| I don't want to hate on this game but I think there's a bad trend amongst all YC game investments. How do they not realise that production values are important for games? Pretty much all YC funded games don't have good art direction. In 99.9% of cases if the game is ugly it's dead on arrival. So many of these games are just YC throwing away $500k. For less than the investment in one game they could hire a few games industry people to give advice on the games. There's so many game art students that graduate every year without being able to get jobs that could make these games look decent. Off the top of my head MZ was YCs best game investment. Game of War lost players to alternative games with higher production values. Along with other issues the company lost most of its value when it was sold. Looking at this game these are some issues IMO: -Dragon animation speed does not match movement speed. This makes it seem like the dragon is not actually walking along. It also doesn't face the direction you're moving. I get this is probably to reduce the amount of sprites needed but with the dragon also not having an animation that matches its movement speed it makes it even more jarring. -Perspective and art style are all over the place. The "quests" sign and chest next to it are clearly created at a different camera angle to the houses, they are also a completely different art style. Inside you can see the walls from all directions, this is used in action games because something could be on that wall, if there's no action elements inside then using regular style walls would help. -Lighting is all over the place, even on the same object. In the town section the building in the bottom left (visible at 0.33 in the video) has a dark back suggesting that it is lit from towards the camera, it casts a shadow on the ground as though the light is from the opposite side. On that building there's also no shadow from the chimney. Either everything should cast shadows or nothing should. None of the small props and trees cast shadows. -The dragon sprite is cell shaded but the backgrounds are not. This can work if done well but because there's a bunch of different styles it can't make the dragon stand out anyway. -Lots of things(but not all) have a white glow/outline. Is this to show what is interactive? Can these be clicked on? The door to a building seems like enough. Also the buildings have shadows that ground them in the scene but then a white glow is put over them to make them stand out. Reading the reviews it seems like lots of parents are enthusiastic about the product but I think you need to be careful when they say their kids "love" the product. I've seen this with literally every educational game or gamification system I've ever interacted with. Kids love the game instead of school but would never stop playing their regular favourite game for it. I think it's disturbing that the website has better production values than the game. Feels very targeted to parents not kids. It seems like they think kids wont notice a low quality game when the founders literally give examples of games they played as kids that have high production values. |