insults the author has endured are inappropriate,
most certainly the threats are. We as gamers benefit from Indies, and we need
to treat them well even if sometimes we don't care for their games. There are
plenty of indie games that aren't my preference, but I'm glad to have them in
the community and want to support them as artists and developers.

------
0xfaded
The graphics immediately reminded me of Tibia
([https://www.tibia.com/news](https://www.tibia.com/news)), the MMO running
since 1997. My friends were into it at one point, and I cut my programming
teeth writing bots for the game (sorry CIPsoft).

Kind of sad to see the playership has been in decline for the last 10 years
though :(.

~~~
dkersten
The art in that game looks consistent, lighting looks decent and the colours
work well together. Sadly all of these properties lack from the OPs
screenshots.

------
fouc
Honestly I think it's a shame when people are so picky about graphics. Some of
the best games I've ever played were purely ASCII-based. I'm talking about
various BBS games, or MUD-based games. There were also some really novel
interfaces like like mTrek [0], and BattleTech 3030 MUX [1]. So much fun to
play.

[0] [http://randsinrepose.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/07/mtrek.pn...](http://randsinrepose.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/07/mtrek.png) [1] [http://bt-
thud.sourceforge.net/thud/big/bigpicture.jpg](http://bt-
thud.sourceforge.net/thud/big/bigpicture.jpg)

~~~
meheleventyone
It's not so much being picky but that from a design perspective aesthetics
should add to rather than detract from the experience. For a modern ASCII
example take a look at Cogmind:
[https://i.imgur.com/lUpcTmF.gif](https://i.imgur.com/lUpcTmF.gif)

From a commercial point of view the aesthetics are used by consumers as
(perhaps unfairly) a judge of quality.

~~~
anchpop
The aesthetics of that game make me want to go buy it right away just from
that gif you linked, it just looks so interesting and unique!

And I don't think it's unfair to use aesthetics as a judge of quality. First
of all, as you mentioned, nice aesthetics do enhance the experience. And
second of all, it's a way to signal strength - a team not capable of making a
good game will often not be capable of making it look interesting either,
especially for indie games.

And it doesn't have to be that expensive either. There's a game I'm slightly
affiliated with (but not in any monetary way) that has been made with a budget
of $0 by volunteers (mostly highschoolers) and I think it looks good just
because of the insane attention-to-detail and meticulousness of everyone
involved. Here's [0] what it looks like for reference.

[0]: [https://youtu.be/Uryrdj-DUcA?t=4](https://youtu.be/Uryrdj-DUcA?t=4)

~~~
meheleventyone
Yup, that looks lovely.

------
sha666sum
As expected, a lot of people in this thread are giving "valuable" advice about
his art style. Jeff's self-ironic way of saying the game looks like crap and
calling his art style inconsistent seems to have set the tone of the
conversation.

Having played through the Avernum trilogy last year, I don't think the art
style is inconsistent at all, especially considering how old some of the
assets are. Please have a closer look at some actual screenshots from a recent
Avernum game[1] before providing your invaluable input on how he should manage
his game art.

[1]
[https://www.gog.com/game/avernum_escape_from_the_pit](https://www.gog.com/game/avernum_escape_from_the_pit)

~~~
djur
The Avernum remakes look fine. That isn't what the article is talking about,
though. It's his new game, which looks substantially worse and consists mostly
of new art. He even includes an image of Avernum 3 with this caption: "Our
previous game, Avernum 3: Ruined World. Why didn't I just write another game
that looks like this? Because I didn't want to. Nyeah!"

~~~
sha666sum
The article is about more than just his new game. All the criticism that he
addresses is about his previous games, and even the title of the article is
"Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap". I'm quite certain that the comment in
the Avernum 3 caption was about changing the perspective from isometric.

------
underwater
It seems like there is so much he could do that _doesn 't_ require paying for
new assets or more expensive artists.

For example lighting and shadows can be generated dynamically (currently
they're baked into the assets, meaning they are inconsistent or completely
missing). Or generate edges between ground textures procedurally so things
don't look so blocky. Add a particle system for weather and atmospheric
effects.

