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Half Life doesn't look like crap. It looks dated. There is a huge gap between the way the OP's games look and how half life looks, because even though the 3D tech was worse and the textures lower res in half life, it had a proper art team behind it. A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for it. Fair enough. But just getting someone to look over the art all together and making it a bit more cohesive would be a huge improvement. The thing is, it seems he's paying different people to do different pieces and just putting it all together without any sense of direction. I think it's alright if you want to pay A to draw this and that, and then when A leaves pay B to draw this and that, but you should have B take a look at the tileset as a whole and ask him to make the pieces look alright together. Because right now it's a huge mess.

> A proper art team is expensive, and he doesn't want to pay for it.

Can't. The word you're looking for here is can't. The unit economics of making the sorts of games that JV makes completely preclude it. It would be way easier to spend the money he doesn't make to get better art talent. This is true. It is also not very meaningful.

And it's not that there is minimal sense of direction just for funsies--it's that you don't have that luxury when we're talking about the rates he's working at. I spent a decent amount of money, in the ballpark of what JV probably spends on third-party work for a game, trying to get freelancers--reasonably priced or, in reality, not so--to work towards a cohesive art style. That I did not ship that game (which is still in a 75%-ish complete state in my graveyard, it's my fuck-you-money project) is largely due to the difficulty of getting art to a standard I felt comfortable with.

JV ships because that standard is lower than I was able to stomach.

His games also happen to be really good, too.

Ok, can't. This doesn't change the rest of what I said, though: Have the freelance artist spend some time fixing up the tileset as a whole!

I think you may not be grasping how tiny the margins here are. Where's the money come from to do it?

Not only the margins, but the number of units sold. Many indie devs are lucky to sell a few hundred or a few thousand copies.

We don't have numbers on the table, so we can't really talk about money. I am presenting what I think would be an efficient use of the money. Not paying a full time artist, not hiring an art director, just having someone with some sense of art fix up the whole asset directory a bit instead of simply asking people to do things generic like he says he does in the article. How much time will depend on the budget. This is just my idea, of course. Maybe he already tried it a bit and it doesn't give as much of a result as I think.

I don't know JV's numbers, but I know mine and a high-quality visual artist who speaks fluent/first-language English and has the sort of willingness to play nice with others' art can be $50/hour. And for a game like these, you're talking quite a few hours, you know?

You can go offshore for cheaper, but then you introduce risk, and if nothing else, JV's model is to minimize risk as much as is possible.

> I don't know JV's numbers

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam... covers "Geneforge 4: Rebellion" (tl;dr: average performer, $120k budget, almost in the black after 3 years.)

I recall that post (I've been a fan of JV's work, and his blog, for a long time!) but that's ten years old now and the market has gotten more competitive. I think that post is actually pre-Steam, though might push it the other way--I recall that he did really well for himself early on after going to Steam.

He has a really good GDC talk that goes into more detail and might shed light on why he operates the way he does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs

Their current game raised just shy of $100k on Kickstarter [0]. Presumably there have been additional presales via other platforms such as Steam as well. Given that, $10-20k as an art budget doesn't seem unreasonable to me, though I have no idea how to estimate how long it would take to do the art for one of his games and if that would be enough budget (probably not at $50/hour, but maybe at $25-30/hour).

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/619141553/queens-wish-t...

$100K is more like $93K after Kickstarter's cut. Further, I can't speak to the tax implications though I would assume they're nontrivial. And he has to pay himself enough to live for a year or more to get the game done and out the door.

This stuff is really raw and really hard at the margins and tolerances we are talking about here.

That costs extra money. If he were to do that, that money would come directly out of his ability to provide for his family. And he's not convinced that it would increase sales enough to make up for it. Maybe he's wrong, and it would, but at first blush I'd trust him to have the best instincts about his own business.

> Can't. The word you're looking for here is can't.

I think the real term is "Not Invented Here Syndrome".

This site has thousands of open sourced game assets: https://opengameart.org

Here is an asset pack of 65 fantasy icons for $5: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/icons/fantasy-r...

I suspect someone spending $200 and a day of searching could probably find most of the art needed for Queen's Wish. There's really no need for him to be hiring freelancers in the first place.

Working with purchased assets is not so simple; there is no consistent art direction when you buy things from different sources. This usually requires an artists to do a pass and make all these disparate assets work together.

Simply saying "just buy cheap assets" completely misses the point here.

Everyone already acknowledges the current art has no consistent direction. It makes no sense to pay extra money for bespoke artwork that looks worse than what you can get by just going to what's already available.

