Im curious Fel, what are you refering to as misinformation? I ask because to me this thread seems to be predominantly people airing opinions, rather than representing their posts as facts.
becus pixelatin is easy, and its not an art.
What.
also i do think game maker cant handle somthing better, graphically speaking. for instance im yet to find a dynamic shadow engine that wont drain my pc with a couple of lights, and just a bunch of lights, nothing else.
Speak for yourself. I've gotten many lights to work in a game just fine.
Even made a 2D 'volumetric' shadow engine with normal maps that could easily have 10+ lights on screen on an 4th gen Intel HD chip. Those where high quality shadows too (with dust effects, and penumbras, etc).
from my experience with game maker, if you want somthing more then a object/grid oriented game, you better seek somewhere else.
Or learn a bit of computer science and understand where you are hitting bottlenecks.
I blame GM for a few things when working with it, mostly the lack of name spacing, but now we have shaders and vertex buffers, you can achieve most graphical effects.
I now work with other engines (loving libGDX at the moment) and its the same story. You need to understand a bitbof cs.
Sure, you will hit the grojnd running with something like unity, but the philosophy is completely different.
Drawing talent isn't something everyone has, and I certainly don't have it - a realization I came to when I decided to make my first pixel art game, "Key to Success", and I like that game a lot more than my failed attempts at HD.
Anyone can acquire skill. No one is born with it. Just dedicate time to it.
Ninety, things that you cannot or have no skill in are hard, things for which you have the skill, are easy. it doesnt matter wether its about pixelatin or painting or fighting or w/e. and thats one of the reasons i dislike when people talk about effort when the question is skill, things that you redraw, require skill, what i understand by effort is, having a vision [i will restrain from usin idea cus its very abused in my opinion] and trying to create the most clear representation of that vision. thats thousands of shots in the dark just to hit the bullseye and what i call effort, and art, skill alone has no meaning nor count as art. you can be very skillful but if the only thing youve drawn is 'fanart' in short, your not an artist in my book. i can appriciate some1`s work for what it is, but that doesnt mean it shuld impress me, when what i look for is what message does that author has.
for example, the vision that im trying to show through Castle Ambush, i got through hittin the punchin bag. and what its supposed to show is awareness and value of your actions, when you act it resonates and prepares the next moment for you, and if you act in doubt you fail and get cornered by the circumstances. but the classic turn based method doesnt reflect what i was trying to do, thus the real-time aspect inbetwean turns, for instance if your faar enough of a bandit with a crossbow, you can dodge his bolt. but i wuldnt say that that game fully represents what i was trying to show with it at the stage it is in.
Again, you can acquire skills.
Effort is how much time you pour into a skill.
This has been made very clear to me recently, working in a team project.
Team members would say that they didn't understand an aspects of programming, and so did nothing, leaving it to me. At first I thought they where quite dumb not to figure it out. Then I learnt they only spent 30mjnutes working on it, whilst I had just sunk 5 hours straight working my end of things out.
They aren't dumb, they just didn't put as much effort in to it.
Spending lots of time and effort drawing fan art will improve your skill. But its still effort, and art. (Its called fan-ART after all...).
Prior effort, or skill means your future effort yield better results. Its the whole idea behind improving your skills.
Tl;dr
Stop attributing peoples success to skill. Acquiring that skill is effort. Whether it is through a hobby, training, etc.