If he did that then he'd be able to carry that work forward into future games,
and achieve a consistency of look and feel that extends beyond what he can get
by trying to match artwork.

~~~
lesbaker
This is along the lines of what I wanted to say. Going from the main
screenshot, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (in addition to what you said)
that could be done programmatically like making the ground tiles look non-
uniform or adding some "noise" to the land/water boundaries. Even some decals
such as rocks or flowers on the ground would do wonders. The point is that
there is big-bang-for-the-buck things that game developers can do with
existing assets and I feel this may have been missed in the discussion.

------
kelvin0
I think it's great that they are able to be profitable in a great niche (25
years!).

As an ex - videogame developer I've shipped several titles from simple 'kids'
games to AAA titles. Here's my take:

You CAN make good looking games on an indie budget. Plenty of indie developers
do it. However this requires an Artistic Director which oversees the visual
style and coherence for the game.

Some programmers (very few I know) have both technical talent and have a very
good 'eye' artistically. They are able to make games and make them look good.
It's once again still about style and visual coherence.

Obviously the writer of the post is not an artist so he might not necessarily
have the time or inclination to dwell on such visual coherence and direction.
That's fine, he accepts that.

But I can't agree with the fact that being and indie makes it harder to have a
pleasing visual aesthetic. That is simply a question of choice, which you can
rationalize with any type of arguments.

That being said I'm really impressed with their success and hope them all the
best for the next 25 years!

------
jayd16
I think the main take away is Jeff is just not passionate about art and so it
gets cut. Even when talking about art he seems to mostly be talking about
technically advanced graphics and still not the art you can achieve with those
graphics. This is fine. Play to your strength.

The rest of the blog post is one of those soliloquies more to reassure
yourself than anything, I'd say.

------
JosephRedfern
Perhaps irrelevant, but I found the original message posted to reddit, and it
ended with:

> Please don't take this the wrong way, I know it has been a contention for
> years, and you are probably very aware of it. I just think you could be
> reaching a lot more new fans and I feel sad about the lost opportunity.

which was (IMO unfairly) omitted from the original post. Totally goes against
the authors suggestion that "What fascinates me here is that the guy seems to
think he is telling me news".

------
AcerbicZero
The vast majority of games which I have sunk serious amounts of play time into
often look mediocre, or worse. Its not that I don't enjoy high fidelity
graphics, its just that those GFX's often come at the cost of mechanics, or
replay ability. Not a fair trade in my mind.

Anyway, to make this useful here are some moderately or lesser known low-fi
(ish) games that are basically responsible for me not having a PhD in
something:

-Rimworld

-Starsector

-Neo Scavanger

-Gary Grigsby's War in the East/West

-DCS Barbarossa

-KSP (Kerbal)

-Factorio

-Xenonauts

-Rimworld again, but this time with excessive modding :)

-Everything Ssethtzeentach has reviewed

------
jlturner
My brother and I have been working our way through the Exile series, and while
they’re old and rough, the game content is really good. They make you feel
like smart figuring out some tough optional puzzle, and there is a great sense
of exploration and internal mapping.

Funny enough I never played any of Vogel’s games past Blades of Exile, and
honestly, it’s because I think they look bad, aesthetically. I never felt this
way about Exile, or even old Ultima games. The problem here isn’t “these games
don’t have good graphics” but rather “these games don’t have good art
direction/style/aesthetic”. Vogel says in the post he has used multiple
artists with conflicting art styles, and it shows. As the games got higher
resolution the problems just got more apparent.

------
Causality1
>made by a team of freelancers, to our specifications

So...did these freelancers not communicate with each other at all? When I saw
the first screenshot on the page, of the newest game, I thought it was
composed entirely of assets purchased from an asset store and built in RPG
Maker and I expected the body of the article to be centered on why it's ok to
buy assets when what you're focusing on is gameplay. I feel like this dev is
really being taken advantage of by his cadre of artists because the other
games on the page don't actually look bad. Maybe a hair generic, but not bad.
The newest one, though, damn. That looks like someone's homework.

~~~
gtirloni
He doesn't have a cadre of artists. They might not be working concurrently in
the same game. He specifically says multiple times that they come and go, life
happens.

I guess there's an argument to be made that he could focus on better and
better specifications for those artists so, over time, the style stays
consistent. But I dont know anything about that. Seems doable?

~~~
gmueckl
You can absolutely write specifications for art. And I would consider a pretty
technical checklist for quality control that is agreed on in advance (lighting
from predetermined direction, adjerence to color palette for corresponding
scenery, shadows consistent, required silhouettes recognizable etc.).

I remember an old style guide written by MS for Windows XP that outlined in
great detail how icons in the default theme style meed achieve their look. It
gave technical details like the exact location of the vanishing point for
perspectively drawn icons. So coming up with an art style specification should
be doable once the style has been developed.

------
DecoPerson
In the AAA game industry a Look Dev Artist would help here. Focusing on the
in-universe elements of the game (as opposed to the UI), they set goals and
restrictions that lead to consistent, appealing, and cheap-to-produce art
styles.

Queen's Wish looks ugly in a quaint way. I might buy it for that reason, as it
makes me think: "Indie creators usually feel there's something about their
game that'll make it sell -- it's clearly not the art style or the music in
this case, so it must be the gameplay and/or the story, right?"

------
crimsonalucard
There's a secret to art this person hasn't realized.

Art doesn't have to be detailed to look good. Minimalism proves this. Those
Geneforge games have just enough detail to look like shit. It's possible to
scale back and keep the art good with less effort but better design sense.

Take the game: Thomas was alone. The guy probably didn't hire a single artist
yet that game looks way better than any gene-forge game. It's all in the
style. The author of this article really just doesn't have a sense of style.

------
ehnto
I have been really enjoying the way games are being stylized nowadays. We
reached a level of fidelity that is really expensive to maintain I think, and
so game studios are leaning in on really solid art direction instead. It makes
for much more interesting worlds and longer lasting art.

For example, LA Noire looks dated (though still excellent in many ways), while
Borderlands looks as good as when it was released.

LA Noire while it feels a bit dated, the characters don't really hit uncanny
valley thanks to the facial motion capture technology. I am still aware they
are a video game character, just a very emotive one.

It makes me think there is a peak realism we should chase, after which
improved graphics wouldn't really add much. I wonder if maybe we aren't
already there.

Many games suffer from high detail but lack of clarity. We are still working
with a 2D screen with limited dynamic range after all. So that means when
there is higher detail it can get overly busy. Lacking contrast, making it
hard to decipher what you are looking at quickly, especially if it is moving.
Stylized games can add visual contrast in their lighting and art, improving
clarity overall. Having said that, I think games could leanr some tricks from
cinema in this regard. Just capturing what is real doesn't make good cinema,
you have to engineer the scene and the shot.

