Something I Don't Get About Indie Creators

[The Lawgiver]

I feel like we're both trying to argue the same point with different words.

THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING REEEEEEEE

Still once again though my point is that stuff either gets disregarded too much or over-focused on by people. I was trying to point out how either of the extremes seems to be the only thing the indie people do.

You seem to be using the word "connected" as in the games are connected because they all contain Link (or Sonic or Mario).

If you read my shit hen you'd understand this isn't even close to what i'm getting at! I'm not looping on this shit forever man!

 

[Grub]

THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING REEEEEEEE

Still once again though my point is that stuff either gets disregarded too much or over-focused on by people. I was trying to point out how either of the extremes seems to be the only thing the indie people do.

I only read your posts responding to me so I probably missed some of what you're talking about. I don't really get what you're saying about indie games. I thought this thread was about indie games just reusing gameplay concepts and not being unique enough with their stories. I'm not sure exactly what that has to do with our autistic Zelda tangent.

 

[Blue Resort]

I think the actual issue is that most gamers today are arguably not really gamers anymore. You've got the advent of online games, quantity over quality gameplay combined with the rising cost of living + the death of game rentals. There isn't really an incentive for people to fork out $50 or more for a unique experience when most games nowadays are designed to keep you hooked for hundreds of hours. I've probably played at least 100-150 games back in the day through rentals but your average zoomer / gen alpha will probably grow up playing exclusively minecraft / roblox and/or whatever game is currently trending. If those same people become indie devs, can you really expect them to make anything original? It's hard to iterate unique ideas if said Developer onlys plays a small handful of games.

There are still a lot of unique indie games out there, but they are getting increasingly harder to find in an industry that's beginning to drown in a slurry of slop.

 

[The Lawgiver]

I only read your posts responding to me so I probably missed some of what you're talking about. I don't really get what you're saying about indie games. I thought this thread was about indie games just reusing gameplay concepts and not being unique enough with their stories. I'm not sure exactly what that has to do with our autistic Zelda tangent.

Games tend to be connected in some way, but people taking inspiration from the gameseither over-draw connections or completely write them off as not existing. Both paths usually end up in some kind of pretentious shallow garbage shit being made. This is usually a plot setup/lore thing but can go further and affect gameplay and visuals sometimes. A good example tied to the zelda thing kinda would be Arzette, a game that's entire selling point is being "like those old bad cdi games but better" and the animation is noticably stiffer than the games it's aping off, which themselves were aping off of prior zelda title zelda II mechanically. To understand what a "good cdi zelda" would be you'd need to make the connection that the cdi games are similar gameplay wise to "adventure of link" and make the gameplay equally smooth/improve upon it but keep the funny cutscenes and not be afraid to make your main character look fugly as the cdi games artstyle instead of making quasi MLP looking stuff for the MC and have all the other npcs be the cdi ones. You need to know how to make actual connections beyond base level stuff but also not over focus on shit that doesn't matter if that makes any sense.

EDIT: more context for what I'm saying

Spoiler: Gameplay comparisons for the zelda shit

Zelda II, odd controls compared to other zeldas due to being a sidescroller, but speedy and smooth

CDi: zelda, clearly trying to do the same thing, but limited by the many issues plaguing the cdi games in general.

Arzette: stiff fascimile of cdi games, running off "remember the thing" ism but not quite capturing things. Somewhat smoother gameplay but it feels wrong for the kind of game it's trying to be.

 

[Grub]

Arzette

I'm responding to your whole post but it won't let me quote it all.

I get what you're saying. That specific example you posted just looks kind of shitty in general. I don't know why someone would try and emulate an actual shitty game but the results are never going to be good no matter how much effort you put in. I think the dev of Arzette just made a bad choice in games to be inspired by more than it being anything to do with trying too hard to connect with other games. That art style is fucking garbage whether or not it tries too hard or not hard enough to look like that shitty cdi game.

On a more general note I think connections between games and how important they are or not is heavily dependent on the game series itself and how the gameplay and stories have been told and iterated on over time. For example, I think the connection between different Metroid games is a lot more important than Zelda games. It would be fucking weird if Samus had just showed up with the Fusion suit in Metroid Fusion with no explanation and the game didn't mention anything at all about the stuff that happened in Super Metroid. Also, the retcons feel a lot shittier because changing things that have already been established feels wrong in a setting where it's been established that one event flows into another. With Zelda that shit matters a little less because magic and time traveling bullshit and most of the games aren't chronologically connected and even the land itself is different from game to game.

