Did we really need an article saying “I think this other bit of text might be written by a robot”? Of all the things you criticise Microsoft for, that’s the one to go for? Or perhaps it’s the other side of the coin, Microsoft unusually did something quite nice so the author had to find something about it to criticise?
Well, the game uses portable bytecode for the ‘Z-machine’ interpreter, and there are dozens of third-party interpreters for it. You can run these games on your phone, no need to compile them.
About the LGBTQ part: she was working at EA when she transitioned, and she recounted acceptance and support for trans people was codified in her workplace, in a time when transitioning often meant discrimination, rejection and even job loss.
People don’t always remember that EA were the “good guys” before they made bank with Sims and CoD.
I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.
On a pedestrian level, I’ve really liked the slow move from “SNES aesthetic” to “PS1/PS2 aesthetic”. My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.
Yes! For instance, say you’re making a character action game about big flashy jumping attacks. It took a long time to make the attack animations and now you need to provide the player with unlockables to encourage exploring, or some DLC.
If you have a 2D game, you’d need to do a LOT to integrate any new cosmetics, or characters, into your existing protagonist. But in 3D, if your character finds a hat, it’s very simple to just attach it to the model. Even swapping to a new playable character, you can retarget animations as long as proportions are similar.
I’m still not quite getting your point, sorry. Why would 3D make it easier to attach a hat to the character or retarget animations than 2D? That seems like a specific engine feature limitation and not inherently a shortcoming of 2D in general? It sounds like you’re comparing 3D to a primitive 2D engine where you need to manually draw and animate everything on screen instead of to a modern 2D engine with character bones, parenting, etc. Perhaps I’m actually out of the loop regarding the current limitations of 2D game engines and am thinking more in terms of a comparison between 3D and 2D animation software.
It might be simple attachment if a character is using skeletal animation, eg Intrusion 2. That art style isn’t used often because the direct limb tweeting is often overly visible. Often, most character frames are hand drawn or at least prerendered.
In these hand drawn styles, a character’s head could appear to enter Z depth as part of the drawing (imagine a 6 frame animation of a character spinning a sword like a top). When that happens WHILE they’re also wearing an attached hat, the hat must rotate and adjust for the depth as well - which means new drawings, even if you’re able to specify the positions of the character’s head during each frame of the animation.
We could be talking past each other with bad descriptions that need visuals, though.
I appreciate your more detailed description. I think I get what you’re trying to explain. It just seems to me (at a very shallow level, I’m no expert) that all else being equal, 2D should be able to do just about anything that 3D can, but more simply (with some exceptions, of course - trying to reproduce a 3D look and behavior in 2D would obviously be an order of magnitude more work than just doing it in 3D).
To your point, I’ve generally noticed that bone-driven 2D animations tend to look kind of janky, like marionettes, but I didn’t think that it was a technical limitation as much as just the animators taking a lot more shortcuts. In other words, why would limb tweening be inherently more overly visible in 2D vs. 3D? It seems that it would be hard to do a pure comparison that controlled for other variables, but intuitively it seems to me that in a comparison that did control for those 2D would turn out easier to produce content for than 3D.
Again, to your point, I can understand that if we compared popular hand-drawn or pixel art 2D assets and environments with popular styles of 3D assets and environments in common usage, especially across indie games, 3D could very likely come out ahead in productivity.
Sorry if I have dragged this conversation out too long. I have an interest in game design/development and game art and hope to some day get into both myself with some small games, so this is a topic that I would very much like to have a solid understanding of so I can make the most efficient use of my time.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Oh, absolutely. I was thinking more in terms of 2D doing traditional flat 2D views like side-view platformers or top-down views. I can completely understand that as soon as you try to emulate 3D with even something as simple as an isometric view it’s going to be much more work than just doing straight 3D.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
I can understand this too.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
I imagine that a lot of 2D games use these kinds of techniques.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
I see the points that you made to another commenter but SNES and Sega Genesis were 16-bit consoles. They were a dramatic improvement (and many games on them were the pinnacle as far as I’m concerned) over the 8-bit NES and Sega Master System. I’ll take well-designed 16-bit games over pretty much anything else.
Not necessarily. Minecraft kinda went that way, but Factorio is still independent, and they were both released around the same time.
AAA games are often based on someone else’s IPs (e.g. Tom Clancy) or derived from a successful competitor (e.g. indie games). But I haven’t seen a ton of cases where the indie studio was bought outright.
So it sounds like you’re talking about knockoffs and not indies in general. Trying to make them equivalent ignores that the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
Symphony was incredible for the time, but its difficulty was all over the place and pretty much becomes zero in late-game. Many, many Metroidvanias by indie developers have far surpassed SotN in quality.
It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I understand that nostalgia plays a big part in that.
One of the few game developers trying to write for the medium of gaming instead of trying to write a book/movie and slap it into a game. One of the few who eschews the three-act arc so prevalent in plays and films.
He really understands that as a different medium you should play to the mediums strengths and how the medium functions for storytelling like his attempts synthesize meaning between gameplay and story. Writing for games shouldn’t be like writing for books or films because while analogous they are nowhere near the same kind of mediums.
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Aktywne