In this post (http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=30850#post30850) Steve talks about the positives and negatives of publishing other titles. One of the negatives he mentioned was something I’ve been mulling over in my mind the past week...

Originally posted by Dexterity

- Product line loses some homogeneity (clashing styles from various developers as opposed to a common "house style")


Mostly I've been wondering about the impact of having disparate art styles across titles from a single developer. I don't think there are any hard and fast answers as to the impact of having games that all have different production values and qualities.

I was reading the Disney source book for "Art of Mulan" and I was impressed at how they were able to take the designs of artists with very dissimilar styles (from traditional Chinese painting, to very modern impressionistic styles) and come up with a unified, balanced, cohesive style that 100's of animators then adhered to, to produce a film that looked like it might have been drawn by one person. It really was impressive to see the impact of art direction at that scale.

Then I think of some of my favorite companies, Blizzard protects their "look" with vigilance. So much as to cancel an nearly completed game (Warcraft Adventures) because it didn't live up to their standards for look and feel. I'm sure there were lots of reasons but they one they give is that it "did not live up to blizzard standards".

You have the games at Monolux, who to Hanfords credit, have a very strong "house style".

MikeB's games do a pretty good job of preserving a certain level of production values that is persistent across all his titles.

And you can spot a Hamumu game pretty easily.

What seems most apparent at the surface is that it is easier to sell to your existing (satisfied) customers if you continue to produce games that look and feel familiar to them.

There has been a lot of talk lately with the Pyrogon postmortem etc. about the state of the market, and the mad rush to puzzle games. How customers are becoming more discerning about the game they choose to play. These things make me wonder, what are the long term costs of looking like a "portal site" with games of all different shapes and sizes, or being something distinct like Monolux? When you think about the long term implications 5-10? Years, how would a "branded" look and feel affect your companies business?

Also how do indie's achieve a uniform look and feel across their games? So far the most cost effective and reliable way is to have the developer do their own art. But as competition increases production values for downloadable games in almost all categories has dramatically increased.

I could blather on because I really don’t have any answers, only thoughts and questions. I just want to see what thoughts others have on the subject.

Best way to preserve unity of art style would be employing one artist for all/most of your projects. Artists usually DO have one specific style and its pretty hard to change the style, actually.

If its not really possible to chain one particular person for whatever reason, you should revise your previous titles and make small "Art Bible" of your company. What do you think the significant colors are, how realistic, cartoony style is. Take references from outside (cartoons, pics, paintings). How abstract is the feeling. Etc.

This way, upon hiring new artist, you havent worked before, you can present some general guidelines to him already.

But the best way would be using services of one particular person. If he/she is not aviable, most likely he is able to point you in direction of similar artist as well.

I suspect that having a consistent style for all of your games is fairly important for finding and keeping loyal customers. For instance, I remember visiting a certain indie's site a while ago and thinking, "Man, these guys don't have any focus." While most of their games had high production values, no two of them had the same "look and feel," which, for me, indicated that even if I liked one of their games, I probably wouldn't like any of the others because they were too different from each other. On the other hand, looking at Silver Creek's offerings, I'm confident that if I like one of their card games, I stand a good chance of liking their other games, too.

Now, with that said, I think it's possible to get away with having different styles across your product line, but you will probably have a harder time attracting repeat business. In some cases, it might even be beneficial to have a variety of styles: eg., if one of your releases is a flop, it's probably best if fewer associations are made between the flop and your other titles.

Well you might not need to do the grunt work yourself, but at least do the design yourself.


You SHOULD beable to point to your old game and say "make it look like this and heres some new designs I've come up with that might work for this new stuff you will need"


Basicly unless your 1st artist is Thomas Kinkade, ( and maybe if it is) you should beable to hire folks that can mimic the style.

I was reading or watching some thing on the makeing of AOE, and they basicly have people that come up with the look, and the grunts use that as a guide to keep it all unified.

SOMEONE needs to have the vision though. The Director.

Either be a good artist yourself (yeah, real helpful advice there), or form a full partnership with a good artist. In other words, make the art production a core part of your team.

So many developers come from a purely coding background and simply contract out their art production wherever necessary. Now, I wonder, what is stopping an ARTIST forming a company, and simply contracting out the coding work...? There's lots of coders out there looking for jobs (I know - they send me their CVs from time to time!)

You know, I think in many ways, it could actually be more successful (if they knew what they were doing, that is).

