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In general, a major software-development principle we held when working on Wesnoth (and which I think is generally pretty smart) was: «options are bad».

Every option in a software program is another code path you have to support, and the combinatorial complexity of multiple code paths, when it comes to testing and all sorts of similar «hidden costs» of doing development, really adds up.

So you don't want to accept multiple kinds of art, and gate each kind of art behind an option flag which users (or the author) can turn off.

It's bad because not only does it increase the support costs of the software, but it also makes it harder to achieve the goal of having a single, coherent art set for the project you're on, because it severely «confuses» your messaging to new contributors.

Ultimately if you've got a game that only has a portion of the art done, your game's mere existence is the best «help wanted» ad for getting additional art. But a critical part of asking for this additional art is a detailed description of what you need to do to match the game's current style.



The thing is — just existing is usually enough. «A picture is worth a thousand words». You don't need to waste a huge amount of time explaining what you want if you've got a large body of examples.

But — if these examples severely contradict themselves, then you're in for a lot of pain. If you've got two radically different visual styles, it's very difficult to explain to new contributors «which style» you'd like the game to actually be in.

All of a sudden you go from a hands-off, «no work for the project lead» matter of just letting the art speak for itself, to having to be deeply, personally involved in steering people.

— Alternate interpretation: It's possible you're suggesting a scenario in which someone's offering to make art for the game in a single, coherent style, and this is a situation where the entire game would get art, but you, the developer, would hide the art from yourself.

At the risk of being impolite, this is absolutely insane.

Which is to say it's «impossible» — there's an enormous time-cost and ongoing maintenance cost of time you'll have to spend getting the graphics to display correctly, and making sure they continue to display correctly as development continues and features get added and removed.

In almost all cases where this has happened (dwarf fortress being a key example), these external «artists» essentially did an enormous amount of programming to make their work viable.

Dwarf fortress mods operate by literally doing direct memory access and looking at the RAM state of the app as it runs, since there's no mod API or anything, but even if you did have a mod API — somebody has to pay the enormous cost of writing the code to get the entire graphics-drawing layer working correctly, and the complexity of doing this is usually equivalent to writing an entire game of its own.

… I mean — any game where this succeeds has essentially «won the lottery», and is an extremely dangerous target to imitate the habits of, because it succeeded not due to «good developer practices» but because it got insanely lucky.



A dangerous thing when looking at the dev practices of other games, especially «popular, successful» games, is a phenomenon called «survivor bias».

Survivor bias is when someone looks at the behavior of a very successful thing, and instead of thinking «oh, they were really successful, so they were able to survive even though they made a bad choice» — instead, one assumes «oh, they succeeded BECAUSE they made this choice».

For example — dwarf fortress doesn't use source control. :ohno:

Not git, not svn, not cvs. They just have old copies of the code in folders.



Anyways, when it comes to art — I honestly personally believe you're going to be entering a really toxic/awkward relationship if you're working with an artist who's producing a style you really don't like.



You can try to «fake» it by being nice, and accepting the art even though you don't like it, but you're far better off just living without and being honest.

It's a lot like getting married. :neutral_face: