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[–] 24 points 3 months ago (4 children)

You may want to try to deliberately get away from the "unreal fivey" look.

I like the underlying style but the strong reflections and resulting high contrast image really hits that "unreal five" look in a bad way, which I suspect will turn a lot of people off.

It's unfortunate but "indie unreal five game" is the new "steam asset flip", in that it is something that makes people skip a game. It's easy to slap realistic lightning into games now, so it has stopped being an indicator of quality, and slowly become the opposite.

Try to find something that works with the games style that you can do to the shading or post processing that sets you apart.

I might mute reflections a bit and add at least some grime and imperfections to surfaces. The cleanliness of surfaces together with unreals realistic lighting is a big part of the "indie unreal five" look.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    At this point, if your game has the UE5 look and runs like shit, then I won’t consider it all.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    That isn't the first impression that I got, although of course I'm just one data-point. The composition, lighting, and post-processing of the stills are really good which is not common for games that are actually lazily thrown together assets. Looking a bit closer though, I do see what you mean and I think the main problem is that the level of quality doesn't seem that consistent. IDK what's going on on that 13th still with the monitor. A lot of the scenery in the trailer looks worse that the scenery in the stills, and some of the UI stuff seems a bit meh. I get that as an indie dev it takes forever to do this sort of stuff, and definitely there's very little that looks outright bad, the problem is mostly the inconsistency in quality. People only have so much time to play games, and it's not that easy to judge how fun a game is from it's trailers and description, so they look for any clues they can of less than complete effort, as any inattention to detail could indicate a lack of attention to the actual gameplay parts as well. Unfortunately for both gamers and developers, how fun or engaging your game is doesn't necessarily correspond that well with how appealing it is to people who see the trailer.

    IDK, this is all kind of unfounded speculation from someone who really doesn't have much personal experience in the area, so take it with a grain of salt

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