I think Jeff Vogel’s process makes a whole lot of sense from a software making POV. Lots of iteration, small changes version to version, building on top of what you already have, reusing code / content.
If you’re an Indie and aren’t just doing it for the art, from a business perspective, assuming you’ve found a niche that works, it makes all the sense in the world, you just need to be able to know just how much you need to change / improve to make something that feels new even though it’s reusing loads of stuff from previous games.
Vogel’s approach to game development has always struck me as extremely common-sense. He’s found his niche, is good at producing games in that niche, and produces games that are within his means. I know plenty of others - arguably more talented - game developers who weren’t able to balance things as well, and they’re no longer making games.
And his discussion on art is just spot on in my experience. Finding good artists who are both skilled and can deliver is hard. And expensive. And most artists with that level of competence are eventually going to move on from freelancing work.
I think his situation is less about getting quality artists and more about art direction. (Apologies if I’m repeating what folks have said earlier in the thread.) Which comes at a price, assuming Vogel can’t do it himself (and clearly he knows he can’t). There’s a gamble he could take where he spends time finding an artist with real vision as well as skill, pays him or her a little extra, and recoups that cost of time and money–and risk that person might split in favor of a better opportunity–when the resulting game appeals to a slightly wider audience. But when the games are selling what they need to at his current burn rate, why take the gamble?
I thought his most compelling argument was that, as a non-artist, he would have difficulty sustaining better art direction because it would depend on being able to work with the same person over several titles (unlikely, as hasn’t been stated.) I think the inconsistency would be damaging. Like when someone temporarily has a great website.
From what I recall he blatantly admits he has inconsistent artwork within a single title and he’s fine with that. Consistency across multiple titles doesn’t even seem to be a goal at all. Which is fine. But I don’t see why one art-directed title on its own wouldn’t be an improvement, except that he doesn’t feel he can afford it. (To be clear, I personally think he’s mostly right that his games don’t need to be better looking. I don’t think they will capture a much larger audience if they were.)
It’s really the same problem. You are very unlikely to find a good freelance art director who is not also a good artist - so you’re now chasing a double unicorn; the affordable freelance artist who is also a good affordable art director. Though maybe calling them unicorns is an exaggeration - they exist, absolutely - but it doesn’t make him better off. Worse, actually - because now in addition to finding an artist who matches his current art, he also needs to find an art director with a similar style.
And you don’t want to do this for just one game (at least not if you want to make a living like Vogel does), because - where possible - art reuse is critical. Just as code reuse is. Reusing art is probably the single best way to save money on development costs that you can do as a developer.
After reading Vogel’s article, I think it’s both that he’s cheap and that he’s not picky. I realize that he’s sort of saying he can’t be picky, but it also seems like he could better articulate what he wants from his 20 freelancers to be able to get what he wants without ending up with as much of a hodgepodge of stuff.
We’ve all played a lot of indie games that are cohesive. I think he’s sort of just making excuses to a certain extent instead of looking at his business and trying to improve it. He’s making money, so he probably doesn’t feel like he needs to improve it.
A problem seems to be that he genuinely does not/has minimal understanding of what looks good together and what does not. Thus despite his art technically being higher quality than things from 25 years ago, it still looks worse.
And so this is something that he’s literally incapable of doing on his own. Turning a bit of his art budget to art direction would be a huge help imo.
He also needs to be really careful not to mess with too much and alienate his niche fanbase. You’d think better art wouldn’t do that, but… well…
I admire his ability to keep on going making largely the same genre of game with the same visuals for all this time, but I don’t think much of his strategy applies to anyone else, and it wouldn’t work if he were just starting today.
Right. It’s something I told the people who were starting websites that I was affiliated with, including this one! You must have longevity. That’s how you build your niche and never go away. GamerDad couldn’t sustain. Qt3 did. The longer you are around, the better off you’ll be and a base will stay with and support you.
Vogel’s been doing his thing so long that he has a very good built in base for anything he makes as long as he doesn’t start making a vertical space shooter or something.
Also, I agree @fdsaion that he might be smart to put some of that budget into art direction help. He can still blur his pixels in Photoshop.
It’s hard to express this without coming across as rude (which is not my intention), but I think that these two comments fundamentally underestimate the difficulties and costs involved in making an actual game, let alone making 20+ over as many years.
Artists are not drones. There are limits to what you can demand from an artist working at $25/hour when you need 1000 pieces of art.
Common to all such visually cohesive video games is that they usually either have limited amounts of art, in-house artists, or are one-off productions (or all three at once). It’s easy enough to make an indie game cohesive when your art is essentially done by one artist. The moment you go past that, it becomes a whole different scale of challenge.
A good example of just how difficult this is on an indie budget, is Six Ages. They “cheat” in using different art styles for different “types” of stories which means they can have a different artist for the different styles. And it’s still pretty easy to see where the art style is “off” in the “main” art work. And Six Ages is a fairly simple game compared to a classical RPG, because it’s 90% big static paintings - not 1000s of icons that need to fit together, occasionally in ways not envisioned by the original artist.
Vogel has worked in the industry for decades and plays games himself. Of course he knows what looks good. Knowing what looks good, however, does not a good art director make. Even many artists are not good art directors.
Of course it would help to make the games look a bit better - as he points out in the article. It would also mean that the next game would take significantly longer to recoup its expenses which would not help at all in keeping Spiderweb software viable and afloat. And the latter is infinitely more important to him, than the former. As it should be.
Jeffs stuck in the local-maxima problem. His games make enough for him to live off, and have done for a long time. He is a smart guy, but probably more risk averse than the average indie partly because, like me… he is a damned lot older than the average indie (I’m almost 50).
Indies who are working on their first game, at age 18, or even younger are more prepared to take risks, spend money they dont have, yada yada in order to push boundaries to make ‘great art’.
But someone like Jeff, (or me) likely is more worried about paying mortgages, healthcare bills, maybe costs of kids going to college/university or even getting married blah blah.
The indie games business is absolutely BRUTAL right now. I have so many friends who are seriously financially struggling. I don’t blame jeff one bit for sticking with a formula that he know works, and most importantly, has a low chance of him becoming bankrupt and hungry.
How is this a non-apology?
He acknowledges what he did, says they were wrong, explains why he should have known better, and then appologizes to everyone he hurt.
A non-apology is when you say, “I’m sorry if you were offended” or something like that.
But for this, what element of a “real” apology is he missing?
(note, I have no idea who this is, or what the context is, or anything. I’m reading your post in a vacuum)
Well… there is the I had no idea running around calling people niggers and laughing about black people being behind bars, because that’s naturally where they are thing… and then claiming today, this very second, was when he realized that isn’t okay. i mean… read the article. There is no way this guy can claim he had no idea, until today, what he was doing was not okay, that he hurt people and that’s just the stuff he wrote… not the stuff he actually did in addition to that. That’s also only one group of many he thought was okay to say things about, which of course he new it wasn’t because you have to know something to try to be what he calls edgy to begin with.
Who knew, who knew that calling a black person a lazy porch monkey might, might be offensive, but “if” someone is offended, he found out today they might be, he’s sorry.
The “and I wasn’t aware until today that I might have” bit really waters it down. It reads like somebody hiring a crisis PR agency to write a supposedly heart-felt apology, and then making just one little addition to make it clear that it wasn’t really their fault.
(But I agree that “classic non-apology” seems overstating it. The classic form is a lot more blatant than this.)
I read that as “I was a total ass, but I wasn’t an intentional total ass who was out to hurt you.” I do think there’s a big difference there that is meaningful, not just in the CYA sense.