~~~
Crinus
IMO even games that go for realistic graphics end up stylized, mainly because
the technical limitations do force those styles (e.g. many PS2 games tried to
be realistic but the lack of pixel shaders means they had to paint the
lighting on the textures and the low resolution meant that they had to
exaggerate some thinner shapes and both of those nowadays give a more cartoony
look). The closer to "today" you go, the harder is to see this, but it becomes
apparent when you see games from the 80s, 90s and (to a lesser extent, since
they are more recent) 2000s. If you can say that a game looks like a $X game
(e.g. a NES game or ZX Spectrum game or SNES game or PS1 game, or N64 game or
PS2 game or PS3 game) that is because its appearance has aspects that are
common with other games on $X - which is exactly what make that a style.

So with that in mind, "dated" is simply a realistic style that isn't old
enough to have become distinct from the current peak.

Also FWIW "stylistic" doesn't necessarily imply cartoony or exaggerated, this
is just a kind of style you can have but certainly not the only one. And of
course the "styles" i mentioned above are treated as just guidelines, many
NES-styled or ZX Spectrum-styled or PS1-styled games wont work on real NES/ZX
Spectrum/PS1 (or even even strictly follow the visual limitations - e.g. many
ZX Spectrum-styled games use single colored chunky sprites with bold outlines
but they do not do attribute clash and similarly many NES-styled games use the
resolution and palette of NES but ignore sprite or VRAM limitations). After
all it is giving the impression that matters, not adhering to strict hardware
limitations (though for some that may also be part of the appeal).

------
ChrisRR
Unfortunately I think the graphics look like that typical windows 95 style
game, where the lighting is inconsistent, the style is inconsistent, the
colour choices are drab and the fonts are just the first default picks from MS
word.

There's a lot of work that needs to be done to pick a consistent style,
because at the moment it's a mixture of everything and it all clashes.

~~~
udp
The fact that you identify "that typical windows 95 style game" as being a
thing implies that it is a style, whether or not you like the style. Building
games that look like that today is just a specific kind of retro.

The screenshots of John's games make me feel nostalgic in the same way that
I'm sure NES and Arcade style games make 80s kids feel nostalgic. The Windows
95 style is retro now, even if it still feels current to us!

------
tempguy9999
What is looking good? To me it's that the hues and colours don't hide relevant
features of the game, or hurt my eyes.

I've played on-line games that have camera shake when you make a hit, bits
spray everywhere, shadows cast where they conceal relevant stuff, none of this
helps me enjoy it, it just gets in the way of what I need to see. It gets
turned off ASAP.

In other cases I'd rather have the characters not act like dicks (stand around
when there's a fight starting, get attacked by monsters and not defend
themselves). The gameplay is so frustrating sometimes. (edit: point is
graphics are low on my list of bothersome)

Art is going mad, like the floppy hair that nvidia GPUs are boasting about -
who cares, really?

(Did play a demo of Vogel's game and liked it, the only problem being that I
didn't pick up any threatening atmosphere in areas where there should have
been. Still, recommended and good fun)

------
mcguire
The link to the Small Business Council at the end:
[https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-
data/](https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/)

" _Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the level of
entrepreneurship actually has declined in recent years. That is, the number of
self-employed in the U.S. has dropped notably. Incorporated self-employed fell
from 5.78 million in 2008 to 5.13 million in 2011. It climbed back to 5.64
million in 2016. So, after eight years, the number of incorporated self-
employed remains well short of the 2008 level. Unfortunately, the news is even
worse when it comes to the larger measure of unincorporated self-employed. The
number of unincorporated self-employed declined from 10.59 million in 2006 to
9.36 million in 2014._ "

~~~
Reedx
I wonder how much of that is due to our messed up healthcare system. If we
fixed that, I bet we'd see a substantial boost because it's one of the most
difficult aspects of starting and running a small business.

------
cushychicken
In this post: "I made a conscious choice of what to build."

In this comment thread: "Fuck your choice. It'd be nebulously better if you
made a different choice."

------
d--b
Dwarf Fortress, MineCraft, A Dark Room, etc.

You don't need great graphics to make games that people really enjoy.

~~~
rasz
Rimworld also shows you dont need $$ and manpower to make great looking games.
Its all about Style, not quality of actual assets.

[https://imgur.com/a/wS3Pt](https://imgur.com/a/wS3Pt)

[https://imgur.com/a/xdDzg](https://imgur.com/a/xdDzg)

~~~
dkersten
Those links are awesome l, thanks for posting!

As far as games with simple but nice art go, there’s also prison architect,
stardew valley, Celeste, risk or rain, terraria, sword and sworcery,
factorio... and many many more. It doesn’t need to be high res or super fancy,
just consistent with a a nice colour palette.

