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Requiem for the Amateurs

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Requiem for the Amateurs

Unread postby icycalm » 03 May 2015 14:22

New essay I need to write. Will explain why SriK and co.'s efforts are worthless (see here).

I like SriK, and he likes my work and he has contributed to this site valuable material, but I nevertheless have to be mean again and explain why the stuff he's making is worthless and why the road he is following is a dead-end.

You can try to guess why here, if you want. The only hint I'll give is that it has something to do with whores.
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Unread postby SriK » 04 May 2015 18:53

I'm not sure how whores factor in, but I'm guessing part of the picture is the necessary lack of resources, time, and experience involved in being an amateur developer. Retro platformers are cool, and if we can create a 4/5 or 5/5 one then that'd be a great personal accomplishment (and a stepping stone to larger things if I choose to go into the industry after college), but they're not really the cutting edge of the genre. The aesthetic and design of Steel Assault is limited by the fact that we're amateur developers. As I said in NeoGAF's Steel Assault thread:

I wrote:The trend toward retro style in 2D games isn't necessarily based on laziness as much as developers simply being conscious of how much money, time, and overall resources they have. A well-executed simpler style is almost always going to win out over a poorly executed complex one (poorly executed because the developers don't have resources). Of course, the ideal is a well-executed complex style, and I'd love to make a game that looks like the latest Guilty Gear with a live orchestrated post-rock soundtrack (synchronized perfectly to the level design) as much as anyone else... but in the real world this takes TONS of money and TONS of talent, which no one has any real reason to trust me with yet. So this is the graphic style and budget level we're committing to, and I think personally that Daniel's doing a really great job with it.


http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread. ... t151399634

To approach the ideal I mentioned in the 2D platformer genre, you need more money, more team members with more experience. In other words, you need to become less amateur. And that's not even speaking about more complex genres like FPSes or free-roaming or 3D action games (the cutting edge of gaming as a whole), all of which seem impossible to create by amateur developers.

I'm sure there's more to this than I've thought of, and I'm looking forward to reading your article on this. I guess I can consider this an advance review of our game? lol
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Unread postby icycalm » 04 May 2015 22:25

SriK wrote:and if we can create a 4/5 or 5/5 one


Man oh man...

If you can create a 3/5 one it would be a miracle. You are actively comparing yourself with Sega, Capcom and Konami (who could create 4/5 and 5/5 sidecrollers in the old days), while you can't even come up with a title for your game that's not utterly uninspired and generic as fuck.

Even locamalito would have to get me on a good day to get a 3/5 for his games, and locamalito is several levels above you in inspiration as a director.

I will hate delivering this ass whooping because I like you, but it's something that has to be done.
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Unread postby icycalm » 04 May 2015 22:30

Though it won't feel that way to you, the article will ultimately not be about you. It will be about the fact that amateurs are not accomplishing anything at all. I am just picking you as an example because you are among the best of them. And if I show that even the works of the best are worthless, I will have proved my point with flying colors.
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Unread postby icycalm » 04 May 2015 22:42

Your arrogance is really infuriating, if I sit and think about it for a bit. You know what kind of inspiration it takes to make a 4/5 or 5/5 sidecroller? Shadow Dancer and Makaimura level of inspiration. And you think a generic sprite and a name like "Steel Assault" can match let alone challenge these games lol.

You do not understand what the job of videogame director entails. Whatever other undeniable talents you might have, your vision is laughable, and that right there precludes you ever making a 4/5 or 5/5 game. Maybe Josh would give you a 3 if your mechanics are solid enough, but from more sensitive critics like me and Recap you'd probably have to settle for a 2.
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Unread postby SriK » 05 May 2015 00:27

Ouch.

When you state it like that, that statement was arrogant of me to say, and I agree that making a 3/5 game is going to be enough work as it is. I was hoping for more substantial criticisms than mocking the game's name and its player sprite, though. I don't think "Steel Assault" isn't any more generic than names like "Gunforce" or "Giga Wing", yet generic names didn't automatically make those games shit and void of value.

