The Ultima V and Baba is You examples are excellent counter-points because they show how great games with simple styles can look.
Did you miss the part where adding an employee would double his required budget for the game? Which means he needs at least double the sales? Which means more risk? And there's no guarantee he'll hit that even if the graphics look better?
He spells out that he's working with freelancers, who often flake out for (understandable) various reasons.
If I had made that many games over 3 decades I would have at least learned how to talk to freelance artists in a way that would get better over time. It seems Jeff has put no effort into it, or gave up too early because he's protected his choices with rationalizations.
While I agree with your assessment, his argument from experience seems to be that none of that will affect his sales, so why bother. I'm sure he knows more about that than I do.
Just investing some of his own time reading up on the fundamentals of art, visual language, perception, color theory, could vastly improve his judgement. I try to build games for fun and learning, and I consciously avoid anything that goes beyond my (non-existing) knowledge about creating 'professional' game art. In my case I resort to abstract graphics or introduce very strict voluntary contraints (like: only 8x8 sprites), ie: similar to what games like Baba is You or boxboxboy are doing. If I were to ever shoot for a game that required 'professional game art' I would definitely invest time to get better at it before even considering to start the project.
It's a bit like the programming side of things. Don't try to build your own engine for your game if you barely know any programming, for example.
I don't think he ever came out and said this directly, but he dances around it throughout the article: As a very small indie developer, that's a huge risk to take. He could end up alienating his current fan base, while at the same time failing to satisfy the tastes of others.
Don't underestimate the risk of changing your style, particularly when it's a defining part of the experience. You will lose at least some customers. It may be worth it, but it's a significant risk.
And then at some point they had a moderate mainstream success, and that got them thinking that maybe they could grow into a much bigger game company, and so they started pushing hard at trying to grow. That was the point where me and a lot of other fairly loyal Telltale fans stopped buying their games. The effort they put into other things meant that they were no longer putting as much care into the things that earned them their original fan base. And, at the same time, they found out that breaking into the mainstream market is a lot harder than it looks.
And now there's no more Telltale Games.
so basically you aren't selling your games? Are you even posting them on itch.io? Your constraint set is WILDLY different
So you're a dilettante? That's fine. So am I. But I don't wonder about my future if my game doesn't sell (or doesn't even ship). He does.
Perhaps you should consider being a little more generous in your thinking.
Besides which, it feels like you're missing the larger point that he really doesn't care what other people like, which he can afford to do because he's making a comfortable living. I think it's great that he's making a living doing things that he enjoys without having to add stress by adding extra layers of complexity in the process - which would help how? More money? He clearly feels that he doesn't need more.
> It seems Jeff has put no effort into it
From the article: "I have had games where I worked very hard to improve the graphics, spending a lot of time and money"
> he'd have enough sense to direct art himself in some way
He does direct art himself in some way: "That is why all of my games have a more generic fantasy style. I have to work with a lot of different artists. It's the nature of the business. Thus I have to write games in a way that the artists can be replaced. The generic style this requires is not ideal, but it is necessary."
Yeah, but you have not.
Maybe Jeff having a single minded focus – maybe even bordering ignorance – is a huge part of the reason why he, in fact, has done it and keeps on going after 3 decades.
Considering different choices, could he be more successful? He probably could, but considering the immense improbability of the level of success he enjoyed over a couple of decades in this particular profession (indie game maker), it seems far more likely that any big change could have made it all crash and burn somewhere along the way a long time ago.
His art direction just doesn’t match the tastes of a large number of folks. Neither did H.R. Geiger’s. Nothing wrong with that.
But it has, that's what many people are commenting on. His last two games looked much better than his current game. It could just be the luck of the draw with regards to which artists showed up rather than a conscious choice, but his new game clearly has a different look than his previous game.