------
csours
The first games I bought online were Spiderweb games (Exile 2,3). I had to
convince my parents to let me use their credit card. I got the code back in
email to unlock the game, and I got to play the second half of the game! I
remember agonizing over stats of things like the waveblades and halberds.

The way I knew I absolutely had to go to bed was when I lost over an hour's
worth of progress due to forgetting to save.

I remember reading The Story of the Baby on IronyCentral back in 2002. [0] The
Baby is now almost an adult.

The Spiderweb Software forums were my first major forum presence.

I love Jeff Vogel's crappy looking games.

0\.
[http://www.ironycentral.com/babymain.html](http://www.ironycentral.com/babymain.html)

~~~
gipp
Oh wow, are you me? I also remember being young enough to think I could just
find a way _around_ the Shareware Demon (lol) if I tried hard enough.

I remember the brief but super fun Blades of Exile scenario community back
then, there were some really fun inventive things people did with a pretty
barebones engine.

I think at one point someone made a fanservice scenario with a lot of people
from the forums and I got a cameo. Good childhood memories.

------
aresant
An incredibly good point is made by a user on Twitter that I hope is taken to
heart by Jeff.

A better quality visual experience could be delivered at near zero additional
cost / complexity with basic technical hacks - eg faux shading / lighting -
see the before / after below:

[https://twitter.com/RavenmoreArt/status/1164447066300588033](https://twitter.com/RavenmoreArt/status/1164447066300588033)

Feels like Jeff would benefit from a consultation with a technical art
director or similar.

Every point he makes about economy, style, preference would still stand but
could also address a considerable amount of the visual criticism (and hence,
lost sales opportunities)

------
mntmoss
Something that never seems to come up when one of Jeff's art defense posts
come up is that an RPG has a considerably higher asset load than most types of
games, not just graphically but all around.

And historically, the genre has responded to this by sacrificing some aspect
of polish - typically animation, but also often by just telling you about a
thing with text.

What Jeff has done by stocking up and reusing generic assets is essentially a
way of reducing that load so that the game actually gets produced on his
microbudget targets. And what's really lost in that is any sort of "wow"
moment where a distinctive scene, magic item or character design can make an
impression visually.

However, I do think he could stand to leverage technology better. 3D might not
be nostalgic, but it is the overwhelming preference of devs trying to use
generic assets, since it gives you so much more utility(take the sword model
and reskin it - new sword! same building with different decor - new scene!)
and even puts some stock animation within reach, when relying on Mixamo or
similar.

Jeff is already using these kinds of stock assets in the new game, it's just
that faithfully implementing them into an old-style 2D tile renderer system
makes them look _worse_ than they actually are, since it guarantees that they
look inconsistent in scale, perspective, lighting etc.

One productive way to respond to his challenge would be to give him an A/B:
license his existing work to a small self-funded team, have them remake it
aesthetically without changing how it plays. Have it launch on consoles and
mobile. Then we'd really know if the assertions match the reality.

~~~
sprafa
If he was making huge money on these games, why wouldn't he invest I having
better artists? Are you saying that the ROI for having better art is so high
that he’s in a self perpetuating cycle so to speak? By keeping his games ugly
he has no choice but to microbudget and on and on it goes?

------
acd
Simple graphics open up for imagination as juskrey post here said. That couple
with a great story can be good enough. A good book does not need to contain
picture we imagine the content, a RPG can be the same. That said better
looking graphics could be sourced from Chinese graphic artist, there is an
industry which makes better game graphics quite cheaply.

For example [https://retrostylegames.com/about-game-
art/](https://retrostylegames.com/about-game-art/)

------
tripzilch
On the one hand, I totally get the business explanation he gave in the second
half of this post. That's a perfectly fine reason and if this is how he makes
his business run for all these years, that is impressive and more power to
him.

On the _other_ hand, he should have led with that, and probably also kept it
to that. Because defending this style as if it's somehow a valid choice
design-wise ... yeah no. It's pretty obvious that the guy has no sense about
design, colour use, or the aesthetic aspects that make retro look "cool", how
they differ from the aesthetic aspects in old games with good art versus those
with bad art, and how to make choices and combine that knowledge to actually
celebrate the look of retro art that he loves so much.

Saying it looks like this because he likes the look of retro art, is kind of
dismissive of .. well basically studying graphics design in general. Because
he somehow equates not spending the effort on making it look good, to the
aesthetic of these old games. But a lot of effort _was_ spent to make them
look good within the limitations of those machines/displays.

Just applying those limitations isn't going to get you the quality. It's just
like those furniture stores that sell vintage-looking stuff, that is actually
just things made badly (crooked) with artificially aged wood, pretending to be
a porch on a beach house, I dunno. It wants to be vintage cool, but it turns
out to be vintage crap.

But I get it for the business reasons. I just hate it when people come up with
the excuse of "actually I think it's prettier this way" ...

------
GhostVII
I largely agree with the post, but using "Baba is you" as an example I think
actually goes against the authors point. The art in "Baba is you" is very
simple, and would likely not take much money to create, yet the game still
looks very nice (in my eyes, at least). It uses simple graphics very
effectively, while the author seems to use more complex graphics, and as a
result the game as a whole actually looks worse and less consistent.

