Creating Masterpiece Games On A Tight Budget

[Music] it's not difficult to notice that in  recent years indie games are increasingly   beginning to overtake AAA projects in popularity  and most importantly in quality after all players   feel the soul in indie games which the developers  were able to put into them not burdened by   deadlines investors budgets or marketers but  logically it should be the other way around   well AAA games receive a large budget a large  number of professionals working on a particular   game and a huge advertising company it would  seem that they must certainly make the game   high quality and popular right on the other  hand Indie developers without a large amount   of resources for game development an incredibly  small budget compared to AAA games and a small   team of developers sometimes consisting of just  one person manage to create games that are many   times higher quality and more interesting  than their AAA competitors and how do they   manage to do that in this video I'll look at the  techniques and tricks that indie game developers   use to streamline the development process making  it easier without sacrificing the end result and   quality of the game optimization of development  using Graphics many in games opt for simple easy   to produce Graphics to save money this works  extremely effectively because it allows not   entirely experienced and professional indie game  developers to create quite nice Graphics that do   not require a huge skill set in 2D projects  a striking example of such Savings in game   development using Graphics are pixel art games and  in 3D games in the style of PlayStation 1 Nintendo   64 or other retro 3D console pixel art games such  as downwell use only three colors in addition to   simple pixel Graphics since the game was developed  by only one person person Ojiro Fomoto and he did   not have much experience in drawing or animation  his choice fell on a similar retro style because   it requires much less time and effort to recreate  and to learn how to do something in this style of   good quality is much easier than in many other  styles it is worth noting that despite the very   simple style the game doesn't look bad at all it  only barrows the technique of creating Graphics   from retro games but not their clumsiness  awkwardness and strange design Solutions   all aspects of dwell's gameplay are excellent  it's a pleasure to play the game the visuals   look Lush the character controls are responsive  and the gameplay Loop itself works great in case   of downwell we cannot say that the pixel art  style makes the game ugly makes it something   worse than a AAA game like God of War for example  after all the beauty of Graphics is not determined   by realism or rate tracing and anyone who thinks  otherwise is just simply an idiot ojiro photo took   the style in which he knew he could work and  made the most of it by the way even the down   whales genre ril like itself is aimed at saving  resources because for airo foto it was easier to   create a random generation of levels than to work  through a huge amount of levels one by one thanks   to this decision the game itself has become much  more replayable because now each playr is a unique   experience which allows you to play downwell  for hours on end it is these Exact Solutions   which solve several problems at the same time  without worsening and sometimes even improving   the game that allow indie game developers to  create a truly highquality product despite   their limited capabilities so as I've said before  in 3D Indie Games developers often also resort to   Retro or simplified style a good example is  games such as Ultra kill Dusk and Minecraft   yes Minecraft is one of the most clear examples  of an indie developer doing something incredibly   successful but at the same time Minecraft graphics  cannot be called a phenomenon or something   particularly beautiful even from the point of  view of indie games so what is the phenomenon of   Minecraft well many factors played a role in the  success of this indie game such as the Simplicity   and lack of games in a similar genre on the market  at that time but one cannot take away from the   fact that it featured a previously unseen gameplay  Loop and complete freedom of action essentially   the player was placed in a world and told to do  whatever you want it was this freedom of action   that led to the success of the game there are  many ways to play Minecraft some people like to   survive some like to build and some like to travel  around a randomly generated World studying its   vastness biomes and inhabitants I think it was the  gameplay and variability of Minecraft that made it   so successful and from that we can conclude that  sometimes and I would even say almost always how   interesting and wellmade a game is from the game  design point of view determines its success of   course the Minecraft developer also chose a simple  style to make it easier to implement his rather   ambitious and large idea using the example of  Minecraft we can see that highly detailed and   labor in intensive Graphics are not at all  necessary for a game to be a masterpiece but   how important are Graphics really and how much can  you actually save on creating them and this is the   question asked by the developer of the game called  thas Was Alone Michael bthl his game consists   of only squares of different colors and sizes  occasionally other figures and easy to create   effects such as Shadows or imitation of water but  there are not too many effects in the game and   all the tension and the entire plot is conveyed  to the player only by text music and atmosphere   Michael bthl pushes the limits to see if a game  with such little Graphics will be successful and   interesting for people also a lot is conveyed to  the player through cleverly designed puzzles and   in general well-designed gameplay puzzles that  carry a certain meaning a message after all   they symbolize the difficult life situations that  people face the game shows that such difficulties   can be overcome with other people helping each  other so to sum up the strengths of Thomas Was   Alone included the gameplay component of  the game well-designed levels as well as   many interesting mechanics such as for example  taking control of several characters but oddly   enough the most striking and catchy aspects of  the game are its plot and atmosphere Michael   bthl managed to make a wonderful emotional  game that consists only of squares and text   but at the same time raises very important  questions of social interaction between people   loneliness fears and how to overcome them the game  forces the player to use his imagination build an   association with the characters in The Game and  sympathize with them we can truly say that Thomas   Was Alone is a successful indie game in which  saving money on Graphics not only helped the   developer realize his idea but also made the game  special unusual in some sense memorable for its   Simplicity because I think we can agree that if  the game had too much sophisticated and detailed   Graphics the meanings that the author wanted to  convey would be lost okay we figured out choosing   simple Graphics greatly speeds up the development  process and the game can still turn out beautiful   memorable and interesting but what are some  of the smaller tricks that Indie developers   use when making games let's take a look at such  trick tricks using Hollow Knight as an example   as far as you can tell Hollow Knight is a Metroid  vener and a pretty big one actually it contains   many locations and a very large rich and detailed  world but if the developers hadn't used a lot of   glav tricks to speed up the development process  they would never have finished this project at   all for example the artist and level designer of  hollow night specifically creates as many assets   as possible that can be consistently repeated and  used in many places he draws them in such a way   that from a small number of elements combining  them in different ways he can create a beautiful   and unique location we see example of a successful  underhand technique here where by repeating the   same asset that I drew we cannot clearly notice  that something here is repeated catches our eye   or looks cheap here's a bad example of using du  at assets understanding this we can confidently   say that the artist of hollow night Ari Gibson  did an excellent job moreover in each location   there's a certain number of special assets that  are not used anywhere else and it is to them that   the player's attention is drawn in this way an  illusion is created and each location seems very   special and unique the player doesn't even notice  that many of the assets such as bushes and walls   practically do not [Music] change so just like  that we discussed some of the tricks that IND   game developers use to optimize the development  process of their games of course these are not   all the solutions that indie game developers use  but these are the main ones I wanted to talk about   in this video so thank you for watching  and I will see you guys in the next video [Music]   for [Music]

Channel: Rexent Gamedev

Views: 4,124

Keywords: indie games, game design, indie game design, gamedesign, indie game dev, indie game development, gamedev, games, game makers toolkit, unreal engine, unity, game maker, godot, game development, game design techniques, downwell, hollow knight, budget of indie games, good game design, game art, indie game art, pixel art games, pixel art

Id: w1q44u2keBQ

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2024