Game Devs Crying About Asset Flips?

I've said before in my rather long rambles that I suspect many of the people slamming games griping about them being true asset flips or even using some assets from a store are actually game devs. It just made sense to me because they have more of a reason to attack such things, right?

I wasn't going to spend the time researching to uncover evidence of this because I figured the odds were so high there was no need to. And then today I stumbled across a video by a person who is continually griping about asset flips and in this particular video he got right to the point "this developer is probably going to make way more money on this asset flip, absolutely no effort put into it... I will bet you money this guy will make more money on this no effort asset kit flip, an asset flip, than I will ever make on [my game] Rock 'N Roll". Well there it is... that's what it all comes down to in many cases I think.

But let me go back a bit... here is an Asteroids inspired game named Rock 'N Roll

And here is an asteroids inspired game named Space Asteroid Shooter: Retro Achievement Hunter

And here is the video I came across this morning while just randomly checking out game videos on YT that I was talking about above.

I do wonder just how many of the negative comments and videos focusing on the use of assets are coming from game devs like this. I think it is quite likely they account for a very large and perhaps even the majority of them.

I noticed at the 2:10 mark of the Rock 'N Roll trailer some text fades in saying "WITH ZERO FLIPPED OR STOLEN ASSETS"

Just curious what people think about such a thing. IMO such developers have lost sight kind of lost their way.
I am all for classic style games and most of you know that but I have to say I agree with the dev of Rock 'N Roll that Space Asteroid Shooter is probably going to appeal to more people. Certainly SAS looks better than RNR based on the trailers. Now gameplay-wise maybe SAS does suck in comparison but I am just not seeing that in the video.

And really gamers themselves in most cases don't give a darn where the game came from... just because the game came from an asset flip does not mean it is a bad game. And just because the asset developer did a really great job (seemingly) on the asset that allowed someone else to risk their $120 (asset purchase + steam fee) and their time to buy it, build it, make a trailer for it, set up a Steam page to offer it to gamers... is this really a bad thing?

If so... bad based on what? I just found this to be a very interesting example. Of one dev doing everything themselves putting in all of the effort. This dev clearly their passion is game development they take pride in doing all of the work for themselves even putting that in their trailer ZERO FLIPPED OR STOLEN ASSETS... and on the other side we have a person who is clearly focused on the business side only they saw an opportunity and invested their time and money leveraging someone else's skills and time.

 

-Several things comes to mind:

1. "Modern art: You totally could've done that... except that you didn't!"
2. South park episode 105 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Rock_Hard )
3. Wilhelm Scream:

Overall, the way I see it, someone who is complaining about asset flips is walking a loser's road that leads to a failure. I'd expect those people to never achieve anything of significance as game developers, unless they snap out of it. It is a sign of immaturity or stupidity or extreme short sightedness. Or maybe those arguments are based on envy. (Probably goes like this: Someone made a game with minimum effort that made 5 bucks in sales --> Someone else is feeling envious --> They start looking for a way to condemn the $5 game --> They pull "asset flip" argument --> And now they feel good about themselves, having proven themselves that even though they made less money, they're morally superior. )

Usually the idea is to cooperate, remix, reuse and build on top of work of others. Sometimes it takes silly forms.(See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.H.O.O.Q. ).

I think there was a book called "Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy", or maybe there was another work that talked about value of reuse of artistic assets and musical themes in creative works. Those articles may be worth checking out.

Developers are supposed to reuse works and assets create by others.It is nigh impossible to create anything unique at all, and a lot of works of art /literature are built on top of the ideas that originated from ancient times. Also, someone who is angry at some naive kid who is trying to profit by selling unreal 4 tutorial has a big problem. For any decent game "tutorial reseller" shouldn't even be in a competition. So there's no reason to even acknowledge that game's existence.

It is also worth keeping in mind that youtube is a fairly deranged place, and not the site you go to for sane opinions. It is not as bad as, say, steam community, but it is not the site where i'd go to looking for sane and intelligent opinions.