The thing about Jeff is that he very much accepts "good enough". Could he make more or do better? Maybe. But that entails risk. Why bring on risk when you're already doing what you love doing and living off it? To make more money? Jeff's not motivated by money except insofar as it's necessary. He just wants to do what he loves and enjoy his life and family, and the "good enough" pace he's set delivers on that.
His art does nothing for me, either, but I do admire his willingness to settle for "good enough" in order to focus on what really matters to him.
The definition of armchair criticism, if I ever show one.
From someone with no experience on that front whatsoever, and who doesn't even get the financial constraints clearly spelt in the article...
I imagine it's the same case here. There may be some passive knowledge gained over the years but not enough to be a competent art director compared to if he even spent 6 months dedicating himself to learning.
It might simply be that he isn't particularly interested in learning it. If he isn't motivated by being an art director, then it would very likely lead to burnout.
Maybe art just isn’t where his talent lies.
I actually wonder if he couldn’t make 2x or more by investing in the art. His previous efforts went from terrible to merely bad. It would be interesting to see what could happen if he crossed the threshold into acceptable.
Then again, I don’t know the total market size for this genre. Maybe even fantastic looking games don’t make enough to support two full timers?
Being that they don't have budget for a new position, they just have to train someone to get better at art directing.
You're missing the point: the author is happy with the games and the success they've brought to him and his family, and he doesn't "need" random tips from anonymous message-board posters, most of whom have shipped precisely zero games.
Sure, it's fair to disagree, but it's also very easy to disagree when giving the suggestions does not put at risk a business that has sustained his family for a quarter century in a business where very few even large game studios have survived that long.
I played the demo of one of his games on a bondi blue iMac back in the early 2000's. The graphics then looked ok. But it's 2019 and new titles don't look better.
I've wondered before who the userbase is for these; is it just fans from back in the day when game development was a smaller thing and the competition didn't have great artists either? Because I can't see getting into them as a new player.
Being able to sell 2x by having a more consistent and up to date art style honestly sounds low to me. Even as someone who's played my share of RPGs, had a Mac back in the day, and know that Spiderweb Software exists, that's the main thing holding me back from checking it out seriously.
But if he's getting by with what he's doing and spending more to try and reach a broader market is a risk he doesn't want to take, that's his call.
How does that mean he needs to double the sale? That's not how any of this works unless he wasn't making a profit before.
Assuming his budget was $50k, and he made $250k in sales. Now if he increases budget to $100k, he sure as hell doesn't need $500k in sales to justify the decision, in fact as long as his sale goes beyond $300k, or a 20% increase, then it pays for the increased budget.
[0] http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam...
Then say that instead of "Jeff needs an art director", which literally means that Jeff needs an art director. Which means another employee. It doesn't mean "Jeff needs to be an art director". Which he is, but results in the current situation where his games have the art they have, people complain, he writes an article explaining, and people like you criticize him for reasonable justification for why things are the way things are.
Then again, the older I get, the more I think the same should apply to developers. You should never lock knowledge inside one person's head, but the idea that you can take over a project without its original creators doing a years long hand off is naive, and leads to all the expected pathologies.
I remember a new $250k CTO saying he was amazed our code didn't have abandoned parts nobody wanted to touch ... this is how professionals are supposed to work, not something they discover "late" in their career.
It's actually really common. Most games take years to make and in my experience at least it's very unusual to ship with the same team that started. Art is also the side of things that most readily gets outsourced, either through bought and modified assets or through freelancers and outsourcing companies. Maintaining consistency is something that has to be managed.
You're saying this like this was one of his design goals from the very beginning when he started 25 years ago. No, it's become a requirement because of how unreliable freelancers can be and how difficult it is to find a replacement that is able or willing to stick to the previous style. Thus generic fantasy stuff has become his solution to this issue that is unavoidable, regardless of whether people agree with him or not.
I mean the guy seems incapable of comprehending style if this is what he's putting out 25 years in.
