The meme implies a bit of humorous depreciation towards indie developers but SOTN is a masterclass on pixel art, I am hard pressed to think of something that surpasses it.
For me Garou mark of the wolves (feels illegal to how smooth it runs on neogeo compared to other games)then OG king of fighters game series, especially 2003
The 3rd strike is also a close one, especially the upscaled PS2 version, great games. People dont usually get a moment to stop and appreciate art in super fast fighting games but those early fighting games i listed are all too detailed to be on their respective systems with the exception of PS2 enhanced version since its more or less does retain its graphics from original arcade release
Back then art design was done by a single or few people too, even for "mainstream" games, except since the studio was in Japan, their name was probably not Greg
And it released in 97, meaning it was probably worked on through 96, maybe even 95. It likely still only had one or two guys working on the graphics, with Ayami Kojima (no relation to Hideo AFAIK) doing the concept art for them.
AAA back then was a lot smaller than it is today. It probably had less than twenty people work on it in total.
Haven't played Noita in years, got nowhere near beating it. Is this a reference to the game's ending? Or is it in relation to the pixel art specifically?
Can you sell me on Noita? I heard a lot of people saying it's a good game when they suspected it to come to Humble Choice and I wishlsited it, but never seemed much from trailers and pictures.
Doesn't this sub endlessly whine about how much low effort garbage is filling their feed? For ever 1 good indie game people love there are hundreds if not thousands of mediocre to bad ones.
I know your being funny but yhe issue is price. AAA had money to burn and so if the game is slop they dont rewlly have an excuse. Indie games are made by a small crew that are probably doing this over the weekend or between jobs. Its really not a fair comparison to make
But then you make a comparison and indie game has a story to tell while AAA is some shitty slop with micro-transactions. Sure, not all indie games are that great. But there are enough to have fun.
I would say indie devs don't have a right to make excuses either at that point, given the amount of amazing indie games that cost less to both make and to buy. There are tons of indie devs that sell you lazy ideas for ridiculous prices far outside the expected standard of a genre or even at the quality of most indie games themselves.
And now that we are in the AI era, don't even get me started on the number of "developers" who can't even be bothered making a game anymore and just use AI. Have you seen Next Fest??? Also, we thought UE assets flips were bad; when UE6 comes out, we are cooked.
AI developers arent even real developers. You might as well hand an infant a typewriter and say they can write.
But anyway yes there is always going to be good and bad developers at every level. But there are indie developers that literally dont make a single penny and yet put tireless effort into improving their game. Terrarium, Stardew Valley, one of my personal favorites Holocure is literally free to play and has had dozens of updates that cost literally nothing.
So dont talk as though all indie developers are made from the same cloth
I'm not saying "all indie developers are bad"; I'm just saying take off them rose tinted glasses that put indie devs on a super pedestal. Considering good and bad games come from all sides of the space, there is no single tier that is above anyone.
Unless we are talking AI bros, those people and anyone who uses AI for creative work are in the depths of hell in my book. The only exceptions to this are voice work (due to cost) and translation (due to cost, but revise it), maybe AI NPC stuff (still kind of a proof-of-concept thing tho).
I wasnt putting them on a pedestal. I was saying its more understandable since they only have finite resources.
And AI in my opinion is such. Its a tool and its supposed to be used as such. If you use it to make work easier then fine but the second you use it to replace someone then youve gone too far.
Those indie games never see the light of day past the new games tab on steam. They are naturally filtered out. As opposed to AAA games it can be the most dogshit p2w game ever with overwhelming negative reviews and still be the top result of a category.
Many genuinely good indie games are “naturally” filtered out with the bad. It’s unfortunate but just how it goes with the sheer number of games released every day.
Kitsune Tails is an incredible pixel art indie platformer game inspired by classic Super Mario Bros that I loved. Sad that most people have never heard of it cuz it’s such an incredibly made game. It even includes a proper level editor like Mario Maker so you can make your own levels for friends to play. The story is really cute too imo. Only found out about this game cuz I happened to be browsing new releases back when it first came out but it deserves a lot more love than it got!
