Gamers love to say “I want shorter games with worse graphics”. Well, would you play an entire game where the maps are light blue squares and dark blue walls, with rare out of place terrain blocks for elements you interact with meaningfully like thrones/pillars/trees/mountains? Where every character is a placeholder with filler dialogue? Where everything’s a placeholder except the raw gameplay experience and the characters involved know?
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I would actually, but I’m probably in the minority on that to be honest.
Just add the base tilesets and i would
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Placeholder graphics? Yeah sure. Placeholder dialogue? Ehhhhhh probs not, chief
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that can be a fun experience lol
I don’t want THAT much worse lmao. PS2 to 3 era, not Atari.
or like. good, GBA era sprites IG.
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Play Westrian War.
Maybe. If even the placeholder dialogue manages to be funny, and the gameplay is also pretty good, then I wouldn’t really mind it. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t, especially if even the placeholders aren’t that well made (as in, EVERYTHING is just a blank image that blends with other things, meaning it’s actually hard to differentiate something from another, and every line of text is just “placeholder”, even the ones that that help distinguish ally from foe. Doing that would be very very lazy, even for a placeholder).
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y’know I just remembered the Kirby Lore™.
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Yummy yummy, strawed men, part of a complete breakfast.
People mean they want games with graphics with lower fidelity, not the lack of visual representation for what’s going on. Shorter games, not games with unfinished parts. It’s a means to communicate that generally speaking they want smaller games that developers need to spend less time on.
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I would, as long as it doesn’t actively harm the gameplay experience. If all the classes had the same sprite or there was no grid so I couldn’t count the tiles, then it would start to become a problem for me. Otherwise, I welcome Fire Emblem with Atari 2600 graphics.
Well… “Shorter games with worse graphics” isn’t meant to be shorthand for “intentionally incomplete games with intentionally incomplete graphics”. I feel like that could be two whole different threads.
Since you’ve stated almost everything in your example is an intentional placeholder, it’s not the final product then, is it? The only things that aren’t placeholders are the raw gameplay experience and characters involved… so they must want feedback on those two things! So if I play it, I’d focus on offering feedback on those specific things.
“Worse graphics” wouldn’t be the thing that stops me from playtesting something either way. There’s many demos of games over the years that I think look beautiful but haven’t gotten to, whether on this site or not. Games that look very up my alley, but I just… haven’t played the extremely free playtest demo of.
So let’s say I download your example game. Would I finish it? I have a shaky track record of finishing games in the first place, so it depends! …Again, there’s many demos out there I haven’t even started, let alone finished.
So maybe I’m not the best guy to ask to playtest any game to completion, but I wouldn’t want “bad/default/etc” graphics to stop anyone from uploading something for others to test!
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i would but im pretty sure nobody that’s actually serious would spend months to years making a game and then make their first sprite
eh its a style
It’s not straw if I’m 100% serious about the low quality graphics of the horribly balanced clusterfuck of a game I’m working on.
you can learn to make it look like shit good
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I’d suggest getting it as good as you can before asking people to take time out their lives to play test it. If there are certain elements you think you need feedback on right now, like the story or maps or sprites, you can put those out separately.
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if you are (trying to) ask an honest question then no, the majority of FEU will not play ANYTHING incomplete, that’s a very well known fact here if you’ve posted any in progress builds. I’ve seen it myself with Host of the Dark. Before it was labeled complete initially, it saw less than 100 downloads a patch, after its initial release? immediately shot up in downloads. And when it went back into in progress? wayyy back down.
Rinse and repeat to where we are today and the older versions are sitting at well over 1K and the current in progress 3.0 build is at less than 40.
Placeholder graphics and dialogue especially will turn people away. Some of the most polished up and coming hacks here sit in obscurity still exactly because they’re not labeled complete. So something that’s lacing in clear polish isn’t gonna do great.
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