How Close Can Indies Get To AAA Games?

How many games are pure procedural though? I mean take a game like DayZ, sure the initial terrain is probably procedural, but adding all the houses, etc, etc...Alot of work. But, im a dev and not a level designer/enviromental designer, so its a bit out of my expertise

 

I agree that using very simple stuff is a good place to start (ideally, just cubes or primatives even characters IMO).

Just remember, as you push the polish on presentation, each step forward requires slightly different approaches. New code, new systems, higher levels of detail.

The problem is that the better something looks the higher the player's expectations and the more that mistakes stand out.

Often times, in order to meet those higher expectations you need to add entirely new systems or completely rewrite systems.

Example Footsteps
Detail Level 0: Just some sounds
Detail Level 1: Sounds must match feet contacting ground exactly.
Detail Level 2: Sounds must reflect the material textures of the ground (so you need a texture query system).
Detail Level 3: You realize that foliage contact needs separate sounds, so when the foot hits a bush, you need foot+bush sounds. This should possibly depend on the foliage bending contact system.

Oh crap... and you really need equipment jingle sounds, and different equipment sets should have different kinds (leather sounds different from chainmail). So now all the wearable equipment also needs locomotion sfx.

Obviously this isn't a super complex problem, but it's also something trivial like friggin footsteps.

 

Depend on the source of the art, if you kitbash from existing assets, you have more luck with realism, because everybody have moved to the same standard. NPR artstyle tend to not works with each other, so if you are doing everything yourself, it's faster, but less than using ready made assets. SO in the end NPR can cost you more for the same scale just on the availability of realistic assets.

 

Its very hard finding good sounds if you do not have a dedicated sfx guy on the team (we dont). I hate most of our footsteps. These im pretty prod of, if you have ever stepped on a fallen chain link fence you know what I talk about

sfx team, another thing Triple A studios have that most indies does not. I wish I had the DICE soundcrew, ever since BF3 i would say they are king of the hill. heck, the first Dice battlefront probably had better star wars sounds than all star wars movies combined together

 

I agree although I think I kind of am coming from a different angle in that I see it like focus on all of that other detail first and not the graphics. Then if desired focus on the graphics later.

But I think just having all of the other detail in there from an audio and programming aspect will be the biggest bang for the buck so to speak. As far as creating the immersive experience.

And there are a few Indies doing this kind of thing.

For example, there are two FPS games that are focusing on packing just a ton of detail and scope in the games and using ultra low poly graphics. One even is using HD background visuals with ultra low poly characters and objects which creates a very unique look.

Check these out and I think they will illustrate what I mean by the audio and gameplay can style / shape the experience greatly.

Ravenfield (which has been compared to the Battlefield games)
Go to about 55 seconds to see the gameplay start.

I think this game kind of shows that basically whatever graphics you come up with even a combo of ultra low poly cartoony and realistic is fine as long as you keep the game itself focused and tie it all together with the audio.

BattleBit (I believe this was described more as a Counterstrike type of game or something I dunno)
This one I think they put more effort into graphics although still very low poly.

The point is once you have everything complete and working. Then a person could decide either keep the graphics as is or give them the same level of detail as the rest of the game. But it is not necessary IMO and with these games being very popular I think it is more than just my view alone.

In the end I think it really all comes down to what a person's main interest is. I am more interested in the gameplay and audio. And a big part of why is because I think audio is more important than graphics and certainly gameplay is and that combined with so many people focusing on graphics to be able to stand out that way I think takes a lot of effort and time. So I'd rather focus on the stuff I am most interested in, am better at doing and reduce the workload greatly in the process.

But for someone who absolutely loves the graphics aspect above all else I understand this development approach wouldn't fit them.

 

Depend on where you draws the line, most AAA don't model the house from scratch, they have tools to do it, same with city lay out, it place the house automatically and then you adjust some aspects, it's modular stuff strung together by code and adjusted by hand. In the case of Ghost recon Wildland, it's 90% procedural, in the case of Horizon, even gameplay placement is procedural.

PCG is a tools and on a spectrum, when you use tree assets, they are in general pcg generated, no game use hand placement of grass anymore, you juts paint influences and noise add details, most AAA have also move to substance and houdini to help generate assets, and animation, while heavy, is still supported by intelligent blending system to create new poses.

