Broad Appeal game art critique
Hi everyone, long time lurker.
I recently formed a company a while ago, and we've been making broad appeal games for the last two months or so. It's finally at the stage where it's getting finished. The style is 'web 2.0' or 'MacOS'. The game market that we're targetting, while 'broad appeal' is people who tend to play match three games ... thus they tend to be female/male (with a ratio of 65:35), 14 years old to about 45 years old ... and so forth.
Here is what the main menu looks like. It's pretty simplistic and uses a MacOS dock bar like interface. To note, I realize that I have used the Nuvola icons ... and for those about to say, they are under a license which allows them to be used within commercial applications such as this game.
This is what the game actually looks like. The donuts sparkle, and lots of the special effects do animation an so forth.
In your opinion;
- Do you feel that all of the art matches with each other?
- What do you think of this particular style?
- Do you think that it matches the target market, or have I got it completely wrong?
- Other opinions/suggestions
We're somewhat late into the project, and while radical changes in style is probably not really possible ... we can always make smaller tweaks. I think in future, i'll be asking about art style earlier in the project.
Thanks for the feedback!
I recently formed a company a while ago, and we've been making broad appeal games for the last two months or so. It's finally at the stage where it's getting finished. The style is 'web 2.0' or 'MacOS'. The game market that we're targetting, while 'broad appeal' is people who tend to play match three games ... thus they tend to be female/male (with a ratio of 65:35), 14 years old to about 45 years old ... and so forth.
Here is what the main menu looks like. It's pretty simplistic and uses a MacOS dock bar like interface. To note, I realize that I have used the Nuvola icons ... and for those about to say, they are under a license which allows them to be used within commercial applications such as this game.
This is what the game actually looks like. The donuts sparkle, and lots of the special effects do animation an so forth.
In your opinion;
- Do you feel that all of the art matches with each other?
- What do you think of this particular style?
- Do you think that it matches the target market, or have I got it completely wrong?
- Other opinions/suggestions
We're somewhat late into the project, and while radical changes in style is probably not really possible ... we can always make smaller tweaks. I think in future, i'll be asking about art style earlier in the project.
Thanks for the feedback!
Replies
Is this a match-3 game?
Could you try to make it clear how you're actually innovating in the genre?
I realise you're playing the 'broad-appeal'-market, but trying to get a slice of that market by just copying the (without exaggeration) hundreds if not thousands of similar games doesn't seem like the best way to go about it. Popcap is one of the big players in this field, and it's not because they have match-3 games. I imagine it's because their games usually bring something new to the table, have high replayability, and look nice.
Ofcourse, if you just want to be another 'company' that plays the trends untill they whither and die, ignore what I said.
This crit might also be hard to hear, but I feel it's no use sugarcoating it for you.
edit: as a humorous aside: maybe the top of that screenshot is actually talking about the mindset of the average company that makes these sort of games. 'only 50 more sales and we have the cash to finish our tetris-clone! Maybe after that we can fulfil my lifelong dream of cloning Snake!'
It is yes.
I suppose at this point, the amount of actual innovation is quite small. I've create some slightly game mechanics which all revolve around the idea of match three, such as blocked tile which have to be broken using match three, collecting keys, hitting specific tiles to cause a special reaction. The matches not only give you money (in which you can buy the specials below), but some of them carry modifiers which can cause other special effects. I'm hoping the overall combination of the different tileboard mechanics (eight in total), donut modifiers and lastly the special bonus's will help make the game feel at least some what different to the other match three games out there.
I suppose really, the thinking is that I look at what's already out there, and some of the game mechanics were presented in each one that I see, so really it is a collaboration of the ideas out there, along with some of my own... which I hope brings a unique play for the match three game. Unfortunately that sort of aspect is very hard to describe with only just these images.
Yes, well, they also have a reasonably popular brand name now too.
Well, we have to play the market and trends carefully too. I mean, we're far too small to try to make something large, and heavily investing in the art that is shown within Polycount is a bit too dangerous for us (as it costs a lot of money). I suppose this match three game is really a way for us to cut our teeth.
Yeah, there is no real point. If you don't like it, you don't ... and well, it's the only way our games are going to improve.
Mmm, I hope that my next game will be more unique and interesting.
Ok, well in that case, I don't think I will ever use this style in the future. I mean, the bar is really high here, and there is a lot of great work here, so obviously coming in here with this is probably not something people are used too. In this particular case, I doubt I'll really bother to try to go for this particular style again and perhaps try something else.
Hmm, I see. I wanted the interface to be very easy to navigate, and often applications try to do that. I am much more used to developing interfaces that are very functional rather than being too flashy, however in that case in my next game perhaps I will invest more time to make a more 'game centric' like interface.
... well ... why not? Perhaps that association would be good for this game?
