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OPINION QUESTION ABOUT ENEMY GFX (IN STANDARD SIDEVIEW JRPG BATTLES)
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StormCrow
2877
StormCrow
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CloseHey everyone long time no see! Life has been crazy for months and shows no signs of getting any less crazy or any less busy so I'm gonna try to bear down and mak gams right through the crazy and the busy.
I doubt I'll be able to post here much, at least until my currentunhealthy obsession game project has matured enough that it's worth posting about. If I do post before then, it'll probably be to ask for help with stuff, ask for paid help with stuff (I have become suddenly really broke, but thankfully there is some small amount of money I have in my paypal that's earmarked for use solely on my creative projects), or ask opinion questions like this one.
Okay, so, QUESTION IS: is it okay (i.e. aesthetically acceptable) for a game to use two (or even more) different graphical styles for side view enemies, provided they are never on the same screen together?
In other words, let's say I'm working on a sci-fi game (by which I mean...I am in fact working on a scifi game, lol) and half of my enemy_sv gfx come from Aekashics and half come from the "hidden" scifi resources that came with MV, completely different styles. Is it okay to use both as long as they never actually appear in the same battle? So the style clash between them is never "in the player's face" so to speak.
I have a feeling this is a "there are no wrong answers, just opinions" type question but, please share with me the delicious thoughts from your sweet juicy brains I am not a zombie promise.
I doubt I'll be able to post here much, at least until my current
Okay, so, QUESTION IS: is it okay (i.e. aesthetically acceptable) for a game to use two (or even more) different graphical styles for side view enemies, provided they are never on the same screen together?
In other words, let's say I'm working on a sci-fi game (by which I mean...I am in fact working on a scifi game, lol) and half of my enemy_sv gfx come from Aekashics and half come from the "hidden" scifi resources that came with MV, completely different styles. Is it okay to use both as long as they never actually appear in the same battle? So the style clash between them is never "in the player's face" so to speak.
I have a feeling this is a "there are no wrong answers, just opinions" type question but, please share with me the delicious thoughts from your sweet juicy brains I am not a zombie promise.
AubreyTheBard
1801
I think you might be able to get away with it if there's some up-front justification for it, like different universes being involved in the story or just plain "it's a hobbyist game, deal with it". People are gonna notice, even if they're not on the screen at the same time.
coelocanth
5448
Welcome back!
If you're using the standard animated battlers for the player and the static sideview battlers for enemies, that's more of a clash than using resources from different artists for your battlers.
So I think you'll be fine to do this mixing. Assuming it's not a commercial game, which get held to higher standards.
If you're using the standard animated battlers for the player and the static sideview battlers for enemies, that's more of a clash than using resources from different artists for your battlers.
So I think you'll be fine to do this mixing. Assuming it's not a commercial game, which get held to higher standards.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I mean, obviously it would be better if you didn't. I don't think it'll ruin the game if you do, especially if it's not a commercial game and you're just doing it as a hobby.
If your options are
1) Use two clashing sets of battlers that don't look great in the same game
2) Use only one set of battlers but have less variety of enemies, which will make your gameplay worse
3) Spend months drawing your own set of battlers that look worse than either set because you're not a pixel artist
4) Commission custom battlers for hundreds of dollars for a hobbyist game
...then most of the time option 1 is gonna be the best option, because IMO it causes the least serious problem.
If your options are
1) Use two clashing sets of battlers that don't look great in the same game
2) Use only one set of battlers but have less variety of enemies, which will make your gameplay worse
3) Spend months drawing your own set of battlers that look worse than either set because you're not a pixel artist
4) Commission custom battlers for hundreds of dollars for a hobbyist game
...then most of the time option 1 is gonna be the best option, because IMO it causes the least serious problem.
DungeonDevDude
1237
author=Sgt M
Only if your game is thematically about style clash. i.e. Super Mario Odyssey. Otherwise nah.
I agree with this. Unless there’s a good thematic reason to break consistency, I would probably not.
StormCrow
2877
author=Sgt M
Only if your game is thematically about style clash. i.e. Super Mario Odyssey. Otherwise nah.
Well I've got one that is (The Staircase) and heavily lampshades the fact that characters from Earth are normal proportioned and characters from RTP fantasy land are superdeformed Chibis, but not this project, no.