 

There's nothing wrong with asset flipping. What do people expect, you get assets from the Asset Store to never use them because an 11-year-old Minecrafter will be pissed in the comment section? Obviously, you get assets to USE them in your games, so asset flipping is really just buying assets because you can't afford a full-time developer to make those assets custom for you.

Basically, that sums it up perfectly. People really don't understand what it's like to make a game; and that everything you see in a game has a lot of work going into it, regardless if it's the models, the textures, the engine, or the scripts. Buying assets saves a lot of time and money so the finished product can be better.

 

Ha ha well I stay away from the deranged stuff. Lol but I see what you mean. I generally only find lots of great stufr on game dev and funny dog videos.

Anyway I agree completely! Whwn I first watched that video I thought instead of attacking it look at what they are doing and learn. Look at how they made their video, look at how they made their game feel exciting. Keep all of the added depth of gameplay you obviously put a lot of effort into and just take the good from their example.

 

@GarBenjamin:

There's actually a better way to explain it.

There's a psychological phenomenon of sorts (that may or may not have an official name).
Basically... when people encounter conflicting belief of sorts (meaning it conflicts with their beliefs), they sometimes feel threatened, and seek ways to distance themselves from a source of conflicting belief, usually by demonizing that source. Once they have convinced themselves that the source of conflicting belief is indeed an avatar of Satan on earth, they feel good about themselves, and feel more secure about holding their own belief. I.e. it is an advanced form of denial.

Usually this happens when someone, for example, thinks that "all people are good" or "I'm a good person", and then encounter some sort of horrific crime performed by another human. Quite a lot of people instantly put their shields up and start saying stuff like "Those are not people, they are MONSTERS!", desperately trying to distance themselves from the target. "They're MONSTERS! (and not people)" essentially means "I'm not like them, I'm different from them, etc". It is some sort of self-reassuring.

Similar thing happens with "asset flipped games". Let's say someone still hold that idea where a gamedev is supposed to do everything by themsleves. I.e. make their own art, to use it in game engine they wrote themselves, in a programming language they invented, on a computer they build from microchips they made out of silicone they mined. Or something.Then they encounter someone who made an awesome looking demo over weekend by throwing together few prefabbed assets.

So, they're obviously are going to put shields up and claim that that the other dude is satan and that this is an asset flipping, which is the root of all evil and is everything that is wrong with the modern world. Once they do that, they feel good about themselves being morally superior and will go back to mining that silicon. Or something.

Now, there is a bit of a humorous exaggeration here, but I think this should give you the overall idea.

 

This is an interesting way to look at it because from the comments I have heard and read from those ranting about asset usage seem to be from people who are under the impression it is the 11-year-old kids (or young teens at least) who are doing the majority of flipping of assets into games on Steam as well as making "stupid stuff" such as games about Suicide and other weird subjects.

All a matter of perception. But kind of interesting how on both sides people seem to think it is kids doing this. Might turn out it is actually some 30 year olds doing it all. Although my personal belief is it is the Venusians... they are the ones doing all of the "bad" things trying to break down society more than it already.

 

It's just assholes, there are a lot of them. These are basically holes that look like donkeys or mules and meddle with space time.

 

Well my 2 cents is that it has nothing to do with physical age and everything to do with PERCEIVED mental maturity. It's simply people who are either jealous of a good game or are just constantly whining about something, and they have a perceived mental maturity of an 11-year-old Minecrafter when they whine about asset flipping online. If you've played any game with voice chat, you'll hear grown-ass dudes complaining like 5 year olds because they have no purpose in life so they just complain.

It's just important to know that these people know absolutely nothing about what goes into making a game. What are they going to complain about next, 2 games use the same engine? How about in-company asset flipping? You think EA or Ubisoft or Bethesda write a brand-new character controller for every FPS game just for the sake of not copying? How about their complicated AI controllers or shooting mechanics scripts? How about free Unity assets; is using the Post-processing stack also asset-flipping?

