Quarterstaff - Tyranny-looking "turn-based action strategy" game from Obsidian's Matt MacLean currently in Early Access

[Roguey]

Because many retards keep screaming for rotatable cameras in isometric games, which makes implementing prerendered maps quite a hassle.

Josh Sawyer says that if he were to ever direct another game like that, he'd just have regular 3D maps with a fixed camera because the prerendered paint-overs are just way too much of a hassle (all the extra time involved plus the memory footprint and what that does to loading times and so on)

 

[mediocrepoet]

Yeah! Kick his ass Tyranicon!

Oh! This must be what people who are really into Pokemon feel like.

 

[Tyranicon]

View attachment 47353

Yeah! Kick his ass Tyranicon!

Oh! This must be what people who are really into Pokemon feel like.

I guess on some level people are betting on developers and creatives in general as some kind of ideological dog fight.

Too bad the ones with the most money almost always steamroll over everyone else.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Too bad the ones with the most money almost always steamroll over everyone else

Nix, them AAAA games aren't doing too well, last heard.

 

[Surf Solar]

Because many retards keep screaming for rotatable cameras in isometric games, which makes implementing prerendered maps quite a hassle.

Josh Sawyer says that if he were to ever direct another game like that, he'd just have regular 3D maps with a fixed camera because the prerendered paint-overs are just way too much of a hassle (all the extra time involved plus the memory footprint and what that does to loading times and so on)

It's a good middleground, but fuck it. Nothing beats the beauty and detail of prerendered maps.

 

[gurugeorge]

Because many retards keep screaming for rotatable cameras in isometric games, which makes implementing prerendered maps quite a hassle.

Josh Sawyer says that if he were to ever direct another game like that, he'd just have regular 3D maps with a fixed camera because the prerendered paint-overs are just way too much of a hassle (all the extra time involved plus the memory footprint and what that does to loading times and so on)

It's a good middleground, but fuck it. Nothing beats the beauty and detail of prerendered maps.

I think 3-d is now is getting just fine with the beauty and detail. Where pre-rendered maps have an edge is in terms of variety.

IOW, 3-d still requires there to be a limited re-used stock of "clutter" and prefabricated environmental pieces. Pre-rendered maps are free from that limitation, so the maps can look very different.

I would say that the pinnacle of pre-rendered beauty so far, which is Deadfire, still has a slight edge in terms of beauty over say BG3, but it's nothing to shout about, and the difference vanishes when you look at a more mediocre pre-rendered game (e.g. Tyranny) vs BG3 - again, the difference is more in terms of the possibility of extremely bespoke map options that pre-rendered has.

One might also want to say that the fact of presentation of a static framed "picture" with its own internal artistic logic gives pre-rendered an edge too, but to my mind that's cancelled out by the requirement to have pre-rendered maps be oddly constructed to suit navigability and clickability of points of interest in 2-d.

Plus also, the isometric view in and of itself is a weird thing that our brains aren't really wired to parse properly.

 

[Hellraiser]

I think 3-d is now is getting just fine with the beauty and detail. Where pre-rendered maps have an edge is in terms of variety.

IOW, 3-d still requires there to be a limited re-used stock of "clutter" and prefabricated environmental pieces. Pre-rendered maps are free from that limitation, so the maps can look very different.

If you didn't mention that 3D is almost on par with detail and beauty I could get your point about variety. But if the technical bottlenecks of handling the same number of polygons or resolution of textures by the player's hardware are not a factor, then pre-rendered is not inherently better when it come to variety. The obvious perceived differences in such are always the result of the performance benefits of pre-renderer assets and possibly connected productivity gains (if you can make assets faster, because you do not need to optimize them as much as for real time rendering, you also have more time to make them look better).

If there really was parity then the only variable influencing how much variety in the assets you can have would be the developer's will. I mean it takes the same amount of effort to do 300 different rock shapes and rock piles (be it via some procedural generation script or actually doing it the pajeet way) regardless if the engine has to do the heavy lifting or of it ends up on a "static" image. Developers simply don't give a shit and often for good reason, the variety of assets used for clutter and other decals doesn't sell games but it does cost money to make. Just today I saw a great post of an example of how for instance Bethesda doesn't give a shit about this, despite their tools and engine being perfectly capable of doing better.

Having varied clutter, foliage, decals and other little details in scenes is not necessary to pass a progress review and tick off the boxes on the minimal viable product checklist.

 

[sser]

This is released but the high-price makes it almost untouchable to curious buyers.

