The ones who buy these games are the people not turned off by the “style, color and lighting” deficiencies.
I looked at his games for the first time after the earlier post and am also not representative of his customer base.
This isn't a complaint, really - I have plenty to fill my time - just surfacing my experience. The art has never been an issue.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
That said, I would not fault the makers of Planetary Annihilation for prioritizing bugs according to the size of their customer bases.
Maybe. And more to the point, even if it were often viable it might not be in a particular case, and the developers likely have a better sense of that then I do. Which is one part of why I'm not complaining.
> Planetary Annihilation made a Linux version and despite representing only <0.1% of sales Linux users accounted for >20% of bug reports[0]. That's pretty damning.
Damning of what?
Daming of the economics? Those numbers could hold despite it being tremendously profitable - it depends on how many bug reports there are relative to sales, how much you're spending per bug report, etc. It's fundamentally looking at the wrong thing. What portion of Linux users had issues? If it's high, maybe that's a big reason you didn't get more Linux sales.
Damning of the platform? Insofar as it's the fault of the platform. It's true that there's fragmentation. It's also true that less effort is often put into the Linux ports, and there are nonetheless plenty of games that I can play without problems.
Damning of Linux gamers? Submitting a bug report is a virtue, not a vice.
Damning of the developers? I don't think that's what you were saying.
These days, though, I prefer the iPad versions when available.
You only expand sales if you have the money/time to invest in doing the things to expand your sales. And even then, it's a risk (they might not expand).
Go on one of the colour palette generators and create a colour palette to stick to for each level. Or use one of those photo to colour palette tools. He doesn’t have to learn about colours himself, he can rely on the tools to get him a palette.
Pick a position for the sun/light source and draw shadows on the opposite side of objects consistently.
His style is already consistent enough so those two would probably be all he needs to do.
Then again, if he’s happy with his sales figures and doesn’t need to expand into the almost-customers then fine, it’s his game and his call after all.
"Picking out a few colors" is not something that's easy if you are not an experienced artist.
Sure, he could probably learn to do it, if he spent some time learning how to do it, but he needs to budget his time, and he decided that story / gameplay is more important than fancy graphics.
I am not surprised and there are certainly more people like you. The issue is that, as he says:
> I am still super-bad at art. Always have been.
He knows his writing and game design can sell games. It is totally reasonable for him to stick to his strengths.
It would be nice to see better support for custom tilesets / assets built into his games, but that also takes time / money.
Sure I am. I buy and play a lot of indie games. My steam and PS4 libraries have hundreds of Indie games in them. The vast majority are pixel art or other low budget graphics. I commented in the previous thread saying that I don’t require fancy or expensive art. Hell, I’m perfectly cool with programmer art, but it needs consistency in style, colour and lighting. His art isn’t terrible, but its also not great and I actually did pass over some of his games in the past because the look just felt a little off.