Jeff Vogel - Why all Our Games Look Like Crap
 

Jeff Vogel has written a piece on why his games look as they do.

The editorial goes on by Jeff talking about why he thinks his games, and especially Queen's Wish, do not look like crap and why he does what he does.

More information.

At least he admits it…but seriously. I could be mean and say something like, "so he is justifying mediocrity, at least in the graphics department of his games". But I won't. (ok, so I did a "Trump-ism", saying something mean, and then saying that I won't say it) :p

Anyway, I get it. He is happy with his little niche. I'm sure his fans will keep buying his games (retreads?) as long as he keeps churning them out. And I will continue to be a non-buyer, unless I see (major) improvements in the graphics department. My 2 cents. ;)

Definitely NOT generational. I grew up with the same thing. I even loved Atari's Adventure, but playing it today sounds crazy to me. Maybe once to see if I can still get through the mazes right the first time, then one quick dance with the Magic Dot for old times' sake and I would be done. There's just so little to the game! Most of the fun came in finding glitches - even back then, playing the game as intended got old in about 4 hours.

I wonder… instead of going for more graphics, what about less? "Nothing can match the resolution of your own imagination!" Isn't that what Infocom said? Would it be better to dump the graphics completely and do a text adventure?

I think the fact that each of his highly questionable arguments is marked as “LESSON” is quite telling… It all strikes me as a bit of a humblebrag, underpinned by a slightly snotty attitude.

Actually, I suspect that following his advice and attitude would likely not serve anyone well who is trying to break into the market. TBH, I think he got very lucky in finding a small, faithful following during the years of RPG drought.

I mean, the thing about his games is that they were fun. I haven't been back to his games since Geneforge and Avernum (one of the iterations of them) and they were fun to play.

Most games that appeal to that throwback sensibility do so with retro graphics. There are plenty of old games that aren't pushing anything graphically but still look fine. But Vogel games aren't retro - they were always ugly. This is sort of the ultimate test for people who say they don't care about graphics - there's a difference between "not good" and "bad."

But they were fun and for a lot of people that's all that mattered.

As for his dickishness… I don't know, I don't really care. He's spent 20 years catching shit, as an individual, for what he does - from the rise of the internet, as it discovered how much fun it is to anonymously dump on someone. I hope people are still enjoying his games and they're still fun to play, there aren't really many people doing what he does how he does it.

He has very valid points as a small business owner operator. If his business is able to make enough money to support his family from game sales then all the more power to him. In the last 25 years how many game companies have gone under by pushing expenses past resources and hoping sales would pull them out of the hole only to not sell enough and go under. I see it in my own business of farming too, farmers expand too fast only to have weather or the market go against them and it's hard times for the future.

Unless you have ran your own small business it's pretty hard to criticize the guy for being risk adverse.
And he is right being your own boss gives you a whole lot of freedom, if not money.

Sure, and if his case was that his games look like crap but are fun, that would be fine. But I find a lot of what he says here to be unconvincing (people that hate his graphics would only be satisfied by AAA quality - that's nonsense), and I think that if someone without his faithful following made a game today that looked like something off a 1996 shareware disk, they would hamstring their chances. I think sometimes one does have to take some of the business risks he gets away with not taking. (And, not so much of a risk when one is handed $100k of Kickstarter money to hire some help!)

From what I read in prior interviews and stuff I believe that he got mad because he once tried to please these people, only to find out that it is never enough. He's not a graphic artist and he doesn't really have the money to hire one full-time, so I understand him. He needs to make a profit. That's it. He knows that he would spend too much on actually good assets because his team is small and he is really not good at it, so why try? That said, his latest game looks shittier than the previous ones. It's a shame, man.

Yeah, it's the fact he's trying to frame it in terms of lessons and weak justifications I find questionable. If he just said that he's making enough money, and is happy plodding along without taking risks, fair enough - good for him. But I do think he's in an unusual position, and if others looked to him for their lessons - badly-done graphics, very little audio, and years of recycling - it wouldn't go too well for them.

