You are game devs. You are Jeff's peers. You are not representative of his customer base.
Did it ever occur to the critics that Jeff's customers may not actually value the quality of artwork in his games all that much? At least not as much as the storytelling.
Even more importantly is staying consistent with what fans expect. It is called "branding", geniuses. If Jeff all of a sudden released a game with an artsy fartsy style, he'd be gambling his future. He might end up alienating his existing customer base by not giving them what they've come to expect, and his experiment may not work for acquiring new customers.
I am sick of armchair critics. Jeff has been doing this for a long time, and longer than all of these know-it-alls. Your opinions mean nothing. His repeated success does.
I don’t know. My guess is that the average gamer is less willing to forgive crappy art than the average game dev, because game devs have more experience dealing with works-in-progress that have unpolished graphics, and “seeing through” the graphics to the underlying merits. I could be wrong, though.
Certainly Jeff’s customers don’t value art too highly – or else they wouldn’t be Jeff’s customers! It’s a self-selected group. The real question is how many potential customers pass over his games because of the graphics.
Yes, the only way to answer that question would be for Jeff to make a big gamble. It makes perfect sense for him to not want to take such a risk. That doesn’t mean we can’t speculate about whether he would win that gamble if he made it. :)
>My guess is that the average gamer is less willing to forgive crappy art than the average game dev, because game devs have more experience dealing with works-in-progress that have unpolished graphics, and “seeing through” the graphics to the underlying merits. I could be wrong, though.
Thing is, the target market for his games is not "the average gamer".
I'm not sure. Look at the Hyperdimension Neptunia games, for example. Reuses a lot of assets, not really known for any graphical prowess, pretty much functional at best graphics. They sell a ton of them. Same with the Atelier games, they are pretty much decent PS3-level graphics but nothing fancy.
Or the Earth Defense Force games. I think once you get loyalty to a series, if anything change is a net negative. There's a lot more to go wrong than go right. Gamers are conservative by nature; if it works, keep playing it
> You are not representative of his customer base.
Sure I am. I buy and play a lot of indie games. My steam and PS4 libraries have hundreds of Indie games in them. The vast majority are pixel art or other low budget graphics. I commented in the previous thread saying that I don’t require fancy or expensive art. Hell, I’m perfectly cool with programmer art, but it needs consistency in style, colour and lighting. His art isn’t terrible, but its also not great and I actually did pass over some of his games in the past because the look just felt a little off.
> but it needs consistency in style, colour and lighting. His art isn’t terrible, but its also not great and I actually did pass over some of his games in the past because the look just felt a little off.
I am not surprised and there are certainly more people like you. The issue is that, as he says:
> I am still super-bad at art. Always have been.
He knows his writing and game design can sell games. It is totally reasonable for him to stick to his strengths.
It would be nice to see better support for custom tilesets / assets built into his games, but that also takes time / money.
If you go up to a bunch of people doing a craft and you show yourself displaying extremely poor technique and care for the craft itself, those craftsmen will disrespect you, and they will be right. As an indie developer it's kind of tiring to hear all these developers constantly praising mediocrity and showing no will to improve their craftsmanship as long as they're able to make a living. You can also make a living and be extremely skilled and care about constantly improving, it's not an either/or situation.
It is rare for any indie developer to be making any kind of "a living" from making games. The fact that Jeff does already makes him exceptional.
As a gamer, I could care less about whatever rubbish being claimed about his "technique" and "craftsmanship". His games are entertaining, unique, and better than most indies in my eyes.
I think Jeff is pretty invested in his craft in general, but it’s just that he focuses on making an ideal product with the resources and abilities he has available to him.
> displaying extremely poor technique and care for the craft itself
That is a pretty presumptuous thing to say about someone who has made a life making games which are loved by his fans. What's the skin off your back that this guy has different priorities for what he likes in games than you do? Why is it ok for games to lack a good story but not ok for them to lack good art?
>As an indie developer it's kind of tiring to hear all these developers constantly praising mediocrity and showing no will to improve their craftsmanship as long as they're able to make a living.
This looks like a mediocre attempt of poor craftmanship and amateur graphics. It looks like a paint-over over something like Thrust with crude basic artwork...
See how it cuts both ways?
What's worse, unlike Jeff's games, where the gameplay and story are the important parts, this even has tired old mechanics and a trite shooter gameplay.
> You are game devs. You are Jeff's peers. You are not representative of his customer base.
You don't really think any of the people criticizing him online are game devs with a track record as long as his, do you? People falling into that very, very small category know exactly why he operates as he does, the niche his games fill, the financial tradeoffs involved, and so on.
If you read his previous blogs, particularly the kickstarter one - his fans were asking for a return to a topdown game rather than making it fancier. Looks like they backed that by taking his kickstarter 3x over what he was asking for to get the graphics done.
> Did it ever occur to the critics that Jeff's customers may not actually value the quality of artwork in his games all that much? At least not as much as the storytelling.
> His repeated success does.
Nobody is questioning that at all. What we were questioning was his last post.
He was trying to justify not making better art using wrong reasons. The only reason he actually had was "I don't want to invest time into finding someone good with art and the market I want to target doesn't care for it either", but didn't want to say that.
This new post isn't better, he push even further, pushing with even bolder claims, $150000-180000 for an artist? Sure... At least he confirm how he works and that explains why the art is so bad.
This guy is clearly a genius in game design and development, it's sad that it's spend alone like that micromanaging the art, but at the end of the day, what matters is that he does what he likes and that's fine.
What's not fine is him that art isn't worth it, that it would means everything will go down, etc... while it's just that he don't care about it and neither does his market.
Selection bias. Jeff's customers are not representative of Jeff's would-be customers, like the ones he casually dismissed in his previous post.
No one is talking about "artsy fartsy", whatever that means (are Jeff's RPG stories "roley poley"?); they are talking about coherent colors and style and uncluttered non-distracting layout. Many/most successful indie games look decent not ugly, and not "artsy fartsy".
But in this new post, he points out that better art styles would likely mean he needs to sell 40k copies (wildly optimistic) instead of 25k (doable over a few years) and likely have to get some kind of up-front loan to pay for the increased costs of that art (he estimates an extra $110k). He suggests that would put the financial future of the (profitable for 25 years doing what he's doing!) company well into "gamble" territory.
So far, two of you said you were customers. The question would be, "Are you both a critic and representative of most of his buyers?"
For instance, he mentioned their games were popular with folks who were blind or couldn't see well. They'd focus on non-visual aspects more than visual. There's another crowd that likes the visual style of the game. Then, there might be some that don't like it but like it's other aspects. What the spread is on this would have a major impact on whether investing in better graphics would increase sales. They'd lose a bunch of money for nothing if the first, two categories were majority of buyers.
Why do we keep repeating the line that he is "successful" and worth listening to? He has been at this for 25 years and nobody outside HN has ever heard of him. And no, being on the front page of HN does not make you successful.
> Your opinions mean nothing. his success does.
The opinion of the consumer is everything, and... graphics are easily the most important element of a game. This is just obvious common sense, even if game devs don't want to admit it. And posting a screen shot of dwarf fortress doesn't disprove that. If DF had graphics and a normal UI, it would have been a minecraft level success, even with the insane amount of bugs it has.
He supported his family making indie games for 25 years doing it his way, for me that counts as successful. In fact what is success is defined by him, and he considers it a success. Who cares who has heard of him.
Graphics are the most important element of a game for you, perhaps. Nethack's tile sets all make the game worse than its ASCII version.
Of course neither point is addressed, and he keeps pretending that the only way to improve is to expend more resources.
As also pointed out in the previous discussion, that's because he simply doesn't have an eye for art. He compares his game to the consistent-and-pleasant-to-look-at Baba Is You, because he can't see the difference, and so he doesn't even see there's a problem to be solved. We might as well try to explain the difference between blue and red to a blind person. That's why he can show a picture of dwarf fortress without realizing it looks better than his game. Going for a Caves of Qud look would also probably save him money - but he simply can't see that it looks better.
Actually I think he engages with your point pretty well. You say:
>he simply doesn't have an eye for art
and
>he keeps pretending that the only way to improve is to expend more resources.
But he says:
>By the way, for people who asked me why I don't just learn to do better art myself, this is why. To learn to do better art, I'd need to spend at least 6-12 months. (To think it takes less is insulting to artists.) I just don't have the time to not be writing games.
It seems correct that for him to develop an eye for art, would require him to expend resources.
How is he supposed to develop an eye for art? Listen to all the comments on his posts? I don't think so, random internet comments are rarely a good source of advice. Developing a taste for art that will actually improve his games will take time and study and possibly even trial and error. And applying that taste once it's developed will take even more time. And it seems totally plausible to me that he can't afford to spend those resources.
His argument is very specific to his own situation. But it seems likely to be correct about his own situation.
I still think he should just allow custom assets to be used. He has a dedicated fanbase. Dedicated fanbases will go out of their way to create and improve content if given the chance. Just look at games like dwarf fortress and minecraft. I don't know much about his games, but it seems like, especially with a kickstarter backed project, allowing custom assets would be the best of both worlds. He could release his game with its 'cheap bastard art' and fans would step in to make their own art. Which might help actually get him some new fans without any extra cost. Some people just like to customize things because they can.
I am too, a programmer with a very bad eye for art. I still think there are several things that look like crap in his screenshots that are not art related, that are programming related, that he could solve without any artist help:
- The width of his grids are inconsistent. It looks like crap because he somtimes uses a gradient only on one side. Either make your lines single-pixeled or force gradients on both sides of a line.
