Gex (1997)
games.greggman.com
games.greggman.com
The page for Gex [1] describes a good portion of the cut assets and secrets mentioned in the article.
Pretty surprising this retrospective post was made only a couple years after the game released -- usually people wait a bit longer to "spill the beans" on development of games they worked on. :)
It would have probably taken much more than the small team they had initially, but there's no reason in theory that they could have gone with their idea and made an extremely rich game, with different play styles in each thematic genre, for example.
Dark Souls does this well. Without modifying the properties of the universe, each area requires modified strategies and this keeps the game fresh, and clever, while staying within the confines of this medieval fantasy world.
Point is, you dont have to force platforming onto a game; but these guys were doing this 20 years ago on potato technology with an understaffed team. I didnt understand gex when I played it, but as a hobby game dev, I respect what they accomplished.
I mean, what is even happening there from a business perspective?!
Okay, people want to make a game that gets big and sells merch, but then the whole thing gets crazy, like nobody even thought about that they needed a game that was SO good that everybody wants to buy merch for it.
I am actually finishing up a project that went very similarly, just at a smaller scope.
Even succesful studios like Rockstar are not necessarily well managed, often success/money just papers over a lot of issues (plus burning out their staff with insane working hours to compensate for lack of planning).
Gex certainly felt like it was designed by a marketing team rather than a game designer with a vision. You could always tell by the "edgy" renders that would show up on magazine covers and the like. It never really appealed to me.
On the upside, the Gex 3 engine was used as the basis for Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, so at least we got that out of it.
By the mid-90s, even Sega seemed discontent with Sonic headlining their brand, so we also got Ristar, Tempo, Wild Woody, etc.
But the lesson the marketroids failed to take away from Mario and Sonic is that this really only works if you have a strong game, not just a strong character.
Two mascot platformers from the side-scrolling, Sonic ripoff period that really delivered on their promise, gameplay wise, were Jazz Jackrabbit and Rocket Knight Adventures. Both of those had consistent gameplay, a tight feel, and neat mechanics that made them fun. Hence why I still remember these, but tend to forget all the others...
But it must have been a fairly old concept. I was a big Sega fan as a child, owning the original Sonic for the Master System, and don't remember any humans except for Dr. Robotnik.
Oddly enough she would go on to establish Crystal Dynamics, the studio that made GEX. And Sega would go on to ship Sonic with a human in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006).
I've been hoping in vain for a couple years that the trend toward faux "8-bit" would pass as a fad, but it seems to really have become a niche with staying power.
Is there something I'm missing that's driving this trend? Or am I alone in preferring line art or other styles over "8-bit" graphics?
Plus anything that is cheap to produce that still makes a profit will tend to have more representatives. I doubt I'll ever play any of those anime visual novel 'games' Steam keeps showing to me but sometimes it feels like that's a trend that won't go away, and I have to wonder if I knew an artist whether he and I could make one that would sell if not well, at least generate a bit of extra income even after the cost of the effort. Meanwhile it'd be fun to work on something like Dark Souls but that's not the sort of game you'd want to take on solo or with a tiny team. Similarly there are lots of indie "8-bit" or just "pixel graphics" games I'll never play, but I find that I usually object to them more on gameplay rather than their often lazy art. e.g. sometimes I find something fun like Rabi-Ribi... Meanwhile Cuphead looks like a good game that also has a way different, you might say truly retro, art style but I don't really have an interest in playing it since I've never had a desire for more of that art style plus I feel like I'll just be disappointed it's not Contra 3 in terms of gameplay.
My unscientific anecdotal experience with the European game dev scene suggests that the vast majority of indie/small developers are people working on their first game who then go out of business upon release and/or are funded by government funds for "creative media" and the like.
Pixel art requires hand-animating each frame of each sprite. Want to change something about the character? You're now changing 20 frames worth of that same something.
It's also generally a lot harder to find people who can competently animate at all so animation-light style are often preferable.
* It's cheap. It takes as much talent to make great pixel art as anything, but it takes less time to do than most styles. Some cartoon vector styles or voxel styles could compete here.
* Passable pixel art is relatively easy. A team with mediocre art skills can still do something okay this way. And even a team with a great artist can get away with letting the programmer draw some objects.
* It's a well-defined aesthetic. A lot of the work of art is defining an art direction for the project. Some pixel art games have great art direction, but most get away with looking roughly like Final Fantasy 4. Only photorealism does better at being pre-defined.
* It's already accepted. If you go for a non-traditional low-fi aesthetic, even if it is artistically stunning, some people will see a low resolution or low polycount and say the graphics are bad.
* The toolchains exist. You can build cool artistic styles around a novel way of rendering things like making everything out of particles or using triangular pixels. But Photoshop won't draw on a triangular grid.
* The artists are already there. You can hire someone who knows pixel art. It's harder to find someone who can draw Cuphead or do good work in a janky one-off tool chain.
* It plays well with the medium. Pixels and polygons are the native elements of the way games are rendered. Any minimalist style other than low-res or low-poly is just a simulacra of minimalism: you could draw stick figures, but that requires the same graphical freedom as a high-res game.
I don't think we would have independent developers without digital distribution. It allows small developers and publishers to create games with a smaller scope than AAA games, and to sell them for less. I think this is allowed because of the reduced logistics of digital distribution versus physical.
But smaller scope will also mean smaller teams - sometimes even just one or two developers. A sprite-based, retro-ish game is much more realistic for a handful of developers to finish in a reasonable time.
Personally, I greatly enjoy the graphics that tend more to the 16-bit, SNES era
That's why you mostly see 8-bit/early 16-bit style pixel art.
But the article was about Gex 1995 (2D platformer): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gex_(video_game)
Trivia:
"Gex Enter the Gecko" (3D, part 2) used the same 3D engine as Tomb Raider 1 (from CORE Design). Crystal Dynamics improved the engine with every game (like Legacy of Kain) and in the end Crystal Dynamics won over the Tomb Raider franchise with Tomb Raider Legend (2006), where as Core Design's engine fork looked old-school by then and basically killed the company. Even to this day "Rise of the Tomb Raider" is still based on that engine, obviously much improved over those many years. (source: check the Wikipedia pages)
If he's supposed to be a stuntman on a "real" movie set, they'd have to explain why their wild west set has magical floating platforms flying around.