I tend to think he's just flat-out full of shit. His kickstarter raised $98,992 for Queens's Wish, and I find it very hard to believe he spent anywhere near that much on the game.

Ghost of a Tale, a game I just recently finished, was crowdfunded with just under $55k. I know that wasn't the total cost because the dev had already been working on it for close to year, but the difference in productions values between that game and Queen's Wish is insane. On top of that, most of the work was done by a single person, and it was his first game.

Iirc, Legend of Grimrock was also made with a little over $50k. When I look at games like those, it makes Vogel's rationalizations seem all the more hollow.

This is nothing more than promotion for his game, which launches in September. He writes an almost identical article every few years.

Yea…I did like some of his games, but trying to justify this crap kinda annoys me. I would expect that in the years 2019 and with a crowdfounded campaign he would do something decent. This looks worse than his first games. I'm having trouble taking him seriously right now.

I doubt highly that either of those games was just made with 50k, that is to say, I bet the people who made those games basically worked a full time job with no pay to get their games made, for a year or more. I've supported a huge number of kickstarters, and a lot of games where things are being Kickstarted for under 100k, people are basically working for free, hoping that the game will payout when its finished. In the cases you listed above, I'm sure they did. In other cases people have worked 1, 2, 3 years and they get very little back. That maybe okay for someone who is young, but a guy supporting a family will think twice about going that route. He hired a sound engineer and an artist for Queen's Wish, whether that justifies the 95k or whether he got something worthwhile for his money (with the art I definitely think he made a poor choice) is another question.
Of the games I funded that were not hugely successful, well most of those developers I've never heard from again. I think the experience can be quite discouraging if one is not a Darkest Dungeon developer.

Well, I think Kickstarter is infested with amateurs and incompetents that have no business being on there in the first place. That they fall on their faces and go and get a job in Carphone Warehouse does not surprise me. Vogel compares well to them, in that he knows what he's doing, as far as it goes, and he makes damn sure he stays under budget.

I thought about this a bit - one thing i've observed over the years is that different generations have different talents. Jeff probably doesn't know how to use modern tools for making 1/4 decent graphics. I suspect the person who made Ghost of a Tale learned how to use those tools (perhaps friends, internet or maybe school) and has some natural ability to make the sort of graphics he needed for his game (it was perhaps the knowledge/talent that allowed him to pursue making the game).
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Sometime it isn't about a huge gap in talent as much as it is a gap in learning experience.
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I've not been expose to the tools to make a game and I'm unsure how quickly i would pick it up on my own in isolation (not a lot of motivation to dwell in that direction right now) on the other hand I have a friend who has a friend who teaches (at masters level) a gaming class that covers the basic in graphic production - so if you took his class you would be expose to those tools and part of the learning curve would evaporate.
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On the other hand I do know a *lot* about programming and internal design and could write a game 100 times more efficient than most of the ones we see hitting the market because those talent game makers know crap about algorithms and efficiency much less about internet efficency (ever dump the communication in some of these games - it is insanely inefficient).
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The point is that knowledge and abilities go a long ways in your decision process. It is often difficult to do things you don't know how to do but once you know how to do it it is trivial - and that gap can be as simple as watching someone else once (or a video these modern times) BUT it has to be the right person (or right video) because learning how to do it incorrectly (or the hard way) can be as bad as not learning at all.
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I dont know jeff or his talent level (ability to visualize/learn new things) but i strongly suspect that is part of the driver - he doens't know how to do better graphics - he reluctant or unable to learn and he is not expose to the correct talent pool (friends - inner circle - community) to learn the trick of doing slightly better graphics easily - and he can't afford to actually hire someone to do it for him.
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Another example - when I was in college I learn how to write an interpreter. The next semester I was hired to write a simple interpreter for an environmental monitoring system (you could adjust the model by adding cascading rule system). The work was trivial - it took days to add what they had spent over a year trying to add to the system - but only because I knew how to use the right tools (lex/yacc) and understood the inner workings. Without the course - something I could do in under a week might have taken 4 to 8 months and might have been far less efficient.
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The point is that it was easy work but for them it was difficult - not because i was particularly talented or smart but because I had seen a simple approach to the problem previously.
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I know i wrote a lot and it is not well expressed but I think what it boils down to is Jeff doesn't know how to make better graphics in an easy fashion and he can't afford to hire someone but if someone could show him an easy way to improve his graphics he might be willing to do so.
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Easy things are hard until they become easy and then you can't understand why others don't see just how easy something is because they can't grasp the short path and keep taking the long path (which makes it hard).
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The rest is just excuses to justify his current position. He has a model that works and he doesn't see an easy (risk free) path from where he is to where we think he should be.
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For the record I would like higher resolution in his games - perhaps grimlock or wasteland 2 level - not so much dynamic lighting but stronger boundaries between the sprites and background. I personally am not a graphic whore - i still find wiz 8 graphics to be acceptable but when it can be hard to see things at a glance on a high resolution monitor - then it becomes annoying (i do not want to pixel hunt - while pixel hunting is a game - it is not a game i enjoyed). zooming/rotation are added bonuses.