------
ggggtez
> That means we have to double our sales to make up for it.

I don't agree. You need enough money to _pay_ an artist, but you don't need to
give the artist a 50% cut of your studio!

Full Disclosure: I personally think the art is bad, but I see the retro
appeal. The mismatching styles and low quality definitely is reminiscent of
old D&D manuals which had monsters drawn by Gary Gygax himself... and which
looked really bad too.

------
adrusi
I don't know the business considerations for this little niche Jeff has carved
out for himself, so I'll just trust that he knows what he's talking about.

The art really does look bad though. I wonder if what he needs is actually
worse art. I'm sure there are corners he could cut, like instead of having a
full set of sprites for each race×class combo (I don't know anything about his
games, I'm just assuming), each facing four different directions, he could
have just one sprite per race with a symbol in the corner indicating its class
and an arrow pointing which way it's facing. I'm not sure that the downgrade
would result in turning off too many players, I think nearly all the players
that care about art style are already turned off from his games. Maybe that
would leave more room in the budget for the aspects where his games really
shine (which I assume they do, given that he can make a living off of them
despite how bad of a visual first impression they leave).

------
ixtli
I would rather modern games look a bit more "like crap" and have even a 10th
of the gameplay depth and quality of Spiderweb games than his games getting
any better. I guess I'm also one of those people who grew up on the SNES and
on Avernum and etc., but i know many younger people who feel the same as i do!

~~~
bachmeier
> I would rather modern games look a bit more "like crap" and have even a 10th
> of the gameplay depth and quality of Spiderweb games than his games getting
> any better.

That's what I was thinking. One of the things about games from back in the old
days (I'm thinking 1980s) is that they had to be fun to play, because they
didn't offer much else. Today there is an emphasis on looking good, but the
game itself usually isn't great.

My hypothesis is that selling good-looking games that suck is more profitable.
The graphics sell the game. Then the kids get tired of it and buy a new one.
If the game is good, they'll just keep playing it and not open their wallet.

------
peterashford
This is really common with indie devs. Rimworld is another example. Gets heaps
of complaints about the art style - surely it should be easy to improve the
art? Yes - but at considerable cost in money and time and also to the ability
to mod the game, which was also one of its core strengths. To come here and
see more of the entitled gamer viewpoint - your business reality doesn't
matter, do XYZ anyway! - is disappointing. Making games is hard, making a
living from games as a self-run studio is uber-hard. Dude deserves kudos, not
criticism. Don't like the art: don't play the games - no-one's forcing you.
But this is his life, this is how he pays his bills - his business reality
trumps your 'gee wouldn't it be nicer in puce'

------
haolez
This article worked like advertising to me. I feel enticed to buy his games
now :)

I like games like NetHack and Baldur's Gate. I was quite disappointed when I
bought Pillars of Eternity and its dull story couldn't keep me interested at
all.

I would choose a nice story over nice graphics anytime.

------
TheRealPomax
A nice related video is his GDC 2018 talk "failing to fail", over on
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs)

I don't particularly like the art that his games use (and I also grew up on
Ultima) but I'm 100% behind the idea that if "trying for better art" (and note
that "better" in no way guarantees "something people will call good") means
putting the entire business at risk, only someone with no sense of
responsibility and no understanding of the value of a dollar would take that
risk. Not in year one, and still not in year 25.

------
makecheck
One of the curses of games is that they start to feel “old” quickly; the
faster you can develop new content, the better. It is a _lot_ faster to add
content with simpler art (and cheaper, with better consistency, etc. as
article says).

Now compare something ultra-realistic like FFXV. Undoubtedly cool. Took them
10 years though, and even then they almost released it too soon. Gamers still
blew through all available content in no time. Except now, the developers
can’t just add a bunch of new stuff in no time: _every_ change has an
absurdly-high quality bar to meet. That means extremely high cost, and
probably more time spent than they’d like.

------
acomjean
Honestly this rubbed me the wrong way. Almost like its a point of pride that
his art is bad.

I think the real question is:

If he made the games look better would he sell enough more to justify the
cost? He feels strongly not. But one has to wonder, how many people look at
say pass, without even trying. Or go the other way an just do a "Dwarf
Fortress" and go straight to ascii.

I guess the economics work for him, as is.

People are fickle, and do infact judge books by their covers to some extent
and in a crowded market. If you went to but something from a website that had
a late 90s web ascetic, you might choose to go to one that looks a little more
modern.

------
Someone
So, this firm has customers that want better graphics, but they’re not willing
to invest in that.

It also seems the games aren’t easily modded (at least, the blog post nor this
HN discussion mention it).

I’m sure it won’t be enough for all or even most critics, but that, to me,
seems a missed opportunity. Looking at the games, the look of the tiles won’t
affect gameplay (as I tight if, for example, the programs do a flood-fill of
the map at some time) so it shouldn’t be hard to, at startup, check for the
presence of a ‘tiles.png’ or ‘tiles.bmp’ file, and read tiles from it, if
present.

------
cosarara
I wonder how easy it would for modders to replace the art in those games, just
like how people made texture packs for minecraft and tilesets for dwarf
fortress. Sometimes a fan with free time is all it takes.

------
dmitriid
You should also see his GDC talk, “Failing to Fail”. Jeff Vogel is amazing:
[https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs](https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs)

------
gwbas1c
(nit)

Gosh the images and text on this page is so small. I know I can make it bigger
in my browser, but consider bringing the font size (and image size) up a bit
on the page too.

------
davidscolgan
This thread reminds me of patio11's thread "What I'd Do If I Ran Tarsnap"
where Colin took a strong contrarian stance and everyone raged against it and
in the end Colin won from all of the exposure.

In case you didn't read the end note: "I am writing these blog posts to get
attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror." I'd say he
succeeded pretty well in that aim!

------
laegooose
Can anyone recommend books/blogs/courses about how to make game (or any
complicated piece of software actually) look good?

As a software developer and entrepreneur, I understand concept of ergonomics
very well - things should be easy to read, hard to misinterpret, responsive,
familiar, easy to click. But I struggle with aesthetics all the time -
something feels off, but I can't pinpoint why and how to fix it.

------
starsinspace
Oh wow, I remember playing Exile back then! Found it on some shareware CD-ROM
in the 90s. Was a nice game... I should check out their newer games!

