> What a weird comment. The guy says he likes the style of his games, and that they make a profitable business for him. Why do you insist there's a "problem"?
The author believes there's a problem, or they wouldn't have written an article about it. I agree with the grandparent comment. The tone of the article isn't "yes, the graphics are bad but it's fine", it's "you just don't appreciate the style". The author lists four things they believe to be the cause of the complaints:
> 1. Queen's Wish has a very retro square-tile top-down view, reminiscent of old Ultima games, old Pokemon games, Spiderweb's first games, tabletop D&D, that sort of thing. For some, that old style is really unfamiliar and/or alienating.
> 2. Queen's Wish uses art made by a lot of different artists. That means that the style is not quite consistent. We've done our best to make it blend well, but it's a little off.
> 3. All the characters only look in diagonal directions. I made this choice because I once thought all the art would be hand-drawn, and I desperately needed to reduce the number of icons I needed. This was a mistake, and I'll probably try to fix it in Queen's Wish 2.
> 4. It's not in 3-D. Some people will only ever be happy with 3-D.
Of these four, two are "you don't like the style" (1 and 4), and one is a technical complaint that the author agrees with (3). But in this comment section, the focus is clearly on point 2 (lack of art direction).
The author has an explanation for point 2 (cost), which most commenters find reasonable (some disagree of course, which is to be expected). But it's the large amount of text spent debating point 1 and 4 (which are unrelated to cost) that people take issue with.
To me, the inclusion of point 1 and 4 come off as deflection from point 2, the point that most complainants actually have an issue with.
> The author believes there's a problem, or they wouldn't have written an article about it.
From the bottom of the article: "I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. You can also follow me on Twitter."
Hah! He knows what he's doing better than anyone here thinks. Here we are discussing his ugly cheap art, browsing through his games, at almost no cost to him (writing a blog post?)
He must have had at least a few hundred sales today, because I saw this blog post on twitter and reddit as well.
He even said his title was click-baity later in the article. He wrote this for the attention, and HN gave it to him. This has at least four times as many comments as most game dev articles I see that get linked here.
The author believes there's a problem, or they wouldn't have written an article about it. I agree with the grandparent comment. The tone of the article isn't "yes, the graphics are bad but it's fine", it's "you just don't appreciate the style". The author lists four things they believe to be the cause of the complaints:
> 1. Queen's Wish has a very retro square-tile top-down view, reminiscent of old Ultima games, old Pokemon games, Spiderweb's first games, tabletop D&D, that sort of thing. For some, that old style is really unfamiliar and/or alienating.
> 2. Queen's Wish uses art made by a lot of different artists. That means that the style is not quite consistent. We've done our best to make it blend well, but it's a little off.
> 3. All the characters only look in diagonal directions. I made this choice because I once thought all the art would be hand-drawn, and I desperately needed to reduce the number of icons I needed. This was a mistake, and I'll probably try to fix it in Queen's Wish 2.
> 4. It's not in 3-D. Some people will only ever be happy with 3-D.
Of these four, two are "you don't like the style" (1 and 4), and one is a technical complaint that the author agrees with (3). But in this comment section, the focus is clearly on point 2 (lack of art direction).
The author has an explanation for point 2 (cost), which most commenters find reasonable (some disagree of course, which is to be expected). But it's the large amount of text spent debating point 1 and 4 (which are unrelated to cost) that people take issue with.
To me, the inclusion of point 1 and 4 come off as deflection from point 2, the point that most complainants actually have an issue with.