 

[Roguey]

0 players right now
1 24-hour peak
4 all-time peak 1.8 years ago

Another game made for no one, what a decline.

 

[Gandalf]

Does it mean the game is bad, too expensive or was it just badly promoted?

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Grauken]

Lmao, 25€ for this

 

[darkpatriot]

Is this just the work of someone really, REALLY new to game art design or a version so early it should not have been released to the public yet, because no professional artwork was done yet?
There is definitely a "too early for an EA release". At least the devs should have the art style decided on.

The staff and their linkedins are on their website http://genericlakemonster.com/index.php/about/

For a team with that "much" (well, it's not nothing) experience, this result is truly mystifying.

Clearly not a full-time project, though, at least looking at the linkedins with people having other jobs at the same time.

They have 3 artists and 2 animators. How can the game look so bad when they have 5 art people who work on it?

 

[Pathfinder: WoTR]

This is tyranny-looking in the same way I'm brad pitt-looking

 

[negator2vc]

Is this just the work of someone really, REALLY new to game art design or a version so early it should not have been released to the public yet, because no professional artwork was done yet?
There is definitely a "too early for an EA release". At least the devs should have the art style decided on.

The staff and their linkedins are on their website http://genericlakemonster.com/index.php/about/

For a team with that "much" (well, it's not nothing) experience, this result is truly mystifying.

Clearly not a full-time project, though, at least looking at the linkedins with people having other jobs at the same time.

They have 3 artists and 2 animators. How can the game look so bad when they have 5 art people who work on it?

Depends on the "artists"

 

[SixDead]

Lmao, 25€ for this

And that is only for quarter of staff, not full staff

 

[mediocrepoet]

Lmao, 25€ for this

And that is only for quarter of staff, not full staff

You should go bitch on their Steam forum about how you want the entire staff for that much.

 

[Zeriel]

Because many retards keep screaming for rotatable cameras in isometric games, which makes implementing prerendered maps quite a hassle.

Josh Sawyer says that if he were to ever direct another game like that, he'd just have regular 3D maps with a fixed camera because the prerendered paint-overs are just way too much of a hassle (all the extra time involved plus the memory footprint and what that does to loading times and so on)

Seems like an odd conclusion. I don't think it's true, but Josh has said many things that aren't true over the years. Fundamentally these games are just showing 3D models on top of a bitmap image; I don't see why that would take so much more time to load with slightly larger image sizes than BG1/2 did, and those load instantly on modern machines. Maybe they just suck at optimizing on Unity (or didn't try). Sounds more like another one of his endless line of excuses why actually the games he hates to make are bad.

 

[ropetight]

PoE engine was not using just one image for background, it was bitmap layers over some simple 3D objects for calculating depth and shadows.
Still, that doesn't explain the loading times.

 

[Zeriel]

PoE engine was not using just one image for background, it was bitmap layers over some simple 3D objects for calculating depth and shadows.
Still, that doesn't explain the loading times.

Yeah, they can do that. I suppose the question is... do you have to? Or is it just tech wizardry to push more dollars on a Kickstarter? Like, you can have baked in shadows or have it literally drawn/animated as part of the original image. The old Infinity Engine games do tricks like that; at the end of the day it's the philosophy of a 2D piece of art as opposed to 3D. I would suppose the more you lean into doing actual 3D tricks behind the scenes the more you're missing out on the potential of the artform.

 

[ropetight]

PoE engine was not using just one image for background, it was bitmap layers over some simple 3D objects for calculating depth and shadows.
Still, that doesn't explain the loading times.

Yeah, they can do that. I suppose the question is... do you have to? Or is it just tech wizardry to push more dollars on a Kickstarter? Like, you can have baked in shadows or have it literally drawn/animated as part of the original image. The old Infinity Engine games do tricks like that; at the end of the day it's the philosophy of a 2D piece of art as opposed to 3D. I would suppose the more you lean into doing actual 3D tricks behind the scenes the more you're missing out on the potential of the artform.

You can make complex animation pipelines with baked effects that look great.


Now mix all the variations that your party can have with different races, armors and weapons and how many different shadows you need to bake in.
You can have one generic shadow, but it looks much better if it is more precise, and since characters are 3D, you just use their projected shadow.
Then there is day/night cycle and weather, interior lighting, effects from the spells... it would be even more complicated.

PoE looked good, still does; it is one of the game strongest appeals.
If only Josh made his part to that standard.