Graphics are a constant talking point in games. Most of us in the indie scene know about things like “retro” and pixel graphics, but even within the community, there’s a hatred towards them by some. I think the general consensus is that people find them too common in indie games or show a lack of originality. Wayward does it out of necessity, to push content faster. Wayward would never be as deep as it is now if it had AAA graphics; it’s just not realistic. It probably also wouldn’t be very fun because the mechanics would need to be so complex as to interact within a 3d environment. Content over art has kind of been a roguelike tradition, and I don’t see that stopping.
That being said, I’d love to see improvements to the art, the ui and the general game graphics. Recently, I got Dusty to mock-up some “HD” graphics for Wayward. Here’s a screenshot of them actually in the game:
Please note: this is a mock-up concept. Not finalized art.
As you can see, Wayward supports non-pixelated graphics very easily. Just add water (and art)! Even though it works out of the box, it may look a bit strange. This is because there is no support for tile mapping currently. Tile mapping is that thing in games that adapts graphics based on what they are near. Here’s a mock-up that shows what it could look like once tile mapping is implemented:
So, less square grid looking! Tile mapping won’t only be an improvement for “HD” graphics in the future, but also for the pixel art style as well as I briefly showcased here.
Who knows, maybe Wayward will even eventually have a full HD graphic set. Don’t worry though, the pixel graphics aren’t going anywhere. This would be an option or modification for Wayward going forward.
Wow this looks amazing. Just out of curiosity, how is Wayward made? What’s the engine that you used to build this beautiful game?
The engine is all custom, built with HTML5 and JavaScript.
Well, all custom besides the jQuery/jQuery UI frameworks for the interface/html manipulation.
It’s interesting, but I like the lack of detail that pixel graphics give you. The imagination fills in a great deal.
This looks so great.
I like the current look now but other options are nice too.
Well, those look fantastic but I am fully behind gameplay quality taking a priority over graphics. I am on a ten year old 500MHz laptop with 256MB of memory and I can run Firefox 10 and barely get Wayward to work in browser(it’s very slow and maxes out the processor a lot – probably not much you can do about that) on it because I’m using SliTaz linux rather than Windows.
I also like the fact that because it’s HTML5 I don’t need wine. I never have been able to get the linux packages to work though.
Anyway my vote is for effort to focus on stability and depth rather than graphics as it looks good and retro as is and is very fun to play.
Absolutely! Performance is still very iffy at this point, but each version we are getting closer to lower and lower specs being supported.
Yes, and you’re making excellent progress. I’m sure if I could get the linux version to actually run it would be much smoother than through a browser.
Also congrats on the Steam listing! It’s nice to see development progress so well. Few open source and freeware games do so well and have such high quality. This game is like a cross between Nethack and aa old freeware game called “Schiffbruck”(? AKA “Shipwreck!”) and it’s one of the most well done and original free games I’ve seen in recent years so I wish you much luck and future success!