The difference between pcg and data has blurred long ago, most data are now just used as parameters to drive a simulation. And even when handcraft, people use module to assemble, which is the first step to tools and then pcg. House and building are very susceptible to be done with procedural, they are very structured in their composition.

The limit of pcg is currently the perspective people have on it, as long the first thing you think is random placement when creating an algorithm it won't truly evolve. Procedural is about implementing a creative "procedure" to emulate with rules.

On sound:
That's one I tend to forget about AAA indie level lol, I have no expertise on it and I know it's super hard, and even everything I say is true, then you will have a beautiful games with crappy sound, because I have no solution lol.

 

This kicks butt man

It's also kind of an example of what I'm talking about though - because you've started to add detail and fidelity, other problems become more apparent.

You've raised expectations, so now it's noticeable that the movement (even in first person) doesn't match the footsteps! Movement speed, direction, etc, all of these things need to be taken into account now.

@GarBenjamin That game looks pretty cool, and despite doing tons of gfx stuff, I am not gfx obsessed. Trust me, if I had an artist who just did all the presentation stuff - I totally wouldn't care.

The main problem is that I need to work with asset store stuff, and to make everything presentable - I need to figure out how to make all that junk look cohesive and good. I need to have some kind of environment and atmosphere, which is really tough to do without custom art - so I try to do what I can with code/tools.

My characters don't even have normal maps - but my world map is starting to really come together.

 

Do you think their market is the same as it would be with AAA graphics? Perhaps part of their popularity is from people who find realistic killing games a bit much and are actively avoiding AAA.. So I'd agree they probably shouldn't change an established style to 'upgrade' the look for realism. Though if it was an option so both types could play their way... Something to mock up and run by the users perhaps..

Thumper might be a better example of an indie title iterated to where I doubt a AAA Studio could have done better, though they might have been a little faster

 

Mmmmaybe they'd be faster, but given the content AAA studios tend to produce, I'm not sure Thumper would ever have gotten made if somebody pitched it at a AAA studio. Thumper is a game that lives and dies by its polish and tight input, and I feel most AAA games are a little more loose than that. AAA has really come to mean huge in a lot of scopes, which I think is a shame because there's a lot of talent at that level that would serve smaller games really well.

 

Me either, I was just comparing the resources, quality and attention to detail aspects of AAA. Huge scope is obviously where they decided not to try to get close to AAA in that case

 

We have added a custom curve to our animations when the foot falls we change sign on the curve. Then when the animations blend in the animation controller so does the curve, we then just look for a sign change and when it occurs that's a foot fall. You must make sure all your sound clips does not have silent padding in the start though otherwise you can get desynced footsteps. Sorry too much tech detail now

 

Ha ha. I get you. I need to spend some time reading my posts for "the message" it is sending. I type just as I think with no filter and I think sometimes I send the wrong message as a result. Not one to sit working on a post for 20 minutes and I probably should be. lol

I realize that many people here aren't obsessed with graphics but it often seems like the perception is that graphics are so much more important than any other aspect of games. And I think maybe part of that is because some people are artists and / or very visually oriented and I also think maybe people have just heard that a lot. Some of it I think is because somewhere along the line people have misinterpreted making a game look interesting as striving for top quality hd graphics. Maybe from marketing or something. I don't know.

It is true of course we know the game should be visually interesting. That gets attention. But that is not the same thing as striving for AAA style graphics. That is just one way to make a game be visually interesting. Just raw quality.

I don't mean it as people here all just love graphics & nothing else but I think sometimes the focus is too much on raw graphics quality instead of visually interesting. That could be done by the scenario depicted in a screenshot. That could look interesting. It could be due to raw graphics quality. That could look interesting. It could be some very distinct (although very simplistic) style. That could look interesting. And so on.

 

That's quite cool and perfectly hits what I was trying to just say in a post above about being visually interesting. Although in this case they made it super shiny AAA-like in a way as well. I don't quite get the game and am not sure it is something I would enjoy but it is damn interesting to look at. Actually reminds me of stuff from the demo scene.

On the FPS games... from what I have seen on YT videos Ravenfield is attracting a lot of people who play the AAA military shooters such as Battlefield 3 or whatever. But I do think the graphics style in the game could indeed make it interesting to other gamers who do not normally play such games. For example, I personally find this much more interesting than the realistic looking AAA military shooters. I don't know it just looks fun.

