Question about the Graphics (hands/legs of people)

[AllenWL]

I'm still trying to find out why hands=better graphic quality
On a side note, I think there was a texture pack thing somewhere that you can try to find.

[A Friend]

Guess more detail = higher graphical quality if I understand his POV correctly.

[PolygonalEgg]

I believe better graphics/animation here would be one to completely replace text descriptions for characters' actions and mood without leaving you guessing what is happening to them at given moment (like their dreaming pose being distinguished from sleepeng). Pets being starve ar prego also have no signs of it unless  you read their stats in text window. Also it is pretty hard to tell what clothes they are wearing and current state of those (means durability). Trees growing stages is enother instance.

[Berengar]

What speaks against high quality graphics?

Creating the assets for hands/legs and especially animating them (hands probably individually for every possible action there is in the game) is an enormous amount of work for the artists and a lot of fiddling around programming wise. The way it currently is you can get away with it without having 3 trillion animations. And as long as the general artstyle is persistent, there is no issue with that (at least for most people, I guess).

Dont see why you would need so many detailed animations.. Incase of this artstlye it would be enough to create an walking, sleeping and "working" animations for the hands. Think its more importend to get a bit more movement into the game.. so the pawns look less like lifeless worms.

Hrm.. maybe add some basic eye animations to.. just a bit of moving up and down.

[Tynan]

I recall Tynan once mentioning that he wants to leave some things up to our imagination, just like reading a book, you get rudimentary info about a person, in Rimworlds case skin color, haircut, body build, various ailments etc... and I think the same applies to actions, e.g. your grower harvests some corn, what you see is him standing there, the plant vanishes and to his side appears a stack of corn, but in your head you may see how he plucks each corn cob and puts it in a basket.

Some people might argue this is just lazy programming/animation, but I kinda like that imagination idea, and I think it would look very goofy when pawns suddenly get arms and legs.

This is the point I really wanted to bring up.

Anything we add would be worse than your imagination. In fact, I'd rather the game has less  graphics. I'd prefer it was more symbolic. Even the graphics that are there really get in the way of players richly imagining story interactions. I only added them to make the game comprehensible and marketable, but I hate the way they suppress imagination (by filling in the visuals for you before your mind can invent them). For example, a  lot of RW fan art depicts colonists as they are in game - chesspiece-like characters floating around. That bothers me. The chesspiece look isn't what they "really are" - it's just  a symbol to represent what's actually happening. If they were represented in ASCII, people would imagine so much more.

The other reason the graphics aren't more detailed is just because of the competition from other ideas. Every feature we could potentially add competes on a cost/benefit basis with the others to try to be the next one worked on. Graphics like this are high-risk, high-cost and low-payoff. They don't come close to competing with systems like social interactions, children, drugs, new storytelling systems, etc etc.

As a tiny indie I try to play to my strengths, which are nimbleness, creativity, nicheness, uniqueness, abstraction, design tightness, rapid iteration, and other such qualities. I'll never beat AAA games in the graphical detail arena, but I can consistently beat them in areas where I have the advantage, so I focus on those.

[MarcTheMerc]

I love Rimworld and its art style... but please Tynan, no ASCII... ASCII gives me nightmares.

[TheGentlmen]

Ya, no ASCII. Unicode instead! Gives more characters...

[Noobshock]

They don't come close to competing with systems like social interactions, children, drugs, new storytelling systems, etc etc.

Is this coming?

[catter]

I don't really care about the graphics. They only use a pawn place holder as the person, they also use various clothing graphics to show kind'a what the person is wearing. I play not for the graphics, but for the game itself and the whole story line that is created by me. I saw a animated story about a game called Under the Rim and the story is based on Blitzkriegsler's RimWorld Alpha 11 - Let's Play Series. Now this story has a lot more than the events and the people still look like pawns (although the have hands sometimes animated for them) it is more about the backstory and the small things done by the people. I think it is really cool and it is a good show that people can show imagination even without good graphics.