Defining polishness. (Anti-Aliased sprites?)

[Jason Chong]

I keep hearing about various definitions of Polishness of a casual game.

Does the list include anti-aliased/smooth edged 2D sprites?

Is it a must to have anti-aliased sprites (using 3D hardware etc)

for a game to be considered polish ?

If that is really the case, then what's the point of using libSDL and etc then?

Is it safe to say that a game that uses DirectDraw is not polished anymore ?


In my case, I rendered sprites on a black background, then fill the solid black background with RGB(255,0,255) and then create outline for the sprites with RGB(0,0,0) and use RGB(255,0,255) as colorkey.

It looks good to me with the outlines, without having to use anti-aliased sprites.

What say you ?

[Hiro_Antagonist]

I'm not sure if you're actually looking for a literal definition, but of course there is none that everyone would agree with.

There's a huge list of tricks which generally convey a polished look and feel. And using alpha-embedded images (with anti-aliasing) will go a long way.

I think most of us have formed our own ideas about what makes a game polished, and figuring that out (and how to apply it to your product) is the kind of thing that seperates the good developers from the bad...

-Hiro_Antagonist

[Vorax]

I think of polish as:

- Attention to quality in all the art forms employed to make a game :
-- Programming (no bugs, responsive controls, good framerate)
-- Sound fx - crisp and consistent with theme and action/events
-- Music - works with the game and is pleasent even after repetition
-- Graphics - clean and consistent - adds atmosphere and interest
-- UI - Easy to use and read - pleasent to look at
- The little extra details that don't need to be done, but are
- A consistency in overall presentation that denotes style and quality

[Anthony Flack]

I like anti-aliased sprites myself. Like them a lot. Wouldn't want to ever surrender my alpha channel now that I've gotten used to it.

But of course, there's no simple answer to this question. An 8bpp game can have excellent polish. It just has to show some style, and consistency. That's not really a technical consideration.

I imagine an 8bpp, simple blitted sprite game could look fantastic. Just think of all the huge sprites and masses of animation you could cram in, at 8bpp and using system memory. Then think about games like Street Fighter Alpha 3, or Metal Slug. Polished up to hell. And good luck trying to do a game like that in hardware.

[Fabio]

Personally I think that what gives more to "polish" is:

1) a game developed in Krakow or Warsaw (sorry, couldn't resist :D )

2) if you can't develop a game in Poland, then IMHO your second option is to make polish graphics: in my mind what gives most to "polish graphics" is clever use of lighting. I think this accounts more than anything else (antialiasing, alpha blending, etc..).

3) if you can make both 1) and 2) you can be certain your game is "polish". :p

[Erik Thon]

I think a good gui can be all-important for a polished feel; give me a fresh and intuitive gui and I tend to become a lot more forgiving about other shortcomings. Other than that, Vorax summed up my thoughts about it, especially the bit about consistency.
Then think about games like Street Fighter Alpha 3, or Metal Slug. Polished up to hell. And good luck trying to do a game like that in hardware.
Weeell.. I'm doing a beat'em'up game myself in hardware with plenty of anims, parallax scrolling backgrounds etc.. so I know it's fully possible if you're being a little smart about it. Just be prepared to up the minimum requirements quite a bit.

[Jason Chong]

Ok if you guys are making side scrollers and such, obviously the keyboard or joypad is the ideal input device.

How would a platform/jump run game be played using a mouse ?

If your game only uses mouse for menus/navigation but requires joypad or keyboard for interaction in the game, is that considered polish ?

I simply cannot imagine how you would use the mouse to play a jump and run game and I think it's kinda stupid.

[Erik Thon]

That would be stupid, sure. But who said anything about mouse control as a means of polish?

[Jason Chong]

well I notice most of the top selling indie games, are all mouse based ?

Is a non-mouse oriented game going to be limiting your market ?

[soniCron]

...here we go again... ;)

[luggage]

I don't think you can just say "If you do this then the game has polish but if you don't have this then it won't". It's not that straightforward unfortunately. Basically - does your game hang together well?

When I'm working on a game and I think I'll add that little bit more polish to something it's usually when I spend the extra effort to make something look nice. For example, do you normally just pop a message on the screen? What about alphaing it on? Scaling it on? Bounce it on?

Don't get lazy - go that extra mile .

[mahlzeit]

You can easily do anti-aliased 2D sprites with SDL, by the way.

[Jason Chong]

You can easily do anti-aliased 2D sprites with SDL, by the way.


That can only be done using software backbuffer in SDL and it's slower, no ?

Any-time you start doing alpha related stuff in SDL, the whole thing must be software only, you can't even take advantage of hardware blitting/color keying anymore.

If you use 3D hardware to do 2D, you have a real alpha channel to play with.

SDL is mostly good just for hardware color keying and blitting. It doesn't accelerate anything more than that.

[Ryan Clark]

That can only be done using software backbuffer in SDL and it's slower, no ?

Any-time you start doing alpha related stuff in SDL, the whole thing must be software only, you can't even take advantage of hardware blitting/color keying anymore.

If you use 3D hardware to do 2D, you have a real alpha channel to play with.

SDL is mostly good just for hardware color keying and blitting. It doesn't accelerate anything more than that.
Our game uses SDL, and we have fully antialiased sprites. Yes, it's all rendered in software, but no, it's not that slow! Especially if you make use of a dirty rectangles updating algorithm.

Our game is 800x600, with lots of alpha/antialiasing, and it will run on a 200mhz machine.

[ggambett]

Same here, Wild West Wendy is pretty graphics-intensive, everything is antialiased, all the characters actually have multiple layers of antialiased parts, and it does run on relatively modest hardware (it eats a lot of RAM though, but it's not the point here)

[Anthony Flack]

Yeah, I know it's possible, but I'm talking about full-screen, multi-layer parallax scrolling antialiased graphics. Similarly, if I were to make a game that used 8 bit software sprites, I would go absolutely nuts and cover the screen in giant graphics. Each approach has its plusses and negatives. Doing anti-aliased sprites in software is great, except it really limits how much crap you can throw on the screen. And for my work, polish usually involves throwing lots and lots of crap on the screen (insert obvious joke).

The point is that polish can take many forms, and there's always a trade-off. Choose whatever suits the project. I bet you could make a highly-polished game using 320x200x1.