- Talking about gradients, his fog of war could use some, that's where you want it, not on the abstract lines.
- The labels "Blessing" "Haste" overlap and create an ugly black line when they do.
- Actually having two labels of characters next to each other overlapping is bad design, not art related. A bit of thinking could probably solve it (replace it with small icons? Change the font for something smaller, typically a non-serif font? use a color code + mouse-over instead?)
But I have been there, thinking I was hopelessly art-blind and unable to improve the quality of my graphics. I just want to address one of the fallacies I used to fall for:
> To learn to do better art, I'd need to spend at least 6-12 months. (To think it takes less is insulting to artists.) I just don't have the time to not be writing games.
He does not need to do better art to make his games look better. He needs to spend a few days doing GFX improvement. The first time I indulged in not adding features to a 3D project I am doing but at solving the various graphic incoherence I saw (solving that transparency bug, finding a better skybox, tinkering with the lighting) after one day, that looked like a totally different program.
Oh, and another one as well:
"So, if I'm lucky, I get this pillar done for $50. Yay! One terrain type down.
999 more to go.
But for Queen's Wish, I want 4 different pillars, to give distinct looks to four different cultures."
That's not being the "Cheapest Bastard In Indie Games". The trick in indie game is to reuse and remix as much as possible. Adding a sprite, changing the palette or the lighting, can easily give different styles to the same sprite. These are tricks that were used widely through all history of video games. Making 250 tiles and multiplying it by the number of cultures you have seems like a waste, especially when you admit that your game looks like crap. How adding more variety of crap will make it less crappier? Focus on other things!
In a way, he is right, yes - he would need to spend more resources. Probably on hiring someone with an eye for art. But how could he tell if that someone actually has an eye for art, if he doesn't have one himself...
I'm not sure he can develop an eye for art, however. He writes "To learn to do better art" - but it's not the doing that's the problem, but the seeing. How do you teach a sense of aesthetics? It seems to me more a matter of taste - you find a picture pleasing, or not. You may be able to learn why you find it pleasing, but the subjective experience itself is not a product of any kind of knowledge.
> To learn to do better art, I'd need to spend at least 6-12 months. (To think it takes less is insulting to artists.) I just don't have the time to not be writing games.
That's such a strawman. He doesn't need to be a top-tier artist. He just needs to know enough to not suck at art. Diminishing returns means that he could spend much less time than that.
It's nearly impossible to improve on something if you're convinced that there's no room for improvement and that anyone who offers constructive criticism is a hater. If you know you have a blind spot for something, getting constructive feedback from others would be useful. But there seems to be a strong amount of resentment from Vogel and a certain subsection of his fanbase whenever it's suggested that he might be able to do better. Such an attitude isn't conducive to improvement.
> Of course neither point is addressed, and he keeps pretending that the only way to improve is to expend more resources.
He didn’t write this blog post to address any of the criticisms; this guy comes across as a “my way or the highway” kind of guy (and hey, if he’s successful in business, good for him).
But he found a topic that makes people want to comment and upvote a lot, giving him tons of exposure, so he would be silly to not keep milking that as much as he can.
> Someone else applied pixelization/palletization to the screenshot of his new game, and the degraded quality made it look better: https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg
I think that's pretty illustrative of Jeff's point actually. I, for one, can barely see any difference at all between these images and none of them look particularly "better" to me than the others.
The lower resolution one looks worse, because when I see low-resolution art like that I expect to see pixel art, but it's just resampled high-resolution art. It doesn't exploit the non-point-sample reality of pixels to create the illusion of higher resolution like pixel art does.
The middle one changes the meaning of the green liquid next to the building. The original uses a bright saturated green, which is the standard visual code for "harmful to touch" (e.g. acid or radioactive waste). The modified version merely looks like dirty water. I haven't played the game so I don't know which is correct.
> Someone else applied pixelization/palletization to the screenshot of his new game, and the degraded quality made it look better: https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg
I can’t tell which of those is supposed to be the “better” and which is the “worse.”
Which I suppose goes to show that this isn’t an issue for everyone
From the description of the filters applied, it feels like the bottom is the original as the palettization unifies the colour and the top is definitely more pixelated. But to me I like the colours of the bottom more and you can see some places (like the tent in the top right) where there's significant detail loss in the top one, which is also why I think it's not the original.
That said, there are some things that are improved. The inconsistent shadows and harsh differences in level of detail are very clear in the bottom one and not so much in the top one.
So I'm with you, I can guess which one is the original, but I couldn't pick a "better" one.
The most cogent criticism of the original post, I think, was that he was conflating cheap art with bad art. You can (and some indies do) have very cheap lo-fi art that still looks good in context. He does not, which is fine, because it is hard.
His response to the critics was basically to double down on conflating cheap and bad. Which is a bit odd! How many times can you include a screenshot of a game with cheap, minimal (or even zero!) art that people still think looks good, and complain that people like how those games but not yours, and not realise that maybe there's something that sets them apart?
Again, it's not the quality of the art, it's the overall aesthetic, and that does not require buying more art, buying better art, or learning to do better art personally. Angband and ADOM are lovely games that do not have a pixel of art (or didn't originally, at any rate; I guess there's tilesets now or something?), and I'd a dozen times rather stare at ADOM than at one of Vogel's games.
That being said, he's still ultimately right. He is a one man shop, he has an established fan base, he's turning a profit, he's doing fine. He's quite right that hiring an artist (or maybe more relevantly, an art director) to try and fix the art problem is an unreasonable gamble. So...just stand up and own it. They're ugly games, the end. He's been very successful; he doesn't need to defend himself.
Some devs make very pretty games with terrible story and gameplay, and that's fine. They don't need to post rambling defences about how their game is really just like Dwarf Fortress if you just squint hard enough. Not every game has to be good at everything!
> he most cogent criticism of the original post, I think, was that he was conflating cheap art with bad art. You can (and some indies do) have very cheap lo-fi art that still looks good in context. He does not, which is fine, because it is hard.
You are conflating lo-fi art with cheap and/or bad lo-fi art. "Cheap lo-fi art that looks good" is not a thing, because the talent that can make something lo-fi also look good and, more importantly, provide good art direction for an extensive project is not cheap.
We are not talking a screen full of pixels or two. These games would require thousands upon thousands of art tiles, that all aim for a distinguishable, consistent and unique in overall style.
As you said, it's hard. That makes it expensive, in either time or money, or both.
> "Cheap lo-fi art that looks good" is not a thing
Dwarf Fortress was literally an exhibit in MOMA; it can look downright beautiful, despite being nothing but ASCII letters in different shades of colors:
> You are conflating lo-fi art with cheap and/or bad lo-fi art. "Cheap lo-fi art that looks good" is not a thing, because the talent that can make something lo-fi also look good and, more importantly, provide good art direction for an extensive project is not cheap.
And I would say you are conflating art with design/art direction. :)
> We are not talking a screen full of pixels or two. These games would require thousands upon thousands of art tiles, that all aim for a distinguishable, consistent and unique in overall style.
Especially if you compare to say, his latest Avernum series, I find this is the case. Personally, I'm kind of sick of pixel art and I find his style generally pretty good, if occasionally a little inconsistent, it doesn't distract from gameplay. Many of the referenced screenshots are against this upcoming title which has gone to a different style, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes.
Although both Undertale and Celeste look bad IMO, they both use pixel art and it's not fair to compare pixel art after resizing it and destroying the pixel-level detail.
IMO Papers Please falls in that category. It has pretty graphics but almost no gameplay. Definitely nothing close to Jeff's games. It's a hit because it captivates you with art and dystopia, but in my book, definitely has no real gameplay that I can bare for more than 10 minutes.
He probably agrees with you, however he doesn't have the necessary eye for art to have cheap good looking art. _For him_, improving his art means he has to hire someone to do it, and that's more expensive than what he's doing now.
And what he's doing now works, so he keeps doing it.
Personally I see people post screenshots on here and I just can't tell what their point is or why it would matter, I also completely lack an eye for art.
What guarantees that lo-fi art is cheap to make though? It can easily take more time to generate good, minimalist art in 2d than modeling something in Blender.
I think because most people dramatically underestimate the complexity of making games and overestimate the sales of games.
It's easy to say, "Just hire an artist" without understanding the complexities in finding that artist, negotiating a contract, ensuring they are delivering to your expectations, tracking their progress, ensuring they meet your creative vision, and recouping the money in sales to actually pay them.
Yep, for all it’s business know-how HN just doesn’t understand this one. He’s making games for people that value story and world building above all else. He’s making a relative pittance doing so — seemingly much less than a full time gig at a faang company.
He’s presumably happy, his customers are presumably happy, yet we insist on giving him obvious advice about a 25 year old venture. It’s honestly hilarious to see the immense amount of time collectively wasted armchairing over it!
I think the core issue is that people don't have a good grasp on the amount of money it takes to develop games, and the paltry amount of money that niche titles rake in. Take computer wargames and flight sims, for example.
Hardcore wargames (e.g. Combat mission, Graviteam tactics, Grigsby's War in the *, etc.) are a very niche market. Even popular ones make a fraction of the sales that more popular titles bring in. Thus, it's not uncommon for the developers of these games to be 2-3 man shops, or even one-person companies.
The consequence is that these games either have to cut down on quality or jack up prices. Why do modules in DCS often cost $60-$70 for just one plane? Because the small numbers of sales means that they will need to have a higher revenue per sale to break even. Why do so many wargames use 2d counters and hex grids? Because 3d art is expensive, and they need to keep costs low.
