Factual, so sick of modern graphics >yes our game is 106 Tittybytes large but just hear me out >everything looks like plastic, shadows are calculated in real time, god rays, and you can see the pores on your guy's face >and all you're giving up is any sense of stylization or distinct art styles between IPs :^) Maybe this is a boomer take but I think video games should be small and look a little shitty. If a game looks too good that's actually a red flag for me, I wanna see some polygons. Usually the issue with games that look too good is they tend to be overdesigned, like in a game like Manhunt vs Forespoken, right, they're both set (at least in the beginning, in the case of Forespoken) in urban slums, but the vibe is way different. Forespoken obviously looks way better, but Manhunt is more soulful in its presentation and I feel sells the atmosphere better, because it couldn't afford to be 8 million gorillabytes large and waste space on useless bullshit. So every piece of garbage on the ground, every car, every street sign, is placed intentionally to add to the atmosphere. Working within your boundaries and all that. It's also an issue of the culture surrounding development methinks. While it's obviously good that nobody feels unwelcome in a dev team for their demographic or whatever, I feel that the push for diversification has kinda killed character design. The chick from Forespoken is so lame and forgettable and it's because she feels like a checklist. I have no issue with her being black or a woman, but when it feels like she's those things just so the game can be like "look how progressive we are :^)" it makes me not like her, especially because she's written like shit on top of it. Feels pandering. Sorry for the tangent but video games used to have coherent art styles and cool protagonists >inb4 so by "cool protagonists" you mean white men? le checkmate... nyo. the chick from Mirror's Edge is an Asian lady and she's cool. What I'm trying to get at is there's this very millennial (I assume) rejection of traditional film elements in character design. I'm a fan of the idea that not every protag needs to be a supermodel tier action movie hero, and that ordinary people tend to look boring, but come on. Give me an original IP in the last like 5 years with a genuinely cool protagonist design. Fuck it, even a cool enemy design. You can't, and if you can, I've probably never heard of it, because shit is so atomized now that my feed is totally different from yours. Ted K was right about technology.
Anyways, what I'm trying to contrast it with is the development office of ye olden days, when game devs were more like groups of friends fucking around trying to make something cool than slaves to the publisher trying to churn out the most commercially viable product possible. That's why shit like cheat codes and easter eggs are things of the past btw. When the publisher gods have 8 other games coming down the slop tube you need to work on one after another, you don't have time to put stupid shit into your game. At least, that's what I assume the case is for devs these days.
Sad, truly. I just want all publishers ever to explode into gore and bones right now, and let devs be devs, work on games more slowly, make them smaller and with more heart.
Side note but I'm equally sick of muh Dave Szymanski ps2 era graphics horror/boomshoot game. It feels so facetious, like somebody went "Oh? You're sick of mass produced, 8 billion polygon slop? I've got just the thing for you: Mass produced, 300 polygon slop meant to prey on your nostalgia! Buy, buy, buy!"
>>402921 >Anyways, what I'm trying to contrast it with is the development office of ye olden days, when game devs were more like groups of friends fucking around trying to make something cool than slaves to the publisher trying to churn out the most commercially viable product possible. theres too many people now trying to make it "big" rather than doing the game because they like doing it. all the soulless fotm friendslop that gets pushed out. or the countless games now that try to look like hollowknight or souls. alot of which feel rather uninspired. which is ironic given that there are far more games currently than there ever was but very few have any cultural sticking power and the ones that do will have boundless knock offs.
>I feel that the push for diversification has kinda killed character design i think this is just do to corpo culture because they constantly need to do "what works" for the shitholders too adverse to risk. >Give me an original IP in the last like 5 years with a genuinely cool protagonist design the only game i can think of recently that has good designs so far is that new valve game
Hate threads like this with obvious questions like do you actually wonder nigger or its rhetorical. Dont wanna point at the elephant in the room but the answer is J.