Likewise. When Final Fantasy decided it wanted to become a pseudo mmo or an action rpg, sure some people were upset, but it didn't seem too weird that Final Fantasy did that because final fantasy changes shit up from game to game. But if Dragon Quest 12 were to come out and be an action rpg with no party members people in Japan would probably riot in the streets.

 

[The Lawgiver]

I get what you're saying. That specific example you posted just looks kind of shitty in general. I don't know why someone would try and emulate an actual shitty game but the results are never going to be good no matter how much effort you put in. I think the dev of Arzette just made a bad choice in games to be inspired by more than it being anything to do with trying too hard to connect with other games. That art style is fucking garbage whether or not it tries too hard or not hard enough to look like that shitty cdi game.

I have to kind of disagree a little about "bad choice of games to be inspired by" because the concepts from the cdi games are tied to an earlier main nintendo console system's game that plays much smoother.

The cdi sprite art is actually really neat looking at times and there's clear effort put into it despite how shit the final game came out. With some tweaking it could have made an actually solid game and I'm surprised there's no emulator mods out there that make it play like zelda II proper instead of the janky slow mess it ended up being. There's also a brevity and smooth flow to things in the goofy cdi cutscenes which is what made them perfect for decades worth of shitposts online, and Arzette was apparently made by youtube poop people who should understand that the flow and brevity of shit's important. They clearly didn't though, because there's a lot of stiff motions and the opening cutscene from what i've seen just fucking goes on and on.

 

[Grub]

I have to kind of disagree a little about "bad choice of games to be inspired by" because the concepts from the cdi games are tied to an earlier main nintendo console system's game that plays much smoother.

The cdi sprite art is actually really neat looking at times and there's clear effort put into it despite how shit the final game came out. With some tweaking it could have made an actually solid game and I'm surprised there's no emulator mods out there that make it play like zelda II proper instead of the janky slow mess it ended up being. There's also a brevity and smooth flow to things in the goofy cdi cutscenes which is what made them perfect for decades worth of shitposts online, and Arzette was apparently made by youtube poop people who should understand that the flow and brevity of shit's important. They clearly didn't though, because there's a lot of stiff motions and the opening cutscene from what i've seen just fucking goes on and on.

This looks like if a low budget children's cartoon from the 90's was made by a tranny.


This looks like Zelda fanart made by a tranny.

I would say they did a perfect job making the game look equally as gay and shitty.

 

[skykiii]

With some tweaking it could have made an actually solid game and I'm surprised there's no emulator mods out there that make it play like zelda II proper instead of the janky slow mess it ended up being.

There actually do exist some sort of fan-made remakes or remasters or something, I'm not sure how much better they are though.

They only did the two side-scrolling ones... I'm still waiting for someone to do Zelda's Adventure, which is the one that actually seems interesting.

 

[AnOminous]

That’s how you wind up with things like Hazbin Hotel and Lackadaisy winding up as the success stories in independent animation. The fujoshis and furries powered them up to a level where they could attract wider attention. Ironically those same qualities will severely limit their appeal to general audiences once they get on that stage. It’s sucks; it’s totally broken. I’m sure someone who’s watching music and prose fiction more closely than I do could offer you similar examples.

I have a lot more hope about Tracy Butler than I do about Vivienne Medrano at this point.

Lackadaisy is quite simply vastly more professionally done, the animation matches the milieu, it's a period piece that actually pays attention to the period, including period-accurate vehicles and even guns, and the characters remain consistent.

Even the music by whoever "M. Gewehr" is is consistent with the period.

HH/HB at this point isn't even consistent with itself. And the characters are loathsome.

 

[chalkyresidue]

I have a lot more hope about Tracy Butler than I do about Vivienne Medrano at this point.

Lackadaisy is quite simply vastly more professionally done, the animation matches the milieu, it's a period piece that actually pays attention to the period, including period-accurate vehicles and even guns, and the characters remain consistent.

Even the music by whoever "M. Gewehr" is is consistent with the period.

HH/HB at this point isn't even consistent with itself. And the characters are loathsome.

