I guess it is a little odd for me to not make any kind of post up in this joint. Time to fix that.
Anyway as far as the rather bitter "production values" debate goes: a thing to remember is that, just as with their big-brother commercial releases, a lot of doujin games are made on absolutely miniscule budgets. Like the budget for Fez, as an example, would make most of these guys blush.
Many of them aren't out to make The Next Big Thing, either - a lot of them just do this as a hobby and use Comiket as a way to share it with others while making a very small amount of money. A lot of these games would be lucky to sell a thousand copies... lifetime. The guys who make it "big" are rare and typically don't expect to do so. The games, therefore, can sometimes reflect this hobbyist attitude - they go with what they have, not what "looks best".
Anyway, the larger part of CF will be in Tokyo for this thing during the weekend and whatnot, to meet up with our existing dev partners and to scout for potential new titles. We'll be talking to EGS about
Territoire to see where they are on that - it actually sounds like things are going well, but I'll admit I've been curious for a while too. We'll also definitely take a look at
Motto Osu - hilariously, the first we learned of this title was when that site went up.
It looks fairly simple, but promising - Muracha and crew know how to design a videogame, at least, and it looks like they're stepping up their ~production values~. (The curious may want to take note of the aspect ratio of those screenshots.)
Beyond that, what I'm most eager to see in action is
Astebreed - time to drop a bit of a GAF Bombshell here, but we were actually considering bringing over Edelweiss' previous titles at one point. The main thing that stopped us was the ongoing effort of our fourth project, and we delayed a bit in getting back to them, and they were then snatched up by Nyu Media. They did mention to us that they do want to take their work to the "next level", as it were, and Astebreed sure seems like it shows that off. If it has unique shmup mechanics like Ether Vapor did, there's a chance we could work on it. (Note I said a
chance, please.
)
I'm also hoping we can run into the lads behind
Arcanum Knights, as they sold the hell out before we could even get a test copy last year. I also just want to talk to those lads in general as they have the best circle name in history.
Anyway, should be a pretty good Comiket! I'm looking forward to it.
PROPER EDIT:
Even though the gameplay may look interesting, the graphics turn me off a lot of time. And somehow I think a friend of mine who studied computer science can do better than that. Just use e.g. more polygons in the models and some textures with higher resolution.
A word on this. In addition to the "hobbyist, therefore no budget at all" aspect I discussed above, a lot of these games are often targeted to as wide a hardware base as possible. Remember, PCs are not popular in Japan, and this software often gets played on a staggering variety of hardware. The general practice for a lot of doujin game devs, therefore, is to simply target the lowest possible hardware denominator and build the graphics around that - not only is it less expensive, but you can be more certain your game will run on as many machines as possible. So many developers see "throw more polygons at it" as not necessarily a good idea.
