Dev Thoughts #1: The NPC Mindset

I've been thinking about this project for a bit and the criticism it has been receiving from some particular places (hi Reddit) and I have one more excuse to pull out for them. They are NPC's.

Now, we all know that NPC meme from like, ages ago. But it means more than that.

What Reddit mostly is about is criticizing my game for its ugly anarchic aesthetic that basically looks like "coder graphics" (a term coined for graphics that are made by someone who hasn't expertise in ingame graphics), but there's the problem: when I came with this game being inspired by 90's gaming, aside from the Binding of Isaac and Hotline Miami influence, I wasn't just looking at popular well-made games like DOOM, Duke3D, Quake... I had to also bring in the ugly side of my inspirations: that means ugly shit like Operation: Bodycount, Witchhaven, Tek-War... all sorts of fugly games and DOOM clones from the time.

And here's the thing: maybe these types of graphics are basic as shit, but I don't see anything more advanced in graphics in games like Wolfenstein 3D or Commander Keen for instance. They're pretty aesthetically archaic, but you know what did we use to counter that? Our imagination.

Try this experiment yourself: close your eyes and try to vividly imagine an apple. Rotate it, slice it in half, slice it more... if you can successfully do this within your own mind, congratulations: you have imagination, and you're not an NPC.

The problem with these Reddit type people is that they're exactly NPC's: they're normies. They don't have imagination, so when they see a generic looking pixel-art cutesy game like, say, Ori and the Blind Forest, with pretty graphics and all with the most detail possible, they enjoy it, because everything in regards of structuring the aesthetic that they need to process to fully understand a game, it's being spoonfed to them. But when they see my game with bare-bones graphics as if it was a clone of Gauntlet from 1985, they can't have the imagination to process much, so they just think my game is ugly.

My advice for all those NPC normies out there is: work out your imagination. Creativity mostly. That's why I keep saying their critique mostly ain't shit when they can't make a better game than I do. They'd rather spend more time trying to deconstruct, destroy and complain about everyone else's creations than creating their own. And I think at some degree in the future I'll be able to have a ground to stand when I criticize other people's games, because I have made my own game. Maybe it sounds like a shitty argument, but that's how it is.

Brain up, guys.