Some people bring up color palette, and that this dev just doesn't have a good eye for art. Maybe that's the case, but the fundamental market principles still apply. He could spend money to hire an artist or spend time improving his art skills, but resources do not permit it.
Exactly. That's the reason I'm highly tolerant about high price for a wargame. Games like TOAW probably don't sell many because it's too tough to play for the ordinary people.
Bad news are good news, so kudos to Jeff to riding this wave.
There are no ugly games, only markets. People should listen closely to him as he gives very sound advice. I read nobody in here stating: "Well I am also 25 years successfully in the business and here is my experience switching from ugly to artsy games." So why bother?
Jeff is right when he says that he focusses only on the buyers and not on the haters. Haters drive the bad news, which is good news for Jeff. He will never be ignored nor forgotten.
> exactly, there is a difference between the "right" way and the "way that works"
His post wasn't about the way that works, it was about the "only way that works".
If that was a post about how he made games, I would have made an amazing comment on it, congratulating him on working so hard, most probably saying how I wouldn't have though there was so much works behind the scene, even more so on new engine on such an old looking games, etc...
It wasn't that kind of post though... it was a post that said that art doesn't matter, that you just can't make it works (even though there so many games that does it).
He just don't want to make it works. It's fine, it's not different than me that am a simple employee.
> Many who are unfamiliar with this industry are surprised to find that artists are some of the highest paid people. Good, reliable artists are rare! Check out this site https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/games-artist/salary/, for salary estimates.
> [snip]
> If I'm lucky enough to find a good person, with bonuses and benefits and so on, I might be able to get this person for $150000-180000.
His link seems to suggest that "top" (90th percentile) game artists make $62k/year. Lets round up the extra costs to the employer (payroll tax, health insurance, retirement benefits, etc) and call that $75k/year. If so, that suggests $150k would be nearly 2 full time years of a top-tier artist.
I love Jeff's games and have bought and played many of them going back nearly 2 decades. But, I'm not convinced that the next step up from status quo is 2 fulltime years of a top tier artist. According to the same site, a median artist is $51k/year (with benefits/etc, lets say $65k/yr). Would hiring that person for a full year justify that extra $25k over his current $40k budget? I think so.
The full price of an employee are typically around 1.4x salary per (and that if you really know what you are doing, many smaller businesses probably hit closer to 2x; mostly because that's not counting the flat expenditures, that a larger business, or someone that knows what they are doing, won't screw up, like the fact that hiring any employees (including 0 in many jurisdictions) often requires a significant amount of extra paper work every year/quarter/month). Anyway your adjusted numbers would be closer to:
62k -> 87k and
51k -> 72k
So adding in the flat extra work (a lot of which isn't necessarily money based as it's simply just time dealing with things), it probably comes out to 80k, which is doubling his art budget.
I made Road Redemption, and honestly these insane figures that he lists only drive home for me how much he doesn't know what he is talking about here.
He could get an acceptable 2d artist from another country for like 2-3k per month total. Then he could buy a bunch of existing tilesets from the unity asset store, or many other places, and have that person modify them. 1000 terrain icons is not even really very many.
With 120k he could have an entire team of 2d artists if he wanted. He isn't some AAA studio that needs all custom top of the line handmade assets.
I also found his full time employee cost argument weakened by his requirements. He's happy with $25/hr contractors from countries with weaker salaries than the US, speaks highly of them, but on the topic of hiring someone full time he uses a premium American employee living in Seattle as his example? Says he'd want to work with them in person despite wanting to work alone? What?
If dude just said "hiring one of my contractors full time would cost me $40k/year and i don't want to pay that" it'd be a reasonable argument. Instead he makes up all these unnecessary requirements that sound like they'd actually make the arrangement worse for him, and points to them as why he can't do it.
The difference is in the magnitude of work. When contracting he's going piecemeal which gives him substantial oversight on each and every piece to ensure it turns out the way he wants. For a full time artist, this would be micromanaging and isn't really conducive to a great working relationship. Add in remoting and it gets even weirder. What are you going to do, mail them every hour for updates?
I don't run a business, but my understanding is that a good rule of thumb for the cost of an employee is about double their salary when you start to factor in benefits, insurance, office space, equipment, quality of life things (snacks/coffee, etc), recruiting, etc. So an artist making 75k could cost 150k when all is said and done.
(if youre american and youve ever had to pay for insurance out of pocket you probably know how expensive it is. When I lefta previous job it was 400/mo to continue my insurance, and some of my friends with families have to pay thousands)
I think there are a few lessons that we can look into if we want to be indie developers:
1) Need to be "cheap", i.e. to save a lot for daily spending and others, and definitely try to get as many free stuffs as possible. Because whence we go indie, we have to pay our own insurances and benefits.
2) Try to find a niche market, best if it doesn't require expensive investment. E.g. flight simulation is also a niche market, but we definitely need a LOT of investment to make it work. For Jeff's games it is tile-map (easy to replicate and make new maps for), small size and interesting story and game system.
3) Stay WITHIN comfortable zone but evaluate our situation every year. If we can stay in comfortable zone and make easy money, why not? Players pick an easy table in poker if they are professional. They don't play for fame or excitement, but for monetary reasons ONLY. Indie gaming is one area that are pretty sticky and our users usually don't go away unless we make bad games, so evaluation once per year should be good enough.
4) Like any other business, better know something before diving into. Jeff is lucky. He started early and had the talent. Most people are not that lucky so some industry experience would be appreciated.
The easiest solution of all is simply to live in a place where the dollar goes a lot further, which is like 95% of the rest of the world.
I don't really understand why more people don't go this route. It confuses me to see things like people living in places like Seattle/San Francisco when it's not strictly necessary. The amenities and interesting folks you find in these cities are not unique to these cities. The only things that seem very unique to them, in my experience, are the rather high salaries which, consequently, leads to an extremely high local cost of living as everything inflates in price in response to the salaries. Makes it a reasonable decision if you're drawing on these salaries, but if you're not...?
Moving to other cities might be difficult if one has a family. But generally speaking I agree that there are other places that are cheaper and still have access to a lot of talents.
I think I've found a secret -- One Weird Trick that will allow you to bring an artist aboard your game project for the bargain basement price of $0. The secret is this:
Learn to draw.
It's a lot of work, and it's not for everyone. But I taught myself the basics of art so that I could have art for my game projects. It may not be the greatest art in the world, but it will accurately reflect my vision.
That said, I also find resources like OpenGameArt terrific -- as inspiration. If I want to create, say, a tile set for a particular scene, I might go look up someone else's tile set, and then create a similar one from scratch.
Celeste is free this week (or maybe next week) on the Epic Games Store. From the customer's perspective, his point stands -- I can choose to play nothing but award winning, excellent games for between $0 and $10/month. How does a game developer compete when their audience already has a glut of excellent content to consume?
This assumes different games are perfectly interchangeable. Would you make the same argument about books? Why does anyone bother to write a new book at all? My answer is that we're really all different: devs and players both. A game developer can compete the same way an author competes: by offering something only they can make, and only to someone who would buy precisely that sort of game.
I’ve got lots of AAA games for free on these deals too, does that mean that AAA are basically free and therefore shouldn’t bother with whatever they’re doing?
it's a bit tongue in cheek - celeste being free is only due to Epic's drive to get more customers signed on. I don't think the Celeste devs are losing money.
but his point stands - there are lots of great games that are free. Games whose graphical style and production value vastly out-weight his games.
These two blog posts have only shown that Jeff is unwilling to make a game with good art (and that's fine). The posts are more about convincing himself that that's ok.
I don't think there's much general learning to be gained here other than maybe some budget numbers if you've never thought to price it out. As Jeff admits, the competition makes the art budget work. Its really just a production decision on what you're looking to make and what expertise you have access to.
> The posts are more about convincing himself that that's ok.
I really don't think they are - people have ragged on the graphics for at least a decade and he's stuck by his guns (profitably, for 25 years!) These posts are about promoting the new game - he knows how to play the internet outrage machine for marketing.
It makes me unreasonably mad that he includes a screenshot of the beautiful looking game undertale with the implication that his games look is even remotely in the same ballpark.
In the last post it was Baba is You, now Undertale, Celeste, Dwarf Fortress... I think this is a big reason why his posts are so polarizing, some people agree with his premise and are willing to overlook the insulting comparisons, while others take them as a sign that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
It feels like there are two separate discussions happening, some people saying that there are beautiful games with next to no art budget and that the author should adopt some basic principles of design, with the other camp focussing on the fact that game devs shouldn't be expected to become artists.
Obviously both camps are right and the author is right in basically saying "I'm fine with my games being ugly, they're still successful despite being ugly..." but then he goes and follows that up with "... just like all indie games,"
So I understand what he's saying and it makes sense for him: he's got a style and an audience and there's a lot of risk to try to change up what he's doing.
That being said..
What he's saying works for him. If you don't have an audience yet, and you don't really know what numbers your game is going to pull in, it makes sense to focus on having a more coherent art style. And the thing is, I think you could do the same style games he does with much better art without it costing much more, you just need an art style that isn't, for lack of better way of putting it, pseudo-photographic (I don't want to say "realistic" because it's obviously not going for that, but, there's no specific "style" to what he has other than "smaller versions of real things"). I think if you were to do a much simpler/more cartoony style, with an emphasis on choosing a nice color palette and nice lighting, you could actually make something nice looking without breaking out the bank. (Again not saying that's what he should do, he has something that works, just that I'm doubtful that "make games that look like they're from 1995 shareware" is a viable strategy to follow).
I pretty much agree with what he said in this post.
