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Thoughts About Future LD’s – Where Time is Better Spent
I like to make platformers now and then. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that they require a great deal of artwork. Developing Evening, I spent a solid three or four hours on just the artwork for the terrain and three or four more for sprites of the girl.
That’s time not spent on gameplay, time not spent on levels, time not spent on making it fun to play.
That’s just not good when you’re working in a 48h/72h time limit.
I’m thinking that from here I’ll probably be making less animation-intensive things. Not necessarily art-light games, but games with a lower art-to-content ratio.
Shumps come to mind, as do (very simple) strategy games. As well as puzzle games. But not platformers and certainly not fighting games.
Just some thoughts I had.
Peace
— Mr. Dude
I played your game, and it’s probably one of the most animation-intensive games I’ve played this LD. And much as the animations aren’t bad, they don’t make it any better a game than the simple platformer that it is. So, yes, you may want to try an approach that requires less art for each element of your games.
However, I don’t think this restricts your choice of genre as much as you suggest it might. In the last couple of weeks I’ve played and enjoyed many platformers that had the character as nothing more than a circle or box (and some even managed to infuse these simple characters with personality). With fighting games it’s harder to find a way of avoiding having many animations, since the animations usually suggest important information about the range and power of moves; nonetheless, fighting games aren’t impossible if you pick your battles wisely with what the character is and how they fight.
Saying that, yes, constraints on time to do art will affect what games you can make – but constraints breed creativity! When I started making my game for this LD, I didn’t imagine my main character to be an ‘X’ key, but ending up with such a simple character opened up new avenues of symbolism in the game’s events. In my case good art is more of a can’t-do than a won’t-do, but I think the theory still holds.