They think that a small team can do everything: Write code, make models, make textures, write shaders, just so that they don't go on the Asset Store and buy a good asset. Until everyone realizes that small teams can't do EVERYTHING from scratch (due to time and/or money constraints), we'll always have people complaining about asset flipping.

So, to those people, I say this: Get off your fat, lazy ass, learn how to code, make your own game engine, make your own game, make it successful and ONLY THEN you have the rights to bitch about asset flipping.

Finally, I don't think anyone cares about who and/or at what age made the game. If a 15 year-old makes a good game, are people not going to play it just because they don't like his age? If yes, then that's just sad and it's time for humanity to collectively jump off a bridge before evolution reverses itself and makes us into monkeys again.

 

I did read all of your reply and agree with it except for this part. It seems like many of the people who are doing the bitching are game devs. Like this guy in the OP he has a whole line of videos about the trash games on Steam using assets and otherwise. He is a game dev himself and is what his video is covering how he put all of this effort into making a game and then someone just flipped an asset kit from the Unity store and will probably make much more money than he did.

I think he is one of the people who strongly believes it is better to do everything yourself even if it ends up not as good as it would be if you used assets or even a full kit. These are the ones focused on the personal pride angle. Seemingly thinking the only important thing is to be able to say I did it all on my own.

I can kind of understand that. I think we all can to a degree. But again I think this is just that whole crazy mindset of focusing only on effort (or rather lack of)that we see people such as Jim Sterling and many others doing. It's like they don't even care about the end result so much as they care about how it was done.

 

I think this is in no way true.

But neither of us have any evidence, so trying to claim any type of statistics is totally pointless. One can consider the idea that game devs are saying it, and then form arguments around that, but any claims as to the amounts of various groups holding that position are simply unable to be tested.

 

Agreed. It is definitely just my opinion. I see it quite simply like why would gamers care? Why would game devs care? Assuming it is a bad game sure people can blame it on using assets or flipping asset kits. Then both could care about asset usage in that context. If it however is a good game I just don't see why anyone would care except for the game devs who believe strongly that a true game dev would never use canned assets. Again just how I see it.

 

Anyone who believes strongly that a true game dev would never use canned assets is probably thinking small.

- Unity itself is a canned asset. Or any engine. Or any middleware.
- Using any software whatsoever means you relied on other people
- Using any libraries of any kind is exactly the same principle as an asset flip. Code flip.
- Same for using a computer

So basically they're saying that they're wilfully making their game look crap for some sort of made up badge of honour that will not achieve a single extra sale. Ignore these idiots for the love of all that is sensible.

On the other hand if a game is only off the shelf assets then it probably won't be that good as it's pretty hard to keep things looking and behaving consistent, but I'm sure gamers would vote with their wallets.

Developers worrying about this do not make good games, because if you cannot have fun you cannot make fun.

 

A deck of playing cards is an asset that's been flipped countless times over the past thousand years to make different card games. If I said I hate card games because they're games made by lazy game developers using the same old assets over and over, how crazy would I sound to you? It's the card GAME that makes it fun, not the playing cards.

I've seen a hilarious mod that flipped a famous actor's voice from known movie roles into game sound effects. ('Pulp Fiction' and 'Snakes on a Plane') It changed the game from a serious war game into a hilarious verbal 'jack in the box' at every hit of the character. Three old assets that were merged to make something far more entertaining than the original old assets ever were for me.

Assets are like cards in a deck. It's the FUN that makes it a great game, not the assets.

 

I agree with those ^^^ completely. I've never understood this whole focus on calling people lazy / unskilled if they are not making their own assets.

I sometimes wonder if it is people not able to buy assets or hire people to create them and feel it is unfair that some other people can afford to buy assets / hire people so they came up with this whole laziness / lack of effort / no skills angle.

Or maybe it really is just so much personal pride to not be able to accept that using the great work done by others who have more skill in those areas is a very smart thing.

Saying that I definitely can appreciate the interest in rolling your own stuff. I share that to a large degree. I always make my own physics systems and so forth because it is just so darn simple to do, works the way I want it to and can easily be customized as I see fit.

