I could refer to that Brigador article again if you're talking about going indy. Not exactly stress free. Heard some other horror stories recently too. everything worth anything is hard, but man...
Do not try and write your own engine. Unity and Unreal are free and better than anything you can do by a billion percent. Do not spend five years making a game. Do not bring up Stardew Valley as a justification for your decision to
spend five years making a game and writing your own engine. Do not expect your first game to be good. Do not make a mech game and expect a billion sales. Do not make a game with terrible dated art.
I read the article and it seems like they are humble but then they try and justify some obviously ego-based decisions.
There are lots of successful indies. Two great examples are Jeff Vogel and Vlambeer. They have some good advice if you look for it.
I could refer to that Brigador article again if you're talking about going indy. Not exactly stress free. Heard some other horror stories recently too. everything worth anything is hard, but man...
Do not try and write your own engine. Unity and Unreal are free and better than anything you can do by a billion percent. Do not spend five years making a game. Do not bring up Stardew Valley as a justification for your decision to
spend five years making a game and writing your own engine. Do not expect your first game to be good. Do not make a mech game and expect a billion sales. Do not make a game with terrible dated art.
I read the article and it seems like they are humble but then they try and justify some obviously ego-based decisions.
There are lots of successful indies. Two great examples are Jeff Vogel and Vlambeer. They have some good advice if you look for it.
Can you give me any links from Jeff or Vlambeer.
Do you think the people of Brigador have terrible art. From the article it looks like no one was an artist on the team. Its weird how they could work for five years and still have bad art, especially if they was putting in 12 hours a day.
On mech game and not expect a billion sales. I was wondering how would you personally know what game could be a hit. Undertale is a good example, how could he have known he was developing a hit. Like they could have spent 5 years trying to develope a Dark Souls clone or a roguelite, would that be a hit?
I could refer to that Brigador article again if you're talking about going indy. Not exactly stress free. Heard some other horror stories recently too. everything worth anything is hard, but man...
Do not try and write your own engine. Unity and Unreal are free and better than anything you can do by a billion percent. Do not spend five years making a game. Do not bring up Stardew Valley as a justification for your decision to
spend five years making a game and writing your own engine. Do not expect your first game to be good. Do not make a mech game and expect a billion sales. Do not make a game with terrible dated art.
I read the article and it seems like they are humble but then they try and justify some obviously ego-based decisions.
There are lots of successful indies. Two great examples are Jeff Vogel and Vlambeer. They have some good advice if you look for it.
Can you give me any links from Jeff or Vlambeer.
Do you think the people of Brigador have terrible art. From the article it looks like no one was an artist on the team. Its weird how they could work for five years and still have bad art, especially if they was putting in 12 hours a day.
On mech game and not expect a billion sales. I was wondering how would you personally know what game could be a hit. Undertale is a good example, how could he have known he was developing a hit. Like they could have spent 5 years trying to develope a Dark Souls clone or a roguelite, would that be a hit?
Just Google their names. They have blogs and regularly give talks.
Sorry, but yes, Brigador has terrible art. For example: The lighting is bizarre. The palette is really non-existant, random colours everywhere. No shape grammar for architecture, totally random. Texture scales are wrong. Detail levels inconsistent. The luminance or lack thereof on the mech's targetting lasers. So much basic stuff that needs to be fixed. A mech is destorying a city? Where's the fire, gas leaks, military, mortars, rockets, flooding from broken water mains, etc? Looks like a typical Sunday night in the suburbs. Another one:
Nobody knows if they will have a hit. That's like asking a major league baseball player if he is going to hit a home run when he steps up to the plate.
You want to step up to the plate as often as you can to hit that ball. You don't want to step up to the plate once every five years.
P.S. - Looking at those screenshots, I think "Why do so many "developers" hate art?" There's so many of these guys who spend years working on these games and then basically cover the screen in dog shit graphics. It's self-sabotage.
Sorry, but yes, Brigador has terrible art..... There's so many of these guys who spend years working on these games and then basically cover the screen in dog shit graphics. It's self-sabotage.
So, because you don't like the art and aesthetic, it's "terrible art"?
Sorry, but yes, Brigador has terrible art..... There's so many of these guys who spend years working on these games and then basically cover the screen in dog shit graphics. It's self-sabotage.
