A loving criticism of the AGS community and its output

[Ponch]

There's another Squinky whose name is TheInquisitveStranger in these forums.

Ah, I was thinking of the eye patch guy who is Tom Selleck's love child. Thanks for clearing that up. Now if only someone could explain to me what the rest of this thread is about.

[Baron]

Scanned the thread, although I read through most of the first page.

   I think I agree with Snarky most, especially his characterization of AGS game development as folk art.  I deeply appreciate uoou's admiration for my skills, talents and potential as a forum member, but I don't see the AGS community as the Moulin Rouge c. 1900.  While not quite wood carving, the fact that we fans are creating games that the "artistic establishment" wouldn't make for us inevitably leads to imitative, derivative and even kitchy game styles.  And there's nothing wrong with any of that, in my opinion, because these games are fun to make, fun to play, and fun to be around (meaning the sense of community I feel here). 

     Just like other folk art communities, I doubt many developers spend a lot of time overtly contemplating the advancement of the genre (Scavenger's "philosophical masturbation" aptly characterizes the attitude of the common man).  Unlike high art or literature, whose tone is more set by the elite avant-garde who might intentionally set out to "break the mold", the folk arts have a greater tendency to evolve organically.  If a new concept plays well, then it will be incorporated into ever more games (and thus frustratingly cease to be novel and cutting edge...).  Uoou's concession that a few exemplary games have pushed the envelope a little bit is evidence that the process is a slow one, but I think he misses the cumulative result in the big picture. Adventure games have indeed evolved since the 1980s - "key in door" puzzles, walking mazes, intentional walking deads and "what word was the developer thinking of" (text based interface) are either extinct or on their way out, while social commentary, deeper story telling and the episodic format are all now in vogue.

     I think the OP should be tweaked and reposted in collage, knitting and scale-model railway forums as an amusing study in the universalism of hobbyists response to not being cutting edge enough.

[uoou]

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[uoou]

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[Dualnames]

I love you, Dualnames.

Awwww

I'm still looking up the topic when reading this, and then going back two pages to see if I accidentally clicked on another topic really

[Khris]

The point is, to automatically default to linear perspective and all those other conditioned rules is, to me at least, worse than not using them at all - not even being aware of them.

That's exactly the point. Looking at backgrounds of people who aren't aware of them makes me wish they were, not cheer their ignorance.

If I look at the critics lounge backgrounds I see a great variety of different styles. Correcting perspective flaws won't destroy their unique look at all.

That's kinda beside the point though. Linear perspective is of course pretty good at what it does, it mimics how a lens (be it in a camera or in our eye) projects an image onto a 2d plane. It's not natural or automatic, though, it's a learnt system which we understand because we are exposed to so much photography and television and are (clearly) conditioned into thinking it is the 'natural' way to represent 3d space on a 2d plane. Which of course it's not - if it was it wouldn't have taken us 30000 years of drawing to come up with.

BULLSHIT.
Take an Edding, walk to your nearest window and trace the lines of the houses outside without moving your head. Bam, linear perspective.
People have been projecting the real world on 2D planes for 30000 years, so how is that not natural or automatic? You say yourself that linear perspective mimics how our eye does its job, HOW WE SEE THE WORLD. So again, how is that not natural?
Also, how is 30000 years an argument? People have been around for much longer, and still more than half the world fucks up their lives due to completely unwarranted superstition.

[Calin Leafshade]

i think uoou is talking about the conceptual nature of the way humans *see* things.

He admits that linear perspective is a good analog of how a "lens (be it in a camera or in our eye) projects an image onto a 2d plane" but our brain interprets those signals with different emphases depending on our situation, making something more or less important/visible than others.

Also, this *is* learned behaviour. Babies have exactly the same visual clues as adults but they find it much harder to judge distance and size based on perspective clues.

[theo]

I realize I might come off as being overly diplomatic but I believe everyone posting here is right in their own beautiful little way. No matter what your opinion, this truly is an interesting discussion to follow.

I hope this doesn't turn into a flame war - it has a lot more potential than that. Try not to get over-heated, everyone. Please continue.

[ThreeOhFour]

I don't want to argue against proper artistic practices, and I think vanishing points are a fantastic way of coming to terms with how to draw straight things in a way that represents how we see the world.

But I find them super boring. I never use them, and doubt I ever will. The world around us isn't made up of perfectly straight walls, roads, floors or power lines. There are curves, bumps, dents - this, for me, is the stuff that makes a background really come to life. People build things wonky accidentally sometimes, because builders aren't perfect, or are lazy, or the ground shifts over time, or parts of buildings wear out and sag etc.

In fact, I have developed what I guess I'd call "Adventure game perspective" - where I draw my backgrounds to avoid character scaling so the pretty pixels don't get messed up. When you look carefully, you can sometimes see I've drawn a door further back that the player can also use much bigger than it should be when you consider the distance away that it is. This is so when the player walks up to it, they don't look enormous. It's totally wrong from a technical level, yet on a design level nobody has ever complained to me about it .