But I don't see anything wrong with a person using built-in physics systems either. I get that it probably works great for many cases and it is there so given a choice between learning how to roll your own and using what already exists it makes sense. And given the choice between rolling your own and using what already exists it also makes sense unless like me you just find it way overkill and don't want to get into the added complexity that comes along with it.

I am happy with rectangles and cubes but I would also happily use graphics and audio from the asset stores. And I see absolutely nothing wrong with a person using canned art for their entire game because I think it is what they do with that art that matters the most just as was said above.

Anyway I just wondered how the community felt about this sort of thing. I don't see it ever stopping really but at least it seems like many folks here don't share this kind of extreme view.

 

For me personally it probably depends on what exactly was done. And I'm rarely going to care unless it's actively affecting the quality of the game. A flipped game with garbage gameplay was going to be a game with garbage gameplay even if the assets weren't flipped. That's not really affecting how I would interact with the game.

Now for a game where the "assets" are kind of important, like say a visual novel or adventure game, I would probably care a bit more.

 

The term is 'virtue signaling'.

 

The space asteroid shooter game looks fun (from the trailer), the other one doesnt or at least it doesnt appeal to me - super niche. The Devs - Druken Apes - are pumping out games so fast its insane, they already got 12 games on steam. Its not like the druken apes are making that much money off there games but it shows that maybes gars strategy would have worked. Most of there games seem to look nice but the gameplay seems abit cheap.
http://steamspy.com/dev/DRUNKEN+APES

If you are going to spend alot of time on your game at least spend some money on the art

 

Ha ha ha! Yeah I get that and excellent detailed description. I basically operate in a sort of temporal flux between thinking deeply about such things to understand and a much more down to earth "everyday joe" view of things. So although I understand what I think is basically going on (which you described) sometimes I just approach it from a "look at this craziness" perspective for the sake of discussion.

We are all guilty of it no doubt and it is often much easier to identify in others than in ourselves. When I watched his video talking about the no effort asset flip game and his game I kept thinking man you are so fixated on this you don't see the solution. You are literally talking about saying you yourself believe this asset flip has a great chance to make more money than your very hard effort from scratch game does. So just think about that for a little bit. Why not take the best of both approaches. The best of yours the original ideas the focus on unique game design and apparently very good programming and combine it with these other things you seem to hate.

Actually his game is fine quite likely it is just missing a couple things. The biggest problems I see are...

1) he seems to hate focusing on visual stuff even more than I do like he even hates the idea of juice / polish on the presentation. He went out of his way to talk about how the asset flip was a version of his game all jacked up on Mountain Dew. lol So that is the first thing. I am all for using rectangles and cubes BUT that doesn't mean you don't spend some time to make some cool fx using rectangles and cubes. I am only against seeking raw graphics quality in and of itself. Juice & polish is the easiest and most fun kind of work to do. Sure it takes time but I've always found that to be a lot of fun feels more like playing than working.

2) his video just doesn't do a good job of making the game seem all that good. In contrast, the asset flip video seems like a nice quality game trailer.

If he worked on just those two things I think it would make a world of difference in the results he sees from his efforts.

Basically there is a huge difference in focusing on awesome graphics quality and focusing on creating visual interest. And I think a lot of people miss that and certainly he is.

For example, these 3 games are certainly not some high fidelity immense labors of graphics work yet I think they are all very visually interesting even more so than many games that do have humanoid and other 3d models and detailed pixel art that people spent a lot of time on.

And two of them also create interest in their trailers immediately with a bit of story that helps to pull the viewer in to connect with and give meaning to these very simple but interesting visuals.

ASCII_Attack

Story of a Cube

Cube Destroyer

Anyway... if he focused on making his game more visually interesting... which just juicing it up more would do to a large degree... that would be a good thing.

 

There is also the case of marketing his game using a perfectly valid sales argument, "authenticity" is something that is valued by some consumer, it doesn't have to be true it has to meet an audience.

Also PUBG is going through the same turmoil with Fortnite. Not quite the same (not asset flip) but direct copy of many things, like similar particle effect on similar gameplay by the people who help them optimize the engine, which is the shady part IMHO. But I guess that another debate.