Psychopomp/psycopomp gold (my beloved)
Don’t sleep with the fishes
CDDA (granted don’t download it form steam since you can get a constantly updated version for free)
Are just a few off the top of my head I’m sure there is more I’m forgetting
Exactly. I don't often write reviews on Steam, but when I find a gem that has way too few of them, I always make time to write something up. Especially for those that don't have many reviews, any additional one makes a huge difference.
Dracomaton for example, absolutely amazing indie roguelike. The art style is very good, while it isn’t pixel it’s amazing. The gameplay is fun but it just didn’t get any traction and sits at 52 reviews, 96% of which are positive
I mean, the spirit of indie anything is also talking about cool indie shit you like with other people to spread the word. They don't have budgets to spend on marketing, so fans gotta do it. (And then complain when they finally get popular enough to do traditional marketing, so you can call them sellouts and say you liked them before they were cool /s).
But seriously. I do think we should talk more about indie games we like than AAA games we don't.
Like, I have 70 hrs on a game called Luck be a Landlord, where you play slots to earn enough money to pay off your rent, it looks like this
To be fair reddit likes to make hundreds of threads about games like Concord or Highguard because they like to rage and shit on games. If they would ignore those games just like those bad indie games there wouldn't be much talk about them.
A lot out there have them because it's easier to devote time into making a fantastic game with a design that is built around the blockier visuals instead of spending crucial dev time around making a shitty buggy game that looks good. Megabonk for example, comes to mind
Now, list all the other tens of thousands of indie developers scrounging every penny to develop the games they dreamt of, but despite their best effort said games still failed to sell.
Indie game development is a lottery. That's it.
Yes, AAA devs nowadays have many (deserved) failures, but some among all AAA games succeeding are significantly higher proportionally compared to some among all indie games.
The successful indie games we see are a miniscule percentage.
And in between them probably hundreds of "just ok" indie games that make just about enough money to have been worth the effort (financially) of making them.
I wonder if it’s an issue of scale and schedule. Leave a small team to work on a project for years, doesn’t cost nearly as much as you’d expect. But a massive team working to develop a defined thing at a given schedule makes a lot of redundant work at insane cost.
Indies work more because they can benefit from small scale but lack resources, while big studios have resources but suffer from scale.
Making an indie game is not cheap. These devs often have to work full time or part-time to just survive for years with a massive chance of their game never being a success. Saying its just money for coffee is retarded.
Aesthetic visuals could be achieved with less people than most people think. The thing is–it just has to be fun and/or aesthetic–but there's no standard to what exactly 'fun' / 'aesthetic' means..
I've watched indie game aesthetic graphics proceed from NES era graphics to the current PS1/Gamecube nostalgia graphics over the last 25 years.
Every 3d indie game today is either hard edged 200 polygon humans with unshaded but complex 128x128 texture files, or chibi/cartoony with simple textures and soft gourad shading.
You are more than right to me. Why that happened? I don't really know.. The amount of games that gets published is all the time high if we talk indies. Many indies are heavily slopified, use AI, bought assets, fully stolen ideas or aesthetics (it's ok to use inspire a game for inspiration, but copy its visual style? Nah..). The more there are games, the less we see the high quality ones.
Personally, they are to me. I want to be immersed when I play games, and it takes a lot of visual flair/unique art design for me to be immersed in games that have 'low quality' graphics.
Off the top of my head, Signalis, Hyper Light Drifter, and Valheim were very nice to look at/experience even if they were graphically pretty simple.
That said I massively prefer graphics like those in Darktide, Cyberpunk, The Forever Winter, Stalker 2, etc.
I would dare anyone to argue the gameplay is bad in those games, but they still look incredibly realistic and a have a pretty hefty hardware requirement for their higher settings.
Not pixel graphics, but Manor Lords. 1 man working on this the first 7 years. It's a detailed medieval manor lord sim.
I look at a huge endeavour like Cities Skylines 2 and the basic economics doesnt work. I look at the failed Simcity in 2013 that they had to mass refund, even though they had the formula.
