Monsters Made for Children

Well if you check the ORIGINAL POST he mentions it being too "cartoony" which I took to mean colorful.

Where as all serious grimy games tend to have that ugly brown filter. (See: Call of Duty, Gears of War, ect ect.)

Instead of trying to moderate everyone's post, how about you actually try to stay on topic and have a discussion yourself?

 

No! I'm not criticizing! I was just wondering if I missed something myself! I do agree though, I like that natural brightness of this game. COD is too brown for me

 

Well, let's be fair. The brown gimmick has sort of died out in recent years. Even Call of Duty isn't brown (it was one of the more colorful series throughout the 7th console generation, actually) - look at this:

No, not a good game at all (at least singleplayer), but definitely not brown like Resistance 3.

 

Well, if you mix blue and pink, you might get something close to brown. Hmm. Does that depend on whether we go by the RGB system or the CMYK one?

As to the OP, the game doesn't take itself seriously. I don't see that as a problem. Why does adult stuff always have to be serious?

 

Agreed that it has died down, and for good reason. It was sort of a weird phase. It worked for some games given the content, but other companies tried to piggy back onto the concept to garner attention from the 'Hardcore' audience, and it just got kinda dumb.

That being said, this game is supposed to feel a little cartoonish, and colorful, and fun. It's not going to be all in your face with some over the top story, though it does appear to have one, it's mostly a creative playground more then it is anything else. In that sense I feel the style fits very well.

Plus the monsters won't always be quite this colorful, as someone has pointed out earlier. Molly uses a color filter for some of the monsters.


Another neat thing about the game is it will be pretty easily moddable, so if you don't want the silly enemies to be a thing, you can probably just get rid of them all together.

Me. I want to see something silly and dumb. I want to laugh at it. Then I want to blow it up, and laugh some more.

 

Most modern games are mostly brown. CoD, BF, stuff like that. just different shades of brown and grey at this point.

 

Needs more grey and hyper-realistic blood please.

 

Well put my friend!

 

I have seen plenty of different colours. Not to mention that animals tend to do that, be different colours and all

 

That unicorn from terraria that was also posted, is not completely bright pink, just its mane. Also, it has red eyes and in no way has the cartoony look, it kind of looks evil still with the shape of the eyes, some people dont understand what im saying, entirely. (not only that but that monster was made specifically like that, to fit the theme of one paticular biome, the hallowed biome with rainbows fairys and unicorns, the opposite of the evil side biome, so it had its place in the story so to speak, it wasnt the art/colour style parameters of the entire games monsters.....)

Not sure why a few others are saying the monsters should look cartoony because the rest of the game is cartoony, because how exactly is the rest of the game cartoony? guards, your characters, the bases you can build, the dungeons the planets the spaceships etc etc all look realistic, as realistic as a 2d side scroller can, where are people getting the idea the rest of the game is cartoony exactly?

and again, just because i dont want bright pink and cartoony means i must want the other extreme: brown, or dark and moody or bloody etc etc *rolls eyes* you guys dont seem to comprehend either, not sure why, i did explain pretty well, either that or not sure why your trying to take what i said out of context so hard...

The idea of those monsters being like that because their tier 1 i.e should be the cutest looking harmless things out there kind of thing, i completely agree with, and hope that this is the case because thatd be fair enough. Just as long as you dont get to a dangerous but awesome difficulty like 80 planet that ends up being full of cute bright coloured little pokemon that look like they just want to hug you lol..... As long as it really is just a tier thing.

 

looks fine to me

 

Such as, the TurtleLhamaRaptor, perchance?



Look at those teeth! Gahhhh!

I have two very good explanations for why this is so ... because it's pretty much exactly as you say, they are pretty tame and comical, more akin to something you'd want for a pet, rather than an actual monster.

1) It's a platformer, how could they possibly make them really scary in 2D 16-bit resolution?

2) The game is made by Chucklefish Games, and everything about the way it has been presented since I started following the production of Starbound last May says that there is a pretty consistent sense of humor involved here. The NPCs will say silly/funny/cheesy things I'm sure, the "monsters" will be melodramatically frightening, and the only thing to be taken seriously about the game will be exploration, crafting, and building.

 

To be fair we haven't seen monster placement or all that the generator has to offer. So, everything we really say in this thread could be meaningless come release. I'm just really confused as how you think this game isn't cartoony in nature.

I mean


Come on.



The signs have been



Everywhere

Okay, that last one was just the team having a bit of fun.

This isn't to say there isn't a serious side to the game, I mean. Some of the monsters they have out there are pretty intimidating.

I don't want to mess with that.



Or these.



I'll probably glass any planet with those on it.



Those things weird me out.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is I feel this game already strikes a good balance of silly and serious.

Though I guess we won't really know for sure until we get our hands on the game.

 

There was actually a decent reason for the "real is brown" effect - the technology and game engines of a few years ago couldn't handle complex lighting effects. In particular a phenomenon called interreflection was difficult to model. Basically, light hits something and reflects off it, and this is what you see - sometimes there's effects like glare and specular reflection (mirrors). You can handle this dynamically fairly easily. However, what happens afterward? What about all the stuff that light hits after that? It's hard to figure out, and we've only recently been able to get around it (sometimes with sheer brute force - see Crytek). However, turning everything roughly the same shade (brown) makes it a lot easier.