 

Maintaining it is very difficult, I created this originally in Unreal (for a test against Enlighten) within another thread and recently managed to get Unity 99% of the way there.. Issue is as soon as I placed anything else I did in the scene I started noticing issues with characters, in which I started working on SSS shaders and a slurry of other things to compensate..

Issue with me is I'm never truly satisfied and / or never really know what's "good enough", where do you believe this stacks in terms of graphics ranking? Because I could probably continue at this rate, although chances are it will slow me down somewhat.

Is this too much? Should I be backing off considerably? Is it necessary? I mean where's the line? Especially considering there's a lot of competition out there.

 

I think those are clearly basically photographic quality. No basically about it... they are. And probably better than many people's photos would be.

Clearly you don't have any problem making very high quality graphics. The thing is like you mentioned... keeping the entire game at this level just seems like you're setting yourself up for a huge challenge. And the important question is it necessary?

You asked that I know. IMO (and who am I really just one of many random voices online lol) no it is not necessary. Personally I think it is the style you are going for that makes it such a challenge. The photographic ultra realistic look. By its very nature it will require more work to make the scenes look interesting and not just like a photograph if you see what I mean.

I totally get this may be your preferred graphics style and am not knocking it at all. Just saying if you went for more of a gamey (is that a word outside of saying this tastes very gamey) look you could probably make the scenes look visually interesting with less effort focused on raw details and quality.

Let's look at some popular games...

Ziggurat This looks very interesting I think but the detail and quality is not the level of what you made IMO. However, the style combined with the lighting or something just works to make it look plenty fine for the game.


Shadow's Inside Structure


Here is an example of the fake indoor lighting used by Skyrim (player took this at 3 AM game time and posted on forum asking where the light was coming from... answer time of day does not impact indoor lighting... this is how they lit it lol).


Shadow's ground

Skyrim


I thought maybe if I arranged the screenshots in that order it would help the comparison to be easier.

Now do you really see that yours lacks in raw quality & detail?

Also keep in mind you seem to be striving for realistic everything... and I remember when you posted a screenshot someone once commented along the lines of where is that color / lighting coming from on the one wall. And yet Skyrim player is inside a closed building at 3 AM with no light source and look at how lit up the room is. Summary: these are games man not National Geographic.

And sure there will always be one of those kind of people who does notice such things and asks about it but the vast majority will not even think about nor will they care.

I think you could drop the overall raw quality down, focus on bringing more visual interest in other ways (some simple props, decals, etc) and have a game that looks great. The very fact that your screenshots can sit beside a very well known AAA game and look every bit as good (I think they are better as far as raw quality is concerned but again perhaps not on the visual interest aspect) I think says a lot.

But ultimately man you have to decide of course. I just don't see why you don't knock stuff out and get er done.

 

Is it too much?

Fallen Spirit Dev Blog:
Week 1: June 13
Week 2: July 7
I'll be expecting Week 3 around August 2nd.

I want to see some friggin game play already!

 

Speaking of AAA stuff I guess it is time for me to start analyzing this Uncharted 4 game to see how to approach it as a demake.

Looks like first scene is basically 1 larger long cube (boat), with 2 small cubes (people) on it, 2 smaller long cubes (smaller boats) with a few small cubes (people) on each and some very tiny cubes for all of the water splashing up all around. And a bunch of speech mainly just record myself cussing at the bad guys.

That seems doable. lol

 

Protip: Use capsules for the people

 

Well in another thread I mentioned using cubes. But you are right when I say cubes I am referring to primitives. So yeah capsules are fine.

Protip. lol

Oh man... big enemy cube just entered the scene. So that is one more.

 

• 4 ground textures (1 from viking village)
• 1 speedtree
• cubes for buildings, deformed cubes for roofs (2 wood texture from somewhere)
• textmeshpro (now free) for text
• water4 from standard assets
• default skybox
• post stack
• banner pack (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/19760)
• rtp shader on terrain

it's not mega polished, but it achieves a lot with very little.

Fog. The best friend of the under-resourced game dev.

 

I'm not sure using skyrim as a yardstick for visual is the way to go lol, it's 6 years old on the previous generation of console, with a company known for janky visual polish.

 

Getting serious Mount and Blade vibes.

Hurry up and release this thing!

 

Additionally, the example image was, I'm pretty sure, from some mod or something. Base Skyrim never looked like that.

 

I need to build some arabian cube houses and some nordic cube houses for the different cultures so the towns look different

I added forest bandits, sea raiders and desert bandits this week

 

Sure it is considering the number of people still happily playing it and this is from the Remastered Edition that is supposed to have upgraded art released in October of last year.