I see all this criticism here and I don't see any real solutions that would, on a realistic, concrete level, help him in any way improve his business.
It looks worse than his previous games, so he's gotten worse with time.
I don't think his liking his games art is a reason not to comment with my take on his blog post about it though.
When you care about art, you usually got some sense of aesthetics and feel more likely unable to bring yourself to ship anything that looks simply bad to yourself.
When you don't got the eyes to see bad art as what it is, you also won't see it as a problem that really needs fixing so you care less about it than is good for you.
You have to strike a balance there. Games are visual independend of the style. Yes you play them – but before you even decide to pick a game up, you see screenshots, trailers or game-play-videos. If that doesn't look interesting, you can have the most interesing gameplay in the universe and it wouldn't sell.
A bit like in films, where the best script can be destroyed by bad acting or the best acting can be destroyed by bad scripts as a passionate creator you have to realize that this is a serious issue.
Amateur filmmakers might figure out directing techniques to get top notch acting out of people who never stood in front of a camera before or they might search very patiently till somebody crosses their way who is a natural talent.
The thing is to precisely know your limitations and do the best you can do within them, sometimes even by not copying the best, but by finding glorious short cuts that sometimes create whole new genres.
... then you will also be very bad at hiring a good art director. You could easily end up hiring somebody who is really bad and you wouldn't know.
Even with all the money that Microsoft had in the 90'ies, they couldn't make Windows look good.
If he also cares about art more, then the other thing he cares about, namely; his one family, are denied that time.
Everything costs something.
People are very visual and your game can be amazing in terms of story or programming, but you also need to sell them visually. That doesn't mean every game has to go for amazing graphics, but it must make sense and look interesting. E.g. nethack looks more interesting without generic sprite package, till somebody developes one with a consistent style.
It takes years to get good at this, unless you did it since you were born. You pay good artists exactly for these years.
He got good at other things he cared more about it.
Maybe he should hang out on HackerNews more, so he can be an expert on everything.
The guy is doing well, relative to his own aims and objectives, and has found a way to work within his limitations to hit a sweet spot that allows him to support his family in a happy life and provide games enjoyed by a loyal fanbase.
What do we discover from HN? He's a lazy bugger that hasn't put any real effort in to respond to his customer's complaints and has failed to learn key lessons regarding his own business (that he has successfully run for twenty-five years).
Sometimes this place is completely ridiculous.
The only thing that bugs me however is when they try to come up with excuses why their works don't live up to the standard of other artists judge themselves by. Jeff listed some quite compelling arguments for his decision, most of them economical, but it still feels like an excuse of somebody who knows they could do better, which is kinda sad.
You don't have to always strive to be among the world elite at everything. Often, mediocrity in some areas of life (professional or otherwise) is a perfectly valid choice that will lead to greater happiness in the end.
So you got me 180° wrong – if his motives were purely economical, I'd completely understand his arguments. But because it is not purely economical I see this as a vague sign that he might not value the time he put into it himself enough, which is never a good thing in the long term.
Jeff doesn't needs to be an expert in everything, he needs to see what doesn't work and fix it, let others fix it or decide this is as good as it gets.
He just wrote a very long article explaining just that.
Don't get me wrong, good art doesn't necessarily need a lot of money or resources. It needs the right eyes that know when it works and when it doesn't. He seems to aknowledge he doesn't have them and explains why he can't hire someone, all perfectly fine. But also sad, because if he could he clearly would.
Having spent at least as much money, out of pocket, on a game that never shipped as JV spends to ship something consistent that feeds his family, I can assure you that this is not the case. Art is far-and-away the most expensive part of any game that wants mass market appeal. It just is. It doesn't matter if you're using a bunch of freelancers from countries that lost all their vowels along the way, it's still expensive.
The solution, then, is to build a long-tail audience that'll buy your stuff because it scratches that itch, even if it doesn't to people who are just window shopping. You know--what JV has done.