Starbound has the high advantage of being highly stylized (i.e., cartoonish) and deliberately retro in that style, so it doesn't need to figure out how to do high resolution rendering of light reflection and such.

 

I had forgotten about this actually. Someone had brought this up to me previously, and it just completely slipped my mind. Thanks for the information. Glad to know all game developers didn't go through like a brown phase just because they we're feeling like brown was the hip thing.

Edit: That being said, I still stand by my previous posts in that I disagree with your opinion on the monsters.

I also disagree that the monsters in Terarria aren't silly either. That whole Light Biome thing was just silly.

Pinky the slime anyone?

Slimes in general actually.

 

I think I'm one of the few people that doesn't find an issue with the current monster styles revealed. Why yes, it may look childish and not be fear inducing....you have to keep in mind that we're talking about "aliens". There isn't a standard for aliens as none are recorded in our history, so the appearance goes as far as the imagination. The game isn't meant to be a horror game, so you can't expect monsters to be scary and have to take them with a grain of salt. I just like the idea of random mobs that change depending on the planet. They might not be scary, but it leaves more to explore on combinations!

 

Musicalbears, er, that first evidence picture with the "embarassed, my optics are up here" dialogue is not cartoony, look at it, then look at the pink thing on Nov 11th post, and not just the colour of the thing on the 11th Nov post but its art style in general.

Nor are those Floran themed weapons cartoony, sure they dont have blood dripping off them or whatever but thats my whole point, for about the 4th time, you dont need blood or dark or moody or whatever you want to call it, because theres a quite fine happy medium which funnily enough is perfectly illustrated by those 2 mentioned pictures.

Their not at all cartoony but not all mature audience only, how hard is it to find that medium for monsters also.



Its human nature to love whatever it is they are going to make, you will want it badly no matter what it is, because its basic human nature to want what we cant have, the whole forbidden fruit theory, but its also human nature to then get what we cant have, then get bored of it and move on to the next forbidden fruit.

Im thinking past the initial wow this game blows your mind because we cant get our hands on it to get used to and over it, thinking to the point of when the fruit is no longer forbidden and in our everyday lives and the novelty has worn off, lets see if your still happy with fighting 10yo styled monsters.

 

Personally I didn't even notice anything wrong with the monsters I've seen so far except for how common some features seem to be (which may just be the Alpha build talking). I do not at all expect Starbound to be serious or realistic. In fact, it is my hope that when it's all said and done, I can actually enjoy a laugh or two from the creatures I find. Starbound to me is the never-ending adventure, it's the book you don't have to put down until you're done writing new pages. As wonderful as that may sound to lore-loving, overactive imagination-having, freaks like me (hey maybe you, too!) we're destined to have looooong slogs of the same-old stuff. Do you really want every enemy you fight to be doomy and gloomy? Do you think the story of your character would be as good or as fulfilling if you were fighting more visceral creatures?

I mean sure, we all want to be the dashing hero in our own story, but for every person in history that wrestled a bear and won, there's plenty of people who got wrecked by a distressed goose at the city park. Would it really make sense if your character woke up in the morning, grabbed his gun, and immediately had to fight off visceral Cthulu-raptor-lions? Not every world is going to be all about kicking down your own front door and hacking through baddies like a Riddick movie.

Edit: I just saw the shitfest some of you are having over whether or not it is "childish", and let me just share one insight I've found to be true about the nature of maturity: You either have it or you don't, it's determined by your character and your self-control, and if you have to sit back and refrain from doing something you like because you're worried you might be "too old" or "too mature" to do, you are not mature enough to be worrying about those things anyway.

 

It's a don't look at my boobs joke. Except it's a robot. I find that silly, and entertaining. Also proof that the game isn't exactly geared towards kids.

I like the pink thing in the 11th post.
I like most things I've seen so far.

A cactus bat, and a tree as weapons are serious?
(I made no point in that last point of mentioning blood, or gore as an element for serious games. No need to bring that up there.)

It's not human nature to love something you know little of. We actually historically tend to fear those things. (See: Every religious war ever, and everyone who is pessimistic about this game because they haven't seen enough.)
Yes we as humans tend to hype things we want, and that's okay. Yes eventually we grow tired of things. That's okay too. It's not a flaw to enjoy the now.

Also. I'm 22 and play Pokemon. Of course I'm going to like the silly looking monsters.

You seem to be impossible to sway, so I'll accept your opinion. That being said, don't bash mine by saying only younger audiences should enjoy this art style.
Everyone likes what they like, you seem to not like the art style, and that's okay.

I do.

And I'm sure I'll enjoy this game well past the "Wow a new thing!" phase. I'll contact you in a few months to remind you in between sessions.

(As a note: That analogy doesn't quite fit here. We can have it, and we are going to get it. We just have to wait.

Where as that "Theory" is intended to apply to things we can't have. IE: Someone's spouse, million dollar mansions, private islands. It makes the unobtainable more attractive. Not the thing you've got to wait a few weeks for.)

 

Nah. The boss is the sphere thingy inside a hole. What? How that could possibly not be it?