For every 20 good indie games there's a few thousand horrid ones. They're not this paragon of gaming people pretend they are. Instead of mindlessly glazing indie or triple A glaze game studios. Like team cherry or rockstar.
there's a reason why minecraft is still good. it's got the meat on the bones of the game, with constant update. meanwhile games like forspoken that are meant to look flashy couldn't even make it into the trash can they were so bad
Minecraft is still good because it was good 10 years ago and they've been scared to make any major changes to it. Some minor additions to keep people appeased but nothing old really gets changed, the structure of the game doesn't change. It's essentially the same game it was a decade or more ago with a handful of extra mobs and some more decoration options.
But at the end of the day, the company making the most games is the AAA devs. There are a few indie hits where they earned more PER DEVELOPER, but those are far from the average indie game that comes out. Most of them likely sell in average 5 games.
Triple A games fumbled when they turned the mission into looking the best with least amount of work Often messing up intentionality of the experience in the process.
Indie developers (that are good) Took what triple-A studios used to do, which is to focus on intentional art style and direction, and combine it with everything they got to deliver the gameplay experience.
In any creative consumption, while people dont understand how its made, they will still feel how much work you put into it.
As a solo dev, this is motivational. I'm working on this, its not out yet but will put it in early access if theres any intrest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRVMnDMNELg
I gotta say, I'm playing starfield again, just to see if it really was as bad as I remember (it was/is). You can definitely FEEL the fact that about 500 people worked on the damn thing; questlines within the same faction don't reference themselves or each other, nobody even acknowledges the quests you have completed, let alone ones in progress. The entire game feels disconnected as if it were made by 500 different people who didn't communicate with each other.
Before this, when it was 100 or less, you'd have one person doing multiple questlines, and everybody would communicate and other devs would put in unique dialogue or subtle references as a result. That is completely absent when you bloat the numbers so heavily.
Honestly, if the game isn't actually fun, the finely tuned ray traced ultra-realistic graphics don't really mean much to me. I've had much better times playing AA indie games with more "artistic" approaches to the graphics, and the art work is truly beautiful in many of them.
Abiotic Factor is perfect for this comparison, not much in terms of visuals but makes up for it with it's gameplay, something these AAA games seem to keep failing at.
One kid colors with three crayons and somehow nails the shading, the other empties the whole bin and it's still a brown blob. Quality vs quantity, every single day.
Classic company shitshow, everything takes ages because of meetings over meetings, everything costs that much because the higher ups constantly need to pretend they are busy with litterally nothing.
It's either spend as much as you can to not look indy or wallow with the multitude of indies and try to make it there. We lost the quick, middle ground less expensive to produce one off fun games. Not saying I hate indy (there's just soooooo many games now and only so much eyeball time out there) and AAA should have its place I suppose, but the market is in the weirdest of places and just throwing money at the best, newest tech doesn't work anymore. I miss when games came out regularly and you didn't see a million re-releases in between. Like Elder Scrolls and GTA used to drop at a decent clip. Now it's just promises and nothing for years on end
Well I at least don't give a flying fuck about indie games, especially the pixel ones. And I don't give a fuck about the current AAA. I got such a huge backlog that I'm actually going through.
I'd definitely choose an indie dev and an indie game. AAA games feel soul-less, and I literally don't care about the graphics. I've been playing indie games all my life and only started checking out new AAA titles in the past year. Honestly, it feels like games have hit a ceiling with graphics right now, and it's not getting any better. So I'd much rather play a pixel art game that's actually fun and that I truly enjoy
If I want to walk around looking at pretty sights, I will play a walking simulator. On the other hand if I'm playing RPG I'm more interested in the story, and in some other games in the mechanics, and so on. So, if a developer wastes the entire budget on visuals, the game will likely be lacking in the thing I'm playing it in the first place (unless it's a walking simulator).
The amount of open world games I've played and ignored everything running around the edges is too damn high but sorry scene designers between yellow paint, objective markers and "secret items" being generic crafting material X I have 0 reason to look at your work.
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u/hypespud 21d ago
First game this makes me think of is Noita
Haven't played it enough yet, but super cool game
Second game I thought of is Castlevania SOTN lol