So get an artist on board now! The days of mediocre programmer art are pretty much over, and from what I hear, it can be a difficult and frustrating exercise to get consistent, reliable art production when you outsource. The lesson is, that having a good artist in the core of your team is as essential as having a good programmer.

doh, Kerchen we're posting at the same time. Thanks for the Consistancy vote! :)

Our latest game in the works is probably a test of our cross genre look stablity.

I tried to depart from the Hardwood Style folks have grown to love, to slide into a new area yet stay grounded in that same universe.



Did I succeed? It's hard for me to tell from inside the fishbowl

www.dangerousmines.com


I suppose in a bit hipocritcal of me to talk about how you can just get some artist to "do it", since I've been so stuck on doing my own stuff. It's just that I know it's done though.

Ofcourse, bringing in art assets from other projects will certainly help keep a congruent element between them. SO perhaps thats one way to accomplish the task Dan.

Tiz a good point Anthony, The director of a movie ( the visionary) doesn't build the set or setup the lighting himself.

The stucture HAS to be done but in the end of the day, most customers aren't gonna care how slick you optimised that chunk of code.

Just like most movies the only folks people rememer are the stars and sometimes the director.

We all need to be good visonaries, not just programmers or really even pixel Pushers.

Then that vision could transend any individual game project.

Quentin Tarantino might be an example, his movies all have his vison in them. You don't need to see his name to know he was involved. But he didn't do it all himself, he had people help him create those products.

PS. Sorry Dan for monopolizing this thread, it's just somting I find interesting :)

Originally posted by kerchen
I suspect that having a consistent style for all of your games is fairly important for finding and keeping loyal customers. For instance, I remember visiting a certain indie's site a while ago and thinking, "Man, these guys don't have any focus." While most of their games had high production values, no two of them had the same "look and feel," which, for me, indicated that even if I liked one of their games, I probably wouldn't like any of the others because they were too different from each other. On the other hand, looking at Silver Creek's offerings, I'm confident that if I like one of their card games, I stand a good chance of liking their other games, too.


Was that indie retro64.com? I like to create different styles for each game, otherwise I get bored :)

Originally posted by Mike Boeh
Was that indie retro64.com? I like to create different styles for each game, otherwise I get bored :)

Heh. No, it wasn't retro64, but the name of the indie in question escapes me at the moment. Actually, I'd say that your games have a fairly consistent style (with perhaps the exception of Z-Ball). I can't put my finger on it, but there's a common element running through all your screenshots that make them look like they belong together, even though they are very different games. Strange, indeed. :)

Originally posted by Anthony Flack

So many developers come from a purely coding background and simply contract out their art production wherever necessary. Now, I wonder, what is stopping an ARTIST forming a company, and simply contracting out the coding work...?

I've always wondered about that too. That would just rule!

pat.

Haha, no jonas your comments are appreciated.

I think your new game still looks very "Silver Creek" not necessarily hardwood but you can see a similar look at feel to things, the color choice, the way things highlight. This sort of luxurious look and feel, it's quite nice.

I have a great artist for Katsu's Journey, however he is a full time indie artist and has a lot of concurrent projects, so it can be tough to get his full attention at times. When you have it though, he puts out amazing stuff. But what happens if my next game is 3D? My current artist is a 2d pixel artist. Blizzard did an amazing job of transitioning the Warcraft franchise to 3D. It was still very obviously a blizzard title.

I agree that there needs to be direction in the art department. In the end I think Indies’ will need to acquire the skills to manage artists. I find it's pretty rare that a developer finds a great artist that they can work with across multiple titles and even if they did, what if that artist got hit by a bus? They would have to find a replacement with a similar style, or acquire art direction skills to be able to communicate to artists what needs to be done.

This is a non trivial task however, I'm an ok drawer and pixeler, but I find it very difficult to try to emulate someone else’s style. Especially if it's a style that is more complex then my own, or is based on artistic experience I just don’t have. Things like color choice are critical, but for me that skill is still guess and check, I just haven’t done it enough to be able to visualize what I want and create it. I would have a very hard time communicating that to an artist and expecting them to be able to re-produce what I want.

When Dexterity.com launches a new game it increases sales on all their titles, but launching Rocknor's Donut Factory (http://www.dexterity.com/rocknors-donut-factory/) caused sales of Rocknor's Bad Day (http://www.dexterity.com/rocknors-bad-day/) to increase in sales too, disporportionally so compared to Dexterity's other titles (according to Steve).