>>402899 I don't think indie game devs are capable of reaching a 7th gen level of graphics, not without ai at least. I wonder how the landscape around ai will look by then
>>402978 Yeah people are pretty much ignorant of the fact that back in 2009 Demon's Souls was a massive risk and basically no one believed that it would work
>>403101 People lnow but they just think if they add a bunch of creative unique stuff together that on its own is something new and creative like some game tjats says its demom souls + sekiro and a littlr bit of bloodborne or some nostalgic ps2 game 100 million people played
>>403020 I would call you dumb for the 4 millionth time for saying "ai" but I'm feeling benevolent today so I'm just gonna pretend you didn't say it instead "7th gen level of graphics" is actually a fairly small checklist At minimum you need the following things: - Pre-baked raytracing (lightmaps) - Tonemapping/exposure + bloom - Rudimentary shadow mapping or stencil shadows only enabled on dynamic objects - Normal mapped materials
Indie games generally have 3/4 of these things they only lack pre baked lightmaps cuz Unity and Unreal both phased it out in favour of real time shadow mapping for everything even static objects You might think that if they have so many of these features already, their games would look "true 2000s" already, but the extremely obvious reason why this isn't the case is because what they lack is the spirit of the 2000s This is the thing that the 2000s being retro will solve, people will remember its spirit
Also because generally you need to go out of your way to disable a lot of PBR shader features in Unity and Unreal in order to get the older, matte look
You might also think it'd be trivial to leverage present day ray tracing technologies to build a qrad clone that you could integrate in your Unity/Unreal build process But sadly this isn't the case as what we call "ray tracing" is a massive lie which is implemented in GPU driver code that like 10 people have seen, ever So you're better off doing it the old way and just writing a CPU raytracer from scratch to make your lightmaps
Of course physics is something that indie devs already have access to through Unity and Unreal but as far as I know it's kinda shit in those games and you can't really do Source engine level stuff that stimulates the imagination
>>403104 Here's another fun Demon's Souls fact that could empower people to make more creative Souls clones: They originally wanted to have a permadeath mode called "True Death" mode When you think about designing a Souls game around permadeath it immediately necessitates very large changes to the game design: - Normal death in Body Form, True Death in Soul form - Recover Body Form when touching own blooodstain (These first two are how people speculate True Death in Demon's Souls was meant to work) - Souls don't go to your bloodstain on death - Level design without blatant ambushes designed to trick the player (immediate improvement) - Start the tutorial in Body Form, it's set up like DS3's tutorial where the area is easy but the boss is hard for new players, this helps players get their grips with the permadeath mechanics in a semi-safe environment - Less linear progression - can go to more areas at the start of the run and runs are less long overall - this helps it to feel less painful when going back all the way to the start after death And probably many more changes I'm not even thinking of
>>403284 that does sound intresting and im sure someone could do it in a way that does good service to this idea but its probably not gonna come about in a meaningful way now as fun as invasions as hight stakes as that sounds unimaginably crazy doing some spliced up uninspired "inspired" indie souls like with the added true death gimmick as some seasoning is still bland mush with some basil leaves, im pretty sure there has been souls likes with perma death which is just other backswill roguelite mechanics, the game i was referencing was prison of husks which is described as demon souls mixed with sekiro which i dont even know what that really means aside from sekiro mechanics like deflects and perfect attacks in a slowerish souls like, i get that its supposed to be an easy sell elevator pitch kind of statement but when the game just looks like eveyother psx inspired thing game thing ish garbage it seems like 98% stuff you like and seen before and like maybe 2% things that are special and unique to you, im aware no idea is truly unique and there will always be overlap and subconscious inspirations but theres really a lack of effort to take a risk though in fairness the game seems like a solo devs first somewhat sizable project so i wouldnt expect a demon souls size new idea. demon souls is still inspired from froms previous works and other media but at the core it really is something i think is just an idea a small handful of guys had that really hadnt been seen before so they took the risk and did it but during the process had evolved a lot.
like most of them wont even take the risks of invasions and like in modern day is that really that crazy doom 2016 considered it and deathloop did it and that was some boring game everyone forgot
>>402898(OP) Go on New Grounds or Itch dot io if you want different, yeah different in that they're ancient flash/html gaymes but still half of which are shitty but there's a few gems there too.