~~~
sha666sum
The Avernum trilogy, starting with Escape from the Pit[1] is a remake of the
original Exile-trilogy. I highly recommend especially the first game in the
trilogy.

[1]
[https://www.gog.com/game/avernum_escape_from_the_pit](https://www.gog.com/game/avernum_escape_from_the_pit)

------
_hardwaregeek
I respect that. Crappiness is an underrated quality. I watched an interview
with Barry Jenkins recently where he talked about his first short film. He
talked about how the film had bad exposure, scratches on the film, weird
color, etc. But at the same time, he still loved it, simply due to its
uniqueness and rawness.

There's this assumption that every artist wants to mimic the big budget
people. Or not even big budget, just medium budget. That filmmakers want to
make movies which are shiny and polished. But a filmmaker who tries to imitate
a big budget production with a shoestring budget isn't going to get a polished
film at a tenth the budget. They're gonna get a weird uncanny valley, kinda
good looking film that isn't quite indie, isn't quite mainstream. And trust
me, as a begrudging attendee of many small film festivals, it's not a good
look.

Contrast that to say, Stranger Than Paradise, which is remarkably simple and
very obviously low budget. It's in black and white. The acting is a little
rough around the edges. The sets are extraordinarily simple. The camera
doesn't do anything fancy. Yet it works because it takes full advantage of its
crappiness. It doesn't half ass quality, it full asses crappiness.

------
8bitme
Big props to Jeff.

As he says repeatedly in his posts if you don't like his art style or games
you're free to find other games.

He's been supporting himself successfully this way for over 25 years despite
the criticism. Clearly there is a community of people who favor his style of
games depsite "the old school art style"

------
ta7fh38f
I'd probably call Spiderweb games one template, with some variations. Not much
has advanced in the twenty odd years I've looked at them from time to time.
First one was OK, all others I've tried for a few minutes and been pretty
underwhelmed with the progress.

------
ahh
Somewhat off topic, but what's the closest thing to Avernum - a big, sprawly,
kitchen sink RPG with a ton of backstory and fiddly combat - that I can play
on my phone? (Not a tablet.)

Growing up Spiderweb games were some of my all time favorites and I'd love one
on the go.

------
juskrey
People are much better imagining "other 90%" of the game realistically on
their own

------
nardi
“Because I have bad taste.”

Seriously, it’s possible to make low-budget art that looks good. This isn’t
it.

------
DonHopkins
This article fondly reminds me of the Game Helpin' Squad's jawesome review of
World Quester 2.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gy9hJauXns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gy9hJauXns)

------
ravenstine
Maybe I'm just an old man at this point, but I find "imperfection" rather
charming. Realism can be cool, but games and cartoons that are "crappy" have
character and allow me to use my imagination to believe in different worlds.
One of the reasons that I still love Nintendo 64 games is that they look
clunky compared to today's games, and they look that way because the artists
had to work within the constraints of the hardware and come up with game
assets that look close enough but don't destroy the FPS. If a game looks
consistently crappy, I can buy into its universe with my imagination.

I forget who said it, but I think there's a saying that great art is borne
through limitation. When an a good artist only has a limited set of tools, or
maybe not even the best ones, it brings out the best in their abilities.