So, because you don't like the art and aesthetic, it's "terrible art"?
As artists, we get critiqued every day so we have to be prepared to make judgements based on our own taste, skills and education. That's what we are paid to do.
If we are afraid to critique art and accept critiques of your own art, then we should pick another line of work.
So yes, it looks terrible. I gave my reasons.
Do you think it looks appealing and delivers information effectively to the player?
While I don't personally care for the art style, aesthetically, that's definitely an opinion, and not the fact you presented it as. As if it were an objective truth that the art were terrible. I have no problem at all with critiquing. I have a problem with presenting an opinion as fact, and of calling anything that someone spent a lot of time and effort on "terrible art".
I have no problem with you saying you don't like the art, or the aesthetic, or even that you hate it. But as soon as you say "Brigador has terrible art", you're treating it as something other than an opinion based on your taste. There's nothing objectively terrible about Brigador's art, and I know a lot of people who've been loving the look from the beginning. People who grew up with the original diablo games, or the original fallout games, are seeing an art style they loved that they haven't seen in a long time. It has appeal.
I think there are ways they could have made the art more cohesive, and more appealing to the general user, but I'm not sure that was their goal. I look at this game and feel nostalgia for older games, which didn't always have a good color pallet, didn't always read well, didn't always look awesome, but were fun and memorable anyway.
I think there are ways they could have made the art more cohesive, and more appealing to the general user, but I'm not sure that was their goal.
They have expressed disappointment in their total sales (5,000 - 7,000 according to steam spy) so I'm pretty sure their goal was to make an appealing game. If they didn't care about making an appealing game, I don't understand why they spent five years on it and wrote so many words about their disappointment.
Do not try and write your own engine. Unity and Unreal are free and better than anything you can do by a billion percent.
What? That is a silly generalization.
I know plenty of Indies who love writing their own tech and are successful doing so.
Sure, don't re-create "Unreal" or "Unity", that would be a waste.
Go look at the GDC vault and you will find talks about Indies successfully making their own tech/engines for their own games (there is even one of me in there ).
It would be a very sad world if we will only have Unreal and Unity from now on forward.
Do not try and write your own engine. Unity and Unreal are free and better than anything you can do by a billion percent.
Go look at the GDC vault and you will find talks about Indies successfully making their own tech/engines for their own games (there is even one of me in there ).
It would be a very sad world if we will only have Unreal and Unity from now on forward.
Cool, post a link to your engine and your GDC vault talk and I'll check it out.
I would be interested in why you chose to write your own engine, how much it cost to develop, how many games it was used on, etc. I would also compare it to what was available at the time: last year, five years ago, ten years ago.
We don't and won't have only Unreal and Unity. We have dozens of choices. I wasn't going to write a shopping list of every available engine.
But in the context of this particular game and the context of the complaints of the developers, I would say that using Unity or Unreal would have saved them a huge amount of time, money and energy. If they came out and said "Yeah, we lost money and five years of our time, but c'est la vie" then cool, no worries.
Do not try and write your own engine. Unity and Unreal are free and better than anything you can do by a billion percent. Do not spend five years making a game. Do not bring up Stardew Valley as a justification for your decision to
spend five years making a game and writing your own engine. Do not expect your first game to be good. Do not make a mech game and expect a billion sales. Do not make a game with terrible dated art.
Reading the interview with the Brigador developers over on Kotaku, I've got to agree with all your points, RyanB.
If I could add one more point: Do not quit your day job before releasing your first game.
I just cringe when I read stuff like the developer living off of family members for half a decade because he didn't want "to spend years making small games and working his way up". He wanted to "do it big, do it right" NOW, because he was afraid of getting involved with life and potentially having a family before being able to work on his dream game. (?)
And while art IS subjective, and I wouldn't called the art terrible, the screenshots I've seen don't look good either. It looks like a mid-late 90s game someone patched to run at higher resolutions. The UI is also really tiny (which is usually a side effect of a high-res mod on older games).
I feel bad for these guys, but honestly 5000-7000 copies sold is AMAZING for an unknown indie's first game. The problem is it seems they literally bet the farm on massive success.