Small business is tough and you have to purchase insurance and benefit for yourself, plus store some money to brace for winters. Many of my friends own small business due to their immigrant status, but few of them succeed.
The bottom line is, he actually does not need to explain anything to outsiders if he wants. But his posts are very helpful for newbies in indie so I appreciate what he says. Plus I like his games and purchased each one of them except Queen's Wish.
I'm also a cheap bastard and only buy on deep discount (66%+ off)...
This kinda reminds me of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead; people will hate but you keep doing your own thing because it's your passion, so as long as you can make a living off it, why change? Especially the idea that "he could be making a lot more money so why doesn't he?", sounds so freakishly greedy. I don't know any of his games, but I kinda feel like checking them out for the sole reason that this guy seems to have life figured out in his own way, so kudos to him.
I'm not in the industry (well, we made one game!) but I bet there'd be loads of cheaper artists, especially through Asia. You'd get incredible artists much cheaper than that.
Having been in this industry, I've seen it go that high and I've seen artists charge a lot less. It does operate more like a free market. I've hired many artists as contractors in the past, whether from the Eastern or Western hemisphere, sometimes the market is in your favor and you run into that perfect artist where the price is just right. Other times you'll pay through the teeth...
You could easily spend that on any profession if you want to.
You can get good artists for far cheaper if you want though. He even says so in his posts. He's always praising his contractors and he pays them $25/hr.
He could hire that contractor to work for him full time for two years for only $100k, so I'm pretty skeptical that the price he gives truly reflects the cost of a minor art upgrade.
I wonder if it would be possible to "skin" the games. Allow for artists to reskin your game with "better" art. Let them put a price-tag on it and see how many of the people who dislike the art will be convinced that way.
It seems to me that for indie game devs, you will always have games driven by what the developer is good at. Great artist, great looking game, great writer, well written game and so on.
I was gonna say this as well. The videogame community has several fantastically talented people in it, creating /tons/ of stuff as a hobby.
Just look at all the mods and assets available on e.g. Steam marketplace or Mod DB, some of them entire games like Black Mesa: Source or Enderal. There already exist reskins of videogames (like the various Minecraft texture mods) and graphical improvement mods (like GTA V's "NaturalVision Remastered") some of which is done without any sort of official API.
His site says he's constantly looking for freelance artists, and he has made a point of how he makes a lot of his money from reskinning and re-releasing his back catalog, so if one of the many people who seems to be so dead certain he'd do much better with better graphics and that it isn't such a big job wants to put their time/money where their mouth is, they could always contact him and propose a profit share.
That's pre-inflation adjusted $750k gross, at a point with 3 employees. Take of cost of sales, marketing etc. and it will be ok but not massive per person (but also note he calls that $750k result "life changing"), and he also points out they have an ongoing cycle of peaks and troughs, and his 2011 numbers coincided with what he described as the "Indie bubble", and an initial burst from getting on Steam, and points out he sold more for a while, and then less again. He makes the point earlier in the video that the ~$200k/year mark inflation adjusted number is closer to the norm for them across his career.
Do you have a link? Assuming he is being honest in this article I have to assume he misspoke in the talk - surely "high five figures" is a more accurate summary of what's in the post.
I don't think his games look that bad as he claimed. Not eye candy, but functional enough. All the time and resources saved from polishing the graphics, he must have spent on improving the game playing. Sounds like a good trade off.
Reading it, it seems more of a response to people on Reddit who may have had different criticisms. I didn't see anything in the post suggesting he knew about the HN thread, although I could have missed something.
This guy's blog articles promoting his game company are appearing too often in HN.
If it was one or two articles every few month's I'd understand but we are now seeing more than one article a month promoting his lo-Q games despite his releasing games on a less than annual basis and none of them containing interesting or new tech.
edit: Also fascinating is the downvoting cabal for anyone that questions any of this. How many accounts does this guy have here? Oh and yes dang I am accusing him of fraud. I know you love to shit on anyone making comment about downvotes but this is genuinely a problem that you should look into between your interviews in major media you've set up promoting and stroking your ego and genius as a moderator that allows this site to be run as a astroturfing scam for sociopaths. The scammers play you and ride you and you let them. Wake up for goodness sake.
>But I can write well. I make good settings and stories, my spelling and grammar are ok, I make addicting game systems, and my systems and stories blend really well. THAT is the product I sell.
If that's true and he's good at those things, then why doesn't the product sell well enough to hire people to make the next game not look like a game design student's homework assignment?
his game studio has made a very good living for decades. he has outperformed 99% of the industry AND still gets to actually make games instead of run a company and herd cats. he is the guy who actually has it figured out by many measures.
You are going to need artist(s) to do tilesets, objects in the world, character portraits, enemies/player models in multiple rotations, UI art, and various splash screens/loading screens/game state transitions.
Conservatively, I'd be surprised if you could put that all together for less than $50,000 if you were paying a contractor to deliver them for you.
The average steam game sells about 30,000 copies. That's the average, including the super big hits from AAA devs. I don't have the data for indie games, but I'd guess it's probably closer 3,000 copies.
So, amortized, you are looking at raising your prices by $2 per copy. Except remember that your platform is gonna take 30%, so you need to raise your prices by $3/copy.
Some of those 3,000 copies sold are going to come from discounted sales, which means if you want to break even on art, you need to push the full price up a bit more so you don't lose too much on sale prices. $4 is a lot of money to ask, relative to the price of the game. It's at least a 10% increase in cost, probably considerably more.
I personally have not bought Vogel's games based solely on their amateur visual appearance, and given the fact that he's never put out a "good-looking" game, how does he even know how it would affect sales?
Vogel is conflating 'good art' and 'good aesthetics', though. Many games 'look good' with 'bad' art because they spend the effort to cultivate a certain aesthetic.
That's probably true. Good art style/aesthetics is a foot in the door for a lot of gamers, unfortunately. A game needs to stand on a foundation of good game mechanics (and possibly good writing), but the mainstream players' choice to try your game is gated by the production value and direction/style of the art.
Here is what the critics don't get.
You are game devs. You are Jeff's peers. You are not representative of his customer base.
Did it ever occur to the critics that Jeff's customers may not actually value the quality of artwork in his games all that much? At least not as much as the storytelling.
Even more importantly is staying consistent with what fans expect. It is called "branding", geniuses. If Jeff all of a sudden released a game with an artsy fartsy style, he'd be gambling his future. He might end up alienating his existing customer base by not giving them what they've come to expect, and his experiment may not work for acquiring new customers.
I am sick of armchair critics. Jeff has been doing this for a long time, and longer than all of these know-it-alls. Your opinions mean nothing. His repeated success does.
I don’t know. My guess is that the average gamer is less willing to forgive crappy art than the average game dev, because game devs have more experience dealing with works-in-progress that have unpolished graphics, and “seeing through” the graphics to the underlying merits. I could be wrong, though.
Certainly Jeff’s customers don’t value art too highly – or else they wouldn’t be Jeff’s customers! It’s a self-selected group. The real question is how many potential customers pass over his games because of the graphics.
Yes, the only way to answer that question would be for Jeff to make a big gamble. It makes perfect sense for him to not want to take such a risk. That doesn’t mean we can’t speculate about whether he would win that gamble if he made it. :)
>My guess is that the average gamer is less willing to forgive crappy art than the average game dev, because game devs have more experience dealing with works-in-progress that have unpolished graphics, and “seeing through” the graphics to the underlying merits. I could be wrong, though.
Thing is, the target market for his games is not "the average gamer".
1 reply →
I'm not sure. Look at the Hyperdimension Neptunia games, for example. Reuses a lot of assets, not really known for any graphical prowess, pretty much functional at best graphics. They sell a ton of them. Same with the Atelier games, they are pretty much decent PS3-level graphics but nothing fancy.
Or the Earth Defense Force games. I think once you get loyalty to a series, if anything change is a net negative. There's a lot more to go wrong than go right. Gamers are conservative by nature; if it works, keep playing it
7 replies →
My guess is that Jeff's customers are not average gamers. In all likelihood, they're people like me who have been playing his games for decades.
4 replies →
> You are not representative of his customer base.
Sure I am. I buy and play a lot of indie games. My steam and PS4 libraries have hundreds of Indie games in them. The vast majority are pixel art or other low budget graphics. I commented in the previous thread saying that I don’t require fancy or expensive art. Hell, I’m perfectly cool with programmer art, but it needs consistency in style, colour and lighting. His art isn’t terrible, but its also not great and I actually did pass over some of his games in the past because the look just felt a little off.
So you’re almost his customer base?
The ones who buy these games are the people not turned off by the “style, color and lighting” deficiencies.
I looked at his games for the first time after the earlier post and am also not representative of his customer base.
14 replies →
> but it needs consistency in style, colour and lighting. His art isn’t terrible, but its also not great and I actually did pass over some of his games in the past because the look just felt a little off.
I am not surprised and there are certainly more people like you. The issue is that, as he says:
> I am still super-bad at art. Always have been.
He knows his writing and game design can sell games. It is totally reasonable for him to stick to his strengths.
It would be nice to see better support for custom tilesets / assets built into his games, but that also takes time / money.
If you go up to a bunch of people doing a craft and you show yourself displaying extremely poor technique and care for the craft itself, those craftsmen will disrespect you, and they will be right. As an indie developer it's kind of tiring to hear all these developers constantly praising mediocrity and showing no will to improve their craftsmanship as long as they're able to make a living. You can also make a living and be extremely skilled and care about constantly improving, it's not an either/or situation.
That is just your opinion. But does it matter?
It is rare for any indie developer to be making any kind of "a living" from making games. The fact that Jeff does already makes him exceptional.
