If the game developers back then had had the option, they likely would not have chosen to limit themselves to x colors and small resolutions, so I don't see why it's so common among independent game developers today to choose to do so.

Likely it's because they share the same nostalgia, and want to target others who do.  Or as others have pointed out, it's a workflow thing.  Smaller, simple resolution is easier than larger, more detailed sprites.  After a fashion, anyway.  It's easier and quicker to make something look ugly-good at low res than good-good at high-res, and still seem somewhat polished.

I've found that doing small-scale pixel work is easier to animate for too.  Animation is a pain in the butt as it is, and getting larger scale stuff to look smooth takes scads of cleanup and refining.  It's time consuming like crazy.  Heck, even Aquaria opted for paper-doll animation rather than hand-drawn frames.  Doing things the low res, ugly-good way gives the artist some leeway.  A lot of indie developers are working on their own, or in tiny teams with no budget, so full on hi-res animation just isn't practical.

some stuff

By the way, I've been meaning to ask... is your user name a Donnie Darko reference?  From that asian chick who was always telling Donnie to "Chut up?"

I mentioned that it helps to avoid the ego trip of leadership, trying to force one's creative vision down people's throats.

Just to clarify (again) I don't mean that there should be a leader ruling with an iron fist.  I mean this:

I don't mean that an idea should be set in stone and buried in an ark, a certain amount of flexibility is always good.  But it seems that if a group of people get together to make a game and start pitching out ideas, only one of those ideas is going to get picked to develop further.  That's what I meant by one person's vision.

The "committee" trap is one where all have agreed to not have a leader but none have relinquished their ego. Instead of a coherent whole coming together from the shared visions of the group, the egos have been merely partitioned. Each member imposes their vision on whatever they can lay their hands on.

Wow, I hadn't looked at it that way before.  Makes perfect sense, though.

*i mean, i'll try my best but how serious can a game about a telekinesis-powered Jesus possibly be?

I don't know how serious it could be, but I do know how awesome it could be.  Good luck!

Obviously a group can only make one person's vision come to life.

While there are many routes to success, personally I think this is where you've gone wrong. Don't try to mimic the boardroom or the committee room in group work. Learn from comedy improv groups and bands. Think art collective, not software company. This is, in my view, the strength of indie games.

A lot of bands fall apart because there's some egotistical 'leader' who wants to tell everyone what to play, but if he's really better at the bass than the bass player than he should probably be playing bass and not singing. And if he isn't better at the bass than the bass player, then he should shut up and listen to the bass player's ideas.

In comedy people who want to craft an individual vision go into stand-up, while improv is about group work. Feeding off other people's creative output and getting a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

A big part of maturity is letting go of that egotistical urge to make everyone else do what you want. The ideal scenario is finding a bunch of creative types whose ideas you appreciate and who can inspire you, and vice versa. Games are a rather new and technical field, so they don't have quite the same talent pool to draw from as comedy and music, but I still think theres a lot to be learned from those models.

Okay, I'm willing to be persuaded.  But does one avoid the aforementioned "design by committee" conundrum if there isn't one single, unified goal set from the start?

Obviously I don't mean that an idea should be set in stone and buried in an ark, a certain amount of flexibility is always good.  But it seems that if a group of people get together to make a game and start pitching out ideas, only one of those ideas is going to get picked to develop further.  And that's what I meant by one person's vision.

I was mainly thinking of a time before Genesis and SNES came on the scene.

It's true, people were amazed that NES had better graphics than Atari 2600, but the 2600 was released almost ten years prior and didn't really have any cutting-edge competitors.  By the time the whole crash of 83 happened a lot of people had just moved back into the arcades.  When the NES came out it didn't really have any competitors.  Atari was on hiatus.  The NES was pretty much making sales on it's own merits.  I remember Atari did try re-releasing the 2600 a little while later with a new ad campaign with a cheesy rap song ("Under fifty bucks!  Now isn't that nice?" It still gets stuck in my head occasionally), but it never really took off again.

And I don't think that the graphics had everything to do with why the NES did so well.  It also afforded a much deeper play experience than Atari.  The deepest game on Atari I think was probably Pitfall, and even that wasn't "winnable," it just looped over an over again like all the other games.  The NES brought story and narrative to gameplay.  So there was more of an avenue for emotional attachment to NES games that Atari couldn't match.  So when I say we were in awe then, it wasn't just because of the awesome graphics, but that visual style has sort of stuck in my mind as being associated with good times.