Mmm, I see. I can agree with that. When I make a new font, as suggested above, I'll not bother using the glow parameter. I thought it looked nice, but yes, it can make text blurry. The other problem is that I have just enlargened each letter instead of rasterizing the same font at a different size, thus OpenGL will make it blurry anyways. Not something I can fix for this game, but will be noted for the next game.
What colour would you propose? I personally like the blue myself, but perhaps you had another colour in mind?
- when designing a website you never fully use for example 1280*1024 because the browser needs its own space (GUI stuff) so does windows or Mac Os or linux.
Besides that a fair majority still uses 1024*768 also du the trend of notebooks and alike. So if you have 1024*768 you get around 1000*600 available for your actual content- thats alot smaler as those bloated teletubby screens
I understand the need to do something with minimum to get into the market, and I understand that almost always comes down to copying. I hope you're right, and that your additions will change the game in a meaningful way. Please let us know when we can try it out.
I think you might be underestimating the power of graphics though. Or you probably aren't, since you're here, and asking for criticism, but maybe you overestimate the quality of your current graphics.
You're already going for the colourfull and 'fun' aesthetic that I'd assume is very popular (looking around in my immediate friends/family, there are quite a few people who play online games like this, and that would seem to be a factor in it), but your graphics are so disjointed (likely because they were never meant for this) that the whole becomes sort of jarring to look at.
Anyway, Renderhjs' comments are still very applicable, so I'm not really adding much at this point. Just that I hope you get to do a more significant second project, and you'll be the next 2dboy/Bit Blot/Edmund Mcmillen/whatever.
http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/archive/2007/destroy-the-web-20-look-future-of-web-design-new-york/
the video to his speech
http://www.viddler.com/explore/fowd/videos/8/
and lastly another compilation of web2.0 graphics showing why its so clich
What bothers me about your design isn't so much that it's ugly - as with Elliot Jay Stocks, I don't think it's awful by default - but it's definitely overused and clich
Thanks. I don't see a point for me to post a critique, then get all upset when I don't get sugar and honey. I need feedback, and it's all really about constructive critism, which this forum is about.
I'd say more as an overestimation of the style than anything else. My last two free projects were 'The Ball' whose art was provided by Hourences, and typically he makes very good stuff (certainly a lot better than me). It is possible in future that we may collaborate more to produce much different styles than seen here in this product. One of the key mantra's we have here is to not do sequels of our own games ... and hopefully that works.
I see. Consistency is something that's difficult for me to achieve here, and I suppose that's really because the art has come from several places. I am obviously trying to achieve the same art style as David V with his icons, while trying to throw in a blend of my own art (which doesn't take long to make) and it's not quite cohesive enough that you guys can see through that. Hopefully however, the people who would play the game would be a little more forgiving on that aspect. Afterall the major point with the graphics I suppose is that it has to be function orientated first... But that could be what led me into this mess.
I sure hope so, but they are much stronger artists than me. It seems like they were primarily artists who then became programmers, where as I am more of a programmer than an artist. I'm competent enough to use Photoshop, Max and ZBrush ... but I'm more comfortable in the realms of C++. But here's hoping I'm able to hire a full time artist.
My point being: use the money you'll hopefully make off of this game to team up with someone who does art, rather than spread yourself so thin, trying to be everything at once. It takes time to become truly good at something, and it's not an easy thing to be a great programmer and artist, and things will certainly move a lot quicker when you can focus on the code, and your artist can do the art. Design can be a shared thing, and if that's not your artist's forte, at least he's there all the time for you to bounce ideas off of.
Standing out style-wise is a great thing, and that extra level of polish could really make you stand out.
Feel free to post in our request/freelance/jobs-forums (whichever is most applicable) to find an artist, I know there are a lot of us who like the idea of doing an indie-game (I certainly would).
For advice on the coding and design, have you checked out the tigsource.com forums? Lovely people there. I was lucky enough to attend a game-jam with a few of them recently, and it was great.
Yes, I'm just trying to be very careful in how I run the development studio. I don't ever want to offer 'deferred' payment like schemes (which seems to be insanely common in this area of computer development), since I've been screwed over in the past by them. Perhaps design would be a good place to think of in tigsource.com. While I won't claim to be a C++ guru, I think I know enough to get by .. but still, a good suggestion none the less.
Well, perhaps for the new game I may ask if you are interested in the next project.
When you look at the top where it says '92 sales to go' and you have the gradient with the letters on top with the fuzzy drop shadow filter on them, it causes extreme eyesore.
Don't layer darker content on top of a huge bright gradient. You have this on the title screen and the game screen. It just causes eye strain for me. You want me to focus on the game pieces, but this big flash of white is tugging at my eye muscles.
and rip it off. shamelessly.