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Hire better artists next time. Your art assets are consistently very, very weak.

You need someone who understands composition, balance, contrast, and a number of other things that are missing. What you appear to have is someone who can do decent, not fantastic, cartoons.

Take a look at Heroes of Might and Magic or Warcraft III. Every single screen could have been painted by hand. You can hardly tell the characters are sprites or 3-D models.

In your games, every character is an awful, two-dimensional thing slapped down without blended edges. If you don't want to devote the hardware to blending it in real time, at least *pre* blend the art with a background of approximately the same brightness as the one you intend using.

This is inexcusable.

It's one thing to say gameplay is more important than graphical glitz. This is true. It's entirely something else if your graphics actively interfere with seeing how the gameplay is progressing.

Real animators don't make all that much money, and they turn out a fuckton of drawings in a day. Find one. Hire him for a couple of weekends.

If you don't want to play Madden 2021 and Halo 6 then you don't have to! To many people the golden-age of video games is the NES/SNES days, or the ULTIMA and SIMCITY 1 days on for PC gamers. This is after the reflex/memorization only games of atari but before the games got overly graphics oriented. It's now actually a hell of a lot easier to make a sidescroller or overhead rpg then it used to be when the game was coded in assembly. Here's a list of a few one man or small team games that are pretty damn amazing and fun to play.

http://www.avernum.com/ -ultima only bigger and buggier!
http://www.freeciv.org/ -not exactly eye candy, but good
http://www.chroniclogic.com/gish.htm/ -inovation!
http://www.dominategame.com/website.php?/ -addiction!

Out of this World still knocks my socks off.

For classic Ultima3-5 style play, you can't beat the Avernum trilogy. Coherent plotline(I'm looking at you, British), cool quests, gigantic world to explore. All done with an interface that will have you cursing your emulated dos box.

Btw, the Home of the Underdogs has all the old games.

Well I would love to see this system come out in North America / Europe, but in the mean time and if the developer never does release it, at least we have a couple alternatives that I know about at least.

You have first, Neverwinter Nights. Which everyone pretty much knows about. Some love it, others hate it. It's also DnD which makes some happy and others groan. Over all it's at least one alternative.

The other, That I know of, is Blades of Avernum (http://www.avernum.com/blades/index.html), which is by Spiderweb Games developer, Jeff Vogal. For those in the know of small press, independant developer, old school Western Style RPG's, Jeff is often looked at as the current king of such games. Low quality graphics but high quality game play.

Now, I used to know of a few smaller old DOS apps that where RPG maker-ish applications. And this is beyond Bard's Tale Construction Set and the others like it but, those where far and few between. One of them, if I recall correctly (Verge), had you scripting everything, I mean nearly everything. Combat system and all. But lord knows where those games are like today.

Sentack

The one thing that stops me from registering any shareware (apps or games) is the price. I don't wanna flame, but I thought the whole fscking point of cutting out the middleman was to lower the price of your software, while keeping a larger amount for yourself.

Case in point: Avernum. They've been going some good advertising for that game, and I'm really interested, but there's no way I'm going to pay 25 bucks for it when I see games RETAILING on store shelves for $10 to $20 all the time. And $40 for Opera? Yeesh. Blah blah I'm a cheap bastard yadda yadda, but I still wanna know where all that purchase price is going if there's no big monolithic publisher involved. Nobody's buying? Try lowering your price to increase volume. I know I'd pay five bucks for either of these programs right now if I could. But no, they have to play hard-to-get. Well fine, two can play at that game.

The company shifted to a new engine that offered a pseudo-3D orthogonal projection with Nethergate. Nethergate was also innovative in that it allowed the player to roleplay either side of the conflict. Now they're working on re-releasing the Exile games using the new engine and under new titles. Avernum and the recently released Avernum 2 do not disappoint.

Although I have linked to the Windows versions of the games, Spiderweb actually develops and releases for the Mac first, and later ports its games to Windows. They also distribute a number of games that they do not produe, but IMO they're nowhere near as good.

All Spiderweb games are shareware, and you can play a fairly substantial portion of the game before having to pay. So if you miss Ultima, give them a try!

The company shifted to a new engine that offered a pseudo-3D orthogonal projection with Nethergate. Nethergate was also innovative in that it allowed the player to roleplay either side of the conflict. Now they're working on re-releasing the Exile games using the new engine and under new titles. Avernum and the recently released Avernum 2 do not disappoint.

Although I have linked to the Windows versions of the games, Spiderweb actually develops and releases for the Mac first, and later ports its games to Windows. They also distribute a number of games that they do not produe, but IMO they're nowhere near as good.

All Spiderweb games are shareware, and you can play a fairly substantial portion of the game before having to pay. So if you miss Ultima, give them a try!

...are still out there, just waiting for you to waste your life on them in arbitrarily sized chunks.

Avernum is one that comes to mind right away. Turn-based play, epic storyline, 100+ hours of gametime, more awards than you can shake a stick at -- and, oh yeah, it's shareware. =)

I remember getting hooked on this years ago in its original incarnation (the Exile trilogy) and it's only gotten better with time. The programmer gave the game a complete overhaul within the past year or so -- new engine, more content, etc. -- and it seems to be holding up well.

Such fond memories. This was one of the first games that had me so engrossed that I burned sick days to keep playing. =)

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