Comments on: How to Make a Mediocre Game

By: I

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 05:14:47 +0000

Knytt won’t sell millions of copies for obvious reasons, EVEN if it’s minimalistic style is appealing. There are plenty of games out there that are great, but don’t look good.

Unfortunately, unless you’re dealing with total casual game freaks, graphics DO matter a LOT. Sure, there’s the occasional ‘retro’ game with ‘retro’ graphics that people will like no matter what, but eye candy definitely aids an indie game in becoming popular!!! There’s crap textures, then there’s eye candy and then there’s next-gen ultra über super graphics off course, but the latter most certainly doesn’t apply to the Indie scene anyways since we mostly do not have that kind of technology at our disposal.

Polish is important, but graphical style and gameplay is what sells, come on, we all know this!

By: 1

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:56:21 +0000

I could see some problems with this article, but I admit that if you hadn’t pointed out that there were problems with the article I don’t think I would have noticed. Also, I feel that some games (in particular, Bejewled 2) do actually benefit from flashy visuals. However, it seemed like this article was discribing how to create one particular game and stressing that all games need these elements (story, flashy visuals, etc.) to be successful. Not true, though they can help a game. In some instances, though, games will benefit from minimalistic sounds or graphics or lack of story. Knytt is a perfect example.

By: Mike Nelson

Mike Nelson — Wed, 23 May 2007 20:19:10 +0000

Yes, a horrendiously bad article. Very hacky. I think you are right about “indie insight” most of it is just common sense when you start doing it.

It’s almost like people say, hey there’s no articles written about this for indie development so lets just write one, but I’ll put a lot of color into the writing to make it sound like Indie stuff is hip and all that, because I know it is. Yuck.

RohoMech has a good point I think about this type of writing. I’m very much not in the “let’s make indie games to make bucks” camp, which sort of alienated me from the indie group that I used to hang out with because most (all?) of them are about what they call “living the dream”, which is making indie games and living off the sales of them.

In my experience Indies that are in it for the money are usually so focused on the money side that it colors all of their decisions about development. I’d guess that most professional developers aren’t that worried about the money in their day to day decisions. They’ll get a paycheck next week regardless of how the game sells in a year from now. Which is an odd state of affairs indeed.

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Sat, 19 May 2007 16:06:12 +0000

Right. But even if you just want money, this kind of advice is terrible, or at least heavily amateur.

By: RohoMech

RohoMech — Sat, 19 May 2007 15:48:12 +0000

So, I think there might be two “indie” camps. There’s people who want money, and don’t really care about the artist elements of games (which is what this article feels targeted at). And then there’s people who sort of fit into what you’re doing, trying to progress games as a serious artistic / technical field. But, since people don’t feel there’s much reward in the latter, I don’t think they care much about advancing that area.