uncopy2002
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 431
Registered: 07-28-2014
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Re: How would you fix DROD's graphics? (+3)
My 2 cents as usual:
It's easy for people to say that a game has shitty graphics, but the catch here is that you can't talk about improving a game's graphics if you have no idea what would be considered better graphics, or art style for the matter.
I suspect when people nowadays (especially on Steam. I don't think it'd be surprising how casual Steam players actually are on average) think about good graphics in puzzle games, they're think along the line of this:
- Casual puzzle games (e.g Snakebird). That kind of art style was a descendent from, naturally, Flash games, with Flash's signature flat color with thick, smoothed outlines as people just draw assets inside Flash itself.
Does DROD benefit from adopting this art style? Probably not, the outline alone introduces lots of wasted space, and DROD rooms are already quite cramped to begin with. This art style also creates an expectation for things to be smooth, including animation transitions, which are exactly the opposite of what we'd want from DROD: we want responsive, practical UX that adapts to our pacing. Waiting for animation frames is the worst enemy to this (yes, I've seen this on so many puzzle games on Steam. It's bad.)
- A 2.5D setup which is like *cough* DROD 3D. Again, very common among Steam puzzle games.
Does DROD benefit from adopting this art style? It's even worse, as we all know DROD 3D flopped like a giant enemy waterskipper being flipped over and its weak point attacked for massive damage. Being 2.5D also means you gotta have the animation transitions, which nobody wants to experience in rooms that take like 1000 moves. So no.
- A typical Unity game setup: Unity-like UIs (skin-swapped of course, that vanilla UI skin is ugly and nobody wants that), hover responsibility, etc. Also very typical among Steam puzzle games.
Does DROD benefit from adopting this art style? Hell no, that's that's a even quickly way to turn the game into garbage. Garbage as in those in Getting Over It, if you've listened to Bennett Foddy's insights.
- Pixel art (a.k.a 8-bit art) setup
Does DROD benefit from adopting this art style? Well, if you want to make DROD even more niche, that is. Also because of how 8-bit graphic games are overflowing the scene you gotta have lots of STYLE to make the graphics stand, and it takes even more effort and talent.
(Also, by the way, I don't think anyone has expected a puzzle game to have flashy graphics. At least not for the 95% of them. So that's mostly a red herring, I don't think such demand ever existed in the first place.)
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What the above is trying to say is that when someone says "this game has garbage graphics" they clearly have an expectation of what would be great, but the most possible candidates of what they think, while mainstream and easily anticipated, doesn't really work for DROD.
DROD's UI comes from the era of DOS and shareware games: packed, practical, extensible (clicking will give you more information than you ever need), and complete. In fact DROD has one more advantage: the whole room is always visible. There are nothing surprising off-screen that you need to worry about ("should I keep this monster for the part I can't see right now? Or that? Arrrrgh if I made a mistake I LOSE LOTS OF TIME").
In this sense, what we eventually got was the natural evolution to what DROD graphics would be if it's gonna be HD-ified. Everything feels right on home, portraits are quirky but still nice-looking, terrain looks pretty on all room styles (especially cloud reflections on water, those are gorgeous), game element tiles are clean even though sometimes they can be compressed af (I'm looking at you, open-door-on-force-arrow-on-token-on-monster-on-weapon-on-checkpoint whatever the evil architects had come up with). I'd be rather off-putted if we instead get an art style that's completed different. That'd not be what DROD is good at.
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That doesn't mean nothing is there to be approved though! There a few things I think could be improved:
- OMG those scrolls and room title backgrounds and who know what else, they're still as ugly and poorly cropped as if they've never been improved at all
- FONT, THE MAIN FONT IS ALMOST COMICS SANS TO ME and is probably the biggest visible eye-sore around, please choose something else that looks good when typesetted (but still maintains the feeling that it currently has now, I understand it has the vibe needed but it's still too ugly)
- Other than those... None! Great job! It's not easy at all to get such a consistent yet distinctive art style, but here we are. There are so many ways to go wrong, and we didn't head into any one of them. So heads up to ErikH.
[Last edited by uncopy2002 at 12-11-2017 05:27 PM]
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