------
j0057
Gameplay is way more important than graphics. Source: played a lot of fun but
crap-looking games in the 90s on a 320×200 four-shades-of-amber screen. Or
what about the 160×144 Gameboy screen that also supported 2-bit color?

~~~
dagw
How good a game looks is not simply a function of the number of pixels and
colors the screen can display. There where great looking games on the Gameboy
and there are terrible looking games running at 4K on the latest GPUs.

------
sukilot
Nowhere in the article does he entertain the notion of finding an artist
willing to join as a _partner_ and go 50-50 (or 80-20) on equity/revshare. He
only frets about the cost of hiring employees on wage.

------
whiddershins
It’s interesting to contrast this attitude with Simogo, who seem moderately
successful by really prioritizing visual conception.

I wonder if there are non obvious economic factors that make it possible for
them.

------
markus_zhang
Bought all of his games and have to say I respect his decision. In small
business you have to find the local maximum and stay there until it's drain
dried and change course then.

------
soup10
Good art is expensive and he makes niche games. My gut feeling is that if he
just improved the art without making sure the games appealed to a wider
audience it would fail financially.

------
ErikAugust
Our game "looks like crap too": [https://megacity.gg](https://megacity.gg).
It's supposed to be retro.

------
ozzmotik
it's nice to see something like this. im personally of the mind that graphics
really don't matter in video games; they are certainly nice, but you don't
need state of the art, AAA high def rendering to make a video game compelling.
i think ultimately the hallmark of an enjoyable game is how engaging and
immersive it is, and how fluidly it exposes its mechanics to you and allows
you a playground to exploit those mechanics.

------
softfalcon
Constraint breeds creativity.

Constraints ensure simplicity where there could have been excess.

If you have less pixels to work with, it helps you edit your design to what is
clear and truly necessary. It prevents bad patterns from emerging in the UI
and game interactions.

I applaud this developer for sticking to their guns, finding their niche and
really making it shine.

There is nothing wrong with building around a practical and dare I say it,
nostalgic design aesthetic.

"Make games you would want to play" is one of the mantras I repeat to myself
whenever I'm tinkering with a game prototype.

Clearly Jeff understands all of this and follows through with the delivery.

Great article!

------
barbs
In this thread: people who aren't the developer's target audience complaining
about the graphics in a game they'll never play.

------
progx
Look at the app-stores, you need great teaser-graphics for the first view of
users. So you get attention.

------
tinus_hn
I don’t know his games but perhaps he could make it easy for his fans to
develop alternative tile sets.

------
unnouinceput
This article was very good for me. It made me fully understand why I never
liked Minecraft and why I will never like it. I would rather replay Gothic
series for 11th time then start playing Minecraft. My kids play Minecraft on
daily basis, when free time is allowed of course, the only game I never played
with them.

------
ctack
And now I want to read his book - “The Poo Bomb: True Tales of Parental
Terror”

------
wodenokoto
Is the first screenshot Queens wish that he is talking about?

------
zapzupnz
Nobody:

Developer: nuh-uh, it's you who's wrong! hAtErS gOnNa HaTe!

------
AtlasBarfed
And graphics disappear from your enjoyment of a game after about an hour
typically, aside from those fleeting moments in "world" games where you get
stunning vistas...

And then return to hack hack slash shoot.

------
YesThatTom2
Hiring s full time employee would more than double his budget. Since his
company is a husband-wife team they share expenses and probably live off the
equivalent of 1.5 salaries (or maybe 1.0?)

------
cat199
enjoying watching people making the same arguments countered in the article
without actually adressing the counterpoints -

the square peg of 'maximizing superficial appeal for the most short term
popularity irrespective of the personal cost' is so deeply implanted in some
people's minds that they literally cannot comprehend doing things in any other
'round hole' sort of way.

------
kd3
Not sure if Vogel realizes this, but his games look like crap. Someone should
tell him.

------
qazpot
This article is a masterpiece of click bait titles.

------
DonHopkins
Speaking of looking like crap, I was recently going through my old backups,
and ran across an ancient forgotten installer for "The Sims Steering
Committee" dated June 4, 1998, an early pre-release version of The Sims that
we distributed internally at EA shortly after they bought Maxis, more than a
year and a half before we released The Sims in March 2000.

Here's a screen recording of a demo I made in a VM, which walks through the
scenarios, objects, and tools, and also shows some of the "SimAntics" behavior
tree code behind the different levels.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY)

It's got a "sketchy" user interface, a dot above the selected character's head
instead of the iconic spinning plumb-bob, a horrifically crude and ugly object
placement tool with yellow squares and big red X's when you can't place an
object (but that gladly lets you place bathtubs on hills), and a bare minimal
number of crappy objects, some of which have astoundingly terrible graphics
and prototypically implemented behaviors.

Especially @ 24:25: the vintage Stereo with colorful musical notes dancing
above it, the stinky Fish Tank (permanently attached to its own table), the
unbelievably nasty Pink Flamingo, the goofy looking Flower (also growing out
of a pot on its own table), and the blue bakelite Telephone (glued to its own
table as well) which looks like it has Halloween Candy Corn springing out when
it rings @ 12:45, then the caller asks you if you'd like your fingers chewed
off by rabid ferrets for $42. It has pixelated censoring @ 13:31, which
attempts to disguise the embarrassing fact that they shit and shower with
their pants on. Also @ 2:00 it has weird pie menus with placeholder programmer
art, and the original characters, including Archie Bunker permanently holding
a burning cigar in his hand! Also there's some unfortunately worded dialog
text that probably wouldn't have made it past the ESRB @ 40:50.

As ugly as it was, it was just playable enough to convince The Sims Steering
Committee at EA not to cancel our project, and to give us another year and a
half to complete it.

Here's an interview with Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims, in
which she describes "Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion".

Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion

[https://web.archive.org/web/20110408034710/https://www.donho...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110408034710/https://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/31)

>The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The
Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including
"Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".

>Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together
until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret
to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.

>The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The
approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned
Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't
missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's
OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!

>In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that
SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not
comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play
book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to
cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.

>If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an
hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally
assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet
forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach
critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned
Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then,
they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped,
like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and
technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet
game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!

Chris Trottier (Sims Online) Q&A

[https://web.archive.org/web/20111211182436/http://www.armcha...](https://web.archive.org/web/20111211182436/http://www.armchairempire.com/Interviews/chris-
trottier-the-sims.htm)

>Q: On paper, a game where you simulate daily life doesn't sound that
interesting. Yet The Sims is really fun to play, so much so that it is now the
biggest-selling PC game ever. Although any development team working with Will
Wright has to feel confident in the product they are creating, has the
unbelievable popularity of the franchise shocked even the development team?

>A: Absolutely. When I was first assigned to The Sims, it was not-very-
affectionately-known within the company as "the toilet game." Will Wright had
tremendous stamina for the risk involved with trying something very new, but
there were certainly a lot of head-scratchers both on the team and outside of
it. In all honesty, the gameplay didn't start to really come together until a
couple of months before ship. Being involved in that tuning process, and
seeing the game take shape from what had previously been a mass of separate
components, was one of the most powerful experiences of my career.