But even if it was the original... man the expectations need to be reasonable. lol I guess the main question comes down to what exactly do you guys expect? Do you seriously expect one man to create something that matches or surpasses Witcher 3? If so why in the hell would you expect that? lol Clearly anyone should know that is not realistic. Otherwise the team behind W3 must be a bunch of very incompetent and / or lazy people.

 

This is 2 days part time on unity

This is the current top visual open world games



It's not that they are lazy or incompetent, they are doing everything from scratch, the argument is that indie won't.

 

And when @ShadowK has a AAA game development company he may very well target the current top visual open world AAA games. It doesn't matter what these AAA companies are doing if you are not one of them. Later this year or next year there may be a game that surpasses W3 and the year after another one. Nobody with any common sense expects an Indie developer to put out this kind of stuff. Watch YT videos of Indie game reviews and you hear time and again "of course this being an Indie game nobody can expect AAA graphics" (variations on that). People are not completely dumb to not realize there is a difference between large AAA teams and one or two guys working in their basement. lol

 

You don't need any of that for those screenshots.


From some guy in Design Foum
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/procedural-worlds.398863/

Toolbox : Map Magic , SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens , Cinematic suite



Stick a character in that scene and run around with more grass.

It's all just generated. Looks fine. Nothing fancy. One click generation, off the shelf post.

@neoshaman - come on, you aren't really comparing that with Witcher 3's visuals are you?

 

@neoshaman you made that in 2 days in Unity?

I do agree that if @ShadowK went for this kind of more stylistic approach it would be easier on him. Right now he seems to be going for photographic quality.

I would say now let's see the game there... but with it only being 2 days I can understand there is nothing to it yet.

And I do agree that yes if @ShadowK (or whoever) made his entire game centered in an area like that it would also be a lot easier. And that is basically what I write about. Not wasting so much time trying to compete with the AAA and just make something that is cool.

It is one of the better more interesting projects I have seen in Unity so far. I like the use of the sounds to bring the scene to life.

Throw in some enemies and combat and / or some survival type of gameplay and this could be really good.

 

No I didn't someone on the forum did.

It's not a good example as in it doesn't represent the full scope of a game which is still a contentious point, and it doesn't have the good art direction of those game who know how to pull your eyes away from limitation and into well composed salient point. It also don't have the optimization concern of running on a ps4 and making the most of it.

But at the same time it show that the limitation aren't just the visual target.

 

He's running into the sun with crazy bloom in a field with tons of tall grass.

Crazy Bloom + Sunrise/sunset is novice trick (it was the first trick i tried to learn)

He did a nice job, I admit, but this is just asset flip running through tons of grass with a nice character model. It does show what a skilled person can do with asset flips though, many possibilities.

If he wasn't using crappy unature he could run at 60fps

 

I don't think you can do indie AAA without some asset flip, else I agree that's crazy talk, even with pgc.

 

I think it is more than fine to build a game around. The world seems alive... and yet strangely barren. Throw in some critters and such and that would make a big difference.

I don't really understand someone spending 2 days building something like that and not turning it into an actual game. But then again I just did a similar thing this past weekend as solely an experiment that I have no intention of turning into a game so yeah there is that. lol

 

I agree 100%. Asset kit bashing will be more and more of how game dev is done at every level.

Better than PCG is really top quality tools for making assets work together visually, unify textures, color balance stuff, move topography around. There are so many resources out there, if there were ways to unify the look or quickly and easily modify to keep consistency.

Basically like hacks for art. I check the asset store every month for new stuff. I really need a set of tools for quick & easy hacking UVs and stuff.

I was looking at:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/79171

It seems promising.

 

Wait till I start implementing my ideas about "circulation pcg"
I have one task and one game away from it. ANd pcg is qualified as tools!

And that game is all about custom asset creation and ton of small decision even after I had downscale it to the maximum. I might do a devlog to show I'm swimming in difficulty due to the subject matter and artistic goal lol. No tools nor pcg would help you when you don't know what decision to make.

 

@neoshaman if a person can easily (part-time 2 days) create a scene like that in Unity why do you think it is we don't see people completing games in a few months some kind of mini survival or mini rpg game?

Is it simply because they cannot find enough content on the asset store to complete a game and building the rest of the models (especially the characters) is such a workload they just never bother to do any more?

