Waste of cash or a good idea

#1 Good textures are not the most important part of making a game. The most important thing is to make sure your idea is fun.

Jeff Tunnell GG

#2 most important part of a game (IMHO) is the story/gameplay, what will your game have to draw people in and make them want to play? yeah, graphics might get them into the game, but will it make them stay?

You can add all the latest and greatest prahics features etc as well as all the eye candy you want, but if the game is lacking in story, game play etc it will more than likely be a bust.

-Ron

#3 If you get the chance, go find a copy of the game "Typing of the Dead"... It's this bizarre derivative of the House of the Dead series.

Admittedly, it is a typing game, but they manage to make it a good diversion through a couple of design decisions.

A quick rundown: it plays just like house of the dead, except that instead of shooting with a light-gun/mouse, you type words that pop up on screen. If you don't type a word/phrase fast enough, the zombie/boss/whatever will hurt you. Bosses also have variances, like quizzes where you have to choose and type the correct answer, or type a sentence with no mistakes.

So, why is it fun?

First, it's a shooting game. Guns are fun! You "shoot" every time you hit a key. This is great positive feedback, at least for males such as myself. I personally prefer this to a mouse-based interface, because on my laptop, it's very difficult to do precise mouse control (and I don't like getting out my USB mouse).

Second, it's got very creative (bizarre?) words/phrases/sentences to type. It's difficult to characterize them, but they're certainly much more interesting than anything they have in Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. It's a cross between corruptions of common sayings, stuff that they probably translated from Japanese, and "genres" (one genre I ran across consisted entirely of statements along the lines of "Clean your room!", "Make your bed!", "Don't pick your nose!", "Sit up straight.", "I'm not your mother.").

Finally, it's a parody of HOD. Typing of the Dead has the worst voice acting I have ever heard, the most tangentially comprehensible dialogue, and the least rational plot line imaginable. The credits are accompanied by a zombie dance line (and yes, you can practice your typing all the way through the credits if you want - if you do well, you get a secret game mode.), and the various endings (of which there are several) are just silly.

It's the most amusing typing game I've yet played. I'll admit that it's got a limited appeal (sort of like MST3K), but one thing that it's not got is graphics. There's no texture filtering or mipmapping. It has horrible z-buffering artifacts, an almost completely uninteractive camera path, models that are low poly count to say the least, and textures that are shockingly low resolution.

So... yeah. Fun is independent of graphics. :)

#4 Good textures are important to a point. Rather than spend money on an artist however, who may not even churn out the quantity you expect, nor the quality you envision, I would (and did) buy some texture CDs. Marlin studios offers some extremely nice products. If you purchase more than one series at a time, you get a pretty good discount as well. Their CDs also offer bump maps for each texture, should your game need them in the future.

#5 good textures ARE one of those things that make a game look more professional, but no more than about 1,000 other things that separate pro games from those just starting on their own. the standard for the size and quality of professional teams has grown and the companies that hire them have more resources. look at how many people made quake and then look at how many people made quake 3 (small, maybe bad example).
i can't afford to hire anyone for my game so i went out and bought a cheap digital camera that holds around 100 pictures and now i take it with me everywhere and have created my own massive library for the price of a cheap digital camera. then plug them into a good software and experiment with what you want. there, now send me the cash i saved you . . .


that was a joke . . .



oh, 'typing of the dead' is pretty dope . . .

my voice acting is going to follow that path . . .

#6 I'm 100% Jeff on this one, if for some reason you just can't get over not having 'good' textures, then look at using an NPR technique like toon shading or something.

Take a look at marble blast, they're hardly going to win awards for the quality of the textures. But they are perfect for the game they were making.

The typing house of the dead was excellent fun (not massive longevity, but good fun), and it even improved my typing!

The Marlin textures are very good but still fairly expensive for the indy, and the license is actually questionable for game distribution unaltered.

The way I generate my 'textures' now is to create very high res models and model the materials accuratly (using very few if any actual textures). Some stuff (metal being a great candidate) uses a specify hardware shader, the other elements are 'rendered to texture', producing both a normal map and the actual texture map. (I had a load of problems with multiple UVW's so I now do both at the same time). Using the normal maps I can reduce my 50-100k model down to 2-3k without any really noticable differences). I haven't quite mastered it with characters yet since the animation gets messed up... which I fixed by not having any character models in my game :)

So despite having the artistic prowess of a lemon, I get some fairly good models / textures :)