As a gamer, I could care less about whatever rubbish being claimed about his "technique" and "craftsmanship". His games are entertaining, unique, and better than most indies in my eyes.
8 replies →
I think Jeff is pretty invested in his craft in general, but it’s just that he focuses on making an ideal product with the resources and abilities he has available to him.
> displaying extremely poor technique and care for the craft itself
That is a pretty presumptuous thing to say about someone who has made a life making games which are loved by his fans. What's the skin off your back that this guy has different priorities for what he likes in games than you do? Why is it ok for games to lack a good story but not ok for them to lack good art?
11 replies →
>As an indie developer it's kind of tiring to hear all these developers constantly praising mediocrity and showing no will to improve their craftsmanship as long as they're able to make a living.
Well, someone who made this:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/760330/BYTEPATH/?curator_...
Shouldn't speak so derisively of Jeff's graphics.
This looks like a mediocre attempt of poor craftmanship and amateur graphics. It looks like a paint-over over something like Thrust with crude basic artwork...
See how it cuts both ways?
What's worse, unlike Jeff's games, where the gameplay and story are the important parts, this even has tired old mechanics and a trite shooter gameplay.
7 replies →
> You are game devs. You are Jeff's peers.
I am pretty sure the critics are not so much other game developers. It's armchair developers and people who don't actually sell games for a living.
Indie game developers that make a living from their games have a huge tendency to give other developers the benefit of the doubt.
> Here is what the critics don't get.
> You are game devs. You are Jeff's peers. You are not representative of his customer base.
You don't really think any of the people criticizing him online are game devs with a track record as long as his, do you? People falling into that very, very small category know exactly why he operates as he does, the niche his games fill, the financial tradeoffs involved, and so on.
If you read his previous blogs, particularly the kickstarter one - his fans were asking for a return to a topdown game rather than making it fancier. Looks like they backed that by taking his kickstarter 3x over what he was asking for to get the graphics done.
You can't argue with that!
> Did it ever occur to the critics that Jeff's customers may not actually value the quality of artwork in his games all that much? At least not as much as the storytelling.
> His repeated success does.
Nobody is questioning that at all. What we were questioning was his last post.
He was trying to justify not making better art using wrong reasons. The only reason he actually had was "I don't want to invest time into finding someone good with art and the market I want to target doesn't care for it either", but didn't want to say that.
This new post isn't better, he push even further, pushing with even bolder claims, $150000-180000 for an artist? Sure... At least he confirm how he works and that explains why the art is so bad.
This guy is clearly a genius in game design and development, it's sad that it's spend alone like that micromanaging the art, but at the end of the day, what matters is that he does what he likes and that's fine.
What's not fine is him that art isn't worth it, that it would means everything will go down, etc... while it's just that he don't care about it and neither does his market.
The art style looks fine to me. I don't get the big deal.
They're talking about the people that aren't his customers because they value art.
Selection bias. Jeff's customers are not representative of Jeff's would-be customers, like the ones he casually dismissed in his previous post.
No one is talking about "artsy fartsy", whatever that means (are Jeff's RPG stories "roley poley"?); they are talking about coherent colors and style and uncluttered non-distracting layout. Many/most successful indie games look decent not ugly, and not "artsy fartsy".
In his previous post, Jeff said that better art styles would increase his sales. So he doesn't feel that this would be gambling his future.
But in this new post, he points out that better art styles would likely mean he needs to sell 40k copies (wildly optimistic) instead of 25k (doable over a few years) and likely have to get some kind of up-front loan to pay for the increased costs of that art (he estimates an extra $110k). He suggests that would put the financial future of the (profitable for 25 years doing what he's doing!) company well into "gamble" territory.
4 replies →
No, in his previous post he said that better set would likely increase his sales, but not proportional to the increased costs and risks.
1 reply →
It would increase his sales, but by his estimate it would have to sell almost twice as many copies to break even.
Coherent art would cost him more than 3 times his current art budget.
1 reply →
> You are not representative of his customers.
I've been buying Spiderweb Software games since the Exile: Escape from the Pit shareware days.
So far, two of you said you were customers. The question would be, "Are you both a critic and representative of most of his buyers?"
For instance, he mentioned their games were popular with folks who were blind or couldn't see well. They'd focus on non-visual aspects more than visual. There's another crowd that likes the visual style of the game. Then, there might be some that don't like it but like it's other aspects. What the spread is on this would have a major impact on whether investing in better graphics would increase sales. They'd lose a bunch of money for nothing if the first, two categories were majority of buyers.
2 replies →
>Here is what the critics don't get. You are game devs. You are Jeff's peers. You are not representative of his customer base.
Actually I'd say that not only they're not "representative of his customer base", but they're also not game devs.
Most people complaining are unrelated to the industry (devs, but not game devs, graphic designers, etc), and don't understand the costs and tradeoffs.
I also see a game dev badmouthing Jeff's graphics in the comments here, when theirs are equally if not more crude.
Why do we keep repeating the line that he is "successful" and worth listening to? He has been at this for 25 years and nobody outside HN has ever heard of him. And no, being on the front page of HN does not make you successful.
> Your opinions mean nothing. his success does.
The opinion of the consumer is everything, and... graphics are easily the most important element of a game. This is just obvious common sense, even if game devs don't want to admit it. And posting a screen shot of dwarf fortress doesn't disprove that. If DF had graphics and a normal UI, it would have been a minecraft level success, even with the insane amount of bugs it has.
He supported his family making indie games for 25 years doing it his way, for me that counts as successful. In fact what is success is defined by him, and he considers it a success. Who cares who has heard of him.
Graphics are the most important element of a game for you, perhaps. Nethack's tile sets all make the game worse than its ASCII version.
He did a GDC Post Mortem - I have heard of him outside of HN.
Reposting my comment from the duplicate thread at https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg
Of course neither point is addressed, and he keeps pretending that the only way to improve is to expend more resources.
As also pointed out in the previous discussion, that's because he simply doesn't have an eye for art. He compares his game to the consistent-and-pleasant-to-look-at Baba Is You, because he can't see the difference, and so he doesn't even see there's a problem to be solved. We might as well try to explain the difference between blue and red to a blind person. That's why he can show a picture of dwarf fortress without realizing it looks better than his game. Going for a Caves of Qud look would also probably save him money - but he simply can't see that it looks better.
Actually I think he engages with your point pretty well. You say:
>he simply doesn't have an eye for art
and
>he keeps pretending that the only way to improve is to expend more resources.
But he says:
>By the way, for people who asked me why I don't just learn to do better art myself, this is why. To learn to do better art, I'd need to spend at least 6-12 months. (To think it takes less is insulting to artists.) I just don't have the time to not be writing games.
It seems correct that for him to develop an eye for art, would require him to expend resources.
How is he supposed to develop an eye for art? Listen to all the comments on his posts? I don't think so, random internet comments are rarely a good source of advice. Developing a taste for art that will actually improve his games will take time and study and possibly even trial and error. And applying that taste once it's developed will take even more time. And it seems totally plausible to me that he can't afford to spend those resources.
His argument is very specific to his own situation. But it seems likely to be correct about his own situation.
I still think he should just allow custom assets to be used. He has a dedicated fanbase. Dedicated fanbases will go out of their way to create and improve content if given the chance. Just look at games like dwarf fortress and minecraft. I don't know much about his games, but it seems like, especially with a kickstarter backed project, allowing custom assets would be the best of both worlds. He could release his game with its 'cheap bastard art' and fans would step in to make their own art. Which might help actually get him some new fans without any extra cost. Some people just like to customize things because they can.
7 replies →
I am too, a programmer with a very bad eye for art. I still think there are several things that look like crap in his screenshots that are not art related, that are programming related, that he could solve without any artist help:
- The width of his grids are inconsistent. It looks like crap because he somtimes uses a gradient only on one side. Either make your lines single-pixeled or force gradients on both sides of a line.
- Talking about gradients, his fog of war could use some, that's where you want it, not on the abstract lines.
- The labels "Blessing" "Haste" overlap and create an ugly black line when they do.
- Actually having two labels of characters next to each other overlapping is bad design, not art related. A bit of thinking could probably solve it (replace it with small icons? Change the font for something smaller, typically a non-serif font? use a color code + mouse-over instead?)
But I have been there, thinking I was hopelessly art-blind and unable to improve the quality of my graphics. I just want to address one of the fallacies I used to fall for:
> To learn to do better art, I'd need to spend at least 6-12 months. (To think it takes less is insulting to artists.) I just don't have the time to not be writing games.
He does not need to do better art to make his games look better. He needs to spend a few days doing GFX improvement. The first time I indulged in not adding features to a 3D project I am doing but at solving the various graphic incoherence I saw (solving that transparency bug, finding a better skybox, tinkering with the lighting) after one day, that looked like a totally different program.
Oh, and another one as well:
"So, if I'm lucky, I get this pillar done for $50. Yay! One terrain type down. 999 more to go. But for Queen's Wish, I want 4 different pillars, to give distinct looks to four different cultures."
That's not being the "Cheapest Bastard In Indie Games". The trick in indie game is to reuse and remix as much as possible. Adding a sprite, changing the palette or the lighting, can easily give different styles to the same sprite. These are tricks that were used widely through all history of video games. Making 250 tiles and multiplying it by the number of cultures you have seems like a waste, especially when you admit that your game looks like crap. How adding more variety of crap will make it less crappier? Focus on other things!
In a way, he is right, yes - he would need to spend more resources. Probably on hiring someone with an eye for art. But how could he tell if that someone actually has an eye for art, if he doesn't have one himself...
