Art Is Everything

#1 Totally agree. Everything else being equal, good art makes all the difference.

#2 What a great thread :)
I think Doom 3 is another great example of this... That game has all the game play of Doom 1 and not an inch more...and yet, gets good reviews, sells a ton of copies etc. etc. If the art had even been on par with other AAA titles it would have tanked I think...but since it's head and shoulders above the rest, we're willing to let the bland game play slide.

As game engines become cheaper and cheaper I think the art will take up more and more of the center stage and artists will finally start getting paid what they're worth.

#3 Actually, I kind of doubt artists will ever gain the proper recognition. The vast majority of mainstream development houses, seem to all sit around and say 'Ooh, pixel shader 6.7 is out! We need to write a new engine to take advantage of it.' Its a bunch of BS really. A good artist, coupled with a good designer of course, can make things with shader 0.000001 or less that will blow you away.
And gee, I wonder how much money would be saved if each version of a game didn't require a spanking new engine, with the latest and greatest. Artists would no longer be fired for 6-12 months while the suited dorks sit around and discuss what they need to add to the next engine after each release.

#4 @Weston,

I think you hit the nail on the head there. People were hyped for Doom 3 because of the IP, past nostolgia, iD fanboyism and some fancy shaders. iD certianly did not try to push the envelope there with what they did on Doom 3.

Although the other side of the equation could say "hey, you can still make a good game by using the same gameplay mechanics and presenting them in in a somewhat new way". This in turn is very refreshing for indies because it confirms that we do not need to push the envelope and try to compete toe to toe with guys who have signifigantly more funding than us to do this, but just need to make a good game that presents what it has to the best of its abilities (code & art).

@Erik,

Never mind the fact that development times take 4x longer to make the same product with pixel shaders as they do without them. This alone is a serious issue that both AAA and indies will have to deal with and consider as time goes on.

#5 I don't think that Pixel Shaders or !Pixel Shaders effects how long the game takes to make unless they are already doing stupid stuff. That's kind of like saying that projects where people use CVS take longer than projects where people use SVN. It's just a tool. If people try to use a torquewrench like a hammer it'll take a lot longer to build a house too.

#6 Art is important but it's not everything. Many of the problems you experienced with that game were poor design ... basically flawed logic (like the piles of rubbble in the buildings that weren't destroyed etc...)

It's also important to note that people referred to Doom 3 ... which doesn't have great art. Turn off all the dynamic effects created by code and it doesn't look good ... so in that case the aesthetics are still important but they are created by dynamic effects in code not by an artist spending many hours to perfect a texture.

I'd say design is most important ... a game that doesn't look too good and doesn't have too much technology going for it can still be fun and successful.

Programming/Technology and Art are both still tied to one another too much in the game field (as seen in Doom 3) ... you can't separate them like that just yet. Also it should be noted that Call of Duty was created first for nearly current PCs and uses a heavily modified Q3 engine while MOH was created for the consoles (which are now 4 - 5 years old) first.

All aspects of a game really are important ... that's what it boils down to.

#7 I wish someone would make a war game where its so real and so true, that you can feel other emotions come into play as you play the game. Maybe I'm thinking more along the lines of a movie-game, but I think it would provide an even better experience of what happened in the different battles. The amount of depressing scenes, as well as the beautiful forests of Europe.

Just a thought...

#8

Quote:Turn off all the dynamic effects created by code and it doesn't look good ... so in that case the aesthetics are still important but they are created by dynamic effects in code not by an artist spending many hours to perfect a texture.

You have to understand that the models in Doom3 were created at high resolution in Maya by artists, essentially perfected, both in terms of modeling and texturing... like a pre-rendered model in a CG movie... then... in order to get them in-game, their resolution is lowered (polygons removed algorithmically), but by using normal map effects the original shape and details of the model can be retained on the surfaces (although without changing the silhouette). So, the code and all the dynamic effects are used in order to stay true to the artists orginally creation.

Eventually, with rapid changes in hardware, normal maps and all these various code optimisations/tricks won't even be necessary... the original, high-resolution mesh could be used instead.

#9 I wish someone would make a war game so realistic that it was just like being there. Then maybe after as many people who played Americas Army played that game, nobody would want war anymore. That would be sweet. I'd call it "How to Tell a True War Story."

#10

Quote:Then maybe after as many people who played Americas Army played that game, nobody would want war anymore.

