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Old 04-16-2004, 06:05 AM   #41
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It's not easy to find and recruit good artists for a project. Most artists that are professional quality, for a start, aren't going to be looking for a freeware game project to waste their time on when they could be spending their time looking for REAL work in the REAL video game industry or whatever.

Second, it's a lot of dedication and work, and it's hard to find people who actually want to spend this much time working on somebody else's artistic vision. Most good artists make their OWN games rather than be tied down by somebody else's idea.

I'd like to end this post with something relevant and appropriate: dickwad.
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Old 04-16-2004, 07:04 AM   #42
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Yufster
It's not easy to find and recruit good artists for a project. Most artists that are professional quality, for a start, aren't going to be looking for a freeware game project to waste their time on when they could be spending their time looking for REAL work in the REAL video game industry or whatever.

Second, it's a lot of dedication and work, and it's hard to find people who actually want to spend this much time working on somebody else's artistic vision. Most good artists make their OWN games rather than be tied down by somebody else's idea.



You'd be surprised, Yuf. I've met many artists in the "scene" who prefer to bring to life somebody else's vision. Usually they are very talented artists but don't have the writing or coding skills to make a game. Or they work better with direction. As long as they are certain that their efforts are going towards a quality project that will get finished, you will find many artists perfectly willing to share their talents. On the flip side, I consider myself a good writer and an OK coder, but an absolutely HORRIBLE artist. If a talented artist approached me and asked if I could do the dialog and coding for their game, I would jump at it.
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Old 04-16-2004, 09:06 PM   #43
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Yufster
I'd like to end this post with something relevant and appropriate: dickwad.
BTW, honeybun, doppelganger rex is me pretending to be a redneck.
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Old 04-16-2004, 09:08 PM   #44
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Originally Posted by Kingzjester
BTW, honeybun, doppelganger rex is me pretending to be a redneck.
Oh man, Yufster totally called you a dickwad.
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Old 04-16-2004, 09:24 PM   #45
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Originally Posted by remixor
Oh man, Yufster totally called you a dickwad.
Meh, I know. I just want her to know who she's talking to... Just when she thinks she is diversifying when it comes to insults, she realizes she is just cursing me out...
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Old 04-16-2004, 09:41 PM   #46
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Meh, I know. I just want her to know who she's talking to... Just when she thinks she is diversifying when it comes to insults, she realizes she is just cursing me out...
Ain't that always the way...
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Old 04-18-2004, 10:47 AM   #47
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Quote:
Originally Posted by deadworm222
I find it interesting that Scramm and Glumol, which were supposed to be fully functioning when released, died, whereas Agast, AGS and other engines that were first released as betas and development versions are still alive. Probably has something to do with getting people actually to use the engine and give input and feedback, which in turn will give the engine developers an incentive to keep on working.

Or maybe Scramm only existed on paper. Does anyone have any insight?
I was supposed to alpha-test SCRAMM! I even had conversations with the developer about how it was to work and such, and got to see a screenshot of the splash screen. (which some of you may remember me posting at the SCRAMM forum a long, long time ago)

I beta-tested SLUDGE, though, and that definitely got me places.

As for why it's hard to find good artists, I've also noticed that even if you do find people who are willing, it's VERY difficult to keep a team together. Ever noticed how big, elaborate projects with many people on various sides of the world are more likely to become vapourware than smaller, less-ambitious projects made only by one person? Eventually, team members start losing touch; maybe one will lose interest, maybe another one will have a sudden tragedy in his/her life that needs attention... who knows?
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Old 04-18-2004, 12:06 PM   #48
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Quote:
Originally Posted by doppelganger rex
Why are all independend adventure games so crappy looking? I mean, why can't some people get together some promising artists and aanimatoers and jsut make something that looks real good, you know, it deosn';t seem so hard, theer are good artists, writres and you know everywheers or so it seems, they just need to be milked? How hard is that?
Me and a bunch of others are doing that actually. We've got writers, artists to a limited degree (though this is what we lack most of) and coders to build the engine.
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Old 04-18-2004, 12:47 PM   #49
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I'm a control freak, so most of the work on Bad Timing is done by myself I only have a musician, a bunch of testers and a crew of voice actors and that's it. The people I really depend on are the voice actors with important roles and lots of speech.

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Old 04-19-2004, 01:12 AM   #50
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Erwin_Br
I think games such as Apprentice, Roger Foodbelly, Project Joe, and many others look pretty good. Some of them are commercial quality.

--Erwin
*cough*

Roger Foodbelly is not going to be freeware AFAIK..
Just wanted to make it clear




Sorry.