What I meant however is that depending on the genre you might find solutions that you can do yourself far easier with equally good (or better) results. You could work with one-color abstract shapes and give them a good feel by using the right deformation and stick some eyes on them. Minimal styles can work in your favour at times etc. Filmmakers also use similar ideas – can't afford to show thing A? Let the protagonist tell us about it in a internal monologue and use it to your advantage. That kind of stuff.
This approach obviously won't work for every game or genre, depending on the scope, but I didn't say it would.
"Depending on the genre"--JV makes Ultima-alikes. So by this theorycrafting he should stop making the games that make him money because people like me will buy all of them so he can go make different games that might be more amenable to cheaper art and not have a built-in customer base that is highly consistent and predictable?
JV makes his games the way he does because people like me already follow him and will buy them. His entire business model is built on not taking risks. What is the obsession around here with disregarding that?
For you it was specifically about that one guy whose games you like as they are and I didn't mean to critizise them. The relativizations uttered by me like "depending on the genre" or "necessarily" were meant to act as hints, that I was talking in a more general sense here. Maybe what he wrote is great advice for other devs who create ultima-alikes, I can't really judge that.
The thing people need to realize is that in compound arts like games, films, theatre every part is important. You can do a film with poor lighting if every other aspect is great and there is a reason why the poor lighting adds to the film as a whole. But you can't make films for 25 years and decide sound isn't all that important – unless you want to look like a complete amateur.
Visuals are an important part of games and independent of the style (photo realism, toon, purely ascii, ...) a game is much more interesting to pick up and play when you feel somebody actually cared about what they put in front of your eyeballs.
If you see a trailer of a film, filmed on a shaky phone with bad light and indistinguishable dialoge, you might decide to never watch it, even if it would've been the most interesting and moving story of all times. But that would've been the fault of the film maker, because they failed to convince you why you need to watch this film despite the technical flaws.
That means you need to see the thing as a whole, only then you can decide which role each part ought to play.
Given that he's making a living with his current strategy, and has been for twenty-five years, he is by definition not an amateur, let alone a complete one.
Indeed, the amateur is more likely the person who insists on making every aspect match their aesthetic ideal. They are not giving thought to what could make them profitable, instead focusing on building something that is precisely what they want.
Or you try and hop on the unicorn train and start looking for external funding - which will invariably start trying to run your business for you, in ways which you may not want.
The big money is in the latter, but not everyone wants to deal with the proto-corporate bullshit that goes with it.
Occasionally you can find niches - usually B2B, because high-worth bootstrap B2C is very hard - which bring in enough to allow solid growth without huge upfront spending on people and offices.
But they're very rare. And apart from the odd flash-in-the-pan one offs, small games are not usually one of those niches.
Hard to disagree with that. I have a few from Humble bundles and can't even use them in prototypes. They're just a grab bag of junk.
Maybe for slightly better placeholder art for a game before they are ready to invest in an art upgrade?
That's Voegl's point 3. There, he admits he probably could develop a more impressive-looking single game, but doing so would make him dependent on the freelancer responsible for the art style (risky) or on paying much more for other art to match the style (expensive).
JV isn't trying to be a runaway success, he's trying to not be a failure. I don't quite get why that's so hard for folks here to parse.
Key here is "teams". It's really hard for one person to bring all of those skills to the table.
And at least choose a decent font (looking at the first screenshot on the blog post)
He does address this in the article: Hiring more people means he directly needs to make more sales, which (I also know from experience) is very difficult to do. Hiring dead weight like an "art director" probably means hiring even more people to carry out the directions of the art director, since they're unlikely to be a can-do person themselves.
The article can be summed into two points:
1) I'm not a good art director 2) Having better art is on my "won't do" list
Nah. I mean, I want Jeff to have a good art director because I find the visuals distracting and a bit unpleasant part of games I otherwise might enjoy, but it's pretty clear he doesn't need one.