Graphics style

What will the graphics style be? Will there be a vote? Will they simply read what people want on the forums?
Personally i like the realistic style of say supreme commander or TA, but it does not realy matter at all if the game is as awesome as they have promised.

You people are going to burn yourselves out on this game before it even hits alpha if you keep it up with the never-ending polls. We already know what the graphics style is.

Watch the Game Visualization, that's the style.

Mike

They are making the game stylized instead of realistic to help cut down on production costs.

I can't say that PA/SupCom style is pretending to be realistic, but I like it more than plastic look of SupCom2. I understand that it's impossible to make a game that costs $20M with only $2M, but still hope that graphics will not be at least intentionally toonish. Simple texturing, monotonic coloring and low polygon detail should suffice to keep production costs at bay and at the same time keep visual style closer to the spirit of game: war machines fighting for a lost purpose of their masters, who fallen long ago, IMO, is far away from being happy and colorful. As far as it known from Kickstarter video, that is pretty much like what's Ubers are doing to units and buildings. But planet design is another theme: thus far, swirls is the most unfitting thing in entire game, it makes landscape look very unnatural and cartoonish. I hope for a more believable planets in final release.

http://youtube.com/watch?&v=qqDSh34VoPY
tl;dw You can't make realistically looking game when your buildings aren't even parallel because of ridiculously small planet. And also budget.

I'm not a fan of swirls either, but I'm not too worried. In the end, the shape of the planets will be a direct result of the procedural model. I expect/hope that the model will be tuned with gameplay in mind more than aesthetic choices, and swirly bits aren't very useful for gameplay.

The game's style is mostly dictated by our budget, even at $2.3m. It's not something another $200k stretch goal would of added either.

Then I am very happy you guys have a limited budget. Though I do find it funny that the reason you guys have such a nice looking style is because of a lack of money. Maybe all modern games should have their budgets limited?

Of course, improved graphics is a matter of budget's orders of magnitude, and by no means can be considered a stretch goal. This far, all visuals fit perfectly except swirls and initial asteroid hit / rocket liftoff particle effects, which, I believe, is fixed by ajusting particle density, color and size. I don't know if swirls are linked deeply with tech details of surface generation algorithm being developed, if so - let it be.

If by 'toonish', you mean what we saw in the kickstarter video, then I'm all for that, as I think that looked great. Listening to the people involved on the live stream and other vids talk about how the aim is to make the units stand out in the right way, so you can pick out the units you need to at the various scales, sounds to me like they are intent on making something that looks good as well as aids gameplay, it all sounds very positive to me

Calling the style 'toon-ish' isn't correct but by the poll options that is the one to vote for if you like the style already presented to us.

Mike

I also prefer the toonish style. Going for realism in many of these games has always seemed a little silly to me.

And the fact that it keeps the cost down thus freeing up more ressources for adding awesomeness is a bonus.

It might also help reduce the ressources required for playing the game thus lowering the barrier to entry as well as enabling even bigger more epic more awesome matches.

Considering all that i am Completely for a more "stylistic" design choice.

I think someone is manipulationg poll results. Do people really prefer toonish? I agree to toonish because of limited funds for development. In this case this makes sense but in general I preffer realistic. I chose realistic in the poll because that's what I like more. I am surprised people prefer toonish. Red Alert 3 was toonish and it was one of the reasons why it was so stupid and goofy game!!!

I think the idea with swirls is that, planets are cartoonishly small anyway like in caroon. It would be crazy to have full photorealism and a tank size of Great Britain that could go around the globe in three minutes.

I also prefer realism, but I would like to have planets of realistic sizes. I don't think it is feasible with current technology and It won't be until we got quantum computers.

Once they went cartoonish then they made these swirls to keep up with style. Swirls could be bigger on bigger planets so I could send 10 ships into the swirl.

personally, i want it to look as much like the concept trailer as possible.

With a 'toonish' or let's call it more symbolic graphics style you have two serious advantages compared to a realistic approach:

1. you might actually get the style you intended from the get go. With the realistic approach you might have settle in the end for a half-way good result because of constraints in the developing resources or even scaling problems on expected user hardware.
2. an too realistic representation might reduce the UI usability in terms of contrast, distinctness, general noise, etc. A well done more symbolic approach, also on close zoom, might therefore be useful aside from aesthetics.

It's less a question of the style itself, it's more a question if the style fits the game play and UI usability requirements. I can have fun playing a medieval rts on a antique looking 2d map with symbolic unit representations, when UI and general game play are well done.

Did anyone play Earth 2160? It was a nice looking game.

The problem is that the OP considers the style used in the Pr-Visualization to be 'toonish', even though tit isn't the correct term for it.

Mike

I think the cartoon style will fit the game pretty well. The Kickstarter pitch video appealed me a lot with the art style and on the plus side: Planetary Annihilation will run well on lower end systems because of it's low polygon count and lack of reliance on shaders .

Will probably be possible to make this game be as big as Torchlight in storage requirements as well .