I'm guessing a more damning criticism you might have about Steel Assault is the setting, and how the level artwork we've shown for "Washington, D.C." or the "National Harbor" may as well be taking place in any generic destroyed city or docks. This is something we're aware of, and we're planning on a second pass over some of the level art to add more distinguishing features and life to the game's environments. We also have much more interesting and original ideas for levels later on which weren't showcased on the Kickstarter page, and a lot of cool ideas for setpieces, enemies, minibosses, etc. past the generic, but I understand that you're just going off of what we've shown so far (which isn't very much).

Josh is actually a tester for Steel Assault, and he'll be helping us once the summer starts and we're able to begin more intense development again. The game's name and the player sprite probably aren't going to change much at this point, but a lot of other stuff still is; we're still very early in development. I don't see how we're doomed to make a crap game with the same rating as Super Meat Boy or Hotline Miami just yet.
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 May 2015 01:06

Aesthetically, the game looks like thousands of subpar '80s sidescrollers that no one apart from Josh and Macaw should ever bother to play. The title merely reflects this complete and utter lack of inspiration.

I don't know how much more plainly I could put this.

And the fact that you think this isn't substantive criticism is once more merely a reflection of your own complete and utter lack of artistic vision as a director.

With this sort of vision 3/5 is your absolute limit, if and only if the game is mechanically stellar.

This is the truth. The rest is hipsterism.
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 May 2015 01:12

NG:DEV.TEAM completely demolishes you aesthetically and it's still debatable if their games are worth 3/5.

Your cosmic lack of self-knowledge blows my mind. There are at least half a dozen "indie" games that I would rather play for an hour or two than your game at this point.

I am going to make you hurt with my essay. Maybe that will help you wake up and face reality.
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Unread postby earthboundtrev » 10 May 2015 06:53

Full Disclosure: I'm a tester for Steel Assault.

Creation in art means selection [ > ], but if a whore is selecting then they select with bad criteria. Whores will have sex based on isolated qualities of a person instead a person as whole package. Similarly, amateurs will be inclined to refine certain aspects their game, but ignore others. This will make their games worse compared to other games in the same genre.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 07:24

I had graphics whores in mind (i.e. art lovers as opposed to gimmicky "hardcore mechanics" hipsters and wannabes).
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 07:28

And you post high scores for Tim Rogers' Ziggurat on Twitter for crying out loud: what could you possibly have to contribute to a game like this?

If anything, SriK should be testing for a game made by Josh, not the other way around. The more I think about this game, the more absurd all the pretensions surrounding it seem to me.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 07:50

Basically, when SriK says that he thinks he could make a 5/5 game that looks so uninspired and generic, all he's doing is trumpeting how bad his taste in games and his judgement is. He really can't see how dull his game looks. I could tell this way back, when he sent me his Super Meat Boy review. The comments in it about the game looking "disgusting" or whatever are mine: in his original draft he did not criticize the game at all in terms of its aesthetics. I had to put those comments in myself because the review could not stand without them.

And then there's the fact that he's so young. I find this with many young players. They essentially think that all old games look "bad", because the graphics are so lo-fi. But they only think this unconsciously. Consciously they think lo-fi is "cool", but since they can't distinguish between one low res pixelated mess and another, they call all pixely games "gorgeous" or whatever. That is how we have arrived at these "indie" games with blurry pixels the size of a quarter of the screen on the Xbox One like Super Time Force, and no one noticing. They really can't tell the difference between that and Metal Slug.

SriK is not as bad as the worst of them, but deep down he too is pretty bad. There is no other way to explain that he thought that a game as generic looking as "Steel Assault" could ever reach the level of a Contra or Metal Slug.

Thinking that the mechanics can make up for this massive aesthetic deficiency is not "hardcore", it's autistic. If The Super Shinobi and Super Mario World (the best 2 sidescrollers ever) had Steel Assault's aesthetics they'd barely be playable, and if they looked like Super Time Force they'd be unplayable.

And SriK thinks that arcade difficulty or whatever can make up for it lol (i.e. what every single game in the '70s, '80s and '90s had, many of which were subpar or even outright shit). Or stages that roll into each other lol.

Man, I am going to tear in him so bad, I'll even talk about his race. I am willing to go that far to protect the artform that he is so callously engaged in shitting on.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 08:02

Basically, when you set out to make a game as an amateur, you have a choice of one of two attitudes.