Boy, we're really derailing this thread, huh?

It's easyer to communicate with people you alread know, and you are more incline to "compromise" and "diplomacy" interacting with them.
But the most important thing in knowing your teammates is trust. You trust them, you know their level of commitment to the project and you know how they will "perform" in standard situations and under pressure.

Ah, see this is one of the reasons for making this thread.  I don't personally know anyone who's interested in making games.  I know artsy people, and I know techy people, but I don't know any artsy-techy people like myself.  I think that artsy-techy mix is what interests me in making games where everyone else I know is interested in oil painting or building hot-rod computers.  Suffice it to say, I know a whole lot of gamers, but no game makers.

So along with group work in general I'm trying to get a little insight on how to work in groups long-distance, with people you've never met in person.

I believe the defacto leader is the only way to get stuff done (preferably my self being the leader).

I would assume that the person with the main idea behind the project would be the best suited to take the leading role.  I realize that not everyone is grade-a leader material, but it just seems the logical choice.  If they don't step up then "project by committee" is likely to happen, and likely to tear everything apart.


Let's take a rather infamous example... The Zybourne Clock.  It's retardedness is so vast that it has spread even outside of the confines of Something Awful.  I was there at the beginning, and shamefully admit that I agreed to help out with it.  (Thankfully my concept art has never made an appearance in any of the reminiscence threads.  It seems to be lost to time.)

Anyway, the person who proposed the idea just threw it out there one day.  A bunch of bored goons decided it sounded like fun and decided to sign on.  As I said, I was one of them.  But the goon with the idea didn't really have any idea what he wanted to do.  He let everyone run rampant with pitching in this or that, and nobody could agree.  At one time there were three versions of the basic story that smaller fringe groups were working on separately.  It was a total fiasco.  Recognizing that it was just a shitstorm, I quietly bowed out of it pretty early on (right around the time they kicked Arthur Lee off the project... the only person out of all of them that had actually ever made a game).  Nobody ever got past the "concept art" stage.  And half the "concept art" that was made was obsolete by the time it was posted because the story had changed five times over.  Either that or people would propose changes to the setting to match the new sketches "cause they were cool."

Granted, that's an extreme case.  But it is an example of how things fall apart largely due to there being no clear leadership.  (Well, that and the fact that goons are boneheads.)

Haha, this game is hilarious  :D

Poot Poot is the cutest lactose intolerant cat I've ever seen.  I agree that some left/right control would be cool, though.

Sword Fighter Zero - title still a work in progress

I wanted to make a simple platform game focused around sword play and daggers that had a bit to explore, but wasn't to complicated in the layout.  What I ended up with was a sword swinging, rope flinging adventure that is pretty fun, though not TOO original in execution.

Is that a Cave I see there?

j/k, That looks awesome.  Good luck with getting it done, we could always use more good platformers.

I thought someone would mention that. The avatar is from Destiny of an Emperor 2, as an aside.

I like stylistic art, and retro pixel art can be stylistic. But there are other forms and styles too. Aquaria for instance was stylistic without being retro or realistic.

I just think it's too easy to fall into the 'retro=good' mindset, when in fact a lot of retro graphics were pretty awful. It's only in retrospect that we find things like a Metroid screenshot aesthetically appealing, even back then they probably wished they had more colors to work with than 16 at once on the screen and 4 per tile/sprite.

While it's true that there is a large nostalgic element to the draw towards pixel-art, I have to say that back in the day we as gamers weren't thinking about "I wish this was better."  There was no better, and no indication that better was coming.  We were all literally in awe at the awesome graphics of something like Mega Man 2 or Super Mario 3.  It was the golden age of console gaming, and we were babes in the woods.

So yes, it did make an impression on me, and I do have somewhat of a bias towards retro pixel art.  But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate what the 360 or PS3 has to offer in terms of visuals.  I just don't place as much importance on visuals in gaming because I remember a time when games were hella fun and looked like shit compared to what we have now.  Whereas what we have now looks amazing but for the most part seems stale, like I've played it all before.

So I'd say that even though I've played thousands of platformers, I still get a kick out of newer, retro-looking platformers just for the sheer nostalgia of it.

How do you overcome the fact that some people's ideas get left in the dust?  Obviously a group can only make one person's vision come to life.

