Comment by Iv

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!