Comment by adnzzzzZ
6 years ago
Anyone with any aesthetic sense can point out how his games are lacking visually, so it's not that presumptuous at all. The effects of his game's poor art on his ability to run a business are another matter altogether that I personally don't care about.
As for priorities, people can have different priorities, but there are a few basics that in my opinion anyone can improve at with minimal effort as long as they try. Developing an aesthetic sense for what works together on a screen and what doesn't is one of those things. It's clear this guy hasn't bothered with this and in my view that makes him a mediocre game developer, which is a kind of developer that I will not look up to if I want to improve.
>Why is it ok for games to lack a good story but not ok for them to lack good art?
This can be a very long discussion but art is the one thing that is immediately visible to anyone. In some ways it's the most important aspect of a game. I don't have the same views on code that I have on art, for instance. With code you can get away with very poor practices and you can be very pragmatic about it because bad code is not nearly as visible as bad art.
> Anyone with any aesthetic sense can point out how his games are lacking visually, so it's not that presumptuous at all
Calling his art bad is not presumptuous. Saying his has "extremely poor technique and care for the craft" is.
> in my view that makes him a mediocre game developer, which is a kind of developer that I will not look up to if I want to improve.
You may not want to make games that look like those he makes, but that doesn't mean there isn't something (probably quite a lot) you could learn from him about integrating mechanics and world design.
> In some ways it's the most important aspect of a game.
Visual art may be critical to a game reaching widespread success.
However, as someone who spent a large part of their youth ensconced in MUDs, I disagree whole heartedly that (visual) art is needed to make a good game.
As someone who lacks aesthetic sense for what works together on a screen but is interested to improve, could you recommend how to do it with "minimal effort" as you say?
The best thing you can do is post images/gifs of what you're working on social media (twitter, tumblr, reddit) and see how many likes/upvotes it gets. As you post things you will be able to compare either to your past posts or to posts of others on how well it does, and if something goes significantly above/below average you can derive that it likely looks better/worse than whatever it's being compared against.
In my case it's about CSS and WEB UI/UX, so it's a bit hard to do what you say but the problem is still the same.