Or do they have such a grand scale in their heads that it overwhelms them?

I see something like that and think there are many games they could produce from it. And yet it often seems these people never make anything except more scenes.

 

This is truly the hardest part of game dev.

By far.

 

That scene is very generic and it lacks story and personality (other than colorful).

Generic scenes are easy to make with stock assets.

But good game scenes need to tell a story of some sort or make a mood (for most games). This is far more difficult. Again, if you look at Witcher, there is so much detail in those scenes. so much attention everywhere.

In terms of all the screenshots you posted above - this one might be the least technically impressive - but it tells more story than any of the rest (sorry Shad, but it does!)

 

1. I think there is the problem of specificity, if you have a given idea in your head, chance you can't find the exact match to your vision freely. That's why I advised rolling with what's there, ie do an inventory of what you have access THEN build a world from it.

2. Making environment through asset flip is super easy, you can look at speed level design on youtube and they do a lot in a short amount of time. But environement isn't game design, the actual cost is coming back optimizing and ameliorating the basis to fit gameplay and vision.

3. Level building actually takes time, ie populating the world with actual stuff to do, special events and encounter, you don't see complete rpg maker game finished too and they are many order of magnitude less intensive.

4. People focus more on the superficial ego building of making games (*cough* me *cough*), they have a VISION and that's what matter (all my trouble is sticking to the vision™), people who are just content to make game won't try to do such folly and will try to stick to simple games, because they are aware their vision might be too big, the failure of succeeding it might hurt. People who both have ambition and know how to put aside their vision have a high chance to finish big games by focusing on the problem, these people are rare to find independently, they generally end up as producer rather quickly. But that's a dramatic retelling that does not count people who never dream of such ambition.

5. Lack of planning and "production oriented thinking" toward solving problem regardless of how big the problem seems to be, ie being practical and not impressed, sometimes the big stuff aren't the thing where problem accumulate, scope by itself for example, is not a big deal (see no man's sky, the scope is literally infinite), understanding why scope is a problem (ie number of specific instanced required) is where you can start solving problem, analysing and categorizing the different type of problem can help produce tools or technique to alleviate the hard case and automate the easier one. Terrain generation is such a problem that used to be a big deal and has been solved, now it's about specific feature and landmark composition, if you pay attention maybe you can solve it.

The truth is how much? is there a breakdown of that difficulty, people generally stop at that assessment and do push the analysis further, that's generally my main criticism when dealing with these problem lol.

 

@frosted and @neoshaman I agree with that basically. I definitely agree it takes more than raw quality (your technical quality). I view it as a level of visual interest which I guess yes can be seen as telling a story. It's like those archviz or whatever it is called screenshots I have seen around here. They look great but I don't get anything from them. Not sure what the point is.

They seem almost sterile to me with no real meaning or anything outside of looking sharp. They do look really good for sheer quality and I can appreciate the work put into them. But I don't see how they fit into games. But maybe that is not the point of them. Really have no idea what it is even. lol They remind me of local real estate companies that have these virtual tours of homes.

On the making games part I don't quite understand why not take such a scene as the "2 Days Simple Unity Test" and turn it into a simple game. If they don't actually have any game ideas they can always default to Deer Hunter or something along those lines. With a bit more work they could make it a survival game. It could be this character is magical and during the day all of that walking around they need to collect herbs or something that produces "power" and then nightfall comes and dragons and other creatures attack and this character is the Guardian.

Maybe people tend to think in terms of complexity too much. Grand designs. There are many tiny games that would be worth making and playing.

 

I think this is it, really. It doesn't take as much imagination to make a scene as it does to come up with a compelling gameplay hook (or narrative direction - that's even harder).

 

Okay let's go crazy!

Let's design the production of a big 45h super boring generic rpg on the highest level to put in practice some idea and see where it break down lol, aka making list of requirement but before the actual design of the game, world or story. Ie let's design the high level formula first:

I mean watch these video intro and come back (the rest of the video are irrelevant)
stop after 1:20

this one to 1:47

We are producer we like formula, they are predictable therefore you can plan for them before even the content is out.

What formula do you want to follow to test hypothesis of production?



I want to see where it goes for the fun of it

 

The one that had the most potential for death & destruction. Which seems to be the first one. However it is quarter to 1 now and I must sleep for work in the morning.

And... just what I needed... yet another project. lol Can you build this out of cubes as we go along? That would kind of kill two birds with one stone.