I agree with what "you" says. I work with a lot of programmers (both games and applications), and code applications myself. It is extremely common to find programmers familiar with one code-path and way of working, and produce utterly amazing results in their area of expertise, but be at a loss when trying to do something outside of their comfort zone (at least without access to someone who has trodden that ground before).

Indeed, from my own experience, I've honed my familiarity with various libraries (and their construction) over the years and can work well with them, but when someone comes along and says "how do I do xyz with abc-set-of-tools/libraries" I'm struggling.

Mr Vogel has a set of tools which work for him, and with which he's intimately familiar. His games break even, and feed his family. He's a happy guy (I hope).

Also, IIRC his lead platform was/is Mac. AFAIK there's less of a game-development ecosystem on Mac in terms of "people to talk to" and until the last 10 years or so, probably less in the way of Mac-friendly game tools/engines/libraries.

If he moved to (say) 3D games in Unity, he'd have a learning curve, and without people to talk with, and bounce ideas off, that'd probably be years of work, expensive assets (his large game worlds need a lot of assets), in the *hope* of increased sales. That's a pretty dicey prospect when you're self-employed.

I can't blame him, but equally I always bounce off his games and I really wish I didn't. It isn't *quite* "just the graphics" but rather the immersion and feel of the game that a better presentation brings with it. I'm quite happy playing old-ish Might and Magic games visually, but they're very different in style to Spidersweb games. I suspect my problem is that I find the games a bit "dry" coupled with visuals that are a bit "dry" that don't hook me.

So, I probably just have to accept that Spidersweb may not be for me, sadly, but thankfully for Jeff, he has a loyal customer base who *love* his games, but he won't be "mainstream". And probably doesn't want to be.

There's a lot of good points there about programmers and their skillsets. But, I do think one has to bear in mind that this is the software entertainment business, and that innovation and progress in the final product are quite important. Terry above made a comparison to farming, but I'd say there's a major distinction - if you're a farmer churning out the same thing year after year, that's great - that's what we need you to do. But, in the entertainment business, that's a problem - if you're essentially doing the same thing over and over, to ever diminishing artistic returns (and in some ways regressing from where you were 20 years ago), that's not such a good thing.

Vogel talks on the one hand about artistic integrity, and then also as if it’s an extremely risk-averse mom-and-pop cottage industry. I think there’s a bit of a conflict there. I have a couple of friends that work in the entertainment business, and I think they’d tell you that if you have ambitions for real creative achievement, then every project is a risk. If you want a nice steady job writing for a Channel 5 soap opera, fair enough, but don’t be surprised if you don’t get much kudos for it, and no-one is too interested in your “art”.

This is a thing I agree with to 200 %.

My dream is to make an text adventure one day, but I fear that no-one would play this these days.

Instead I get replies like these : https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea…=1#post6242237
But, okay, this was from a permadeath server the devs had especially set up …

Thanks to Blizzard who made everyone believe that Dialogs don't belong into RPGs.