Attitude 1: "Hey guys, I am making this game here with my friend, and it looks like this and will play like this. Hope you'll check it out when it's done if it looks interesting to you!"

Response: "Sure, looks cool (for an amateur game made by two dudes with mediocre talent at best and no resources), might check it out when it's ready (but probably won't because I'd rather be playing a real game with my precious free time)."

or,

Attitude 2: "LOOK AT THIS COOL ARCADE AWESOME 5/5 MASTERPIECE THAT BEATS 90% OF WHAT CAPCOM, KONAMI AND SEGA EVER MADE AND THAT'S THE FIRST GAME I EVER MAKE WITHOUT EVEN HAVING A REAL ARTIST ON BOARD! IT'S GONNA KICK ASS AND I'LL BE THE NEXT K0J1MA!"

Response: "Someone put this little retarded 19-year-old Indian moron back in his place because his absurd bleatings are getting on our nerves."
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Unread postby SriK » 10 May 2015 19:48

You know, after some reflection, you're right. Aesthetically, we don't really have much inspiration or original ideas to set Steel Assault apart yet, other than the fact that it's a retro game mostly respecting 8-bit limitations (which isn't really that special given that actual 8-bit games exist). The game's scenario is about as generic as they come, and I pretty much wrote it in 30 minutes because I wanted to take a break from programming object collisions (the FMV intro was a placeholder I made while looking for an artist, which I got attached to because the video was fun to search out and edit together).

And of course you're also right that arcade-style difficulty was standard for decades in platformers, and that levels flowing into each other doesn't matter if the levels themselves suck. That "Design" portion of the Kickstarter page was just meant to contrast our game's design against something like Super Meat Boy, not claim any sort of innovation.

That being said, I just want to say I never actually expected my game to approach anything near the quality of Metal Slug or Contra: The Hard Corps. Not even remotely, and I'm sorry for ever coming off that way. When I talked about possibly making a 4/5 retro platformer above, I was judging my game as a retro game by the standards of 1989 NES titles, not trying to say it's going to be better than Metal Slug (one of the prettiest games ever made, and better than any 8-bit game ever) or that I'm going to be the next Kojima. Basically, if we can make a game that would have been pretty good for a NES game 25 years ago, I'll be happy; this is all I was ever really aiming for, despite some of the rhetoric on the Kickstarter page. I think that for my first real game project, with 2 guys working on it in their spare time and a budget of $8,000, that'd be a great personal accomplishment and about as high as we could realistically go.

Or is even that much impossible, given the art quality? Am I just being arrogant again, overestimating how talented I am and the quality of what we can make?

And honestly... even after trying to absorb what you've said in this thread, I still can't completely see what's wrong with the game's art compared to other 8-bit titles myself (obviously it looks way worse than Metal Slug, or any proper 16-bit sidescroller, but I've only been judging it as a retro game). I even made this image to compare:

comparison.png


I've looked at all these screenshots and level art from that console era, and I just can't see what exactly makes our game so much worse (and many more famous NES games looked a lot worse than the examples I picked). It's certainly less colorful, and I'm still not a huge fan of how the first stage looks, but I don't think it's comparatively terrible or anything. Maybe I'm just going blind lol.
Last edited by SriK on 10 May 2015 19:49, edited 1 time in total.
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Unread postby SriK » 10 May 2015 19:48

Also, the comments about the aesthetics actually were in the original draft of my Super Meat Boy review I sent you (unless you're talking about the Ghetto post). I still have it on my Dropbox:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/293 ... eatBoy.htm

I checked the differences between that and the Insomnia version, and here are the changes you made when talking about the aesthetics (italicized is what you added):

Where are their 15-second-long "bite-sized challenges?" When were the art and character design ever this generic, let alone downright revolting?