Although both games are completely different with totally different styles of play, they have a lot in common:

Rocknor (in the title and in the gameplay)
Art style
Music style
Writing style
The World

Plus the full version of Rocknor's Donut Factory actually replaces the "get the full version" buttons in the free version with "get Rocknor's Bad Day" and links over to RBD's page on Dexterity.com.

I'm of the opinion that the game's look & feel elements influence customers more than the brand "Monolux" itself does. And hearing that RDF's launched caused a disporportionate spike in RBD's sales enforces that theroy.

Just wait till you see the art style in my next game!

~Hanford

Now, I wonder, what is stopping an ARTIST forming a company, and simply contracting out the coding work...?

Nothing's stopping me, really :)

I've always wondered about that too. That would just rule!

Pat, I'll hire you for my next game ;)

Well there you go!

A few years ago I was an artist who couldn't code - now I'm an artist who can code, and although I know there are stacks of better, more qualified, more knowledgeable, more experienced coders on these boards than me, I think the fact that I can take care of the art side puts me in a stronger position than many of those much better coders - particularly when it comes to building a brand.

What I'm saying is, if you DON'T have it, you really NEED to get together with someone who does. Certainly you'd want to be more than just a good programmer these days... but if you were also a great game designer, or had terrific marketing skills, I'm sure you'll stay in demand. Otherwise, you might just end up another one of rhm's contract coders one day...

Hey, prehaps consider marrying an artist?


but there's a common element running through all your (Mike Boeh's) screenshots that make them look like they belong together, even though they are very different games.

I always thought so too. You might say you change your style, but somehow, it's still your style, and I think you DO have one, despite your protestations. And it's not a bad one, either.


I'm of the opinion that the game's look & feel elements influence customers more than the brand "Monolux" itself does.
...Just wait till you see the art style in my next game!


I'm of that opinion, too. It's a very distinctive style, and it's also a really lovely and appealing style which I like very much. You're another one who has absolutely no problems in this department. But now I'm curious as to what the next one's gonna look like...

I think Twilight certainly lacks consistency of style and gameplay from game to game. We have arcade games, puzzle games, board games... basically we just make whatever we want to make. Despite that we have certain customers who more or less just buy every game we put out. So perhaps there's some consistency there none the less. Still it's certainly reasonable that it would be easier to sell a logic game to a fan of aargon than it would to sell that person a shoot em up.

Well, I think what goes for Monolux goes for most game companies. It takes a long time to build up solid brand reconition and loyalty, and even then look & feel still carry over customers across titles (that's how I interpet the RDF release, anyway).

I do have to say though that I think simply not having an ugly game is more important that consistent look and feel. Steve, all your games look good, and I think simply having good looking games does wonders for carry-over sales. There are some really ugly looking games out there.

~Hanford

ps: Thanks for the compliments, Anthony. Means a lot to me coming from you ... your games have incredible art style!

Dan, what you should do is have your artist make those referance images to guide any future hired artists. This is an anchor point that they can expand from.

This might even look better that what you would actully repent it in the current game. For example, The Link we say in the old games, and the Link we see in the new games is still Link. It's a little green Robin Hood looking guy with a Sheild and Sword. How that was repesented in the 1st games was primitive, but the essence of link still remains till this day.

So thats what your artist would do. Record the core concepts with image drafts, ect. They can even come up with set of palette images that the future artists would use as a guide for color schemes.

The color picker tool does wonders when trying to get a sample of the right color from prior artwork you've had done.

From what I've seen of your game, it stays true to an established style which seems like it would help when it comes to finding other artists to take over.

You just need to stick to your guns and not let them stray far from the most importants visual aspects. Artists want to express themselfs, we are a tempermental lot and want to do stuff out way. But that isn't allways in the best interest of keeping that constistant look between projects.

Try to use that where it's adventagous, but remember the golden rule.

" He who has the gold makes the rules"

:)

You WANT me to hate you dont you :))

Its a pain in the ass being a lone coder to be honest. I'm used to working with an artist sat behind me and us working as a team. Thats the main thing I miss about mainstream development.

I can afford to pay for artwork, but it feels so cheap doing that, not like its a partnership. I'd much rather partner with someone who had vision and an eye for art.

But lets face it, how likely is it that I'll find a non-flaky artist who does great work, really fast and doesnt mind taking a risk by working without money for the first game or two??

Bleh.. 15 years ago I had a friend who was like this, but of course we all messed about and he went off to work at epic.

Git.

Sod.

Bugger.