 

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton 1675

 

Folks buy coffee table art books, graphic novels, posters, collect tarot card decks and many other artifacts simply for the raw graphics quality itself. Interestingly there are entire museums all over the planet dedicated to this concept and proclivity of wanting to view 'raw graphics'. Must be some folks out there that this is what cranks their cogwheels.

 

That's completely true of course and outside of games I like art just for the art and like things style and design even if not intended as an art piece specifically. I guess instead of saying "I am only against seeking raw graphics quality in and of itself" I should say I don't agree with focusing on raw graphics in and of itself so much in the context of games especially if that focus is all consuming to the point where people cannot ever complete a game because they strive to hit some (apparently) impossible to reach graphic fidelity level.

I don't know man I just think art is much more than raw graphics fidelity I've seen people make fantastic art out of literally garbage. Junk scrap iron art. I have a cool little airplane hanging from my living room made entirely out of a single beer can. I see it as creativity and design ability to make something visually interesting even out of something that is not the highest grade raw level.

Well heck actually you do that I think? I seem to remember you posting about some massive architectural design or something a few years back. And that is how I see it I guess. You didn't need diamonds and gold to make a masterpiece... something very visually interesting... and I don't think game graphics need the highest grade raw stuff either to make something very visually interesting. The one is a focus on technical and tools and materials and the other is more of an eye for design or something. An ability to work with even the simplest stuff and make something very interesting out of it.

 

Some would argue those were raw graphic quality (ie not dependent on material), it's not the effort or raw material that matter, but the result (and the appreciation of the onlooker). I get what you are saying though, you are talking about raw display of production values.

 

Yeah I didn't mean to get back to this subject but anyway... lol all I am saying is I have seen many games that are a lower overall quality (or maybe technical quality / fidelity is a better term) yet look more visually interesting than other games where obviously the tech or just raw quality of the stuff is higher more detailed etc.

When I say raw graphics I mean lower as in taking a crayon or pencil and quickly drawing something say a coffee cup and then higher raw graphics quality would be that same coffee cup as a near photo perfect 3d model. That is what I mean by focusing on raw graphics quality.

Visual interest is something else. Maybe the one drawn in crayon has a very interesting design to it maybe a dragon handle or whatever and the other looks like the black coffee cup sitting in front of me right now at the truck stop. It doesn't look bad just looks like a coffee cup.

It can also be the arrangement in a scene. One person may have several objects all that look fantastic as pieces yet another scene has much simpler objects obviously not as good as the other pieces but it all looks much better because the layout / arrangement is more interesting. A simple example is maybe the duper duper quality items are all lined up maybe the much simple items are rotated differently and one or two has fallen over.

I am not an art expert so am not master of the terminology. But that is what I mean hopefully it makes sense.

 

Gamers don't care about where the assets come from or how the games are built. Gamers care about whether or not they enjoy playing the game. Developers are doing the gamers are disservice any time they make decisions based on their own pride more than the gamer's needs/wants. Avoiding all 3rd party assets just so a developer can claim they "made everything themselves" does not benefit gamers. Using the best assets available (whether that means 3rd party or not) benefits gamers.

I have built my own asteroid clones in the past without using any 3rd party assets, but that was many years ago when that was the only option. For example, I did that on a TRS-80, Apple IIe, and an IBM PC with an EGA graphics card. Back then, I did it all from scratch because that was the only option. If you build an asteroids clone today, you should definitely use a readily available game engine and the best assets (graphics and sounds) you can find. Juice it up as much as possible for gamers to enjoy.

 

That's so true lol, I have taken a challenge to make a huge game on another thread, on the basis of that observation, and still keep heading right into it! I have just toss out a ton of useless overthought works to start on simpler basis again RFOL.

 

Surely there is something pretty unethical about buying a premade prototype pack and then selling that as the entire game? I'm not sure I find that a good thing. I find it quite insulting really, when there are many that put hard work and passion into their projects and actually work for the end goal, whereas this lot download an asset, repackage it and sell it.