I have enjoyed his Avernum games. I love the setting and it feels like an old AD&D campaign. Plus, he does reward the player that loves to explore. His games do have that old sandbox feel where you get your butt kicked and have to come back in five lvls to get your revenge.

The games play totally different but Avernum always seemed like an underground Might and Magic.

I’m not expecting his games to be beautiful but this is the first time he has regressed his graphics which is what is annoying me. I’ll wait for the reviews

It's an intriguing stance for him to take, perhaps not the way I would have gone but whatever works for him is ok by me. Personally I don't think his games look all that bad, and I was hopeful for some upgrades after the kick starter, obviously that didn't happen and now I suspect it never will. In any case, keep making games and I'll keep buying/playing them!!

Because he's complacent and has been so for the past 20 years.

I didn't claim those games were made with exactly 50k. I specifically mentioned the dev of Ghost of a Tale had been working on it for close to a year prior to the crowdfunding and that probably wasn't the total cost. It's a ballpark figure, but it's in the same ballpark as Queen's Wish. When you consider that, the difference in quality between the games I mentioned and Vogel's stuff is striking.

If those guys basically worked a full time job with no pay for a year or more to get their games made like you suspect, that only makes me even more impressed with what they accomplished and less impressed with Vogel's excuses.

His list of "reasons" could be applied to any indie developer and used as excuses in the same way. When I read through that list though, it's obvious he's just rationalizing. He's definitely complacent, and even if he wasn't, I don't believe he has the talent or the know-how to achieve much more. Therefore, he gives us stuff like "Remember we're a tiny company, like most indie developers." and "We Need To Maintain a Consistent Look".

I'm not trying to bash the guy. I just don't think he's being completely honest with himself and others.

The person who made Ghost in the Tale, Seith, has worked at Dreamworks. He knows a lot about how to make great looking graphics and animations. What he did know little about is programming. He had to learn that from scratch basically. He also had to learn Unity in the process. So, he is coming from a very different direction. His game was bound to look great as that is where he is very good at. Fortunately he also picked up quite a bit about programming and Unity to turn it into an actual game that is worth playing.
Jeff on the other hand appears to know very little about making a graphically good looking game and appears to have no interest in that either. I'm sure that if in all these years he is doing this, he would have spent some time on improving his skills in this area, he could have made Queen's Wish look a lot better.

I have no idea why I have to always bring this up before anyone else, but there's a huge difference between making party-based RPGs and single character games.

Ghost of a Tale, Underrail, Age of Decadence, Eschalon etc etc etc etc are all single character games. The developer does not have to spend time developing their engine for serious party-based mechanics, pathfinding and balance, hence they can concentrate on aesthetics more.

Now look at the party based games that come out by 'sole' developers… Grimoire, Spiderweb games, Knights of the Chalice, Legends of Amberland etc etc etc etc, every single one of them taking heat for their graphics and very little else.

I'll be happy to listen to the constant diatribes about graphics more when someone develops this elusive great looking party based game on a shoestring budget, but not before.

Yes, Queens Wish is a step down, according to first impressions, but it's his SEVENTEENTH unique game, I think that's the reason the 'niche fans' are willing to give it a shot and not abandon someone just because the people who never played any of those SEVENTEEN games are rushing to dump on him… YET AGAIN…

And finally, games like Ghost of Tale are not 'solo' games, just as Vogel's games are not 'solo' games, they are small development teams with one very dominant developer, much like how when cheap films get made, sure people will say "[insert director] made this themselves on a shoestring", but, yeah, other people were involved too. Games that are literally only one single developer and zero other people are for sure a different ball game. And even at this level there's a vast difference between someone with Dreamworks contacts and someone with 'economy' contacts ;)

As JDR said, I find it hard to believe that the $100k went to the enhancement of the engine and the graphics. If you look at his KS updates, he describes the typical Spiderweb development process (previously done without KS money).

If you look at the updates for the project, the development of the engine happened within that normal (non-Kickstarted) schedule, as did the rest of the development stages. So, business as usual. Then we are expected to believe that the $100k was spent on the graphics and sound for this? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it. :p You could hire two full-time junior graphics guys for a year with that.