I'm not sure he can develop an eye for art, however. He writes "To learn to do better art" - but it's not the doing that's the problem, but the seeing. How do you teach a sense of aesthetics? It seems to me more a matter of taste - you find a picture pleasing, or not. You may be able to learn why you find it pleasing, but the subjective experience itself is not a product of any kind of knowledge.
4 replies →
> To learn to do better art, I'd need to spend at least 6-12 months. (To think it takes less is insulting to artists.) I just don't have the time to not be writing games.
That's such a strawman. He doesn't need to be a top-tier artist. He just needs to know enough to not suck at art. Diminishing returns means that he could spend much less time than that.
4 replies →
> How is he supposed to develop an eye for art?
Which is exactly why the CEO of Ubisoft has quite an eye for art (he actually may have an eye for art, but my point is he don't have to...).
You can hire someone to do this, even part time, you can find someone to collaborate with that can do it too.
His arguments aren't correct argument. His actual argument is that he don't care and don't want to have better art. That's all.
It's nearly impossible to improve on something if you're convinced that there's no room for improvement and that anyone who offers constructive criticism is a hater. If you know you have a blind spot for something, getting constructive feedback from others would be useful. But there seems to be a strong amount of resentment from Vogel and a certain subsection of his fanbase whenever it's suggested that he might be able to do better. Such an attitude isn't conducive to improvement.
> Of course neither point is addressed, and he keeps pretending that the only way to improve is to expend more resources.
He didn’t write this blog post to address any of the criticisms; this guy comes across as a “my way or the highway” kind of guy (and hey, if he’s successful in business, good for him).
But he found a topic that makes people want to comment and upvote a lot, giving him tons of exposure, so he would be silly to not keep milking that as much as he can.
He might be sacrificing some reputation for the short term thrill of controversy.
That’s something we all should be wary of.
4 replies →
> Someone else applied pixelization/palletization to the screenshot of his new game, and the degraded quality made it look better: https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg
I think that's pretty illustrative of Jeff's point actually. I, for one, can barely see any difference at all between these images and none of them look particularly "better" to me than the others.
I think the difference is day and night.
The lower resolution one looks worse, because when I see low-resolution art like that I expect to see pixel art, but it's just resampled high-resolution art. It doesn't exploit the non-point-sample reality of pixels to create the illusion of higher resolution like pixel art does.
The middle one changes the meaning of the green liquid next to the building. The original uses a bright saturated green, which is the standard visual code for "harmful to touch" (e.g. acid or radioactive waste). The modified version merely looks like dirty water. I haven't played the game so I don't know which is correct.
> Someone else applied pixelization/palletization to the screenshot of his new game, and the degraded quality made it look better
I can only speak for myself, but assuming the bottom SS is the real one, it looks the best to me.
My main problem with his games is that the interface feels clunky.
> Someone else applied pixelization/palletization to the screenshot of his new game, and the degraded quality made it look better: https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg
I can’t tell which of those is supposed to be the “better” and which is the “worse.”
Which I suppose goes to show that this isn’t an issue for everyone
From the description of the filters applied, it feels like the bottom is the original as the palettization unifies the colour and the top is definitely more pixelated. But to me I like the colours of the bottom more and you can see some places (like the tent in the top right) where there's significant detail loss in the top one, which is also why I think it's not the original.
That said, there are some things that are improved. The inconsistent shadows and harsh differences in level of detail are very clear in the bottom one and not so much in the top one.
So I'm with you, I can guess which one is the original, but I couldn't pick a "better" one.
Those other versions don't look better, though.
Hopefully, your perspective dissuades others from alchemizing the author's rationalization.
Meh.
The most cogent criticism of the original post, I think, was that he was conflating cheap art with bad art. You can (and some indies do) have very cheap lo-fi art that still looks good in context. He does not, which is fine, because it is hard.
His response to the critics was basically to double down on conflating cheap and bad. Which is a bit odd! How many times can you include a screenshot of a game with cheap, minimal (or even zero!) art that people still think looks good, and complain that people like how those games but not yours, and not realise that maybe there's something that sets them apart?
Again, it's not the quality of the art, it's the overall aesthetic, and that does not require buying more art, buying better art, or learning to do better art personally. Angband and ADOM are lovely games that do not have a pixel of art (or didn't originally, at any rate; I guess there's tilesets now or something?), and I'd a dozen times rather stare at ADOM than at one of Vogel's games.
That being said, he's still ultimately right. He is a one man shop, he has an established fan base, he's turning a profit, he's doing fine. He's quite right that hiring an artist (or maybe more relevantly, an art director) to try and fix the art problem is an unreasonable gamble. So...just stand up and own it. They're ugly games, the end. He's been very successful; he doesn't need to defend himself.
Some devs make very pretty games with terrible story and gameplay, and that's fine. They don't need to post rambling defences about how their game is really just like Dwarf Fortress if you just squint hard enough. Not every game has to be good at everything!
> he most cogent criticism of the original post, I think, was that he was conflating cheap art with bad art. You can (and some indies do) have very cheap lo-fi art that still looks good in context. He does not, which is fine, because it is hard.
You are conflating lo-fi art with cheap and/or bad lo-fi art. "Cheap lo-fi art that looks good" is not a thing, because the talent that can make something lo-fi also look good and, more importantly, provide good art direction for an extensive project is not cheap.
We are not talking a screen full of pixels or two. These games would require thousands upon thousands of art tiles, that all aim for a distinguishable, consistent and unique in overall style.
As you said, it's hard. That makes it expensive, in either time or money, or both.
> "Cheap lo-fi art that looks good" is not a thing
Dwarf Fortress was literally an exhibit in MOMA; it can look downright beautiful, despite being nothing but ASCII letters in different shades of colors:
https://www.moma.org/media/W1siZiIsIjI1NTc0MSJdLFsicCIsImNvb...
> You are conflating lo-fi art with cheap and/or bad lo-fi art. "Cheap lo-fi art that looks good" is not a thing, because the talent that can make something lo-fi also look good and, more importantly, provide good art direction for an extensive project is not cheap.
And I would say you are conflating art with design/art direction. :)
> We are not talking a screen full of pixels or two. These games would require thousands upon thousands of art tiles, that all aim for a distinguishable, consistent and unique in overall style.
I mean, one of the examples given was ADOM: https://i.imgur.com/d0RpSnY.png
There's a lot of ways of solving this particular problem.
> that people still think looks good
I saw some people suggesting this last time, but I actually found the games referenced looked worse than his games.
I mean, you tell me...
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/691830/ss_d499ccc...
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O4qcf4H_x1k/XWRVHrVMvII/AAAAAAAAB...
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IBv08R44oKE/XWRSJefoKxI/AAAAAAAAB...
Stuff like this is pure opinion.
Especially if you compare to say, his latest Avernum series, I find this is the case. Personally, I'm kind of sick of pixel art and I find his style generally pretty good, if occasionally a little inconsistent, it doesn't distract from gameplay. Many of the referenced screenshots are against this upcoming title which has gone to a different style, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes.
Although both Undertale and Celeste look bad IMO, they both use pixel art and it's not fair to compare pixel art after resizing it and destroying the pixel-level detail.
2 replies →
A good example of low-fi "cheap" art fitting well in the overall aesthetic would be Papers Please (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please)
That was also a one man production with outsourced art.
What would be examples of indie games that are "pretty" but have terrible gameplay?
Given the choice I'd opt for Jeff's games over something pretty and unplayable.
IMO Papers Please falls in that category. It has pretty graphics but almost no gameplay. Definitely nothing close to Jeff's games. It's a hit because it captivates you with art and dystopia, but in my book, definitely has no real gameplay that I can bare for more than 10 minutes.
He probably agrees with you, however he doesn't have the necessary eye for art to have cheap good looking art. _For him_, improving his art means he has to hire someone to do it, and that's more expensive than what he's doing now.
And what he's doing now works, so he keeps doing it.
Personally I see people post screenshots on here and I just can't tell what their point is or why it would matter, I also completely lack an eye for art.
What guarantees that lo-fi art is cheap to make though? It can easily take more time to generate good, minimalist art in 2d than modeling something in Blender.
You guys it's OK for some guy to make ugly games, and for other people you don't know to buy them, right?
He's happy, his wife is happy, his customers are happy, his rent gets paid.
So why is everybody trying to sprout off about how they have the solution to a "problem" he doesn't have?
>You guys it's OK for some guy to make ugly games, and for other people you don't know to buy them, right?
Sure. Nobody thinks otherwise.
>He's happy, his wife is happy, his customers are happy, his rent gets paid.
Good for him.
>So why is everybody trying to sprout off about how they have the solution to a "problem" he doesn't have?
Because he posted an open letter to the general public on the topic. If you don't want responses, don't post. Internet 101.
I think because most people dramatically underestimate the complexity of making games and overestimate the sales of games.
It's easy to say, "Just hire an artist" without understanding the complexities in finding that artist, negotiating a contract, ensuring they are delivering to your expectations, tracking their progress, ensuring they meet your creative vision, and recouping the money in sales to actually pay them.
Yep, for all it’s business know-how HN just doesn’t understand this one. He’s making games for people that value story and world building above all else. He’s making a relative pittance doing so — seemingly much less than a full time gig at a faang company.
He’s presumably happy, his customers are presumably happy, yet we insist on giving him obvious advice about a 25 year old venture. It’s honestly hilarious to see the immense amount of time collectively wasted armchairing over it!
3 replies →
You must be new here.