I feel bad for these guys, but honestly 5000-7000 copies sold is AMAZING for an unknown indie's first game. The problem is it seems they literally bet the farm on massive success.
Hell yeah! At $20 a pop and 5,000 sales, that is a great start. Now, imagine they had used Unity, spent maybe one year instead of five developing a smaller game, maybe spent a bit more time and money on art...
Yeah, the art is awesome, Gauss is the man... it's boggling that people are just finding out about this game and him, he's been posting his process on Polycount for years. He's pumped out an insane number of assets. I hope you guys don't give up on making your own stuff.
I also like Brigador's artstyle. Sure, it can be improved on, but it has already achieved a certain mood, setting, and atmosphere, which is what I believe art is supposed to do, and they appear to have invested more effort in artwork than most indie games I've seen. Although I don't know if they should have complained about poor sales; I mean, if you're an indie developer, or planning to be one, you should know what you're getting into.
I'm sure Brigador will do better in the long term. It's one of those Indie gems. They need to get a bunch of medium sized YouTube or twitch steamers that love indie or mech games. Also getting in a bundle or sale would probably help. There's summer game drought and they need to take advantage of it before fall.
Do not try and write your own engine. Unity and Unreal are free and better than anything you can do by a billion percent.
What? That is a silly generalization.
I know plenty of Indies who love writing their own tech and are successful doing so.
Sure, don't re-create "Unreal" or "Unity", that would be a waste.
Go look at the GDC vault and you will find talks about Indies successfully making their own tech/engines for their own games (there is even one of me in there ).
It would be a very sad world if we will only have Unreal and Unity from now on forward.
I agree with this, I never understood the argument of "just use Unity or Unreal" especially if you are talking to engine/graphics/gameplay programmers etc... it's kind of what they do and can help their skills to work on something from scratch. For a loose comparison, it's almost like telling artists: "you don't need to learn anatomy and build a base mesh from scratch when there are ones you can download and use"
It comes down to what your end requirements and goals are.
Obviously I don't believe indies should never make a game engine from scratch is good advice, but creating a prototype in UE4 or Unity definitely sounds like the best route to start with. There's no commitment and you'll be able to start on production and iteration right away.
So this was 5 years in development.... 2011 ..so Unity 3.5..not sure what version UDK was on... Would those engines really have been the best solution for a 2d Isometric action shooter? Seems like you would have to do some super heavy modification to get the look and feel that Brigador achieved with their custom solution
I bought Brigador in Early Access and haven't regretted it for a second. The music, the gorgeous old-school look and normal mapped & lit sprites, the fun of stomping on running crowds of pixelated people...all gold to me. You might not realize this but they were GOING FOR a late 90's aesthetic, which your comments seem to indicate they hit dead-on.
I agree, betting the farm on a fairly niche title, and spending 5 years to do so is a bigger gamble than I'd choose to make. That said...they didn't squander investor money on parties, celebrity endorsements, fancy offices, etc like some other studios I know of. They put up their own hard earned savings, and borrowed against their own personal credit with family & whatnot to produce a labor of love.
Anyway, I wish those guys the best and hope the recent flurry of attention around the "failure" results in some much deserved added sales.
to the developers who makes these whiny posts, and the people defending them; nobody making a product in the society we live in DESERVES sales. thats not how capitalism works. its irrelevant of how good your product is, or how much effort you put in it. when was the last time you bought a cd from a band you werent interested in, because o my gosh these guys tries really hard and they put so much effort into this and also their dog died and it would really help with rent this month you guys
Developers whine because we all see shitty games that are successful due to marketing, branding, luck, or trends. I honestly don't want to see a good game and good developers flop for marketing reasons, but there's a reason AAA devs spend as much on development as they do on marketing.
to the developers who makes these whiny posts, and the people defending them; nobody making a product in the society we live in DESERVES sales. thats not how capitalism works. its irrelevant of how good your product is, or how much effort you put in it. when was the last time you bought a cd from a band you werent interested in, because o my gosh these guys tries really hard and they put so much effort into this and also their dog died and it would really help with rent this month you guys
I don't think they were whining. It was a good interview because you got a sense of their thought process and why they made certain decisions.
There was some frustration, sure. I think they would be much less frustrated if they did things differently.
