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TIGSource ForumsPlayerGeneralThe polite answer to "you play all the day"
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #60 on: April 05, 2013, 08:10:33 AM »

if being an indie game developer is so uncreative and easy, and fans are willing to eat anything up, why is it that so few indies can make a living at it? even you, pompi, tried selling a game; remember your sumerian board game? didn't it get something like less than 100 sales? if fans are so gullible that they eat up any terrible game, why didn't they eat up yours?

it's partly due to marketing and connections, sure, that's a big factor, but if a game does *that* badly chances are the game had problems

it just doesn't make sense to me that such a tiny percent of indies succeed if being an indie were so easy. if something is easy, you expect a higher ratio of people who succeed to people who fail, and the vast majority of indies who try to sell games and make money fail
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #61 on: April 05, 2013, 08:11:52 AM »

Well I'm not sure about that, they do less things but are much more specialized. The work they do is much more in depth, character modeling alone take 1 month for just a straight rendition without the correction or the design. Between the sculpt, the (for animation) low poly and the shader, there is a vast amount of knowledge and work to do.

sure, there's less specialization, i didn't mean that an indie does *as much* work as an entire AAA team does collectively, i just meant that an indie does more work than the average team member on an AAA game's team
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« Reply #62 on: April 05, 2013, 08:13:13 AM »

if being an indie game developer is so uncreative and easy, and fans are willing to eat anything up, why is it that so few indies can make a living at it? even you, pompi, tried selling a game; remember your sumerian board game? didn't it get something like less than 100 sales? if fans are so gullible that they eat up any terrible game, why didn't they eat up yours?
indies are lazy bums who can trick fans into buying anything
unless we're talking about me
people just dont appreciate my flawless game and all of the effort i p-*dissolves into a massive steaming pile of shit*
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« Reply #63 on: April 05, 2013, 08:27:24 AM »

if being an indie game developer is so uncreative and easy, and fans are willing to eat anything up, why is it that so few indies can make a living at it? even you, pompi, tried selling a game; remember your sumerian board game? didn't it get something like less than 100 sales? if fans are so gullible that they eat up any terrible game, why didn't they eat up yours?

burn of the century
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gimymblert
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« Reply #64 on: April 05, 2013, 08:39:37 AM »

Well I'm not sure about that, they do less things but are much more specialized. The work they do is much more in depth, character modeling alone take 1 month for just a straight rendition without the correction or the design. Between the sculpt, the (for animation) low poly and the shader, there is a vast amount of knowledge and work to do.

sure, there's less specialization, i didn't mean that an indie does *as much* work as an entire AAA team does collectively, i just meant that an indie does more work than the average team member on an AAA game's team
Well I was trying to say it's not true, the average (who aren't designer) can have has much works and concern to address in their own field.
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #65 on: April 05, 2013, 08:46:08 AM »

i think so, but most of it is made-up work that isn't really necessary. so sure, the people who work in the AAA industry have a lot of "work" to do, but very little of that work is actually mandatory; they could make the game without having one guy to model just the guns, instead they could use guns from their last game with some small changes (there's no need to model completely new models of guns for each sequel), or even don't draw the guns at all and make them glowing lights, and save on that gun modeler's entire salary.

huge portions of most AAA teams can be eliminated with the game just being as fun, good-looking, and playable. it's just that budgets increase, and the budget has to go somewhere, so they hire more people to do things that don't actually need to be done in a videogame. i remember there was one guy working at blizzard and his entire job was to do the water in the water levels. that's what he did for *all* of his work there, for years. when blizzard could have used a much simpler effect that was almost as good-looking and saved on that guy's salary

so basically, yeah, the water guy at blizzard may do "as much" work as an indie, but it's work that the game would be just as good without (or even better). you can create work out of thin air, like rolling a rock up a hill, or moving a pile of sand grain by grain 2 feet with chopsticks, but it doesn't mean that work creates value, even if it's hard work
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gimymblert
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« Reply #66 on: April 05, 2013, 09:46:20 AM »