 

I'm a little afraid to click that first link. But anyway my idea is to use procedural generation in TC. I feel like I've messed with settings enough to get a pretty decent algorithm that can create interesting and useful terrains:



This gets the terrain set up. Please note that the water is from a different tool (Suimono), so it can be adjusted, added or removed as needed. The thing of it is, the player will be able to pick a seed and much like is shown in those images get a different world. Then, the world will be populated. First by flora appropriate to the biome (different biomes will have different terrains, and different flora and fauna), which can be set up to populate based on such variables as flatness of ground, height of ground, closeness to other objects in the world, or even specific splatmaps. Then, fauna will be added to the world based on both biome and then the flora. That fauna will have AI routines related to the environment, so it acts realistically - a deer will stay in or close to the woods for example (I imagine this might be done simply by painting a "roaming range" on the terrain by setting some radius around each tree--clusters of trees would have contiguous areas).

Then humans will be added. Initially they would be inserted at places ideal for the simple, "living off the land" kind of jobs like farming, fishing, hunting, or forestry (I'm not sure what the name of this is). But those people will have needs, so other individuals who can fulfill those needs (like say a doctor or marketplace or general store) will be added. Thing is this will all be done programmatically, so all I'm doing is defining the algorithm for how a character of a particular type (Hunter, Farmer, etc.) enters and interacts with the world.

At that point the next step is to create an advanced AI with a number of attributes that define their actions in some situations (what a farmer does when coming across a bear, for example), and you have pretty much the basis for a simulation.

Obviously that's simplifying a bit, but I think the idea is sound: creating a bunch of logic and environment-based systems and adding them together and letting them create emergence.

Now since I'm quite poor thus far at game dev, and because I spend most of each day expending my "mental energy" on other stuff I haven't gotten as far with this as I want to. But it's a hobby, not a job.

 

You can propose other formula, it was just to illustrate that popular works use formula so why not? For example there is the bioware formula:


But yeah I think I will make some small easy prototype to test aspects, not sure if full game though, it's a production exercice after all. I want to see if people would bit into something that people don't like to discuss much, ie making boring list for planning lol, so there is a lot list, analysis and counting to do before something will run. Though we need prototype to evaluate stuff, for example on what metric to base encounter density? generally I use cube of 2m² because that's basically a "game" size smallest (shower) room. Base on that how big a house is in that metric (increment of 2m) what is the load of asset necessary in that space (ie how much you can cram in it), how fast do you travel that, and at what rate encounter must be (every x tiles) on average, and what are the minimal size necessary of each encounter (gives you a upper limit to the density of the world.

Let's push some other arbitrary number to lock things down:
- 15 regions on a 4x4 divided world (1 region is empty), that's the number of region in the last zelda, so why not. 1 starting area for tut and intro, 2 final areas (with the first being the fake ending that lead to the second), other 12 accessible in any order, 7 of which are mandatory to collect plot trickets, 4 are side contents, 1 is secret. That mean 3 hours per region (not necessarily consecutively), each region has 8 major events slot for story progression, ie 22,5mn per events. That's 120 events for the entire game.
- the entire world is 36km², aka 1,5km² per region, so we need to verify how big that represent in term of density. That's 225 tiles of 100m² per region, 2500 tiles of 2m per 100m².

The thing to do now is define what's the structure of a region, for example on top of my mind, incomplete:
- a major challenging place important to progress (functionally, the dungeon)
- a major town/settlement (to break down in term of requirement, aka services, plot point, etc ...)
- enemy diversity count cap (specific enemy, recurring enemy, "palet swap" aka enemy customized to the region)
- overall biomes and geography
- type of obstacle and traversal
- type of rewards and secrets

 

Insane quality there bud. I hope you have devs that can justify your quality!

 

I'll just say levels of detail is just adding stuff, I've created / collected enough art over the years to simply drag and drop but it went against what I was trying to achieve for those pictures.. Which was how good could I get a basic scene to look without it being a "lightbox".. The first one looks like stock Skyrim, the second one looks heavily modded.. Just as a side note .

So lets compare and contrast, below were some other tests I did where I'd gone out of my way to bring the quality down.. Literally it was a test of how fast could I get through it, we're talking no more than an hour per scene which in terms of making a large game it's quite critical you can get through it quickly.

As we're being up front here, that first screenshot I posted took longer than these two combined + making that entire game jam game.. Sure once I "got it right" I can use it as a template but it wasn't easy to get it to that level.