You might not realize this but they were GOING FOR a late 90's aesthetic, which your comments seem to indicate they hit dead-on.
Fair enough. If that was their intent, I guess they nailed it. The graphics just don't sell me on the game - or repel me. I'm completely neutral on them. As an artist though, some stylized and themed artwork will move me a long way towards opening my wallet.
And my point on the UI still stands. Tiny. Please developers, I'm older. I've been PC gaming since the 1980s. I wear glasses, and my eyeballs are not young. Don't make me squint and lean in to read stuff. (This is also a problem I have with the 'high-res' 90s art. It is difficult for me to quickly make out what-is-what on screen. It makes me feel like I'm not supposed to be seeing that much of the map, and I should be running the game in 800x600.)
to the developers who makes these whiny posts, and the people defending them; nobody making a product in the society we live in DESERVES sales. thats not how capitalism works. its irrelevant of how good your product is, or how much effort you put in it. when was the last time you bought a cd from a band you werent interested in, because o my gosh these guys tries really hard and they put so much effort into this and also their dog died and it would really help with rent this month you guys
I don't think they were whining. It was a good interview because you got a sense of their thought process and why they made certain decisions.
There was some frustration, sure. I think they would be much less frustrated if they did things differently.
alright, maybe whiny was a bad choice of word. the article wasnt that bad, but the imgur post was. my post was aimed toward all the indiecopalypse posts aswell though. and i dont really understand why we read all these stuff about indie games failing. what of use can we take away from it? this case for example, some of the last words of the imgur post is litterally "dont do indiegames". that comes of as bitter and whiny to me, and is of no use to anyone.
I could refer to that Brigador article again if you're talking about going indy. Not exactly stress free. Heard some other horror stories recently too. everything worth anything is hard, but man...
Do not try and write your own engine. Unity and Unreal are free and better than anything you can do by a billion percent. Do not spend five years making a game. Do not bring up Stardew Valley as a justification for your decision to
spend five years making a game and writing your own engine. Do not expect your first game to be good. Do not make a mech game and expect a billion sales. Do not make a game with terrible dated art.
I read the article and it seems like they are humble but then they try and justify some obviously ego-based decisions.
There are lots of successful indies. Two great examples are Jeff Vogel and Vlambeer. They have some good advice if you look for it.
While I have to agree with the rest, especially the engine part, which is just a giant tempting black hole many programmers fall through, Brigador has very cool and unique art. It is clearly intended to be "Tiberium Sun" cheesy and old school. It is niche but in todays world you have to be niche. Its likely not as mass appealing, but it certainly stands out.
The biggest downfall of Brigador in my opinion is the core game loop and they made a big mistake by releasing early access without any progression, and everything unlocked which is absolute roadkill for replayability and keeping players interested, (which in turn recruit friends and so on). There is a money system now which seems good enough, although not optimal, but that was way too late and the damage has been long done. The second big thing is that there is no ingame progression whatsoever, there are no items, no pickups, no buffs, no steroids, no upgrades, no weapons to pickup, no loot, no perks, no character progression, nothing. You end the game as you start, Two weapons + one utility item. The fact that there is nothing also rips the sense of wonder from the game, as you 100% know that there is nothing you can find or aquire, aside of new enemies and environments which is a big core gameplay issue. Both factors combined resulted in players churning throught the content and losing interest insanely quickly, which is fatal as players have a lot of value even after the purchase.
I offered my free advice twice (Game design being my field, and shooters my speciality) and wrote one of the guys a lenghty text with feedback, but It was ignored, (not to sound mad or something, these were issues any decent designer would spot and were instantly alarming) so I find this a bit sad. Hoefully they made enough cash to fund the next game and the engine can be used again, that be good.
Maybe a refresh could be released, adressing the issues, + bunch of cool new things and a subtitle "Brigador: Armageddon" or something, warranting a bit of new buzz, which could well give a second chance, it wouldnt be the first to do so.
While I have to agree with the rest, especially the engine part, which is just a giant tempting black hole many programmers fall through, Brigador has very cool and unique art. It is clearly intended to be "Tiberium Sun" cheesy and old school. It is niche but in todays world you have to be niche. Its likely not as mass appealing, but it certainly stands out.
But then there is a disconnect between their complaints about sales and the art style.