You have never work on a real studio with AAA pretension? The technological pressure and the balance required to achieve it is not trivial, you always have to optimize. Optimization is why you can't reuse that easy model and mesh from different games, trying new things to push a bit more mean more than once redoing the entire things, and any reuse generally end up being bad idea. Sure there is optimization in workflow and headcount that could be done, that's also true for indie (especially myself), you can't always plan it. The reason a bad idea is only bad when it's done and you see it wasn't that good. You can see the result, contrast early generation console game with last title, it's day and night and it is using the same amount of resource.
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #67 on: April 05, 2013, 10:03:39 AM »

all of that just sounds like a weak justification to me. there is no sane reason whatsoever that a company needs to pay someone full time to be a "gun modeler" or "water texture guy" rather than a 3d modeler or texture artist in general

there are also AAA companies that reuse assets -- atlus reuses many in its games (e.g. shin megami tensei series, persona series, and many of their other games all use the same enemy models, you see lots of models reused between their games)

also, who CREATED that technological pressure? e.g. who is the one that made players demand newer and better graphics each year? the industry did. but players don't inherently care about that, and many players quite vocally say that they don't care how good a game looks as long as it plays well. the best selling game of a year is not almost never the best-looking (a game can't look ugly, but as long as it looks above average that's fine in terms of sales)

i also question the correlation between number of artists and how good a game looks. often more artists create a more lukewarm style. there are plenty of games with only a few artists (e.g. ico) that are more visually appealing to me than games with hundreds of artists (like world of warcraft). so i don't think it's true to say that if you cut down on the number of artists that means worse graphics for the player
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« Reply #68 on: April 05, 2013, 10:15:14 AM »

Ron Paul's Israeli Battlechess would've sold a lot better if it had normal mapping
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #69 on: April 05, 2013, 10:17:42 AM »

that's cause even though 100 artists can sometimes be beat by 20 artists, 1 artist always beats 0 artists
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gimymblert
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« Reply #70 on: April 05, 2013, 10:32:52 AM »

Persona don't sell has much as the latest tomb raider for exemple (3 millions in two weeks), I don't see what's the argument. And there is justification in having a full time gun modeler, I think you just underestimate the level of expertise and appreciation that goes with that. Number of artist is not about artstyle, it's about details and variety, AAA world sell partly because they are crammed with details. There is balance to have with identification (core won't play a poney game even if it is teh best fps ever), gameplay and audiovisual impact.
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #71 on: April 05, 2013, 10:46:35 AM »

the difference in sales is largely due to genre: action games sell better than jrpgs in the modern era, even in japan. and tomb raider is more well-known as a series. still, persona 4 sold total about 2 million copies (if you count all platforms) and that's nothing to sneeze at either. if you want games with few artists who sold a lot in the first week, what about pokemon diamond? 2 million in the first week -- i don't really see any correlation between number of artists and number of sales, the correlation is mostly between how famous a series already is. if halo 4 had just reused/modified half of its assets from halo 3, and cut the number of artists by half, there would have been some haters on the forums, but it probably would have sold just as well

also i'm sure a lot of detail and knowledge goes into the "gun modeler" role, but my point is that does a game really benefit from all that work, or is it just busywork? will anyone even have noticed if the guns from halo 4 used the same models as the guns from halo 3, aside from like 1% of players who are obsessive?
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gimymblert
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« Reply #72 on: April 05, 2013, 11:01:53 AM »

If people where able to replicate the success of pokemon you would have much more hi profile 2D games, it's not happening. Tomb Raider only had 14 artists for the record, much less than unchartred but took much longer to produce, assassin's creed is annualized now so it make sense to do thing in parallel. So the argument is that good graphics is the easiest reliable way to attract attention.

I do have grip with art direction (brrrrrown shooter), technology choice, realism impact on gameplay, etc...