Thanks for remembering it, though.
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Old 04-19-2004, 05:47 AM   #51
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Project Joe is probably going commercial as well, at least according to one interview of the Synthetix folks.
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Old 04-19-2004, 05:49 AM   #52
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Squinky
I was supposed to alpha-test SCRAMM! I even had conversations with the developer about how it was to work and such, and got to see a screenshot of the splash screen. (which some of you may remember me posting at the SCRAMM forum a long, long time ago)
Exactly, the splash screen was the only thing anyone ever saw of the whole thing.
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Old 04-19-2004, 05:58 AM   #53
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jannar85
*cough*

Roger Foodbelly is not going to be freeware AFAIK..
Just wanted to make it clear




Sorry.



Thanks for remembering it, though.
Excuse me, but the author stated the following question in his original post:

Why are all independend adventure games so crappy looking?

Not a single word about freeware or commercial.

--Erwin
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Old 07-19-2004, 04:41 PM   #54
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Quote:
Originally Posted by deadworm222
I find it interesting that Scramm and Glumol, which were supposed to be fully functioning when released, died, whereas Agast, AGS and other engines that were first released as betas and development versions are still alive. Probably has something to do with getting people actually to use the engine and give input and feedback, which in turn will give the engine developers an incentive to keep on working.

Or maybe Scramm only existed on paper. Does anyone have any insight?
hehehe, I was googling for anything about my ancient adventure game project, and this thread brought a smile to my face. I remember the SCRAMM guy too, James Slaughter. he got on my nerves pretty quick when he'd do things like bash other people's engines, but never put out crap himself, and er long I became a naysayer of his work, to only unfortunately be proved right. what I find cool though is the majority of you went on to make adventures anyway, and a lot of the names around these communities I recognize.
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Old 07-20-2004, 12:56 AM   #55
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Quote:
Originally Posted by king super
hehehe, I was googling for anything about my ancient adventure game project, and this thread brought a smile to my face. I remember the SCRAMM guy too, James Slaughter. he got on my nerves pretty quick when he'd do things like bash other people's engines, but never put out crap himself, and er long I became a naysayer of his work, to only unfortunately be proved right. what I find cool though is the majority of you went on to make adventures anyway, and a lot of the names around these communities I recognize.
James Slaughter didn't start SCRAMM, though. That would be Jimmi Thøgersen (aka Serge) who also made SCUMM Revisited, some kind of tool to read and extract data from SCUMM files. One day, Serge quit his work and James took over.

--Erwin
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Old 07-20-2004, 07:51 AM   #56
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Personally I don't think indie adventure games are all that bad looking, but it would be nice if AGS had the same feature as ScummVM. You know, where it can take the blocky sprites & backgrounds, and slightly blur them to make for a better looking game.

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Old 07-20-2004, 09:27 AM   #57
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sky Warrior Bob
Personally I don't think indie adventure games are all that bad looking, but it would be nice if AGS had the same feature as ScummVM. You know, where it can take the blocky sprites & backgrounds, and slightly blur them to make for a better looking game.

Sky Warrior Bob
That's anti-aliasing, and although it can be effectively used to smooth out some uneven artwork, it does nothing to help artwork that is unattractive in the first place.

Although I can understand and will happily play a game with a background or a minor character that may not be up to par visually, I have no tolerance for, and will not play, a game that has a main character that is poorly drawn or animated. I will be looking at this character for the entire game, and if the designer is not willing to take the time to make it look good, why should I think the rest of his game is any better? Regardless of artistic ability, a game designer should have the ability to recognize an ugly character. There are quite a few of the RON games that suffer from this. (Which is unfortunate, because there are other RON games that have very impressive artwork.)

Whenever I look at an independent game that I may be interested in playing, I go and look at the art for the main character before I do anything else.
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Old 07-20-2004, 09:31 AM   #58
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I hate that feature!
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Old 07-20-2004, 09:33 AM   #59
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Kind of as an addendum to the above, the VOICE of the main character, if you're doing voices, HAS to be easy on the ears. This generally isn't an issue for most independent adventures, though, since there are few that do "talkie" versions.

I mainly say this because I thought that the HORRIBLE voice acting in FotAQ was definitely the worst part of the game. I don't WANT to play a guy with a New York tough guy accent, especially in a game that depended so heavily upon humor. (What little humor there was.)
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Old 07-20-2004, 12:53 PM   #60
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BTW, I take offense to the statement that ALL indie games have crappy graphics. Just off the top of my head, here are some great-looking projects:

1. KQI and KQII from AGDI
2. Out of Order
3. Night of the Hermit

and in progress...

1. KQIX
2. SQ7
3. QFG2 remake
4. Rise of the Hidden Sun (shameless plug: http://www.chapter11studios.com)

Here's some food for thought. Great graphics take a lot of time and dedication. They can't just be churned out. With indie/underground games being a fairly new (2-3 years) phenomenon in the mainstream AG community, it's gonna take time for these high quality graphic adventures to be finished.
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