 

People should focus on the quality of the end product, not where the individual parts came from

 

Even when the creator of the pack explicitly gave you a permission to do that in asset pack eula?

Ethics are not a good argument, because they're relative.

 

What if I wasn't interested in making games but really wanted to get into marketing and promoting them? It's unlikely anyone is going to risk their pride and joy with me without a track record. Rebranding and promoting a premade prototype seems like a good solution in that case. I'd get to develop my marketing skills and learn from mistakes without ruining the potential income from someone's labour of love. I can see that as one path to becoming a skilled publisher with funding available to take on more exclusive titles later.

If the prototype pack isn't a full game but just enough to demo the tech, then I'd agree that marketing it as a full game falls in unethical territory.

 

The backlash isn't purely because premade assets are being bought and used. Players are expressing an exasperation at the incredibly bad signal to noise ratio that has resulted from a lot of devs uploading games that simply have very little meat to them. Unity, the Asset Store and Steam Greenlight allows them to do this and the ecosystem does not have good enough tools for separating the cruft from the decent games. Yes, people are not targeting their exasperation very well, but it's not like there's any productive discourse between small devs and gamers at large to inform them.

 

Ethics are not argument because they are based on per-person beliefs, social contracts and opinions. Anything but legality. Much like the rest of your post.

Haven't you read the news? Valve turned the valve to "fully open".

 

I just find that's not an okay line to cross. I wouldn't go around downloading a load royalty free music and then selling it as an album. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. I guess I can't say much else other than it really rubs me the wrong way.

I'm really not sure you could do that easily. How do you make your Unit Z repackage stand out from all the other ones?

 

Would you go to a wholesale shop and buy some posters and try to sell them? Or buy some used books and then sell them? How about videogame cartridges... say you find a batch of NES, SNES or Genesis cartridges. These same exact games are being sold right now by multiple places. Quite often the exact same game has different names in different regions.

The practice of buying & selling existing things with no changes made is common everywhere in pretty much all things.

I'm not saying people shouldn't use an asset kit as a foundation to build on and customize. Personally I think that would be best. But I see nothing unethical about someone buying an asset kit and then selling it. Not sure how ethics even come into it? The person pays for the asset and then they spend the money and time to take it to the gamer market. The fact that 10 or 100 people can do that doesn't make it unethical.

Now if a person stole someone else's game and published it as their own yes that is wrong clearly. If they stole the asset kit (pirated it) and sell it as their own clearly that is wrong. But someone paying for the kit then investing more money and time to release it on the store is not wrong in any way. It might not be very smart because a dozen other people can do the same thing. But that doesn't make it wrong in an ethical way.

 

When it comes to the asset store, this is how it appears to me.

Socially acceptable use:
Buy assets and use them in your game in some way that they are difficult/impossible to identify.

Socially taboo use:
Buy assets, change virtually nothing and publish an 'original game'.

Legal acceptable use:
Buy assets, publish them in a game any way you want.

But practically, it does not matter as long as it is legal. If someone buys a blob of assets and makes a good game that people have fun playing then no one has any right to bash them for that. Low effort template and clone games have been around for a long time and yet frequently peg the most popular on charts. This is simply another flavor of that.

Whining about it doesn't do any good. The guy in the video is essentially complaining that someone else is probably going to make more money than him with less effort than he put into his product, and that irritates him. That is childish and asinine. Put your pants on, this is a business for you and there's no place in profitable business for whining about someone else beating you to the punch. If it isn't a business for you then you have no reason to be tilted about it.

 

They usually have terms and conditions a bit like the asset store to prevent that, though if you mean public domain recordings, then there are people who have made livings collecting and selling those. I tend to think of them as being in the service industry rather than the product one. I could spend my time to find the public domain gems, or buy a "best of" collection from someone who has already done it. It's the old time / money trade off.

It was a "what if" so I can't say I've put a ton of thought into it, but I really don't see it as that different to marketing an exclusive product. "How do you make your game stand out from all the other ones?" is a tough question to start with.

