What I would like to figure out is how much graphics is enough? When you are dealing with trying to keep a very small filesize for an RPG by limiting the graphics, what is the bare minimum amount of graphics you should use before the game becomes boring? The first Dragon Warrior (for NES) used the same graphics for it's castles, dungeons and towns... All three areas used the same tileset! Yet for its time that was a hugely popular game. The early Final Fantasies had a seperate tileset for it's towns, dungeons, and castles, Yet they often reused those same graphics to create multiple towns and castles. In todays time however would a game that followed the same guidelines of DW and FF graphics wise sell? When does this become too noticable and boring? What do you think would be the bare minimum of graphics to be use?

Look at the games from Spiderweb Software (http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com) they are profitably selling RPG's and they have very minimal graphics. I would probably start with their games as a baseline.

knowing how to deal with minimal graphic material, is a question of design.

knowing what your cards are, you should play with them wisely. look at dweep or solid spheres* for example. I can show you tremendeus amonts of puzzles on a single tileset and you wont get too bored with the graphic content.

by variating the puzzles and using the right mixtures of graphic elements, you will be able to keep the player satisfied and distracted from the graphic content.


*Both, I remember did have varius backgrounds/tilesets but I'm talking about "what if they had only one tileset/background"

Look at the games from Spiderweb Software they are profitably selling RPG's and they have very minimal graphics.

I just studied the terain tileset for the first Exile game and it had a surprisingly low amount of tiles... Their were basically walls and brick floors for the towns and purple stone like walls for caves and dungeons along with some grass tiles.

However this WAS their first game and back then a lot of graphics might not have been expected... I wounder if this has changed now? If someone was to release a game in a similar style as the first Exile. Do you think it'd have a chance?

I Also attempted to look at the graphics for the first Avernum... A LOT more... However I couldn't happen to find the terain tiles in the graphics folder... I'm guessing they are embedded... However they had tons of extra little graphics as kinda decoration for the towns and dungeouns.

by variating the puzzles and using the right mixtures of graphic elements, you will be able to keep the player satisfied and distracted from the graphic content.

That is a very good point. I just did a test and created a few seperate town and dungeon maps with the map editor I created and they all used the same tileset... The overall feeling of each map was quite different however, which made it more interesting to explore.

Thanks, you guys were great help! :D