So yes, vanishing points are a great way of establishing a foundation for how things work. But you should be able judge it fairly well by eye, really, if you sit back and look at your image once you've sketched out a rough version of it. I personally feel that composition and functionality as a game asset/location take priority over whether all the lines are straight, and will continue (for now, at least ) to do all my backgrounds content in the knowledge that the perspective lines don't converge at a single point.

[Khris]

So yes, vanishing points are a great way of establishing a foundation for how things work. But you should be able judge it fairly well by eye, really, if you sit back and look at your image once you've sketched out a rough version of it. I personally feel that composition and functionality as a game asset/location take priority over whether all the lines are straight, and will continue (for now, at least ) to do all my backgrounds content in the knowledge that the perspective lines don't converge at a single point.

Which is perfectly fine, as long as you are indeed able to judge it by eye (which you undoubtedly are).
Usually, establishing a proper perspective is suggested to people who have actually tried that and failed.

To put what I've said earlier in perspective, here are two examples of game art I think is absolutely great, without a single converging pair of lines:

   

So I'm all for an innovative way of picturing things. But I have no doubt that both Mr. Hammill and Ali understand perspective and could draw according to its rules.

It is simply a tool, much like a graphics program that supports layers, that greatly helps with producing aesthetic graphics.

[Pinback]

I think we make adventure game backgrounds for AGS games in a formulaic method not only because it fits how we imagine the world our game is set in, but also from a production standpoint.

I never push the camera down onto the floor to get a worms eye view of things, nor do I ever make BG's from a birds eye view-simply because it would require a hell of a lot more sprite work just so I can experiment or spice things up. 
For my latest game, Primordia, I work in almost any perspective you can think of; one, two and three point perspectives, isometric and dimetric projections, mixes of any of the above, and half of the time I work with a kind of natural perspective off the top of my head, to make the picture visually interesting and create the kind of painting I prefer to look at- but it can be a real bitch when it comes time to make it actually work as a game.
My point is, while making an adventure you can take a more experimental approach to creating the assets, but it can be hit and miss as to whether it'll actually work properly in game, and even if it does work well it can affect how you create everything else in the game, drawing out production time interminably and generally being a pain in the ass later.

But if we're talking about the games themselves, at the end of the day I guess I just appreciate both schools of thought. Taking a traditional approach and putting a new spin on things can create just as much of a masterpiece as ignoring the rules completely and and creating a purely original product.
I also believe that the process of creating games is just as, if not more important than the product itself anyway. Enjoying the creative journey, learning and discovering what one is capable doing should be of paramount importance I think.
Would I like to see more people push the envelope? Sure, but not at the expense of not having any decent size playable adventure games around that scratch my itch for having relatively predictable genre/setting/story I can feel comfortable with and sink my teeth into.

It's like, sure; I love Twin Peaks, but I also love Star Trek.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I agree with many of the points raised here by Khris and Snarky, and I even understand and empathize with Ben's approach (which I have done myself).  There is a good consensus that knowing the rules in order to know how to break them is the way to go, which I fully agree with.  If I didn't know proper perspective then many of my backgrounds would suffer because I didn't 'understand' how perspective works and how items appear when projected onto a 2D plane.  Because I understand these rules (and because Lucasartists and Ben and Khris and many others understand them) they are able to diverge from strict adherence to those rules and create off-balance or strange landscapes that still somehow appeal to our inner sense of 'rightness' or accuracy.  Playing DoTT, for example, I never found myself questioning the geometry of the rooms in spite of the doors having extreme angles and such, merely because within the framework of that game everything else was designed to match that approach, making it look 'right'.  This is key, I think, in any 'style' that diverges from strict perspective laws:  whatever approach you take, the whole of the piece should conform to whatever rules you have set it to.  An easy way of proving this visually is to draw a rectangular room in perspective and then to begin drawing doors along the walls stretching towards the screen at random and without attention or care to perspective; the result will be terrible, but if you design the entire room around a specific method then, like Ben's artwork, the consistency of the design wins out over the need for perfect symmetry/perspective.

I think this is a good topic of discussion but please keep it civil.  I'm not directing that at anyone in particular, just generally, as I've seen a few angry looking responses here and there and there's just no cause for it.  If you can't agree civilly to something then agree to disagree and leave it there, otherwise, provide a good argument and evidence to support your view without being disrespectful or overly blunt.

Thanks!

[Nikolas]

AGS is... a tool right? A tool we all love and all the games I've played and taken part in (from AGS), have a blue cup somewhere, which shows the dedication to the creator (ergo god?) and the community and everything else.

That said, I can't really think for a single moment that there is any talent at waste here, when anyone is free of using any other tool available: You don't want to be limited to what AGS can/can't do? Move further ahead.