I think the core issue is that people don't have a good grasp on the amount of money it takes to develop games, and the paltry amount of money that niche titles rake in. Take computer wargames and flight sims, for example.
Hardcore wargames (e.g. Combat mission, Graviteam tactics, Grigsby's War in the *, etc.) are a very niche market. Even popular ones make a fraction of the sales that more popular titles bring in. Thus, it's not uncommon for the developers of these games to be 2-3 man shops, or even one-person companies.
The consequence is that these games either have to cut down on quality or jack up prices. Why do modules in DCS often cost $60-$70 for just one plane? Because the small numbers of sales means that they will need to have a higher revenue per sale to break even. Why do so many wargames use 2d counters and hex grids? Because 3d art is expensive, and they need to keep costs low.
Some people bring up color palette, and that this dev just doesn't have a good eye for art. Maybe that's the case, but the fundamental market principles still apply. He could spend money to hire an artist or spend time improving his art skills, but resources do not permit it.
Exactly. That's the reason I'm highly tolerant about high price for a wargame. Games like TOAW probably don't sell many because it's too tough to play for the ordinary people.
Bad news are good news, so kudos to Jeff to riding this wave.
There are no ugly games, only markets. People should listen closely to him as he gives very sound advice. I read nobody in here stating: "Well I am also 25 years successfully in the business and here is my experience switching from ugly to artsy games." So why bother?
Jeff is right when he says that he focusses only on the buyers and not on the haters. Haters drive the bad news, which is good news for Jeff. He will never be ignored nor forgotten.
Rock on, Jeff!
exactly, there is a difference between the "right" way and the "way that works"
> exactly, there is a difference between the "right" way and the "way that works"
His post wasn't about the way that works, it was about the "only way that works".
If that was a post about how he made games, I would have made an amazing comment on it, congratulating him on working so hard, most probably saying how I wouldn't have though there was so much works behind the scene, even more so on new engine on such an old looking games, etc...
It wasn't that kind of post though... it was a post that said that art doesn't matter, that you just can't make it works (even though there so many games that does it).
He just don't want to make it works. It's fine, it's not different than me that am a simple employee.
1 reply →
> Many who are unfamiliar with this industry are surprised to find that artists are some of the highest paid people. Good, reliable artists are rare! Check out this site https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/games-artist/salary/, for salary estimates.
> [snip]
> If I'm lucky enough to find a good person, with bonuses and benefits and so on, I might be able to get this person for $150000-180000.
His link seems to suggest that "top" (90th percentile) game artists make $62k/year. Lets round up the extra costs to the employer (payroll tax, health insurance, retirement benefits, etc) and call that $75k/year. If so, that suggests $150k would be nearly 2 full time years of a top-tier artist.
I love Jeff's games and have bought and played many of them going back nearly 2 decades. But, I'm not convinced that the next step up from status quo is 2 fulltime years of a top tier artist. According to the same site, a median artist is $51k/year (with benefits/etc, lets say $65k/yr). Would hiring that person for a full year justify that extra $25k over his current $40k budget? I think so.
The full price of an employee are typically around 1.4x salary per (and that if you really know what you are doing, many smaller businesses probably hit closer to 2x; mostly because that's not counting the flat expenditures, that a larger business, or someone that knows what they are doing, won't screw up, like the fact that hiring any employees (including 0 in many jurisdictions) often requires a significant amount of extra paper work every year/quarter/month). Anyway your adjusted numbers would be closer to:
62k -> 87k and 51k -> 72k
So adding in the flat extra work (a lot of which isn't necessarily money based as it's simply just time dealing with things), it probably comes out to 80k, which is doubling his art budget.
I made Road Redemption, and honestly these insane figures that he lists only drive home for me how much he doesn't know what he is talking about here.
He could get an acceptable 2d artist from another country for like 2-3k per month total. Then he could buy a bunch of existing tilesets from the unity asset store, or many other places, and have that person modify them. 1000 terrain icons is not even really very many.
With 120k he could have an entire team of 2d artists if he wanted. He isn't some AAA studio that needs all custom top of the line handmade assets.
I also found his full time employee cost argument weakened by his requirements. He's happy with $25/hr contractors from countries with weaker salaries than the US, speaks highly of them, but on the topic of hiring someone full time he uses a premium American employee living in Seattle as his example? Says he'd want to work with them in person despite wanting to work alone? What?
If dude just said "hiring one of my contractors full time would cost me $40k/year and i don't want to pay that" it'd be a reasonable argument. Instead he makes up all these unnecessary requirements that sound like they'd actually make the arrangement worse for him, and points to them as why he can't do it.
The difference is in the magnitude of work. When contracting he's going piecemeal which gives him substantial oversight on each and every piece to ensure it turns out the way he wants. For a full time artist, this would be micromanaging and isn't really conducive to a great working relationship. Add in remoting and it gets even weirder. What are you going to do, mail them every hour for updates?
1 reply →
I don't run a business, but my understanding is that a good rule of thumb for the cost of an employee is about double their salary when you start to factor in benefits, insurance, office space, equipment, quality of life things (snacks/coffee, etc), recruiting, etc. So an artist making 75k could cost 150k when all is said and done.
(if youre american and youve ever had to pay for insurance out of pocket you probably know how expensive it is. When I lefta previous job it was 400/mo to continue my insurance, and some of my friends with families have to pay thousands)
Here's a mockup of the game with improved lighting. Top is edited, bottom is actual screenshot: https://twitter.com/RavenmoreArt/status/1164447066300588033
The claim that changes like these take 12 months to learn and $11.0000 to implement, is incompetent at best or dishonest at worst.
I could be one of naive “art-blind”.But I cannot decide which ones are better, and for me both look same.
I couldn't tell which was which.
That does not look better
I think there are a few lessons that we can look into if we want to be indie developers:
1) Need to be "cheap", i.e. to save a lot for daily spending and others, and definitely try to get as many free stuffs as possible. Because whence we go indie, we have to pay our own insurances and benefits.
2) Try to find a niche market, best if it doesn't require expensive investment. E.g. flight simulation is also a niche market, but we definitely need a LOT of investment to make it work. For Jeff's games it is tile-map (easy to replicate and make new maps for), small size and interesting story and game system.
3) Stay WITHIN comfortable zone but evaluate our situation every year. If we can stay in comfortable zone and make easy money, why not? Players pick an easy table in poker if they are professional. They don't play for fame or excitement, but for monetary reasons ONLY. Indie gaming is one area that are pretty sticky and our users usually don't go away unless we make bad games, so evaluation once per year should be good enough.
4) Like any other business, better know something before diving into. Jeff is lucky. He started early and had the talent. Most people are not that lucky so some industry experience would be appreciated.
The easiest solution of all is simply to live in a place where the dollar goes a lot further, which is like 95% of the rest of the world.
I don't really understand why more people don't go this route. It confuses me to see things like people living in places like Seattle/San Francisco when it's not strictly necessary. The amenities and interesting folks you find in these cities are not unique to these cities. The only things that seem very unique to them, in my experience, are the rather high salaries which, consequently, leads to an extremely high local cost of living as everything inflates in price in response to the salaries. Makes it a reasonable decision if you're drawing on these salaries, but if you're not...?
Moving to other cities might be difficult if one has a family. But generally speaking I agree that there are other places that are cheaper and still have access to a lot of talents.
Wow, yeah, I read his previous blogpost, and I read the HN overmisunderstanding reaction to that, and I know I already agree with his followup.
I'm not going to play one of his ugly games, because I'm not his target audience, but I might buy one just to support him.
> I'm not going to play one of his ugly games, because I'm not his target audience, but I might buy one just to support him.
I've bought a whole bunch of them to support him - I don't mind the graphics but RPG just isn't my thing.
I think I've found a secret -- One Weird Trick that will allow you to bring an artist aboard your game project for the bargain basement price of $0. The secret is this:
Learn to draw.
It's a lot of work, and it's not for everyone. But I taught myself the basics of art so that I could have art for my game projects. It may not be the greatest art in the world, but it will accurately reflect my vision.
That said, I also find resources like OpenGameArt terrific -- as inspiration. If I want to create, say, a tile set for a particular scene, I might go look up someone else's tile set, and then create a similar one from scratch.
Ok, but Celeste isn't free except the prototype game jam version. I've spent well over $50 buying copies of Celeste for friends and family as gifts.
Celeste is free this week (or maybe next week) on the Epic Games Store. From the customer's perspective, his point stands -- I can choose to play nothing but award winning, excellent games for between $0 and $10/month. How does a game developer compete when their audience already has a glut of excellent content to consume?
This assumes different games are perfectly interchangeable. Would you make the same argument about books? Why does anyone bother to write a new book at all? My answer is that we're really all different: devs and players both. A game developer can compete the same way an author competes: by offering something only they can make, and only to someone who would buy precisely that sort of game.
1 reply →
But he answers this question. He doesn't compete in the "indie game" space. He competes in the "Jeff Vogel game" space.
1 reply →
I’ve got lots of AAA games for free on these deals too, does that mean that AAA are basically free and therefore shouldn’t bother with whatever they’re doing?
1 reply →
It’s free on the Epic Game Store either right now or very soon.
it's a bit tongue in cheek - celeste being free is only due to Epic's drive to get more customers signed on. I don't think the Celeste devs are losing money.
but his point stands - there are lots of great games that are free. Games whose graphical style and production value vastly out-weight his games.
These two blog posts have only shown that Jeff is unwilling to make a game with good art (and that's fine). The posts are more about convincing himself that that's ok.
I don't think there's much general learning to be gained here other than maybe some budget numbers if you've never thought to price it out. As Jeff admits, the competition makes the art budget work. Its really just a production decision on what you're looking to make and what expertise you have access to.
