Single post in Sprite Discovery Discussion

I'm just gonna toss my two cents in here as well as a few of the responses are bothering me and I've been in a agreement with Sei's reasons - at least to some extent - this entire time and understand why, though I'm in an eh mood right now already so I'm probably not gonna respond henceforth (might also come off a bit strong, apologies if it does and I can revise later if so) x A. Reason for "consistency": Sei has already answered this, for those of you that missed it here it is. The reason for not just doing what looks good and going through so much effort making them "consistent" is to keep the sprites from being chaos - as in you have wacky potato-patterned Pikachu and suddenly a soccer ball Voltorb, then a regular Ditto. Bit of an extreme case, but gets the point across a bit. It's just crazy and unreasonable and doesn't look good in the grand scheme of things. Might make for nice variants in some people's opinions, but I think a lot of you are forgetting that all game makers have an idea, an aspiration, a game they wish to make. Niet wishes for the sprites to be consistent and not wacky and out of the spirit of the original games, and so do art staff at least to the extent they'll work hard to do just that. Just because we want wacky, good-looking chaos doesn't necessarily mean it goes in hand with what the game is designed to be. If I wanted Skyrim to have thunderbolt-summoning, terrain-destroying, cataclysmic dragons and got a backing for it, doesn't mean they'd add it? Because that's not what the game they spent years upon years of their life funding, coding, and well, bringing it to life was meant to be. I understand the wish for good-looking sprites, I really do, but there's such a thing as compromise, discussion, constructive criticism..If you can do better, apply for art staff, they can always use some help. Make a suggestion, show your "better" sprites as an example to show them what they could be doing. Art staff are spending so much time because they want to make them look good, fall in line with their need for consistency - whether we think it is necessary or not it has been explained why many times before - and please as many people as possible. It's not really as simple as color shifting. Color shifting brings about poorly contrasting shades, I've tried this, other areas need fixing afterwards, might make details hard to make out, et cetera. They do need to be shifted, then adjusted even if pixel by pixel. That's just how it is, I'm sure Sei or Shazi could whip up a "just shifted" and a "shifted and tweaked" version for people if it was requested, if they have the time for it but ^^; not to mention they create the sprites themselves from scratch, they can't just take the original, unedited sprites after all. B. The reason for the lock: Restating this now (as VyrusVoyd mentioned it), but the reason for locking it wasn't because they were upset - which maybe they are and maybe they aren't - but rather because Sei wanted everyone to have a chance to read it before it got buried. Same reason I'm restating the reason for consistency even though it got mentioned many times - it got buried behind other posts. C. What is this "constructive criticism" thing Sei mentioned?: Constructive criticism is taking apart a piece of work, analyzing it for positive points and negative points, then relaying both to the creator of the piece of work in as non-biased and informational a way as you can. So they can learn what they did good and should keep doing, what they did bad and should be fixed, how you think it can be fixed, et cetera. Rather than just criticizing something which by definition is simply pointing out the flaws and expressing disapproval towards it. That doesn't help to fix it x We should put as much work into constructive criticizing the sprites as they put into making them if we wish for things to change.

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It's understandable why people don't want this "consistency", Sei and Niet probably also understand why players don't want it, but unfortunately we weren't the ones who spent 11+ years coding this site nearly every day and paying for the servers to host us all to enjoy the game, or years and years of working on the site's art and sprites, on top of having normal lives to lead. Yes we pay to play this game, we pay for other games as well that don't let us have such a strong input into further development, we pay to play because we enjoy playing, and if you don't enjoy it then..It's as simple as that ;w;' but if you're not enjoying it for a fixable reason and normally would, then put together an actual, well thought out reason - cough suggestion forum cough - and gather backing, get others' input as well, get it known by staff, have them analyze your idea and see if it aligns with their goals and is doable and they'll add it. If it doesn't, readjust it, get input, ask why and how it could align with the goals. Suggestions are currently being pushed for to an extent by Niet because he does want us to enjoy the game. But saying, "I don't like this for X reason" doesn't help fix any issues unfortunately, why don't you like it, how can it be fixed, is it reasonable, put some effort into this and make it an actual discussion rather than a slug-fest of criticism all the time. We'll get some answers, Sei does read through all this, and Niet and Garthic do read the suggestions (the more upvotes, more likely it'll be seen). That's all from me though ^^; Edit: Meant to add this in as well @art staff, but there is a compromise between consistency and chaos, it's called organized chaos. You can have what looks like a giant mess all over the place, when in reality there's substance to it - you have certain things in one corner and other things in another, it's just not space-efficient really, yet it's still organized enough to know where everything is. It would take some work to figure out this sweet medium, but I'm sure if people wish to expand upon this..Well, discussion ^^