@MiltonW You’re looking at it from the point of view of someone whose played and appreciated the original. Anyone who enjoyed the original won’t care if I add a few lights and shadows, I get it.
But from the point of view of your average Steam user who aren’t aware of the original, how the game looks will obviously play a part in their decision to pay for and play the game.
Even if you were right and it added no commercial value, why is that a reason not to do it?
@gpstudios_tom
If you want people to look at your game on Steam, shading isn’t the first concern. You would have to get your graphics done by a professional.
Of course some games benefit from shading, but for others it is completely useless. Would ‘flappy bird’ get 50% more players if it used shading?
And if you just want to add shading as a hobby/learning thing I’m all for it. Just don’t think it will help in sales…
Not unless shading fit the game’s aesthetics. I mean, how many players specifically requested lighting/shadows in Flappy Bird?
Actually, Flappy Bird is a bad example, because it already had so many players. It’s harder to get 50% more players if you already have tens of millions of downloads - you need millions of new players, as opposed to thousands.
You said: “50% increase in players, depending on how viral the game already was”.
So you want a highly viral game, with no players…
I dare you to give an example where shading would sell even 1 extra copy.
How about somewhere in the middle? How about a game that gets hundreds of thousands of plays, and is viral enough to keep going for a month or three?
If you do the math (making a couple simplifying assumptions), you’ll find that a 1% difference in a player’s likelihood of sharing leads to well over a 50% difference in the total number of players.
All these games would have done just as well without shading.
Cel-shading may have done something for Zelda, but that’s about it.
And of course shader programmers are very useful, but for special effects and video processing, not for actual ‘shading’.
And if a game already gets hundreds of thousands of plays, shading is not going to matter in the likelihood of sharing leads… The game has gotten all those plays because it’s fun to play, shadow or no.
But who cares. You believe your thing, I believe mine. Happy shading.
Let’s agree to disagree. I think this thread has lost its purpose long ago.
TLDR: OP asked for dynamic lighting/shading, and got some good direction (IMO). That’s great. If I was using OpenFL directly instead of HaxeFlixel, I would jump in right about now, since I wanted to do something like this for a while 