ITT: lots of people missing the point that he doesn't actually believe his games look like crap, he's just made a conscious (and profitable) decision to go retro. He likes his games' visual style and values the freelancers who produce the art. I didn't think this is a difficult point but apparently it is.
I don't think people are missing the point. There's 2 aspects to this: style (retro) and execution (the actual graphics).
Gamers generally like the style. The Venn diagram of his target audience and people who like retro game visuals is likely near a perfect circle.
What makes the games look unpleasing is the execution. It's just all over the place, to the point where it looks like a mashup of free assets collected from various websites.
People are pointing out that his otherwise amazing games are being held back by their subpar graphics. Unfortunately, instead of taking the criticism fairly, he sets up a strawman to deflect any blame, claiming that anyone who doesn't like the execution just dislikes the style.
There's multiple points in the article where this shows, for example this one:
>The key problem here is that, when most people say, "Your art looks bad," what they mean is, "I want art that is good." They mean, "I want AAA-quality art."
Big jumps there Jeff.
He shows his lack of knowledge about making good art when he says he can't afford the extra man power to solve the issue. No one here would claim that, to fix bad code, you have to hire more programmers. Art works in the same way. The problems are foundational and don't require more employees or more hours to get right - just a better approach.
The argument that this is not possible with freelancers is silly. He gives the example of a freelancer creating a super niche style that no other artist can replicate. No one is asking him to create award-winning art. People are simply asking for games that are not-ugly. There's plenty of artstyles that fit all his requirements, while still being not-ugly and reproducible by other artists.
I don't doubt that it's hard to find good artists when you never took the time to study what makes good art.
The truth seems to be that after his 25 years of game development Jeff still doesn't know how to make good looking games. He has every right to do as he wants - just as anyone else is free to comment on the look of games. But this article is nothing more than one big list of poor justifications, which is why it's getting a lot of flak.
I think it's unfair to claim that addressing the problem doesn't require more man hours, though. If you were (or maybe you are, I don't know) unable to program, how would you solve a programming need?
Either by hiring someone to do it for you, obviosuly adding man hours, or by changing your own skill set and the distribution of your focus which either takes time outright (which translates to man hours, as you learn new skills) or changes the distribution of hours, taking effort away from other areas of the game, such as writing.
If _all_ he had said was that he had made a conscious decision to go retro, well, a lot of people _are_ responding to that. "It's possible to go retro without looking bad" is a common sentiment in this thread.
But more importantly, that's not even all he said. He also defended his decision by pointing to games like Pokémon and Baba Is You, and saying "these games also look ugly, therefore there's nothing wrong with my games looking ugly", which means that _he's_ missing a really important point, which is that those games don't look ugly.
I completely understand if he can't afford to hire anyone with design sense, and that he doesn't want to learn basic design. But a lot of the rest of what he's saying is outright wrong, and belies a complete misunderstanding of what people mean when they say his games are ugly.
Probably the best counterexample is Kingdom of Loathing:
Kingdom of Loathing isn't ugly. It's possible to draw very low-effort art without a game looking ugly. It's much more understanding basic principles like consistency and clarity, than effort or budget.
> lots of people missing the point ... he's just made a conscious (and profitable) decision to go retro
And in turn I think you're missing the point somewhat - people's point is that retro doesn't have to mean inconsistent art style and bad colours. There are lots of examples of beautiful retro games.
The question then is how many of them are from developers that have been able to consistently live off it for 25 years.
His point is not that it can't be better, but that he believes he can't do better without taking financial risks he does not believe to be worthwhile given that his current model works for him, and that his games look good relative to the constraints.
I think you're both right. As a businessman he's decided he does not need to do better in order to maintain whatever profit he requires to fund his livelihood. That's a perfectly valid decision. Who are we on HN to advise otherwise?? There are tons of examples of entrepreneurs who make "lifestyle businesses" that are good enough to put their kids through school. I'm not going to tell them they're doing something wrong!
The one thing I disagree with is that the graphics are not "retro". They're just bad. It doesn't look like someone sat down and planned a complete set of artwork having a deliberate retro style, with a consistent palette, lighting, etc. It looks like someone hired a bunch of rando one-off artists and threw together whatever they came up with--which is essentially what OP wrote that he does! It's working for him, so why change it?
I agree it's "bad", but it's also clearly "retro". It's just not consistent, good retro. But making the decision of going with lo res, pixelated art is probably the right thing if you're not willing to take the risk of spending more on it. The inconsistencies are likely to be less obvious within those constraints than without them.
There are better and worse ways to make retro looking games, and there are ways to care about the look of your game without having it noticeably effect your budget.
The most confusing part of the whole story is that his latest game looks noticeably worse than his two previous games. So there seems to be something more going on beyond that he just wants to go low budget and retro. The problem doesn't seem to primarily be the budget or the quality of the art per se, but a lack of care when it comes to art direction.
I don't dislike retro games, actually love the art style of Streets of Rogue and KeeperRL, for example, and I agree it's a great way for indies to get budget under control - it's easy to be tempted to just get better art, but then animation, collisions, interactions etc still need to be coded and contribute significantly to development time.
that said, what makes these game look at least weird is the combination of very retro tiles (say, 1994is, master of magic level) with late retro higher def sprites (say, 1998ish?, baldur's gate level)
while going retro style is not a bad decision for indies, the graphic and ux suffer from being mixed styles, and that's imho a valid criticism.
> that said, what makes these game look at least weird is the combination of very retro tiles (say, 1994is, master of magic level) with late retro higher def sprites (say, 1998ish?, baldur's gate level)
They look way higher res than BG to me, more early or pseudo-3D sprites, they're reminiscent of Van Buren's sprites.
The issue is that the art direction of this game is way inferior to his previous games, which were made with more limitations (and even more limited budgets, since they weren't Kickstartered).
this tells me that AAA studios could do really well to produce "indie games" with AAA-quality graphics. Gamers _want_ the originality and interesting indie games, but they don't want or don't care for low-quality aesthetics in their graphics (even when the graphics doesn't matter).