Thanks for your opinions, everybody. Only a few posts but I'm happy with the consensus (yay RMN). Coelocanth has a pretty good point that the RTP kind of clashes pretty hard with ITSELF.
My thinking is...pretty much 100% aligned with LockeZ' here. It's the least of all evils here.
As to references to "a hobbyist game", these days it seems like everything I make is semi-hobbyist, semi-entrepreneurial. In what I recognize is an obvious bid to have my cake and eat it too, my basic M.O. seems to boil down to: "First part is free, therefore it can have all of the FUN ("unprofessional") stuff: unlicensed music, rips, etcetera; second part is commercial, will only include resources I legally own and can use."
I've yet to really actually get meaningfully past the "first part" stage which is fine. Nothing wrong with doing this for fun. I do have a project (not yet up on here, but related to When You Were Young) called AfterSaga that is all-"street-legal" from the ground up (well, except for a placeholder soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu that'll eventually get replaced, did I get that name right, it's wapanese and I typed it from memory).
Anyway, I've never played the Metal Slug games (maybe I should) but as I'm already making use of rips from them for vehicles in the thing I'm talking about (Spriter's Resource or w/e it's called is great, got some pretty cool use out of show picture, flying semi-animated vehicles around the map during cutscenes) that's the third option I want to consider. It's unlikely there are enough Metal Slug rips available to give me all of the enemies I want but it'd be cool if there were. The graphics I have looked through are p. cool, I like the style.
Random Blather
This is a weird project, anyway. A big "guilty pleasure" for me in vidya is big dumb AAA modern military shooters, all the "modern warfighters". I'm in the minority in that I actually play (and repeatedly REplay) them for their campaigns. They're super linear so they really lack for replay value (although occasionally you get something that abuts this genre but is actually a really broad and deep and good game with loads of replay value: Ghost Recon: Wildlands is one of the best open world games I've ever played (or more accurately, replayed over and over), and my hot take on it would be that it does a great job of scratching the itch that MGS V: The Phantom Pain scratches; I'd also describe it as non-stupid Far Cry) but I enjoy the polish and the spectacle and the cinematic action even if it is super duper linear. And to be honest I have a big (metaphorical) hard-on for all of the hardware and tactics and lingo and the whole milieu. Gunjii-ota is the wapanese term for what I am: the English phrase, which I'm not gonna lie, I kind of love, is "gear queer".
Anyway, this project is experimenting with
a) What happens if you cross the DNA of a JRPG with the DNA of one of these modern warfightery type games?
b) What if you take one of these modern warfightery games and completely reverse the polarity on all of its basic LCD chauvinistic jingoistic assumptions?
So for instance in virtually all of these games you are a silent or almost silent white male protagonist by default, and in most pre-2016 examples, you can't change that. My game has an (almost*) silent protagonist that's a lesbian by default and you can't change that default you just need to suck it up and be a lesbian. Its non-silent protagonist is a woman of color and you can't change that either because she's an actual character with a fully fleshed out personality and dialogue and stuff. IDK, I find this interesting in an experimental sense.
(The best example of an "almost silent" protagonist I can think of in commercial games is John (Spartan 117) from Halo.)
Final blathering in my spoilertagged blather: if not for the delightful abundance of firearm graphics for sideview battlers in MV, I would almost certainly not be working on this weird cyberpunk JRPG hybrid anti-Modern Warfare modern warfare thing.
Anyway, this project is experimenting with
a) What happens if you cross the DNA of a JRPG with the DNA of one of these modern warfightery type games?
b) What if you take one of these modern warfightery games and completely reverse the polarity on all of its basic LCD chauvinistic jingoistic assumptions?
So for instance in virtually all of these games you are a silent or almost silent white male protagonist by default, and in most pre-2016 examples, you can't change that. My game has an (almost*) silent protagonist that's a lesbian by default and you can't change that default you just need to suck it up and be a lesbian. Its non-silent protagonist is a woman of color and you can't change that either because she's an actual character with a fully fleshed out personality and dialogue and stuff. IDK, I find this interesting in an experimental sense.
(The best example of an "almost silent" protagonist I can think of in commercial games is John (Spartan 117) from Halo.)
Final blathering in my spoilertagged blather: if not for the delightful abundance of firearm graphics for sideview battlers in MV, I would almost certainly not be working on this weird cyberpunk JRPG hybrid anti-Modern Warfare modern warfare thing.
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