I’ve only watched the first Lackadaisy preview that dropped a year ago. Would you say it’s reached a level where you could recommend it to people outside of diehard genre fans? I’m hoping for good things, but I try to keep my expectations low.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

I don't know anything about the modern Lackadaisy but the old Lackadaisy Cats comics back fifteen twenty years ago were pretty reliably great

 

[DeadwastePrime]

I don't know anything about the modern Lackadaisy but the old Lackadaisy Cats comics back fifteen twenty years ago were pretty reliably great

its been on a hiatus since they began doing their animation thing understandably but i am sure hoping they do something before the decade ends

 

[gay porn is the best porn]

Okay, so you're an indie creator, you could make literally anything you want.... and you decide to make something that is basically just yet another "girls in impractical outfits doing acrobatics while fighting monsters" type story that is barely different from the slop Japan has put out for yonks now.

The problem is that most indie creators are the least creative people on the planet and just try to copy whatever works. Right now we're seeing a lot of them try to copy games like ultrakill and make roblox tier japanese horror story game number 5778687576795. The obsession people have with japan and by extension japanese content is ruining western animation and video games. A lot of the discourse around shows like invincible mention the bad animation but the suggestions they make to imporve it are just:
>go off model to be more like anime
>have 10 billion impact frames + 60 fps
>enslave the animators
The funny part is these faggots don't know that invincible goes off model all the time, it's just that it's not obvious.

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

Why would you need $500K for an indie horror game to begin with? Just boot up RPG Maker lmao.

I'd say the most successful RPGMaker game was the Fear and Hunger series. The first game was a rougelike that took J-Horror and the Berserk Manga, and tossed it into a blender with the works of HP Lovecraft. The game also pushed the envelope for what was acceptable to portray in a game, which meant that Lets Players had to use a nerfed mod in order to feature it online. I think this is a rare case of a game being derivative, but being a success nonetheless because it knew that players would recognize the references to other people's works, so blatant were they.

The Kingdom Come: Deliverance series could have been a great example of an Indie developer finding success just by making a historical game that was actually historically accurate instead of portraying history as a Progressive's wet dream filled with enlightened negroes and gay sex, but then the sequel happened....

 

[The Lawgiver]

This looks like Zelda fanart

lmao that's literally just a low budget animation studio doing the early zelda games' artstyle with hardware limitations, it's really obvious with the noses and the hair.

They only did the two side-scrolling ones... I'm still waiting for someone to do Zelda's Adventure, which is the one that actually seems interesting.

That one was just a top down zelda but incredibly shitty photos as all the textures, wasn't it?

This one isn't quite as recognizable as a zelda game aside from the gameplay and names. The other 2 cdi games are cool to me because visually int erms of the sprite background art it's really close to the the look of what they seem to have been going for with temple designs in the old zelda promo art. the character sprites are just more HD remakes of the zelda 2 style of sprite.

Apparently I never hit enter on this message, but it's still important I think so I'll hit it now.

 

[skykiii]

That one was just a top down zelda but incredibly shitty photos as all the textures, wasn't it?

Admittedly I'm being kind of contrarian here, part of the reason "Zelda's Adventure" is more novel to me is because the other two are the ones that get overexposed online, so I feel like I've played them even though I haven't. And of course they're the ones that got the fan port/remake.

Naturally I'm gonna be interested in the oddity.

The obsession people have with japan and by extension japanese content is ruining western animation and video games.

I half-agree. For me its not the obsession so much as people take all the wrong things from Japanese media.

There are some things anime is good at. Emotive storytelling and action sequences for example. I remember watching the early 2000s Justice League cartoon but thinking the battles were kinda stupid after something like Dragonball Z.

And let's be honest, if you told me that Hikaru no Go was about a kid who wants to be a professional Go player, I might not think that sounds like an interesting premise... and yet its one of the best anime I've ever seen and makes playing a slow, contemplative board game somehow a thrilling experience comparable to anything Yu-Gi-Oh throws at you.

The problem is that people tend to not notice the technique so much as they notice the superficial shit, so we get anime wannabes. I remember even thinking that Avatar the Last Airbender was basically "American Naruto."

 

[skykiii]

I think the actual issue is that most gamers today are arguably not really gamers anymore. You've got the advent of online games, quantity over quality gameplay combined with the rising cost of living + the death of game rentals. There isn't really an incentive for people to fork out $50 or more for a unique experience when most games nowadays are designed to keep you hooked for hundreds of hours. I've probably played at least 100-150 games back in the day through rentals but your average zoomer / gen alpha will probably grow up playing exclusively minecraft / roblox and/or whatever game is currently trending. If those same people become indie devs, can you really expect them to make anything original? It's hard to iterate unique ideas if said Developer onlys plays a small handful of games.

