Opinion The "indie" feel

Neptune

Member
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Just learning that a janky WIP is more powerful than finished/polished content. Didn't really click till now to use this to my advantage...
 

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
Don't know how these two images (animations?) look in their natural environment, but I can think of two possible explanation why the latter image is more popular:

1. Just by looking, the boss sprite is clearly more visually interesting. The big sprite clearly grabs my attention, and I can see some cool details about it.
The way the boss fight picture is posted here, I can't tell any details at all, and there's not much to focus my interest on, except maybe for these lighted crates (?) and this purple cloud with undefined figure in the middle.

2. Maybe the latter picture is more lucky? Like, it was posted at the time when more people were around and could see it, and a somewhat prominent initial traffic could cause a snowball effect, when popular thing is favoured by algorithms and becomes even more popular?

Maybe it's a bit of both. Again - I don't know if these were just the pictures posted as they are, or they actually appeared larger or maybe one of these was more animated.
However, the way these pictures are posted, I definitely consider the latter to be cooler looking just because of the amount of detail. I'm pretty sure if I saw this boss sprite - about as large and detailed as in the second picture - but as a part of finished gameplay screenshot, I'd find the overall picture at least as cool, and likely even cooler.

Note: All that comes from a person who is completely insensitive to retro nostalgia and other appeals like that. Thus, an additional "indie feel" of any kind doesn't really hold any added value to me.
 
I'll add that in my experience, artwork makes a far better showing than gameplay progress and definitely better than technical updates.
Alice's notes are good as well, and probably more insightful, but sometimes it just comes down to people want a pretty picture and don't care about the rest of it. At least, they react better to it on social media.

As a poor artist myself, I am sometimes bitter about this fact.
 

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
I'll add that in my experience, artwork makes a far better showing than gameplay progress and definitely better than technical updates.
I guess artwork definitely has an advantage of being immediately understandable - you see it and you can immediately classify it as cool/not cool.

Then again, @RichHopefulComposer experiences with Twitter show that having an artwork with the sound added made even better impression.
That, or it was another case of one post getting randomly more popularity than another.

Though I could totally see how the artwork from the post work great for grabbing attention, while the animation *with* soundtrack held it and made it worthwhile, more so compared to art on its own.
Of course, these are all speculations here; these kinds of popularity phenomena are tricky to reproduce, making it even harder to come up with a reliable recipe for social media visibility.
 

Neptune

Member
Interesting thoughts. The left frame is actually this (it was playing when I screenshot) so pretty similar.
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Probably not worth scrutinizing Imgur, but thought I'd share anyway. (interesting exposure climb tho 👀)
 
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Neptune

Member
I think people that follow stuff like #gamedev and #indiedev are there for the "WIP"...

I see people post truly fantastic things that required huge amounts of work and a team and it gets 8 likes and a share - flip side I'll see some simplistic placeholder "kinda poking around... and uhhh ya. might finish later" 4 ZILLION likes 😆
So I think there is definitely an over arching mood and desire for simplicity.
 
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