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His problem, and you can see from his wording, is that he thinks about "graphics" not "art." Sure he made a 3d game. So what. He doesn't seem to have the same passion for art direction as he does for game design so its not surprising at all that you can throw money at the wrong problem and not get much out.

it's more of a taste problem than a budget problem, plenty games go low fi and are amusing both to play and look at, i.e. Celeste

Specifically its more of an art direction problem.

If you have an artist with decent technical skills, enough time, and an excellent art director, you can still achieve great results. Eventually that Artist will learn and become better in what they independently produce.

Plus, the art is visible through a camera, and with post-processing and FX - which are easily controlled or influenced by that same art director. Just tweaking colour, camera angle, and FOV can produce incredibly unique results.

I had a very small budget, and no team, and was able to produce something regarded as reasonably good-looking in 3D for Frontline Zed:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/915490/Frontline_Zed/

Your game looks great, and so do many other indie games with low budgets like Stardew Valley and Axiom Verge to name just a few examples, even though there are many more.

Vogel just isn't willing to put in time and money into visuals because it's probably a combination of it 1. not being a priority for him and 2. lacking the skill for visual design (not necessarily implementing it, but just having an eye for it) which is probably also due to the point #1

It looks awesome! Best of luck.

> He doesn't seem to have the same passion for art direction as he does for game design so its not surprising at all that you can throw money at the wrong problem and not get much out.

I think that's the most robust critical takeaway from this Hacker News thread. Vogel feels as if marginal spending on art assets is unprofitable, but if a root problem is instead artistic consistency then more expensive art is not necessarily (much) more effective art.

That said, this also doesn't negate Vogel's business point, that it's always worth examining what's "good enough" to optimize return. Suppose Vogel doesn't have and can't easily develop a good artistic eye for consistency; it's still probably not worth it to hire someone else to do it for him.

The problem to me isn't when someone says "we want cheap work and we understand it will not be particularly high-quality," but when they say "we want top-quality work but we're not willing to pay for it."

And to me, I read it as he expects more towards the latter than the former. "Talented, reliable" implies an expectation of a specific level of quality beyond "cheap work, not particularly high-quality".

I read "reliable" as "delivers, preferably on time." That's reasonable to ask for from any freelancer, but since Vogel specifically doesn't pay enough to keep artists on retainer I can understand how he doesn't always get it.

I don't have such a high reading of "talented," since others in this thread generally complain that Vogel has a poor eye for quality, and Vogel in this blog post notes he's looking for a basic 'good enough'.

I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, in particular since he understands that not having a reliable cadre of artists is his problem and not that of primadonna artists. The stereotypical out-of-touch manager who asks for "top-quality work on a shoestring budget" also externalizes the blame for failure.

That is: I think many people are responding to this blog post as if it had read "our games look like crap, but that's because we can't find good artists," rather than "... and that's fine by me, we're getting what we want to pay for."

>Finding talented, reliable, reasonably priced freelancers is HARD

He wants the talent, but he finds talented artists to demand an unreasonable amount of money. To me it's him that comes off as unreasonable.

I think you're ignoring his statements about his business model, game audience, ROI for graphic's improvement, etc.

No I'm not. In fact, that just supports my point; he doesn't want to spend much on design because it won't make him more money, but he wants "talented and dependable" designers. You know that old "pick two" saying? Also, something about cake comes to mind.

Something made of straws comes to mind.

Don't see why it would. Maybe I am reading too much into that one sentence, I don't know. The whole "talented... for a reasonable price" bit stuck with me though. If all of the talented people want a certain rate, then guess what? That's the market rate.

Yes and he acknowledges that by saying they are "really HARD" to find. Clearly after 25 years in the industry he didn't wait for you to point out that reliable talented artists don't usually come cheap. He's simply decided they are not worth the price tag for his business.

...again, his definition of 'reasonable' is what's off here.