There are still a lot of unique indie games out there, but they are getting increasingly harder to find in an industry that's beginning to drown in a slurry of slop.

Its funny I missed this response, because it actually does touch on something I feel is a problem... well, more than "touch on." You said it: a lot of modern creators have very few experiences.

And it's something that worries me, and probably contributes to the problem I've been going on about. Like it or not, most "creators" aren't really creative--humanity usually can't have an idea that's not suggested by something else first. And when your experience pool is limited, so are your ideas.

Heck, I've even experienced this first-hand. I've seen people, for example, claim that its impossible for First-person Shooters to incorporate swimming (there was a brief period of time where FPSes would avoid having you in water for long periods). Then I was like "Duke Nukem 3D did it and that was back in 1994" and it just blew their little minds.

One of the funniest interactions I had on that front: in a group, there was an argument about how "good" graphics have to be. Someone asked "would you play a game that had absolutely no graphics at all?" My response was: "yes, I would indeed play Zork." The guy ended up having to look up what that was, and from there was shocked to find out how compelling it was.

But again, mostly I think this is the problem. A lot of people have experienced only a narrow range of ideas, and its the rare person who looks and wonders "why does it have to be this way?" And even then, it becomes a process of reinventing the wheel.

........... On this note.....

Recently I saw the first few seconds of a Game Theory video that kinda proved my point. The video was about how "Mascot Horror is dying and being replaced with more psychological horror." His proof? Entirely that the Game Theory subreddit is now talking about that stuff more often.

My immediate thought was this showed the GT guys are not real gamers, because those kinds of horror games existed long before Mascot Horror, and indeed greatly outnumber it... but here is this moron, fucking flummoxed that horror games that aren't about Mascots could possibly exist.

He hadn't seen it, therefore did not know it was possible. Out of sight, out of mind.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I disagree with this. Earthbound is a very linear game that lacks a world map. I couldn't stand Earthbound's gameplay whereas I enjoy most of the Dragon Quest games and I give very little shits about stories in games. The only similarities between Earthbound and Dragon Quest is that they're both jrpgs and they both use turn based battles from a first person perspective. Many of the dragon quest games have class systems, a few of them have monster catching, they have the casino and pachisi, party members that can be swapped out. Earthbound has none of those things. Even if you compare just the three snes dragon quest games to Earthbound they're pretty different. All three of those Dragon Quest games have far more in depth gameplay than Earthbound does.

EarthBound was known to have issues in development, and while there's lots of things to nitpick about (particularly in how half the storyline elements are dropped or aren't filled out like they should be), it's still jarring how EarthBound goes from four interconnected cities and their outskirts (Happy Happy Village included) to just a bunch of largely disconnected areas.

The "seeing enemies before they attack you" is arguably better than just random encounters in the world map but Chrono Trigger released the same year did the same thing but BETTER--approaching enemies in EarthBound never made much sense because as soon as you hit one, every single enemy on the screen would make a beeline straight for you means you'd be facing four Unusually Aggressive Weasels (or whatever) instead of just one. The other thing about EarthBound is that you'll start noticing how slow it gets when there are too many enemies on the screen, and it will only get worse when you have three other characters following you.

 

[Grub]

it's still jarring how EarthBound goes from four interconnected cities and their outskirts (Happy Happy Village included) to just a bunch of largely disconnected areas

That was the point in the game where I was getting pretty over it.

The "seeing enemies before they attack you" is arguably better than just random encounters in the world map

I disagree with this. Or at least, I prefer random encounters. I find having visible encounters changes the way I play games. I really noticed it with Dragon Quest VIII I didn't like the 3ds version because of the visible map encounters and I quit Dragon Quest IX because I found the dungeons boring because I was spending more time avoiding monster encounters than just exploring and playing the game. The only games I've played where I haven't minded visible encounters is the SaGa series and I think it's because for the most part the enemies are hard to dodge and you end up fighting just as many battles as you would with random encounters.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Earthbound is a meme. And it's not a very good one.
Maybe there's something really amazing in Itoi's prose but it sure as shit isn't in the English version.