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Comment by glenvdb | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is that the game is in Uncanny Valley.

It's trying to achieve a certain level of detail/realism, but it's falling short of expectations.

This might be completely intentional, to evoke a feel for games from an era that did the same thing, but comparing to Baba is You highlights the developer doesn't understand that.

Baba is You has gone completely in the opposite direction in terms of graphical detail, come out of the Uncanny Valley, and is now sitting atop Cuteness Peak.

The dev needs to decide where he wants the game to sit and why.

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The art doesn't even need more detail or realism, it just needs consistent detail. Even just a simple palettization/pixelation preprocessing for every sprite could be enough - https://i.imgur.com/oPH7paD.jpg

And making sure light is consistent. In the first picture some objects like banners, notice board, bathtub shaped thing have clear shadow below them, others like fence, green plant, mushroom don't. Buckets have light coming from left side hay stack from right, other from top. I wonder if it would look better if some objects were flipped horizontally.

That's at least 50% of it, if he had given his artists any direction it should be this: Light coming from top left, soft shadows. Give the artists a palette and let them create. When you don't have any limits, your creativity is unbounded, and that can be bad for delivering something on a time budget.

That is a surprisingly good result. It literally changed my perception of those screenshots from "that is some gross and sloppy artwork, I'm keeping my money" to "hey not bad, I might buy that"

Wow, it is amazing how much better the bottom picture looks. How hard is palletization to do?

Amazing result

The article explains in detail where he wants the game to sit and why. Sorry, I don't follow.

If the dev truly understood where he wants the game to sit and why he wouldn't have compared it to Baba is You.

But his games don't sit where he thinks they sit. It's baffling as there's a huge market for "retro" looking indie games, and has been for a decade or so. Plenty of successful and influential indie games made by a small team (or even a solo developer) in the past decade have been really successful despite looking like they could run on an NES or a Commodore 64, with limited palettes and chunky graphics. But there's a difference between that and what appears to be placeholder programmer art.

> in the past decade have been really successful

He makes indie games for 25 years. They feed him and his family. That sounds very successful to me.

I'm not saying he's not successful. He's implying you either have shoddy graphics, or spend big money on AAA graphics. But they're not the only two choices, and that's proven - there are successful games without AAA graphics that also don't look bad. If he's feeding his family on his games, changing his attitude to their appearance could expand his audience significantly for relatively minor effort.

> He's implying you either have shoddy graphics, or spend big money on AAA graphics.

He really is not. The article goes into the details of the nuance of where his games are graphically.

Not to mention he specifically addresses what you're talking about.

The next step up in art quality is to add one person to his permanent team, which roughly doubles each game's budget and roughly doubles the sales needed to support that budget. That's a big step and he's not willing to take that risk. Not sure who would be in a better position than him and his wife to assess the risk for that, so it's very hard to argue with that judgement.

I think others have pointed out that this belief that he'd have to hire someone is a fallacy. There are some pretty basic techniques that he could learn from literally watching a few YouTube videos that could be applied to his existing graphics that would just take them to the next level. He's leaving money on the table because he's too stubborn to admit that visuals matter to a lot of people and the basics of design aren't so complicated that they'd eat his dev time/budget.

>The next step up in art quality is to add one person to his permanent team, which roughly doubles each game's budget and roughly doubles the sales needed to support that budget.

That's just simply not true. He just needs to increase revenue by the additional budget to support the budget. So unless he was only break even before with revenue == budget, he doesn't need to double the revenue.

Eh. I played some of his games and they were pretty fun.

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