When I say the artwork looks terrible, I'm talking about basic things like colour palettes (or lack thereof), focus and contrast.
The biggest downfall of Brigador in my opinion is the core game loop and
they made a big mistake by releasing early access without any
progression, and everything unlocked which is absolute roadkill
for replayability and keeping players interested, (which in turn recruit
friends and so on). There is a money system now which seems good
enough, although not optimal, but that was way too late and the damage
has been long done.
The second big thing is that there is no ingame
progression whatsoever, there are no items, no pickups, no buffs, no
steroids, no upgrades, no weapons to pickup, no loot, no perks, no
character progression, nothing. You end the game as you start, Two
weapons + one utility item. The fact that there is nothing also rips the
sense of wonder from the game, as you 100% know that there is nothing
you can find or aquire, aside of new enemies and environments which is a
big core gameplay issue. Both factors combined resulted in players
losing interest insanely quickly, which is fatal as players have a lot
of value even after the purchase. (+ some miniscule things and some UX
problems but that falls into margin of error of every game)
It's their first game so I'm not surprised that there is a lot of design problems.
But how the hell do you not have weapon and mech upgrades in a mech game? No metagame at all? Is it a puzzle game? The only reason to play a mech game is to blow shit up in more and more ridiculous ways.
Replies
Do not spend five years making a game.
Do not bring up Stardew Valley as a justification for your decision to spend five years making a game and writing your own engine.
Do not expect your first game to be good.
Do not make a mech game and expect a billion sales.
Do not make a game with terrible dated art.
I read the article and it seems like they are humble but then they try and justify some obviously ego-based decisions.
There are lots of successful indies. Two great examples are Jeff Vogel and Vlambeer. They have some good advice if you look for it.
Can you give me any links from Jeff or Vlambeer.
Do you think the people of Brigador have terrible art. From the article it looks like no one was an artist on the team. Its weird how they could work for five years and still have bad art, especially if they was putting in 12 hours a day.
On mech game and not expect a billion sales. I was wondering how would you personally know what game could be a hit. Undertale is a good example, how could he have known he was developing a hit. Like they could have spent 5 years trying to develope a Dark Souls clone or a roguelite, would that be a hit?
Sorry, but yes, Brigador has terrible art. For example:
The lighting is bizarre. The palette is really non-existant, random colours everywhere. No shape grammar for architecture, totally random. Texture scales are wrong. Detail levels inconsistent. The luminance or lack thereof on the mech's targetting lasers. So much basic stuff that needs to be fixed.
A mech is destorying a city? Where's the fire, gas leaks, military, mortars, rockets, flooding from broken water mains, etc? Looks like a typical Sunday night in the suburbs.
Another one:
Nobody knows if they will have a hit. That's like asking a major league baseball player if he is going to hit a home run when he steps up to the plate.
You want to step up to the plate as often as you can to hit that ball. You don't want to step up to the plate once every five years.
P.S. - Looking at those screenshots, I think "Why do so many "developers" hate art?" There's so many of these guys who spend years working on these games and then basically cover the screen in dog shit graphics. It's self-sabotage.
If we are afraid to critique art and accept critiques of your own art, then we should pick another line of work.
So yes, it looks terrible. I gave my reasons.
Do you think it looks appealing and delivers information effectively to the player?
I have no problem with you saying you don't like the art, or the aesthetic, or even that you hate it. But as soon as you say "Brigador has terrible art", you're treating it as something other than an opinion based on your taste. There's nothing objectively terrible about Brigador's art, and I know a lot of people who've been loving the look from the beginning. People who grew up with the original diablo games, or the original fallout games, are seeing an art style they loved that they haven't seen in a long time. It has appeal.
I think there are ways they could have made the art more cohesive, and more appealing to the general user, but I'm not sure that was their goal. I look at this game and feel nostalgia for older games, which didn't always have a good color pallet, didn't always read well, didn't always look awesome, but were fun and memorable anyway.
I know plenty of Indies who love writing their own tech and are successful doing so.
Sure, don't re-create "Unreal" or "Unity", that would be a waste.
Go look at the GDC vault and you will find talks about Indies successfully making their own tech/engines for their own games (there is even one of me in there
It would be a very sad world if we will only have Unreal and Unity from now on forward.
