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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

I'm with you on the games being excellent examples of a super niche style done well but he's basically writing an article attacking the very concept of art direction as a waste of resources. That comes off a little disrespectful towards people who care.

I think there's no point in making their games looking any different than they do (because it's part of their brand, now) but the correct response to a question of why they don't make a "better" looking game is that they don't care. Or, maybe, it's a taste issue. Flailing your hands about how people totally did not appreciate you going through the trouble of making the graphics isometric or hiring underpaid artists is not the way to go. It's maybe "honest" but it's IMO at best a misunderstanding of and at worst a severe lack of respect for art direction and visual design.

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I think I interpreted the article differently from you. I saw this as a cold hard look at what works and the dangers of changing your brand (or rather, the fact that "better X" doesn't always mean more success when you're Forte is Y), not some general argument against the idea of artistic integrity. Doing what Vogel can now do after 20 years and an established audience would lead to ruin for 99.9% of devs today aiming for financial success because the market is very different. And I'm sure he knows that.

This was what I took away from the post as well. The realism was refreshing and to me very positive. It shows there actually can be a middle-ground in indie development and not just the two extremes of “Have a viral hit and earn millions!” and “Spend more than your life savings and go broke!”.

All too often I think people are happy to throw their hands in the air and presume that indie success is just ‘impossible’. This article, for me, added some much-needed nuance to the discussion.

Yes the business reasons were perfectly fine, and he didn't explicitly argue against artistic integrity, it's just that he didn't display any, while making arguments about artistic choices.

There's an interesting unstated major premise here, that "art" exclusively means pictures.

Spiderweb tends to focus on different aspects of game making that are admittedly a lot less visual, but are arguably no less artistic. This is a wildly hyperbolic analogy, but it seems to me that suggesting that Jeff Vogel doesn't care much about art because his games are weak on the visuals is a bit like suggesting that Led Zeppelin didn't care so much about art because their shows didn't offer the same visual spectacle as a GWAR performance.

> but the correct response to a question of why they don't make a "better" looking game is that they don't care. Or, maybe, it's a taste issue.

No, he plainly states it is a cost issue. He can't afford to hire the people who could create truly "good" art for his games.

Steamspy lists their games as having sold [in the millions](https://steamspy.com/dev/Spiderweb+Software). If they wanted to, they absolutely could afford a B+ tier art guy going through the basic steps of making their backgrounds not look like programmer art, for a few months.

You can actually see some decent concept art and character design in their current games but they're drowned out by a stubborn refusal to actually change the overall balance of detail, suffocating those decent artworks in a sea of blurry/noisy backgrounds. It's a colossal waste, really, only explainable by a stubborn refusal to "learn art", which I can respect by itself, but the post comes off as utter denial of that even happening.

It's okay to dismiss art direction and make that some kind of design philosophy, it works for their games. But blaming it on everything but dismissal feels wrong.

Using Steamspy to just declare how much money he has made and that it is enough to support his family, continue development and hire someone for more art direction when the entire article is about he doesn't have enough money to hire someone is exactly why he wrote this article.

People keep posting in the thread that games with "bad art" still look good with "good art direction" but art direction also costs money, which he still doesn't have.

You say they, but it's only one guy as explained. It's not that he sees art direction as a waste of resources, he sees it as a risk to his future. To expend resources in the art direction he would have to hire more people, and try and ensure the same art style. Which would mean he would need more sales. Plus he would have to upfront these expenses and he might not make it back.

It's an extra risk he doesn't want to his lifestyle that has worked for him for 25 years.

Disrespectful ? The dude says his games look like crap. He doesn’t say everyone else’s should. He’s explaining why it makes business sense for him to do so! This is business 101 from a sucessful indie game dev

He also says his games look like crap because that's how old games look to him. Yes he has business sense, he also has no taste.

Now this seems disrespectful.

> he's basically writing an article attacking the very concept of art direction as a waste of resources. That comes off a little disrespectful towards people who care.

Sounds like "people who care" are people that have spent a lot of money on art and need to respond to this post to justify it. Or are artists themselves and need to prove their worth.

Money talks.

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