Of course this is coming from someone who deals with classical music, which appears to be the epitome of OUTDATED art, but anyhow...

[Snarky]

To follow up on the side-discussion:

He admits that linear perspective is a good analog of how a "lens (be it in a camera or in our eye) projects an image onto a 2d plane" but our brain interprets those signals with different emphases depending on our situation, making something more or less important/visible than others.

Linear perspective is realistic and accurate in the sense that (at least from a distance, so that depth cues like binocular parallax and focus depth aren't effective), from a particular vantage point, without moving, a person cannot tell the difference between a real, static, scene and a perfectly executed 2D picture of that scene. This is why matte paintings in movies work, for example. No other method can make that claim for any situation. (Parallel projection can be seen as an edge-case of linear perspective for things that are extremely remote, such as when seen through a telescope or from a satellite camera. Just set all the vanishing points to be infinitely distant, so parallel lines converge at infinity.)

So to the extent that a 2D picture can portray the real world the way we see it, linear perspective is as good as it gets, and is not in any way "arbitrary." Of course departures from realism can often be defended on psychovisual, symbolic, stylistic and artistic grounds, but it's simply wrong to say that linear perspective is just one of many "equally valid" ways to realistically depict the world.

Also, this *is* learned behaviour. Babies have exactly the same visual clues as adults but they find it much harder to judge distance and size based on perspective clues.

Learned behavior implies a degree of arbitrariness. But there are many things a baby cannot do that are nevertheless instinctual and in some sense "innate": much of our development as we grow is programmed into us. Of course, it is very likely that our visual system has been designed to be trained by the stimuli it experiences. The question is rather whether the different stimuli a person may be exposed to leads to significant differences in the way 2D images are parsed among normal adolescents and adults.

Generally, it appears that people across the world "see" in the same way, with only minor cultural differences. For example, they are equally prone to most optical illusions. I have seen one report that a certain tribe who had not been exposed to images or photos before had a hard time seeing what they depicted, but the results were not very robust, and it's unclear to what extent they simply could not comprehend what they were seeing (cars, skyscapers etc.).

To put what I've said earlier in perspective, here are two examples of game art I think is absolutely great, without a single converging pair of lines:

At least one of the roofs in the screen from Gesundheit! (above-left of the cactus near the bottom of the screen) consists of more-or-less converging lines, and in general I think the buildings do roughly follow linear perspective or parallel projection. It's a great example of how perspective is not incompatible with stylization. Also, I'm pretty sure (going from memory) that while the buildings in Nelly Cootalot may all be seen face-on, there is normal scaling where things get smaller as they get further away, again according to the linear perspective rules.

So I would certainly argue that linear perspective is an essential skill for realistic drawing--not necessarily knowing the rules of construction and vanishing points and all that, but being able to determine roughly how shapes and spaces should look in a perspective drawing. But at the same time I don't agree (and we had this argument recently) that an artist has to master the rules before breaking them. In fact, I would propose that playing with the rules and learning when and how they can be broken (including listening when people tell you you're doing it wrong and your "wacky" perspective just looks shit) is an essential part of learning them.

[Khris]

At least one of the roofs in the screen from Gesundheit! (above-left of the cactus near the bottom of the screen) consists of more-or-less converging lines, and in general I think the buildings do roughly follow linear perspective or parallel projection. It's a great example of how perspective is not incompatible with stylization. Also, I'm pretty sure (going from memory) that while the buildings in Nelly Cootalot may all be seen face-on, there is normal scaling where things get smaller as they get further away, again according to the linear perspective rules.

That's all true of course.
However I got the impression that uoou thinks we want to turn every background into something fresh out of Google SketchUp and that's what I wanted to argue against.

[loominous]

Having taken the long "learn the rules" route, I've come to appreciate the fresh naive outlook of people unfamiliar with them. In many ways, I find that: 'You musn't know the rules, if you want to break them' to be equally true. (It's like listening to a language; once you know it, you can't objectively hear how it sounds anymore)

So when I hear people categorically declare that the first thing to do as a beginner artist is sit down and learn the rules, it strikes me both as a dull and crude welcoming to the supposedly free and imaginative world of art, as well as a way of killing this untainted perspective.

Or to continue a train of thought from a previous poster:

Bad art & wrong perspective is horrible to look at, bad art with good perspective is still bad art but not that bad

.. while Good art with Bad perspective is still good art.

[Monsieur OUXX]

Good art with Bad perspective is still good art.

I think that's a good perspective on good art with bad perspective.

[Moresco]

But the choice should be made intelligently not automatically.

Are you saying that you're more intelligent than 99% of the world?  I made the choice to learn linear perspective based on intelligence.  You see, I wanted drawings to look realistic!  I saw that linear perspective drawings DO look realistic! Oh shit?! guess what? I decided to learn linear perspective and now I'm HAPPY!

Seriously, I can't take you seriously.  Some of the things you say are so out there, you might want to sit down with someone and talk out your problems. =/