Walljump, walljump, get the keys to unlock the path ahead, oh no the screen scrolled and there's a huge saw there I couldn't see before, death, restart level, repeat 50 times until you get to the next mundane, basic, submediocre-looking stage.


https://www.diffchecker.com/k4krfv9v

All the other comments about the terrible level art and character design were mine, and I clearly remember writing them. If I had to rewrite it now I would emphasize it a lot more though, it really was a depressing experience. (Reading it again, I also really don't like the tone of the last few paragraphs... when I wrote that review I had barely even learnt what a 1CC or a proper arcade game was, but there I am telling off the "modern generation" for savestating and continuing through old games, something I was probably doing 6 months beforehand.)
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 20:21

Kid, do you see me playing Shatterhand or Batman or any other 8-bit game?

'nough said.

Why would anyone play these games when there are hundreds of utterly superior and more beautiful 16-bit ones that we haven't played and never will because we don't have the time?

It would be utterly insane to do so.

Josh and Macaw have played everything, and THAT'S why they would play your game too, and that's fine.

But for everyone else it would be insane. Or in the case of people like you, hipsterish.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 20:40

What we have here is once more the "indie" hamster rationalizing at full speed.

I mean, who gives a shit about the "8-bit/16-bit" distinction anyway? I just want to play run & guns. What if all those games had been originally made for the SAME console? So that you wouldn't be able to sort them in two categories and claim that your game was not competing against games in the other category? (which is exactly the "indie" scam).

The "retro" hamster works exactly the same way as the "indie" hamster. I mean, why do we need retro games at all?

The answer is that we don't, and you know it just as much as we do, but since you can't make anything better, you are making something worse and instead of calling a spade a spade you are calling it an achievement because you want to sell it to us and divert our attention from the hundreds of utterly superior games in the genre that already exist to your massively inferior one.

What makes Shatterhand special is what it achieved AT A SPECIFIC POINT IN TIME. Achieving the same thing 30 years later is not by any means an achievement, especially when that achievement has since been topped again and again to an insane extent. The only person who could rejoice at the fact that that old, inferior standard has been "achieved" again (which it hasn't because your game is on a hugely lower level of inspiration than Shatterhand, but let's suppose for a second that it isn't) is an old fogey who was too dumb to embrace the superior games when they arrived. Someone nostalgic for the "good old" 8-bit days, which were certainly not good compared to the massively better 16-bit ones, but he's just too stupid to realize it... and hence rejoices at the sight of your game.

Unfortunately, none of your customers and fans are even "old fogies", but merely young hipsters who just want to play the latest, "coolest", "edgiest" thing around. And of course, the developer always deserves his fanbase, and vice versa.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 20:50

SriK wrote:the FMV intro was a placeholder


Sorry, but I aint buying what you are selling.

You can go ahead and change the title, protagonist, intro, and all the other things I will point out to you at length (laughably bad weapon effects -- worst I have ever seen in my life -- and so on) -- and you SHOULD change them, of course, if you can -- but the fact will still remain that you are at best a mediocre director and the game would have been better off with a better one (for example, myself, who is giving you all these directions).

Above all, the game would have been better off with a proper artist and a vision, which is what no Western amateur has ever had, which is why I am writing a requiem for their efforts. Because they are dead before they even get released.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 21:17

The only game I've backed so far on Kickstarter was Uber's Human Resources. It wasn't as cutting edge as PA, but it was still fairly cutting edge, in RTT terms at least, if not in RTS.

I would never in a million years back a game that promised to be "as good as the original Command & Conquer". I would never even play that game. I played C&C when it arrived, and I played most of its predecessors and descendants. And now I want something more. Besides the fact that I still haven't put anywhere near as much time into PA as that game deserves to be played. It would be insane to put PA aside in favor of a poor knockoff of C&C in 2015.

About the only person who would be legitimately backing and playing such a game would be an RTS nutter who's played every RTS game ever made inside and out (which I haven't), and has also put 2,000 hours in PA and gotten sick of it, and since there are hardly any new RTSes coming out, he would play pretty much anything new in the genre, including therefore also that game. I.e. the JoshF or Macaw of RTSes.

Everyone else who put time into that game would be a HIPSTER who cares more about socializing on the internet with other hipsters about the latest "coolest" "edgiest" soon-to-be-forgotten piece of trash than actually seeking out and experiencing the best the genre has to offer.

You yourself would be busy playing the 16-bit masterpieces of your "chosen" genre if you actually loved the genre. And only once you had played ALL of them would you consider setting on the decades-long road of making something comparable, let alone better (after many, MANY iterations, and untold failures and sacrifices!)