I'm sure it'll be better than being given $10m to make a talking simulator that had zero connection to the expectation of the kickstarters.

Where did the money go? At 100k, as others have said, I'm sure it would be ok for those to be his wages. Sure, you could hire random graphics guys, but will they have a clue about how those graphics effect the gameworld?

If you want to make him out to be a fraud for taking 100k to make a game for his fans, please be sure that you were one of the donators before you complain…

Have a day off Lackblogger. You're talking bollocks about things you're clueless about, as usual.

So you didn't contribute to the kickstarter then…

Nope. Because I didn't believe he was really interested in Kickstarting a real advancement of his shovelware. Which he clearly wasn't. Why you think I need to have paid to have an opinion on the matter, I've no idea. But please don't explain, for Christ sake.

LOL.

Move along…

Not many will, for sure. Of course, not many played the original games, either - the market was comparatively microscopic back then.

Text Adventures UK has tons of them and even some sort of application for making your own. From their website:

I don't know what scale you have in mind (by "no-one would play it" if you mean you won't sell a million copies of it, you're absolutely right), but there's a ton of tools for writing text adventures these days and robust communities who play and talk about them. You just have to go to the right places. Here's one good spot to get you started: https://ifdb.tads.org/

Just posted the first hour of gameplay on youtube (permission by Spiderwebs Press agency). And just for you guys I made this one in english this time, as there isn't any other preview around yet as far as I have seen.

Nice one kordanor

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I keep almost trying a Spiderweb game.

One day…

Jeff Vogel is Ellis Studios except he got away with it. Had Ripper been on the job in 1995, he would have pointed out that every Vogel game smells like the same shite as the last one :biggrin:

Lol. No - I was very overtired yesterday, and not in the mood for taking any crap. I think calling Spiderweb shovelware was unfair (though I do think he was pushing it during the remakes of the remakes period.)

I don't think there's anything truly shady about Jeff. I do think this is not really what Kickstarter is for - essentially for an established company to get an advance on business as usual, which I think is the truth of it. To me, KS is about asking people to take a risk with their money to allow something to made, which otherwise could not be. I don't think this "kickstarted" anything, and I think the suggestion that it was to finance development of a new engine, and new graphics was… disingenuous.

He's no scammer though, and I'm sure he'll deliver an actual game, as promised. The other buggers are trollscammers (troll and scam at the same time - double your pleasure), and I don't want them getting their claws on any Watcher's money. ;)

This is kind of a weird line of discussion. Vogel never said that the Kickstarter money would be used to make Queen's Wish any more higher-production-value than any of his previous games, nor would/should any of the many screenshots shown in the campaign have led anyone to believe that was the plan. There was a line in the campaign that said "art is expensive", but presumably the reason he said that is because he needed new art due to changing the perspective of the game - not because he was getting higher-quality art. And there was no deception there, he provided plenty of screenshots of what to expect. The "professional sound" stretch goal was never reached. To me, the KS seemed more like a pre-order really, but a pre-order that puts a lot more money in Vogel's pocket, since he doesn't have to pay the Steam Tax on them, which is good.

Personally, as a backer, I figured the money was always going to go to the same place that (I assume) the vast majority of Spiderweb's revenues always go, which is the salary of the two employees (Vogel and his wife). They live in Seattle, a stupidly expensive place, and refer to themselves as successful, so I would assume their combined yearly salary (paid to themselves) is over $200K, probably well over. They've got 2 kids and property records show they live in a $1.4M house. The KS money is not some huge amount that would go really far.

Having said that though… I'm also tiring of his seemingly continuous stream of humblebrag / lesson posts like you said on the 1st page :lol: And I don't think other developers should follow his "lead" on, well, probably not much of anything.

He strikes me as someone who's too scared to do anything more elaborate or risky, because of the chance that it might upset the precariously-balanced apple cart he's got going on. Maybe he could afford to take some risks if he wasn't living in one of the most expensive areas in the country (and why? he works from home…)