Dude...have you ever tried to use OpenGameArt or asset packs in anger? The quality is at best "uneven", you'll still have the exact same "but they're inconsistent" complaints, and then on top of that you get people whining that you used off-the-shelf art. (Rather like "oh it's an RPG Maker" game, which is something that Zeboyd Games, another low-budget indie developer, gets all the time; they don't use RPG Maker, but that's another story).

You can't make everybody happy. JV is going to more reliably make money by making his audience, like me, happy. Why should he change it?

Dude... I have and am using asset packs. If your design schtick is looking as cheap as possible then it's not very hard to get what you need.

Indie dev here who was been working solo on games for the last 3 years (nights and weekends) using the resources you're describing. You can get a lot of mileage out of those assets for not much money, but it takes a huge amount of time and skill to turn them into something consistent and usable. You can usually find art similar to what you want, but almost never: - in the correct aesthetic - the right size - with the proper animations

It's a full-time job to find this art in the first place, to resize, to animate, to recolor, and apply effects to the art to help it match your desired aesthetic. And then it still is never good enough.

There's a lot to be said for having someone produce art to your requests in a consistent style, even if the quality of the art is not extremely high.

I think the key words here are "New Coke".

When you change your focus from a loyal customer base and change key aspects of your product they prefer in order to chase a competitor's customers you risk losing your own base and still not picking up a substantial portion of the rest of the market.

Yeah, I think the biggest problem with his games (and I only know them from the screenshots) is in art direction.

He compares it to Baba is You, and while that game's art is technically simple, its consistent aesthetic and style sells it.

Meanwhile, in his screenshots, the visuals seem dated and inconsistent. I don't think it's a problem with the quality of the assets, but in art direction, and like he said, that's on the developer.

When playing Avadon I recognized assets that were reused from the Exile series. Literally decades-old art. This is all minor stuff like leather gloves and other items, but it contributes to the lack of consistency.

> people will still think your game looks like crap. And those people who don't (I for instance really like SNES games still), will also be satisfied with the art he can create.

I like Spiderweb games, but most SNES games looked better than this. Some NES games looked better than this. You can have cheap, low-res art that is coherent and pleasing to the eye, but this isn't it.

He includes a picture of Ultima V for DOS, which looks better than his current games. Hell, he includes a picture of the original art for Exile, which IMO looked better than the later Exile III tileset (which was ported back to releases of Exile I). The problem with the aesthetics of his latest game is not resolution and it isn't that it's in a classic 2D tile-based style.

That said, I see where he's coming from. The audience for games like his is very small, even when the graphics are good. I think he should add support for custom tilesets. It's common in the roguelike world, and at this point his audience is closer to the hobbyist/roguelike scene than the average indie studio.

Swapping out a tile set would have been pretty trivial on the old SW games on Windows (on Mac you had to meet with the Resource Fork). It was all just images in folders.

I used to go and snag cool-looking NPC/monster graphics from the monster spritesheet and Blades of Exile scenarios and paste them into the PC spritesheet so I could use those graphics for my party members. I always really wanted BoE to support Vahnatai party members.

I get a little annoyed at how graphics tech is often equated with art direction. Anno 1602 has matching colors, good contrast, perfectly proportioned tile art, consistent balance of detail and good lighting. Its mountains look majestic, its forests lush, its buildings picturesque. All things you could get if you spent money on letting someone actually do some art direction on the game rather than just commissioning concept art and sticking it on top of flat background textures.

There's quite a fine line between "crap" and AAA actually, as evidenced by "any game from more than a few years back, looks like crap". And if you extend that line out to infinity, good art is on the crap side of it.

   AAA  |
  ------+--------------------------------------+------
   crap |                                      | good

AAA and crap have more in common with each other than with good art. Queen's Wish looks like Diablo-I-era AAA art, done poorly.

>But any of those are hopelessly out of reach for any Indie developer even with today's tools.

This just isn't true. It only a question of money and/or time.

Yes, I think that's exactly what that comment meant.

I'm sure a 2 man experienced team consisting of a programer and an artist can recreate the vault intro sequence of F3 in a few months. They wouldn't be able to expand thst into the full 2007 game without years of man-hours. Because F3 itself took thousands of man hours. It'd take a lot less time with modern tools, but not enough to offset the work of hundreds of developers.

You're not going to get hundreds of man hours of content for free but setting up Source or Unreal or Unity to get a modern engine with every feature those games had does not take months.

An engine that's roughly equivalent, in absentia the actual games' data, is not remotely equivalent to those games.

The same could be said for gameplay data though. My point is it isn't some insurmountable cliff. You get out what you put in.

And if it takes one person all that time to build the roughly-equivalent engine, that person does not have time to design and build the game's assets, nor design and playtest the levels.

You do get out what you put in, but one person can only put in so much.