But you did not choose the genre, the genre chose you (because it's easy to develop), and that's why you are here today, telling us that your generic 8-bit styled game looks like a 4/5 or 5/5 game in 2015.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 21:25

SriK wrote:I don't think "Steel Assault" isn't any more generic than names like "Gunforce" or "Giga Wing"


lol

The "Giga" in Giga Wing stands for the exponential scoring system that is the heart of the game and the main reason to play it (as I explained in the scoring thread), while the "Wing" stands for the airplane theme. It is a great name that sticks to your mind after you realize what the game is about. It would have been generic if it was called "Wing Assault" or "Steel Wing", but the "Giga" is where the class and the vision of the director shine out. He knew very well what he wanted to make, and it was a unique thing, and the name perfectly reflects that. It is your low level of experience with games and your bad taste that are the reason you have trouble seeing this without having me first explain it to you.

Gunforce is also inspired, to a lower level of inspiration of course, but it's still a new word dude! If only you had had the balls to coin a new word for your game! And the taste to come up with a word that doesn't sound retarded! (e.g. VVVVVV and so on).

Instead, 5-6 years from now you yourself will need to Google "SriK's game" to look up what your game was called lol.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 21:34

And the no. 1 result will be this thread, and you will come upon it and reread it, chuckling at how naive and inexperienced you were, with your head in the clouds dreaming of k0j1madom because a bunch of hipsters threw some crumbs your way on Kickstarter.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 21:44

Thesis: In a retro game, aesthetics matter even MORE than in a regular type of game (and they matter a lot in regular games too as it is).

Anyone care to try and guess why?

Recap says this somewhere too in his forum, and I only now realized why (he says the thesis, but he doesn't justify it).
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 22:01

icycalm wrote:What makes Shatterhand special is what it achieved AT A SPECIFIC POINT IN TIME. Achieving the same thing 30 years later is not by any means an achievement


And the most damning fact of all is that the amateurs are NOT EVEN achieving what had already been achieved 20 or 30 years ago.

Not a SINGLE game out of the thousands that the amateurs have churned out in the past 10 years since the "indie" scam began EVEN APPROACHES the greatness of a Super Shinobi or a Super Mario World.

Decades later, and with insanely superior computers and middleware and content libraries, and they STILL can't get ANYWHERE NEAR even MEDIOCRE games of the past like say Eswat or Shadow Dancer.

There is no reply to this damning accusation.

This is the requiem for the amateurs.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 May 2015 22:18

Of course, we are talking about Japan-dominated genres in which Westerners couldn't compete even in the '80s and '90s, when real developers with real experience, commitment, resources and vision were having a crack at them.

And now we have Western amateurs who have neither experience, nor commitment, nor resources or talent or vision, so of course they are going to do even worse lol. A shitload worse of course!

I mean, the Western amateurs today are not even reaching Earthworm Jim and Donkey Kong Country levels of achievement (and those are mediocre games). In Japan, meanwhile, there IS the occasional amateur who reaches a decent level with their games. Plenty of doujin sidescrollers are 3/5, and if Josh is to be believed, there may even be a couple of 4/5 or 5/5 ones out there that deserve to be played extensively and be reviewed in depth and hyped for everyone to hear about.

And then you have companies like Dracue and Astro Port that began as amateurs and have now reached a level where they are putting out quality that can claim 4/5 ratings (i.e. a genuine RECOMMENDATION to make space for that game in your to-play list, at least if you enjoy the genre) and compete with most anything made in the past by the companies that used to dominate these genres (all of them Japanese, of course).

Meanwhile teenagers like SriK not only do not have any mentors or surrounding culture in which to learn about how such games are made, but do not even care enough about these genres to look up the best games in it and play them!

SriK has played nothing! He knows more about "indie" games than about real games! The most he will do is namedrop 8-bit games as if they mattered! And he wants to beat the Japanese in their own genres in his spare time in the summer!

Unbelievable attitude and ignorance! Simply unbelievable! And hence the wretched results and raging hipsterism culture that utterly dominates this little niche of the gaming landscape.
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