Comment by sangnoir
6 years ago
He'll need to not merely expand, but (almost) double sales just to earn back increased cost - and that is a business risk he's not willing to take. In a follow-up comment, he mentions the looming recession and how the last one destroyed his sales.
To get me on board would take minimal effort:
Go on one of the colour palette generators and create a colour palette to stick to for each level. Or use one of those photo to colour palette tools. He doesn’t have to learn about colours himself, he can rely on the tools to get him a palette.
Pick a position for the sun/light source and draw shadows on the opposite side of objects consistently.
His style is already consistent enough so those two would probably be all he needs to do.
Then again, if he’s happy with his sales figures and doesn’t need to expand into the almost-customers then fine, it’s his game and his call after all.
I spent hours / days to figure out a color palette for labels in an non-game app, and the result still looks like shit. I tried using kuler (Adobe Color now?) and it wasn't much help at all.
"Picking out a few colors" is not something that's easy if you are not an experienced artist.
Sure, he could probably learn to do it, if he spent some time learning how to do it, but he needs to budget his time, and he decided that story / gameplay is more important than fancy graphics.
He doesn't draw any art. Most of it he buys from art repositories (because already existing generic art is cheaper), the art he can't find he commissions from freelancers. It's in the article.
Only based on his wildly inflated numbers that are around 6-7x too high.