O
Otyugra
Guest
Some circles of the internet have a pretty ill-informed hate for retro indie developers and it really grinds my gears, and I wonder if you all feel the same way I do. Recently, on both Tumblr and Know Your Meme, this post was "trending". On KYM, it currently has 133 more likes than dislikes, and 42 people favorited it:
__Ignoring the literal meaning of this post (which is laughably over-exaggerated), this post is making fun of indie game developers for being out of touch with what players enjoy looking at.
__Let's assume that Charre (the person who made the post) is referring only to indie developers who make games for profit without a publisher (that's who the people in the comments all thought Charre meant), not people using GameMaker for the very first time or something like that. Do you think this is what most retro, purchasable games look like? Can you name one purchasable game off the top of your head that looks like the bottom image even slightly? You probably can, but odds are you can easily name five retro games that look more like the top image of the two; I certainly can: Owlboy, Crimson Ancients, Rain World, Cyber Shadow, Sushido, Stardew Valley, the upcoming unnamed game by Cory Alex Martin, Earth Overclocked, and Homestead. (Rain World may have a publisher, I'm not sure)
__I argue that Charre has an unwarranted hate for all games that are inspired by the retro look, but aren't perfectly retro. Yes, faux-retro games like Pony Island look awful (arguable some art assets in UnderTale are awful too), but a game like Risk or Rain has an art style that isn't purely retro and should not be compared to retro games like some kind of measuring stick.
__how do you all feel about games "inspired by retro art" that do things new and interesting, or take advantage of modern times? This could be as simple as Shovel Knight expanding it's color-per-sprite limit, or an experimental color palette & sprite size, such as the one I used in SnakePit:
__I partook in a 64 by 64 pixel game jam and in order to have more sprites on the screen, I made each sprite 7x7 rather than 8x8 and made the left over bottom and right line of the screen black (9x7 = 63, not 64). Likewise, I wanted to convey a campy Halloween monster-esque atmosphere while also keeping the game "retro" enough to vaguely remind the player of the Gameboy, so I used 3 colors. By Charre's standards, SnakePit is a game made by a moron because it doesn't look like a true gameboy game, and because I'm not using all the colors and pixels I can.
__So is Charre's dislike warranted in your experience: should all "retro" games look like a SNES game rather than experiment with the style?
__Ignoring the literal meaning of this post (which is laughably over-exaggerated), this post is making fun of indie game developers for being out of touch with what players enjoy looking at.
__Let's assume that Charre (the person who made the post) is referring only to indie developers who make games for profit without a publisher (that's who the people in the comments all thought Charre meant), not people using GameMaker for the very first time or something like that. Do you think this is what most retro, purchasable games look like? Can you name one purchasable game off the top of your head that looks like the bottom image even slightly? You probably can, but odds are you can easily name five retro games that look more like the top image of the two; I certainly can: Owlboy, Crimson Ancients, Rain World, Cyber Shadow, Sushido, Stardew Valley, the upcoming unnamed game by Cory Alex Martin, Earth Overclocked, and Homestead. (Rain World may have a publisher, I'm not sure)
__I argue that Charre has an unwarranted hate for all games that are inspired by the retro look, but aren't perfectly retro. Yes, faux-retro games like Pony Island look awful (arguable some art assets in UnderTale are awful too), but a game like Risk or Rain has an art style that isn't purely retro and should not be compared to retro games like some kind of measuring stick.
__how do you all feel about games "inspired by retro art" that do things new and interesting, or take advantage of modern times? This could be as simple as Shovel Knight expanding it's color-per-sprite limit, or an experimental color palette & sprite size, such as the one I used in SnakePit:
__I partook in a 64 by 64 pixel game jam and in order to have more sprites on the screen, I made each sprite 7x7 rather than 8x8 and made the left over bottom and right line of the screen black (9x7 = 63, not 64). Likewise, I wanted to convey a campy Halloween monster-esque atmosphere while also keeping the game "retro" enough to vaguely remind the player of the Gameboy, so I used 3 colors. By Charre's standards, SnakePit is a game made by a moron because it doesn't look like a true gameboy game, and because I'm not using all the colors and pixels I can.
__So is Charre's dislike warranted in your experience: should all "retro" games look like a SNES game rather than experiment with the style?
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