An afterthought: How many different versions of "The Best of The Beatles" are there?

 

Most games that are "asset flips" still required a significant amount of dev work putting all the assets together into a finished product. These people complaining don't appreciate the amount of work involved, as they likely have never finished anything they have started on their own.

At the end of the day the amount of work you put into your game is entirely meaningless if you never ship it. If using premade assets shortens the development time enough that you can actually get it done and released, it seems like the correct decision. The guy in the video complaining with his incomplete game he probably will never finish is just being a baby. He probably realizes that his project was too big for him to actually complete, but is too immature to even admit to himself his own mistake. So he lashes out at people who obviously took the time to realistically scope their own project to something they can complete and ship within a reasonable time, and that apparently took using 3rd party assets so was probably the correct choice.

Its a far better choice than getting 1/3 of the way in, getting your primary mechanics done, but then not finishing the game.

 

To anyone but yourself, it's meaningless whether you ship it or not.

@Voukras nailed it: the problem isn't that people are "flipping assets", it's that there are a lot of games out there of sub-par quality, and most of the audience doesn't know what to complain about. The term "Asset Flip" took off in gamer vocabulary, and suddenly that's what we hear about even though it's not actually the root cause.

I had a game on Steam accused of being an "Asset Flip" despite being 99% custom made by me and an artist. The three things that weren't custom made were a skybox, a font, and a very simple model pack. Nobody cared about the effort I put in. The lesson there is not that I shouldn't have used 3 assets (and an engine) from outside of my team, it's that I did a poor job of the designing and/or differentiating my product from others. (More likely, being a match 3 game, my mistake was more fundamentally making a game in such a crowded space.)

Edit: I forgot sound, that was purchased too.

 

@angrypenguin Honestly, it's pretty big of you to admit that the design wasn't good enough. Devs being bitter about results and interacting poorly with players that don't understand how much effort tends to go even into games they don't like is kind of what started this whole mess. You just need to follow Jim Sterling's videos on the drama to see how it evolved. Hopefully things will cool down soon, they sort of seem to have been cooling down despite Unity3D and asset flipping becoming more permanent additions to gamer vocabulary.

 

There's no point bullshitting yourself about these things. I made a game of a type I wasn't familiar with for an audience I didn't understand. It showed. I learned from it. Future projects are better as a result.

To be honest, I still quite like the design in and of itself. It just wasn't enough on its own for that audience, I think primarily because it wasn't easily communicated. My designs since then have addressed that. It's not good enough to be cool, it has to be self-evidently, obviously cool (to the target audience) without my working to explain it.

 

Lol! My strategy? I never had a strategy to make games with cheap/weak gameplay.

Only to *try* to choose the niche somewhat wisely (but more just look at the game design and male it good) then focus on managing scope and maximizing dev speed so game development can be profitable and reasonably reliable (on average providing a certain sustainable bare minimum monthly income).

I'd favor stronger gameplay and weaker graphics quality. That's not to say lack of presentation polish/juice just means simpler easier to create graphics instead of hi fidelity very laborious graphics.

I am actually working toward that building a framework. Just takes time. In fact that time is 29 hours so far.

 

I used an asset in my demo build. I thought about people pointing out that it was a free pack from the store, but I modified the texture, changed the shading style, and added a couple needed animations and nobody ever said anything. Of course this model is only temp but for a minute I thought about putting in crunch hours to complete the dev model I was working on to put it in the game instead of the free asset from the store.
Image from store




Rejiggered version for my demo build


Re-textured with only a 5 pixel color swatch.