But the true waste really come with truly inefficient pre production process.

edit:
For fps the gun is like the character, it's the thing you see the most in the game, of course you will spend time on!
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #73 on: April 05, 2013, 11:13:36 AM »

i could say the same about tomb raider though: if you made a game exactly like tomb raider, but without the tomb raider name, very few people would have heard of it or bought it; what goes for one goes for the other

also this is more than 17 artists: http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/tomb-raider__/credits

and it's true that you spend a lot of time looking at the gun, but you also spend a lot of time looking at the sky, or the pause screen, but most people can't tell one sky scene from another sky scene, because there are few identifiable characteristics. our brains are built to tell faces apart, not guns apart, or skies apart
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Blademasterbobo
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« Reply #74 on: April 05, 2013, 11:30:16 AM »

gimmy said brown shooter again i think that calls for a temp ban
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« Reply #75 on: April 05, 2013, 11:39:12 AM »

About the gun modeler, someone in the industry once told me that it's easier to model an entirely new thing rather than make modification to it. Gamer are picky these day.
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gimymblert
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« Reply #76 on: April 05, 2013, 11:40:19 AM »

Okay forget tomb raider, i could have said unchartred when it was introduced, last of us or beyond two souls. Btw sky is a backdrop and even that there is still lot of care put in. And gun give you gameplay info and has some immersive quality (sound, animation) which are regularly praised, so it's not "that" meaningless.

however on tomb raider straight from the inside:
Quote
Thanks guys as for the textures it is random as hell. I admit to use crazybump, Ndo, zbrush, maya, and x-normal(baking) I was being pretty experimental at times also and trying to do alot of stuff using 3D shaders in Maya rendered out using displacement. The lower Cobblestone texture was mostly procedural textures on roundish lumps of stone placed randomly on the grid in maya than the shader would displace and get all those cracks and deformations than baked out all the passes in maya and put it all together in photoshop. We did not have a whole lot of time to make textures in this game, We relied heavily on mixing textures together to get a surface quality vs putting all the info into a few textures.

The best way would be a process like Naughty Dog where you have dedicated texture artist to really sculpt out the fine details and express depth and form from the modeled shapes the Environment artist does.

I did see Tate's and Beh's a bit later in the process of Tomb Raider and it helped to clean up my workflow a good bit. I wish we had more time to zbrush. But every artist at Crystal was all roles, we were all responsible for Modeling, texturing, Lighting, and even Scripting to some extent. The whole Envio art team at the peak was 14 artists. I would say this team was the most versatile team I have been on. ND has far more Artists... not even sure how many I would have to really do a head count

www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=119045

Yeah just env artist Tongue

also: BrownMasterBobo
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PompiPompi
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« Reply #77 on: April 06, 2013, 01:39:25 PM »

Leonlc, err, you started with the "You are getting confused by words" and etc. Let's agree to not insult each other. Smiley

Anyway, of course you can cut corners in every industry, but it's easier to do so in games. Because the end user does not know what the game suppose to contain until he plays it to completion.
If Apple is making a new phone, every little feature of the phone is inspected by the consumer before it's bought. Some features are also vital for a phone or vital to upgrade from previous phones. You can't sell an iPhone 2 inside an iPhone 5 box(although some people bought bricks inside Apple boxes).

With a game, you can cut as many corners as you like, your 50 levels game can be shortened to 10 levels game. The user will not complain because he didn't know the game was originally  meant to have 50 levels.
Things like splitting games into episodes are common in the game industry and with indies as well.
A game is one of the few products that the user don't know what he is buying until he plays it.
Of course there are reviews and etc, but you usually can't really tell what is that you are buying until you actually start playing it.

Maybe that is one of the reasons users like to buy sequels from AAA companies, because then they buy something they are familiar with.


About the work that people do in the industry. I believe they try to be efficient as much as possible. They probably use "tricks" to shorten their production time.
For instance the characters in Assassin creed that have details up to the finger prints and the folds in the skin.
They take finger prints pictures from real photos and use that for displacement maps. They don't actually draw the finger prints.

And graphics do sell games. So does IP and many other things not directly related to gameplay and how fun the game will be.
But... that applies to indies as well.
Indie games sell thanks to networking, gimmicks, visuals(pretty visuals don't mean they have to be next gen 3D) and all the other tricks the industry use to sell games as well.
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« Reply #78 on: April 06, 2013, 02:04:39 PM »

why'd you ignore all of paul's posts
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« Reply #79 on: April 06, 2013, 02:28:10 PM »

Let's agree to not insult each other. Smiley
being calm and peaceful doesnt get you anywhere
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