~~~
rgovostes
The Computer History Museum, or some similar institution, would surely be
grateful to have that added to their collection.

------
mruts
If one doesn't care about art, why not just use ascii art? I quite like the
style of Nethack or Cogmind. If he cares about art (which he claims to), why
not just make it look good and consistent? No one is expecting AAA type art
and there are tons of indie developers who make beautiful games with beautiful
art and it wasn't that expensive. I've never played any of his games but
looking at the screenshots, they put me off. They look like all the art was
found online on free asset stores. It all looks inconsistent and uses too many
colors and tries to be too realistic. It looks gross I would have hard time
playing the games.

It seems like all his games could be using ascii art instead, and honestly,
they probably would look a _lot_ better.

------
mar77i
> It achieved financial success (among the blind, apparently)

That reminds me: I guess not even a game like NetHack can be realistically
played by a blind person, so I wonder if this was some failed kind of joke or
if the author actually considers that audience.

~~~
gbersac
It's clearly a joke.

------
TheCapeGreek
There's a difference between a conscious choice to maintain a certain style or
level of detail, and a lack of willingness to improve said style. The whole
article reads to me less like "I don't want to upgrade to 3D or higher detail"
and more like "I'm too comfortable to want to improve the current art by
putting in 10% more detail".

Disclaimer: I'm not a business owner and don't work in the games industry. My
opinions are that of a layman from the (sometimes similar) maze of the
development agency sector.

Lesson 1 is correct. Perfectionism will always be there.

Lesson 2 has a false premise that the amount of effort and cost to increase
art quality is more than the value gained in sales and profit. It's not wrong
that hiring more people will be a bit of a gamble, but also putting more time
in it to iron out kinks is an alternative step. If you're a business owner
then long hours are the norm, no?

Lesson 3 is just putting the blame on the freelancers. Yes it's hard to find
talent and yes it's hard to afford it, but that shouldn't be an excuse to just
give up on trying to strive for better.

Lesson 4 I agree with. One should follow their strengths. However that doesn't
mean stagnating at one level.

~~~
jplayer01
> There's a difference between a conscious choice to maintain a certain style
> or level of detail, and a lack of willingness to improve said style. The
> whole article reads to me less like "I don't want to upgrade to 3D or higher
> detail" and more like "I'm too comfortable to want to improve the current
> art by putting in 10% more detail".

He has an entire section dedicated to this issue though. Which boils down to
the fact that improving the graphics sufficiently for enough people to not say
"this looks like crap" far outstrips the budget and team he has available. His
take:

> I have had games where I worked very hard to improve the graphics, spending
> a lot of time and money, and they really did look better! But when I
> released those games, the vast majority of people who had said, "Your games
> look bad." STILL said, "Your games look bad."

I get his position and I don't see a problem here. Gamers are incredibly
fickle and I wouldn't want to be subject to the whims of the gaming
community's opinions on graphics. Of course, he's choosing to limit his
audience to an extent but ... that's fine. He wants to focus on everything
else that can make a game good and valuable and it seems that's something that
his business has continued to survive on.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think he doesn't understand why people say the games look bad (and people
may have trouble articulating the real reasons too); I believe 'meheleventyone
captured the root issue elsewhere[0] - the game he presented has inconsistent,
crappy style. Which can be contrasted to other simple games he uses as a
justification - these games look well because they have a particular style.

The solution isn't to go 3D, or add more details - it's to get one artist
responsible for the overall style and refactor art relentlessly so that it all
fits together. It should be entirely within his budget.

\--

[0] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766174)

~~~
gtirloni
He explains why he doesn't want to get a single permanent artist in the
article. A few times.

~~~
jplayer01
... it's like nobody's reading the article. And it's a good article.

~~~
CathedralBorrow
It's an interesting pattern to notice; well written articles that pre-
emptively address common questions, and then a pile of comments that ask those
exact same questions.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Some articles (like this) don't address common questions, they brush them
aside, possibly not realizing that actually addressing them would remove the
point behind the article.

~~~
vidarh
It's more that people don't like the answer: That he's happy with where he is,
feels safe doing what he knows works, and don't want to take risks that could
very well give him a massive boost but could also make his business fail.

