> Jeff, the art problems of your games have nothing to do with low-res. Baba is You (or Downwell) are just as low-res, but manage to look good because they use fewer colors and choose them well.

I expect they're also less busy, and more stylised.

Looking at the Queen’s Wish's screenshot, it doesn't look lower resolution than Dungeons of Dredmor, just worse, the backgrounds are way too busy, the colors are inconsistent, too subdued so their kind-of meld into one another making things less legible, the lighting is odd, the level of details seems to vary from one sprite to another,…

Compare

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tV0QOWTjVOM/XV23pI64tQI/AAAAAAAAB...

to

http://i.imgur.com/tc3rt.png

I think this looks more consistent than both: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2018/...

It's all subjective. I much prefer the Queen's Wish look. The other one looks like somebody's MySpace page from forever ago.

I am not sure which one I prefer.

Completely agree that it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they are low res. However, it's not just the colors. For me it's mostly that the lighting across artwork is very inconsistent. The artwork separately is quite good, but because some stuff is much lighter than the rest it feels like it's gathered from multiple separate games and put together in one.

The article explains why this is so. Arguably with some art direction from Jeff himself he can make art that is more easily replicable, but the reasoning seems to be that "I have to be able to swap artists out."

Instead of learning enough about game art over 25 years to direct some consistency across artists for his games, he rationalizes it as an explicit business choice.

I think he's missing an opportunity to learn more about art himself. After making so many games for so long you think there would be some learning/mastery of low-res art. Seems like Jeff is taking the easier route of "that's my style."

No where in the article does Jeff talk about any effort he's put in to learn about palettes, lighting, or generic styles that can be emulated. He only talks about swapping out artists.

He could first pay an artist to create a style guide like this: https://66.media.tumblr.com/f055b014e1db777c9ebd54579691cda0...

Then swapping out artists will be easier and the game will look more consistent.

Yes! It's clear the consensus is that he needs art direction to get consistency, but this is how you actually put that into action. He needs style guides 100%. It's also potentially a good longer term investment, you can re-use and adapt them.

The guide also needs to include lighting, which he has diddly-squat of.

That palette swapping trick looks like a great idea for indie games!

It was used on the Gameboy Color to colorize the grayshaded Gameboy games.

You can choose what palette to use by pressing a combination of buttons on most start screens. See this example of Super Mario Land: http://i.imgur.com/HupBY.png

"I have to be able to swap artists out” is, in my opinion, a really bad reason as it leads to an inconsistent messy looking final product. I’d rather have repetitive art (due to not finding another artist who can match the previous ones work and therefore having to reuse assets) than an inconsistent one.

I play a lot of games with low resolution, cheap or crude graphics and that never bothers me, but I find inconsistent art really difficult to ignore to the point where I probably wouldn’t play this game.

Keeping art generic, boring and inconsistent to swap out artists is akin to using a lowest common denominator language and framework so you can swap out programmers. Maybe it makes business sense, but it leads to uninspired boring results.

I’m sorry at how negative this comment turned out, so if the author reads it I hope he takes it constructively and considers how to improve the consistency of the art.

EDIT: I don't think the art looks terrible, but it could be improved a lot with relatively minor changes (consistent shadows would be a great start).

I don't think you can develop more universally palatable sense of esthetic even over 25 years. You like the stuff you like. You can hire people to have sense of esthetic for you. But you need money for that so....

There are pixel artists that create and share restrictive palettes, which I think could help. For example: http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=16247

Totally aside the cross-dither chart gives a great animated effect on my monitor!

Baba Is You and Downwell are a totally different kind of retro. They're trying to look like NES games. John's games are retro as well, but they channel the very different style of 90s Windows games, which had so many colors (256) they didn't know what to do with them all.

I was going to say exactly this, but you nailed it.

The 90s game style saw more powerful chips and higher color depths as a chance to do realistic art and skeuomorphic interfaces.[1] I'm sure they looked good to people then, but the reason they look so dated now is that realism as a design goal is better accomplished with modern graphics technologies than anything they had available then. Anything that still looks "good" does so because it was able to carve out a stylistic niche that didn't depend on having a more realistic interface as the end goal.

Pixel art games look timeless (to me) precisely because their limitations meant that designers had to find a style that worked for the particular game. To be sure, there are 80s games with bad art, but I think on the whole the older art was better (and is now more iconic) because the limitations pushed creativity.

I still love to play low-res games (including new ones like VVVVVV[2]), but most of them are in an older art style than John's games, which (if I'm being honest) look (visually) kind of crappy to me.

[1] The poor font rendering in most 90s games doesn't help matters either.

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/VVVVVV_-...

> honestly doesn't take that much time

On the contrary: It will take all your life :)

Honest question, where does one learn that skill? If it doesn't take that much time, how long it usually takes? I have no clue about art, design, and stuff. Where does I even start?

I made a minimalistic game requiring only 3 colors, then spent a month making different palettes for it. Started with terrible color sense, ended up with this: https://imgur.com/a/boc29

This is missing the point entirely. The point is much closer to: don't worry about art and focus on making the game.

People will always get upset about graphics, and will always have their own "suggestions" on how to make your art not terrible. If you listen to one person, you might just alienate every other player that doesn't like that person's style.

So basically Jeff just need to take some art lessons