It's VERY difficult to design a look for democracy. For any newcomers, this is an indie game I'm developing pretty much alone. Its especially hard in comparison with the day job, which is working on a multi-million pound game with its own brand new 3D engine yada yada.
When you don't have a 3D engine(like democracy) and the game is entirely conceptual, just what do you fill the screen with?
In some ways its a nightmare, in other ways its exciting and challenging. Its far too easy to make a game that looks like Excel, or just a whole mush of icons.
In the old DOS days, it would just be a text based game.
This lunchtime I tried Superpower 2. The guys who wrote this have never heard of tooltips apprently. Thats just a newbie mistake. But it looks nice, even if I have my doubts about its learning curve and playability. They have a big spinny 3D globe as their background.
This morning (after a flash of inspiration last night) i replaced the backdrop of the game with a nice landcsape hi res image, and redid some icons. It now looks basically like a windows desktop, with a number of icons and a nice pleasant backdrop. I quite like this. I might stick with it.
I was reading about the indie games being submitted to IGF and their $335k budgets.
That's insane.
I reckon ALL games should be done for maybe $30k. Then, if they are fun and people like them, by all means spend a million dollars on a fun sequel with whizz bang graphics. But gambling $7 million and hoping the game idea is fun at the outset? Thats mad.
What do YOU think?