> The posts are more about convincing himself that that's ok.
I really don't think they are - people have ragged on the graphics for at least a decade and he's stuck by his guns (profitably, for 25 years!) These posts are about promoting the new game - he knows how to play the internet outrage machine for marketing.
It makes me unreasonably mad that he includes a screenshot of the beautiful looking game undertale with the implication that his games look is even remotely in the same ballpark.
In the last post it was Baba is You, now Undertale, Celeste, Dwarf Fortress... I think this is a big reason why his posts are so polarizing, some people agree with his premise and are willing to overlook the insulting comparisons, while others take them as a sign that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
It feels like there are two separate discussions happening, some people saying that there are beautiful games with next to no art budget and that the author should adopt some basic principles of design, with the other camp focussing on the fact that game devs shouldn't be expected to become artists.
Obviously both camps are right and the author is right in basically saying "I'm fine with my games being ugly, they're still successful despite being ugly..." but then he goes and follows that up with "... just like all indie games,"
So I understand what he's saying and it makes sense for him: he's got a style and an audience and there's a lot of risk to try to change up what he's doing.
That being said..
What he's saying works for him. If you don't have an audience yet, and you don't really know what numbers your game is going to pull in, it makes sense to focus on having a more coherent art style. And the thing is, I think you could do the same style games he does with much better art without it costing much more, you just need an art style that isn't, for lack of better way of putting it, pseudo-photographic (I don't want to say "realistic" because it's obviously not going for that, but, there's no specific "style" to what he has other than "smaller versions of real things"). I think if you were to do a much simpler/more cartoony style, with an emphasis on choosing a nice color palette and nice lighting, you could actually make something nice looking without breaking out the bank. (Again not saying that's what he should do, he has something that works, just that I'm doubtful that "make games that look like they're from 1995 shareware" is a viable strategy to follow).
The inconsistencies really stand out.
Getting the first artist to lay down an art bible, with colours, sizes etc means the next one can work to the same style.
Just setting some limitations, at the start of the game, like a colour palette etc would make it easier for him as worked.
He also uses free assets, like those from OpenGameArt, which don't follow any specific palette.
I pretty much agree with what he said in this post.
Small business is tough and you have to purchase insurance and benefit for yourself, plus store some money to brace for winters. Many of my friends own small business due to their immigrant status, but few of them succeed.
The bottom line is, he actually does not need to explain anything to outsiders if he wants. But his posts are very helpful for newbies in indie so I appreciate what he says. Plus I like his games and purchased each one of them except Queen's Wish.
I'm also a cheap bastard and only buy on deep discount (66%+ off)...
This kinda reminds me of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead; people will hate but you keep doing your own thing because it's your passion, so as long as you can make a living off it, why change? Especially the idea that "he could be making a lot more money so why doesn't he?", sounds so freakishly greedy. I don't know any of his games, but I kinda feel like checking them out for the sole reason that this guy seems to have life figured out in his own way, so kudos to him.
Does an artist really cost $150000?
What about a contractor for 3-6 months?
I'm not in the industry (well, we made one game!) but I bet there'd be loads of cheaper artists, especially through Asia. You'd get incredible artists much cheaper than that.
Having been in this industry, I've seen it go that high and I've seen artists charge a lot less. It does operate more like a free market. I've hired many artists as contractors in the past, whether from the Eastern or Western hemisphere, sometimes the market is in your favor and you run into that perfect artist where the price is just right. Other times you'll pay through the teeth...
You could easily spend that on any profession if you want to.
You can get good artists for far cheaper if you want though. He even says so in his posts. He's always praising his contractors and he pays them $25/hr.
He could hire that contractor to work for him full time for two years for only $100k, so I'm pretty skeptical that the price he gives truly reflects the cost of a minor art upgrade.
I wonder if it would be possible to "skin" the games. Allow for artists to reskin your game with "better" art. Let them put a price-tag on it and see how many of the people who dislike the art will be convinced that way.
It seems to me that for indie game devs, you will always have games driven by what the developer is good at. Great artist, great looking game, great writer, well written game and so on.
I was gonna say this as well. The videogame community has several fantastically talented people in it, creating /tons/ of stuff as a hobby.
Just look at all the mods and assets available on e.g. Steam marketplace or Mod DB, some of them entire games like Black Mesa: Source or Enderal. There already exist reskins of videogames (like the various Minecraft texture mods) and graphical improvement mods (like GTA V's "NaturalVision Remastered") some of which is done without any sort of official API.
(One would probably call this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_labor, but I strongly dislike the term due to its association with big$ milking fans.)
Given some thought about a general framework for this the ability to reskin might be a nice thing to have.
His site says he's constantly looking for freelance artists, and he has made a point of how he makes a lot of his money from reskinning and re-releasing his back catalog, so if one of the many people who seems to be so dead certain he'd do much better with better graphics and that it isn't such a big job wants to put their time/money where their mouth is, they could always contact him and propose a profit share.
> I don't have that much cash on hand. Nowhere near.
After watching his recent very interesting GDC talk* - he mentioned high six-figures income ($800K+). I guess he spends a lot :)
EDIT: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs
That's pre-inflation adjusted $750k gross, at a point with 3 employees. Take of cost of sales, marketing etc. and it will be ok but not massive per person (but also note he calls that $750k result "life changing"), and he also points out they have an ongoing cycle of peaks and troughs, and his 2011 numbers coincided with what he described as the "Indie bubble", and an initial burst from getting on Steam, and points out he sold more for a while, and then less again. He makes the point earlier in the video that the ~$200k/year mark inflation adjusted number is closer to the norm for them across his career.
Do you have a link? Assuming he is being honest in this article I have to assume he misspoke in the talk - surely "high five figures" is a more accurate summary of what's in the post.
Link: https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs?t=2594
Looks like a very specific number to misspeak in the talk. It's in the slides.
Updated the comment. $8xxK was mentioned somewhere in the slides as well.
Do you have a timestamp? I downloaded the (auto-CC) transcript but can't find anything relevant in that text.
https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs?t=2594
Non-mobile link: https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/08/i-am-cheapest-bastar...
I don't think his games look that bad as he claimed. Not eye candy, but functional enough. All the time and resources saved from polishing the graphics, he must have spent on improving the game playing. Sounds like a good trade off.
They are terrible in motion. My opinion, though, mind it.
This is a response to the responses to this article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20765521
Posted a few days ago.
Is it really a response, though? It feels like a repeat of the same article -- down to many of the same filler images.
Fair point honestly, it seemed worth posting for continuity though.
it is a good response, and it does give logical, rational arguments as to why the criticisms given to him are invalid.
Reading it, it seems more of a response to people on Reddit who may have had different criticisms. I didn't see anything in the post suggesting he knew about the HN thread, although I could have missed something.
He should brainstorm ideas around how is fan base could submit art suggestions for free.
Jeff is a legend and a hero for staying in business as long as he has.
Better walls than nethack, moria and slashem ascii ports
This guy's blog articles promoting his game company are appearing too often in HN.
If it was one or two articles every few month's I'd understand but we are now seeing more than one article a month promoting his lo-Q games despite his releasing games on a less than annual basis and none of them containing interesting or new tech.
edit: Also fascinating is the downvoting cabal for anyone that questions any of this. How many accounts does this guy have here? Oh and yes dang I am accusing him of fraud. I know you love to shit on anyone making comment about downvotes but this is genuinely a problem that you should look into between your interviews in major media you've set up promoting and stroking your ego and genius as a moderator that allows this site to be run as a astroturfing scam for sociopaths. The scammers play you and ride you and you let them. Wake up for goodness sake.
>But I can write well. I make good settings and stories, my spelling and grammar are ok, I make addicting game systems, and my systems and stories blend really well. THAT is the product I sell.
If that's true and he's good at those things, then why doesn't the product sell well enough to hire people to make the next game not look like a game design student's homework assignment?
his game studio has made a very good living for decades. he has outperformed 99% of the industry AND still gets to actually make games instead of run a company and herd cats. he is the guy who actually has it figured out by many measures.
You are going to need artist(s) to do tilesets, objects in the world, character portraits, enemies/player models in multiple rotations, UI art, and various splash screens/loading screens/game state transitions.
Conservatively, I'd be surprised if you could put that all together for less than $50,000 if you were paying a contractor to deliver them for you.
The average steam game sells about 30,000 copies. That's the average, including the super big hits from AAA devs. I don't have the data for indie games, but I'd guess it's probably closer 3,000 copies.
So, amortized, you are looking at raising your prices by $2 per copy. Except remember that your platform is gonna take 30%, so you need to raise your prices by $3/copy.
Some of those 3,000 copies sold are going to come from discounted sales, which means if you want to break even on art, you need to push the full price up a bit more so you don't lose too much on sale prices. $4 is a lot of money to ask, relative to the price of the game. It's at least a 10% increase in cost, probably considerably more.
Maybe he's saying that adding good art won't make his games sell better. In that case it would just be cost without gain.
I personally have not bought Vogel's games based solely on their amateur visual appearance, and given the fact that he's never put out a "good-looking" game, how does he even know how it would affect sales?
8 replies →
Vogel is conflating 'good art' and 'good aesthetics', though. Many games 'look good' with 'bad' art because they spend the effort to cultivate a certain aesthetic.
That's probably true. Good art style/aesthetics is a foot in the door for a lot of gamers, unfortunately. A game needs to stand on a foundation of good game mechanics (and possibly good writing), but the mainstream players' choice to try your game is gated by the production value and direction/style of the art.