Unity of Command Forums

I personaly love your work Nenad = the game graphic looks amazing

Is it also from you ? :

That is a nice cat indeed! Always nice to see a one-man-band indie dev (I'm talking about your own projects, not this one with 2x2) who can draw to a professional standard and code. You shame my own efforts (I consider my level as being able to create elite level programmer art D:).

delastone wrote:I personaly love your work Nenad = the game graphic looks amazing
Is it also from you ? :

Thanks. Yep, it's one of my older works. The image is part of a fat cat "portraits" series. It even won some awards iirc.

As for UoC graphics, I initially rooted for the full 3d engine. If done properly, 3d map can add a lot to the looks and player experience. But to be honest, I've seen a lot of poorly done 3d strategies, with all 3d-ness just getting in the way.

When I joined the project, the game's 2d graphical engine was already well in place. I just went on and tried to squeeze the best out of it. It's interesting that with this type of game, graphics production process looks more like wrestling a complex graphics design problem. There's huge amount of visually interdependent elements to tune. It's far from just drawing pretty sprites.

Spooner wrote:That is a nice cat indeed! Always nice to see a one-man-band indie dev (I'm talking about your own projects, not this one with 2x2) who can draw to a professional standard and code. You shame my own efforts (I consider my level as being able to create elite level programmer art D:).

Thanks. Well, there are certainly some types of games in which you can get away with ye olde industrial strength programmer art. And if you follow some easy to learn logical rules it can even be made to look tasteful. On the other side "artist code" is a real partybreaker

But seriously, although I can do both, I find it extremely tiring doing it in parallel on a project. And it's not only because of the workload. The two modes of thinking are of very different nature. By constant switching you just lose your focus on both sides. In my one man projects I mostly focus on programming/design side of things. Graphics are always done using minimalistic aesthetics of one sort or another, just to avoid dwelling too much in it.

It's always a good thing to team up if you can find willing and able people.

To continue to fall even more off-topic:

I agree very strongly that poorly implemented 3D, as found in a lot of strategy titles, often kills the game. Very functional 2D can have a similar effect, showing that aesthetics are pretty much ignored too. Good art direction is also critical (for example, A Valley Without Wind apparently uses professional sprite artists, but the programmers seem to be the ones who put it all together in the game ). A possible problem to be faced with UoC's design is that, being 2D and apparently simplistic, it did appear, to someone I showed it to, as "just like a free flash game", which people are used to not paying for. The irony is that I think they'd take it more seriously as a wargame if it was done badly in 3D or 2D with a terrible UI! Hopefully that is not a common reaction though

I do outsource my game music, since I really couldn't even get started with that myself, but I think I'd rather keep making my own art, albeit rather simplisticly (I am in the highly stylised, pixelated camp). My problem is not so much art quality, which is, I hope, adequate for purpose, but the fact that it takes me a good while to draw sprites and a phenomenal amount of time to animate even simple stuff. As you say, art or code require completely different heads to be worn and continually switching tasks can be very detrimental to getting either actually done.

Also, what artists call "code", coders call HTML:D