I once tried to start a film and video club in my city, for people interested in making short films but who had no one to work with and lacked equipment.  I made a website, put up flyers around town, and managed to organize a sizable group of interested people together.  And together we all had a good body of actors, writers, and a decent collection of equipment (cameras, lights, computers, tools, etc.) for everyone to draw from.  Meetings were fun and everyone made friends that they even saw outside the club.  But people were reluctant to share their equipment.  Everyone had their own ideas that they wanted to make.  Even with the promise of "if we stick with one project for now, and get it finished, then we can do another and eventually yours will be done" people couldn't get into the long-term mentality.  One by one people dropped out and eventually it dissolved into nothing.

Also, I've never made a game with a group but, like a lot of you I'm sure, I've done a lot of other group projects (at work or at school) and there are usually two outcomes:

1.  One person ends up the defacto "leader" and makes all the decisions for everyone because nobody knows what to do.  Everyone agrees with the reluctant leader because they don't want to do any of the hard stuff like "thinking."

2.  It turns into "project by committee" where everyone is throwing their (usually bad, at least to everyone else) ideas into the mix and everyone argues over them, which is bad for productivity and the end result is usually a crippled mashup of half-formed elements.

But those two scenarios are for "work" type projects that no one really wants to do in the first place.  I'm sure that in a project where the group members all have an actual desire to work towards a common goal it's different.  But that's my question... how does it work?  What makes a good group dynamic?  And how do you resolve issues of members feeling ignored, left behind, or used?  Or do you just kick such fragile lilies to the curb?

So, discuss.  What kinds of problems have you encountered working in a group?  How did you resolve them?  What kinds of benefits did you encounter?  How did your group delegate tasks?  Inquiring minds want to know...

My weak point is that, while I can do half-decent art and all kinds of coding and maths and design and I have great ideas, I'm all over the map, and I have absolutely no focus.

This seems to be a general problem for Tiggers. I almost feel like we should have more collaborations happening. Groups tend to lend projects a little more inertia.

At the risk of sounding like a swooning teenage girl, of all the TIGS members hanging around here I'd like to do a project with you and superflat.  It seems to me that we three share the same sensibility when it comes to cartoony visuals and black humor.  The three of us each use a different programming environment though, so logistically I don't know how well that would work.

I also don't know how either of you would feel about a collaboration, but I'm just throwing that out there.

Agreed about groups, all the games I've actually finished have been with a group, so I've been doing that pretty exclusively recently. Right I'm working on a game where the total group size is six (basically the Immortal Defense team plus two more of my friends), which is the largest size team I've ever worked with, and it's going well so far.

I had a whole huge post asking how you overcome problems with working in groups, but it grew to "deserves own thread" status.  I'll be posting it in a second here, and I'd like your input...

I suggest just setting the resolution to 320x240 or (at most) 640x480 if you want a retro look.

A lot of people can't run 320x240 at fullscreen.

(Though why everyone is so in love with retro looks, I don't understand.)

Says the person with a pixel-art avatar.

scale, then draw:



draw, then scale:



If you think "but the first one looks better" then, well, you don't get it.

No, the first one does look better.  It's pixel art.  Pixel art should always be as crisp as you can get it.  The second method is destroying the pixels.

If you want to scale hi-res art, use the second method.  The first would destroy hi-res art.

Well, a lot of threads that don't have any new posts in them seem to be marked with the "NEW" symbol for me, but other than that I don't see anything unusual.

They're just lonely, and want to be read a second time.

[effort]

Youre righttt, I guess I should put some more effort into this 

it's a too good concept to waste it on some joke game, right?   

I would say yes it is, but if a joke game is all you're after then that's cool too.

That's fine, it's not like we're inviting you to a threesome.

Okay then.



ode to godzilla

godzilla is my mentor
a great green tower of death
a japanese tormentor
with very fiery breath

What is a good graphics program to use that can draw at low resolution and scale up without blurring?

Photoshop.

Stagger Lee.

Yikes... which version?  Because the Nick Cave one would give the ESRB a coronary.

well, that was the version that I had thought off, it was the second song that I could think of  that seemed to be game-able.

Hehe, okay then

Just tone down the part about forced blowjobs at gunpoint and I guess it would be okay   Well, that and "crawling over fifty good pussies just to get to one fat boy's asshole*."  Love the song to death, but it's just so damned vulgar

I think Crow Jane off the same album would make a pretty good game, though.





*(bonus level, maybe?)