 

I often wonder if this particular disdain emanates from the I can't do it so it sucks camp. If that is where the thrust of it arises then an examination of one's underlying motives becomes a necessary component of ponderance if one wishes to make a business venture of their talent stack. If that is not the place this compulsion to attack the level of art quality in a game by derisively equating realistic quality assets with inability to finish a project is off the mark and you apparently do not understand the technical artists mindset.
I can within a few hours produce a human avatar that can be slotted into most Steam games. Will 'I' be satisfied with it.. No. I can always adjust the folds on the costumes joints to deform better and look more realistic. I can always add more polys around the nose and while I am at it i need four sneer, smile, scream and banshee face morphs. Dang..those metal shoulder plates look like plated christmas ornaments. I will need to tweak the material textures..maybe try some new shaders out..or that bling is gonna p*** me off bigtime. Am I trying to please you? No. Am I trying to please my boss? Eff him..he will love it when i get done. No. I am trying to beat what i did last time. The boss don't think we need face morphs..until a player mentions how it makes the fighting more realistic when the avatars faces react appropriately to the combat.

If you do not get this from this explanation you never will because you are not a technical artist. Should the artists start trashing you because you want to make your code perfect. Me. I do both just as well so I do not have a dog in the fight as far as coder versus artist. i understand both mindsets and try to make my code as elegant and readable as I tend to make my art detailed and realistic. It is a mindset. Not an appendage waving exercise as you seem to portray it as. It is about competence.. which does have it's root in compete...generally in relation to ones self or ones colleagues of a profession.

 

First off absolutely I cannot make the great art. That is for sure. It takes a lot of time for me and it is time I don't have the patience to spend. And even if I did it wouldn't be fantastic pro level art by any means. With that out of the way... I get what you're saying and it does make sense trying to surpass what they made last time. I guess I see it like where is the limit? Doesn't there come a point where it is just wasting time? I can refactor my code over and over again and always strive to improve and I used to do that a lot.

For me there is a point where if I see that getting in the way of getting things done then I just make myself stop. And it is hard to do that. The desire is always there to improve. Refactor this. Maybe redo that whole thing. But striving for perfection I have found it just kills projects more than it helps them to reach completion.

I guess it all comes down to what is the end goal? If it is to continually improve skills alone then it makes a lot more sense to me. If it is to complete a game then I think it becomes a major obstacle... almost like a conflict of interest... striving towards two completely different goals at the same time. Which one is given priority will determine the ultimate outcome.

 

Your version looks a whole lot cleaner to me. I like it much better.

 

I meant in terms of producing content quickly.

 

How long did it take you to do that?

 

Ah! That is true.

 

Roughly 45 minutes to an hour I think. I don't quite remember exactly how long. I do remember there were some unwelded verts and unfriendly turned edges near the double set of horns and side of head, but I decided to just run with it after spending time on editing some of the mesh. The UVs were fine but I had to rearrange them for my needs, and I removed root motion (I think) from one animation, added a rough death cycle and piddled around with colors a bit.
It might have been 2 hours including getting him set up in engine, but I saved about 6-8 hours prior to showing off the demo at the local game conference I attended. A pretty good trade off imo.
Placeholder for this - still incomplete creature.

 

Hmm, I'm late to this party.. For me it's obvious, it's just common sense.

Ok, lets hypothetically say we have two music artists.. They both manage to get a mechanical license to a well known song, artist A decides it's too much effort to make the song their own and decides to just add a scabee da ba at the end of every 4th bar.

Then we have artist B who decides to re-mix it, sing it themselves and make it their own.. Not only would artist A be somewhat annoying they'd also be a talentless hack and whilst artist B is covering someone elses song they made it their own with skill and as many music covers over the past have shown us, they tend to go down well..

Now to relate it back to games, I'm not sure how many different types of barrels one can have.. If I were to have someone assess a platitude of barrels and make sure every instance of barrel we used was unlike any other games barrels, I believe it could be a somewhat waste of time.

If I was to ask gamer A, did you notice and appreciate our bespoke barrel work? The answer would most likely be, no and why are you asking me such a dumb question?!

Nobody screams at AAA for using SpeedTree and lets face it, as a paraphrase of Will Ferrell ShadowK IS European Birch..! Or it's in every openworld game I've seen, whatever..

In short, put the effort in to making it your own.. But to dismiss the leg up the asset store can give you, especially for trivial items seems sheep like Barrrmmy..

Regards,
Dr. Cox... *Cough* I mean ShadowK.!