...except the guys who hate your guts.

#11 The mother of all examples of art trumping all....Myst. Basically a slide show...virtually no game play, no tech, design consists of a few very derivitive puzzles...not even much animation...just pure, incredible art...and blamo...blockbuster!

Exile was outselling the SIMs for a while I believe.

There simply aren't any games that rely so completely on just design or tech that could compete with Myst's sales record.

Of course that's not to say that great art combined with great tech and design won't blow a simply great looking game out of the water every time, but if you're only going to have one of the three...

#12 I think that games today are maybe even becoming too centered on art. Like Weston said earlier in this thread, many games today are the same gameplay ideas you saw years ago on the old DOS shooters that take up less space for the entire game than the torque executable does. If someone were to go out and make a game with a completely revolutionary gameplay concept, it would become a top seller even if its system requirements didn't call for a new graphics card.

#13 I have to disagree -- art isn't everything.

I've spent countless hours playing Zap, and look at the specular highlights and per pixel shaders in that game. It wasn't the prettiest game at IGC04, but it sure was the most fun.

Quote:a completely revolutionary gameplay concept, it would become a top seller

Well, it might be top rated, but that doesn't always translate into sales. Sega is a great example of a company with a string of revolutionary games that sold poorly.

And that brings up an interesting point. You can capture the quality of the artwork easily in marketing pitches on the game website, box art, etc., but you can't as easily capture the quality of the gameplay. All of us have fallen victim to the pretty game with the cool concept and great box art screenshots, only to go home and play it for 5 minutes before throwing the controller at the screen and hunting for the receipt...

#14 I beleive it has alot to do with genre of the game. Some games (ie ZAP) don't need to look good to be fun or enjoyable. Others do. A shooter definatly needs the eye candy. Most shooters are not that challenging in Single player mode and they have to portray an enviroment and atmosphere as well as tell a story. They have got to wrap you up with submersion into there story line so you can actually stomach killing, the characters over and over and at the same time feel you've done somthing.
Other games look good for astetic reasons they could be fun either way. Cosmo Bots by Retro64 (shareware download) has great gameplay, is very challenging and is riddled with some of the best art I've seen in a sharware game ever. From the 2dbackgrounds to the particles. The point of the game is sensless but the combination of art and gameplay creates addict quikly.
I think you definatly have a balance but really that balance is defined by the genre of game you are putting out.

But go ahead and raise artist pay anyway. :)

Matt

#15 My humble opinion, and I do mean humble, is that games should be fun. I admit that this is an overstated fact on this site but fun is just a three letter word. For me fun means that I can jump into a game and quickly get immersed within another world (escapism), get a bit of stimulation and be given rewards both audio and visual. Providing some way to personalise the game by decorating/customising helps. A sense of progress is essential too whether it be accumulating items or trying to get the best score/ranking. I think the graphics side of things (particularly realism) can help with immersion and stimulation but the key word here is help; it's not essential.

Zap is easy to play from the word go. It provides a means of immersion/stimulation via the network play and provides rewards. It doesn't provide all of the above for me but it does go a long way towards doing so and therefore I consider it a great game.

I think, like almost everything in this world, a sense of balance and appropriateness is needed. Some types of games don't need feature X, some do. Sometimes feature X needs to be there for no reason other than it's what the market expects; welcome to the big league. Hopefully, as indies, we can develop games and break these expectations or maybe create new ones.

Sometimes is takes great art to attact players but it's amazing how short a period of time that people move onto actually caring more about how fun the game is and art becomes secondary. Does this make great art essential? Possibly, but it shouldn't saturate your way of thinking about your game.

I personally don't give a rats ass whether it's got pixel-shaders or not but then again, I'm not the consensus.

- Melv.

#16 Myst was a great game, perhaps one of the best games of all time. And while I agree the art was an essential piece to making it a great game, almost everybody nowadays completely miss the impact of the game, it's subtle design and how it changed the industry.

For those who weren't around, or choose not to remember that far back, at the time Myst was developed, there was little concensus as to the how GUI design for games should be done. There was little in the way of allowing the user to select which keys they wanted. Game manuals were the size of small paperback novels (slight exaggeration there).

They had to be because you had keys for everything and no two games agreed on anything.

Check the literature, there were huge discussions on User Interface design, GUI design, Player interaction - a lot like today.