I would be interested in why you chose to write your own engine, how much it cost to develop, how many games it was used on, etc. I would also compare it to what was available at the time: last year, five years ago, ten years ago.
We don't and won't have only Unreal and Unity. We have dozens of choices. I wasn't going to write a shopping list of every available engine.
But in the context of this particular game and the context of the complaints of the developers, I would say that using Unity or Unreal would have saved them a huge amount of time, money and energy. If they came out and said "Yeah, we lost money and five years of our time, but c'est la vie" then cool, no worries.
If I could add one more point:
Do not quit your day job before releasing your first game.
I just cringe when I read stuff like the developer living off of family members for half a decade because he didn't want "to spend years making small games and working his way up". He wanted to "do it big, do it right" NOW, because he was afraid of getting involved with life and potentially having a family before being able to work on his dream game. (?)
And while art IS subjective, and I wouldn't called the art terrible, the screenshots I've seen don't look good either. It looks like a mid-late 90s game someone patched to run at higher resolutions. The UI is also really tiny (which is usually a side effect of a high-res mod on older games).
I feel bad for these guys, but honestly 5000-7000 copies sold is AMAZING for an unknown indie's first game. The problem is it seems they literally bet the farm on massive success.
Fun game
Great soundtrack
I wish more devs would take a risk and deviate from the same old mass appeal copypasta bullshit
I
I hope this new attention gets them some more sales.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/
Also lots of good stuff in this thread:
http://polycount.com/discussion/129048/gausswerks-live-twitch-tv-kitbashing-modeling
It comes down to what your end requirements and goals are.
I agree, betting the farm on a fairly niche title, and spending 5 years to do so is a bigger gamble than I'd choose to make. That said...they didn't squander investor money on parties, celebrity endorsements, fancy offices, etc like some other studios I know of. They put up their own hard earned savings, and borrowed against their own personal credit with family & whatnot to produce a labor of love.
Anyway, I wish those guys the best and hope the recent flurry of attention around the "failure" results in some much deserved added sales.
There was some frustration, sure. I think they would be much less frustrated if they did things differently.
And my point on the UI still stands. Tiny. Please developers, I'm older. I've been PC gaming since the 1980s. I wear glasses, and my eyeballs are not young. Don't make me squint and lean in to read stuff. (This is also a problem I have with the 'high-res' 90s art. It is difficult for me to quickly make out what-is-what on screen. It makes me feel like I'm not supposed to be seeing that much of the map, and I should be running the game in 800x600.)
The biggest downfall of Brigador in my opinion is the core game loop and they made a big mistake by releasing early access without any progression, and everything unlocked which is absolute roadkill for replayability and keeping players interested, (which in turn recruit friends and so on). There is a money system now which seems good enough, although not optimal, but that was way too late and the damage has been long done.
The second big thing is that there is no ingame progression whatsoever, there are no items, no pickups, no buffs, no steroids, no upgrades, no weapons to pickup, no loot, no perks, no character progression, nothing. You end the game as you start, Two weapons + one utility item. The fact that there is nothing also rips the sense of wonder from the game, as you 100% know that there is nothing you can find or aquire, aside of new enemies and environments which is a big core gameplay issue. Both factors combined resulted in players churning throught the content and losing interest insanely quickly, which is fatal as players have a lot of value even after the purchase.
I offered my free advice twice (Game design being my field, and shooters my speciality) and wrote one of the guys a lenghty text with feedback, but It was ignored, (not to sound mad or something, these were issues any decent designer would spot and were instantly alarming) so I find this a bit sad. Hoefully they made enough cash to fund the next game and the engine can be used again, that be good.
Maybe a refresh could be released, adressing the issues, + bunch of cool new things and a subtitle "Brigador: Armageddon" or something, warranting a bit of new buzz, which could well give a second chance, it wouldnt be the first to do so.
When I say the artwork looks terrible, I'm talking about basic things like colour palettes (or lack thereof), focus and contrast.
It's their first game so I'm not surprised that there is a lot of design problems.
But how the hell do you not have weapon and mech upgrades in a mech game? No metagame at all? Is it a puzzle game? The only reason to play a mech game is to blow shit up in more and more ridiculous ways.
I just have extremely different taste, I guess.