Disturbing trend in iPhone games

[Gil]

They're buttons, you hold your thumbs over them 90% of the time, it's not something a developer wants to pay money for.

[blumunkee]

Don't defend shit art. Ever.

[Corsair]

I don't think he's defending it so much as pointing out that it doesn't really matter.

[Gil]

I don't need my toilet to be an artistic masterpiece of architecture, because I spend 5 minutes a day in there to do dirty business. I will never defend it and say it's a beauty, I just generally don't care.

Same with this. It's art images I'm not going to look at. It's completely irrelevant if it looks good.

[big brother]

My point is: someone spend time drawing bullets, a red button, and a generic d-pad when they could've spent the same time drawing something that relates to the game's theme. Every visual element, even those that don't matter, should be subject to the art direction. This separates professional work from that of amateurs.

If you look at an interior design magazine that addresses remodeling bathrooms, you will find that there isn't just one generic toilet. Even if you only spend five minutes a day doing your dirty work on it, a toilet is like any other element of the bathroom. It can fit the motif, resulting in a harmonious look and giving anyone who walks into the bathroom a positive impression. If someone hired you to remodel a bathroom and gave you $250 in the budget to spend on a toilet, you wouldn't spend that money on something non-matching because "it doesn't really matter." In the same way, someone paid money for this ugly GUI, and I don't see how we're out of line to criticize that decision.

[Dusty]

I highly doubt they even paid someone to make the GUI. Probably the work of some programmer or something, or some other person where art is not a strongpoint.

[big brother]

In my industry experience, programmers and other non-artists get paid, too.

[Dusty]

Indeed, however they're probably not going to be getting paid as much as an experienced artist would to make the GUI when they're probably just getting paid to do it off on the side of the actual programming. Or they just paid whoever, be them artists or not, as little as they had to, to get as little(but functional) GUI as they could. Either way, I doubt they went much out of their way in terms of time and money for that final outcome of a GUI.

[CharlesGabriel]

I really have not compaints at all when it comes to iphone games, since I don't even play games on my phone... I wouldn't really bother much judging if graphics are proffesionally well done or not... after all the screen is just too small for anyone to really notice those issues... my point of view over this is simple, as long as it looks good for the gamer's eye it will do the trick... if you weren't an artist, you'll all probably think this is at least an allright game, visually speaking...

Well, from my artist point of view, I think the filter was unnecessary, things could look just fine without that filter lol... I also agree with big brother, even though the gui isn't as important as an entire character sprite sheet, it still should be handled under the art team, not just having your coder take on the job, specially since it's not their strongest point like in many cases, as you can probably see in here with some of those screenshots.

[monteboyd]

Check out the screenshots from C64 on the iPhone to see how much nice interface elements can add to the product. The C64 app is awaiting approval by Apple after initially being rejected but you can check out the video to see how wonderful it is.