I look at these pictures below and I think to myself, it's "good" sort of damning with faint praise. Although it's a much more realistic endeavour. As @neoshaman keeps saying, indecision can be a major thorn in a project ..

@frosted, it's summer time buddy got a lot of personal stuff / holidays etc. to deal with. I'll crack on when the weather sucks again which is like 90% of the year over here.

 

@ShadowK you don't want to freelance for a VR game?

How well optimized are your scenes? It all comes down to that in the end, I see so much nice artwork on artstation, but often they are not practical because too many materials which boils down to to many set pass calls etc. But S***, that's some quality right there!

90 procent bad weather, a fellow Swede maybe?

 

The most difficult one to optimise was the one with loads of foliage due to using a deferred renderer, the screenie doesn't show the full picture as there's also about 20KM2 of terrain behind it. Out the box it ran about 30FPS, but after faking things like reflection (on the water shader as it was picking up the en mass foliage), optimising shader passes etc. I got it running about 80 - 90 FPS on a GTX 980 w/ an additional test of around 20 skinned mesh renderers.

Of course that was at the highest settings with the longest shadow caster distance etc. it would run far faster on medium settings..

I do the odd bit of freelancing for people I know, but I'm not cheap and I did work with a team on my original project a while back and if I get a demo done I'll probably get them involved again.. They are busy with their own stuff anyway, so it's not a biggie.

No, I'm not but I love the place.. One of my favourite bands is in flames and I like the scenery etc., I would be a happy swede.. The house prices were rather expensive and when I spoke to some friends over there they mentioned something about a waiting list? Also your beer's way too expensive ..

 

@ShadowK the screenshots I posted are from the Remastered Edition of Skyrim that has upgraded graphics. It was released in October last year so is quite recent. And they are better quality than Skyrim original had (played it on my PS3).

Anyway obviously your graphics are not the obstacle here unless it is the time required to keep everything at that level which is it I suspect. Actually I think you mentioned that too above.

I completely get that. People don't seem to understand me focusing on minimal simplistic super fast graphics and this is a big reason. Yes I could spend more time on something to make it better. I could redo an object 5 times to make it better. But that just means I then need to iterate 5x on everything else I add except for those certain things that just can't get right (and you all know what I mean... there is always something or more often some things) that take 20 iterations to look right and fit in with the others.

I've done that kind of thing in the past (many years ago) and refuse to go down that road again. It was a time where I never completed anything because all of my time was spent on this one thing. It's like cleaning out the garage (or whatever) as you clean out one section then you notice another area that needs cleaning (it now sticks out like a sore thumb) so you clean that one and then another area is noticeable. Well basically this is what @frosted has described before. When one thing has increased quality it creates work to make everything else look the same. I'd instead prefer to downgrade that one thing and focus on audio & programming to improve everything.

Anyway sorry for the ramble. You are much better at making graphics than I am. The important thing is can you create enough content at this quality level to complete a game in a reasonable amount of time? Reasonable is something you'll have to decide. I'd be looking at completing a mini rpg in about 3 months with a playable area certainly being testable within a 2 to 3 weeks or so.

But I also don't like projects that drag on. I have had enough of that from my job... big projects lasting many months and even many years. For my own projects I like to keep them tiny (at best) to small (at worse).

I need to be able to make progress... see progress... feel progress... and for me that doesn't happen by seeing a list of graphics files grow inside a folder. All of that is meaningless to me until it exists inside a game world and I can interact with it in some way even if that simply means a big rock blocks my movement. Until the rock (tree, table, enemy, whatever) is in the game and "alive" within the context of its role I don't see it as done or having served any purpose.

Whew what a lot of rambling... lol

IMO you have a lot of room to lower overall graphics quality and focus on making things interesting by moving forward focusing on programming and audio to bring these scenes to life. That's the thing... an area by itself and especially a screenshot of an area is just so dead. To rely solely on the raw graphics quality to make it interesting yes it would need to be near AAA.

But focusing on design can add visual interest. And definitely bringing it all to life with programming and audio will make a huge difference.

Maybe try making some of these scenes in quarter to half the time. Set a clock and what you end up with is what you end up with. Then stick some props in real quick. Then add some audio ambience. Then add some programming to interact. Whether that is walking around, jumping blocked by walls, jumping through windows or whatever. Stuff to smash is always good.