Then out came Myst. A game, with NO manual. I remember discussions by people everywhere about how you just started the game and there were NO INSTRUCTIONS! You had to figure out EVERYTHING. And it worked. The user interface was so intuitive you didn't need forty keys and a manual to figure out how to get around. People were dumbfounded.

It started a whole new emphasis in user design - minimal presentation. Reduce the number of keys to just the ones you need, minimal layering of art elements - you don't need stacks on stacks of menus. But it did a lot more than that.
Myst was an example of focus in game design. They focused on the art, they focused on the user interface, and they focused on the music.

The worlds were etheric, interesting, challenging. We don't see that nowadays because everybody assumes the Myst User Interface whenever they encounter a puzzle game. The assume the great graphics and attention to graphical detail, they assume a beautiful integrated musical score. But, their design changed a whole industry. Now we talk about increasing the amount of the game world you see on screen and making the HUD smaller and less intrusive. Myst took the concept of game immersion and pushed it way beyond what anybody thought was possible.

People only remember Myst now as being fun and that it was one of the first games to make CD ROM drives sell. But if the game had been on 50 floppy disks people would have loaded it up and played it.

All of which beings me to my real conclusion. Art is not all, neither is great special effects, great music, great coding or even great gameplay. QUALITY is all. If you don't focus every piece of your game to the best it can be then you will create a gap in the users expectations. That gap is what drags great game concepts down to mediocre games. If you don't have the time to make every piece of your game as tight and as polished as it can possibly be - then your game design is too big.

Thanks for the listen...

#17 One heck of a conclusion there, David, and right on the point. Quality, in all forms, makes or breaks greatness. Nintendo, Blizzard, BioWare and others all let their pride in their games shine through, and it shows. Between them they've made some of the best games in the world, Ocarina of Time (which, with the top rating in GameRankings, ain't far off), StarCraft, Baldurs Gate, KotOR, the list goes on.

#18

Quote:It's also important to note that people referred to Doom 3 ... which doesn't have great art. Turn off all the dynamic effects created by code and it doesn't look good ... so in that case the aesthetics are still important but they are created by dynamic effects in code not by an artist spending many hours to perfect a texture.

It's not simply code that made the doom 3 graphics look good. THe artists had the shader tools to preview their work, and created the art with the tools that let them see the graphics fully rendered. To say that crap art was created and shaders somehow made it look fantastic shows that you don't really understand the process.

Everything had to be made to look that way in a 3D app, and then shaders made that would emulate that look. Then skilled artists had to modify the artwork to make it so that it would appear the same in the game engine.

When creating the textures fo bump maps you no longer have to create the lighting, justa diffuse texture with colour information, then a normal map that you can generate from high poly models. Then you have to create specular maps that make certain areas catch the light a certain way. It can often be more involved than the old fashioned way of doing simple skinds with all texture information on a single texture page. instead you have 3 or 4 seperate textures, and a bunch of textures that effect how a material recieves and reacts to light information.

It's more like creating pre rendered art, but no less work, and requires a lot more computer resourced to produce that kind of artwork. Only reason the art looks bad without the shaders on, is that the requirelements in the media is so much different, its a completely different process, I doubt the artists ever really saw the game running without pixel shaders, as they would have needed them active to see what they were doing, particularly in later stages when they were putting levels together and setting up the lighting and atmosphere within the levels.

#19 Take the greatest looking art you have ever seen in your life and make it into a game with crappy code, crashes, exploits, cheats, and UEs, and see what you end up with. Art is not everything, "Harmony" is everything.

#20 Yeah, my biggest critisism as an artist is that most games don't push gameplay enough relying on slick visuals to sell a game in a glossy printed magasine or tv AD. With GPU's taking over the graphics there is a lot of room for better AI, physics and an endless amount of inspiration for some creative, innovative ideas. A game has to have good controls, gameplay, art and sound, like Gonzo says.

My favourite game this year was riddick, followed by fable and then Kotor2. mostly because they tried to tie everthing together really well and made fun immersive playable games with more depth than most of whats churned out today. A good engine these days needs more effort put back into researching other areas that are often lacking in games today. Physics is taking pretty big leaps but AI isn't really. Doom being a good example of a pretty face with a dinosaur lurking in its bowels, crappy trigger AI, poor path finding and a few cheap frills dont a good game make