Hey there,
So, I made a jam game in 2013 called Rude Bear Resurrection in 2013, and it won Ludum Dare's innovation category. In April I started work on Super Rude Bear Resurrection.
It's been in The Guardian, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun (several times), The Irish Times etc. etc.
It's been exhibited at Tokyo Game Show (paid for by Sony), EGX (paid for by Multiplay), GameCity 9, The Guardian's Radius Festival, Rock Paper Shotgun's event Feral Vector, the UK's largest game festivals Insomnia51, 52 and 53, Update and Beefjack's event in September.
And now we've got funding. I can't talk about who's funding us until I sign my contract next week, but this has been negotiated for 2 months and all that's left to do is sign the pieces of paper. We launch first on PS4/Vita some time next year.
I'm constantly trying everything I can to make the game look better, but I don't have an artistic art and it's hard, because I also have to do the rest of the entire project, level design, code, marketing, implementing SFX etc. and I try my best on the art perspective, but my best isn't good enough to fix the problem.
The game currently looks like this:
Now, I dunno if the style is working, so we're trying a new one, and that currently looks like this:
The far background, green edge stuff are placeholder, and my artist is fixing the cracks that look a bit like nuts/eggs repeating so they're not as obvious, but do you think this is an improvement? (Also the flame is my own shitty particle system, please excuse).
Like, people have said to me "The art isn't /bad/ it just doesn't wow you". I dunno what I can do to fix the problem, maybe some shader stuff?
The original plan all along was that if we just populated the background with more "stuff" like Spelunky then eventually it'd end up looking really nice, but I can't tell if that's actually true, because I'm not that conceptual, and the amount of work it'll take to do that, it'll be a huge liability if it doesn't end up working, we'd have to redo everything.
SDo you think the art style will fix itself by having more assets (and if not, do you have any suggestions on how to fix that)?
Cheers.