Suggestion: More images?

Something i have noticed is the lack of images in the games. I’m not talking about images at every text, but rather having some images here and there to give us an idea of what the author envisage their world and landscape, characters and concept.

Is it something too hard to do? Is it something authors dont favor for an specific reason? For people that have some difficulty with english, having more images in games would be bomb.

Whats is your opinion?

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Part of the appeal of these games is that you can imagine the world described in the text as best you like it, although obviously within the constraints of that text. Official art often is slightly (or even very) different from what people would picture left to their own devices.

Also, art costs money if commissioned and time if you make it yourself. Given that the majority of the game will be text anyway, and whatever art you provide may not even be to the audience’s taste, it’s often not worth the trouble.

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I made a poll a while back kind of about the same topic, maybe you can get some more answers there.

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I wouldn’t want official images in my games because I prefer my readers being able to imagine both the setting and the characters as they like. I don’t need or want a canonical visual expression of my story; in fantasy, especially, I think words can evoke richer mental images than most artists could manage to capture.

It’s also worth noting that there’s a vocal fan contingent who HATE images, who’ve been out in force since character drawings started regularly showing up in CoG titles. Some of them just have gripes with the style, but many feel it’s a betrayal of the medium – that a CoG game must leave everything to the “vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.”

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I was about to post, and then @Havenstone said pretty much exactly what I was going to :laughing: Although I enjoy cover art, and love the covers that have been created for my games, internal art isn’t a priority for me. Threading the needle of art matching players’ internal imagination, as well as being a style that players personally like, when opinions differ so much, is a tricky proposition.

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If you change your mind, you can use my AI-generated Hearthlight sausage dog for free. :laughing:

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Ohhhhh now I see why. Yeah what you say makes sense. I knew it was something the authors themselves did deliberate. Thanks

Alright i commented there already

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Alright then just saw the post you linked

But i think its a 50-50 thing in here. The post Loudbeat created has a solid 50% of almost 100 people voting. But yeah, i can see both sides of the issue. At least i have an answer. At first i was lost

I wasn’t addressing it to ask for more comments but thanks anyway (it’s an old post)

I took a few good ideas from all that I gathered about the subject:

  1. Do whatever you like, if you want to fill up your game with images no one’s stopping you.
  2. If you decide to put images in your game, especially if they are character portraits or representations, give the users the choice not to see them.

In my own game just at one of the first screens, there’s a warning about the images the game contains, and you can choose to not see any image, see only images without character faces, or see all. With that, I think you can please both sides, and it cost nothing to code it, even after having written the whole book. At least it’s the best solution I’ve come to so far.

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I put pencil sketches I created into Wizardry for funsies as I’d was enjoying making them but no one seemed to care about them (I don’t think I got any feedback good or bad about it, so seemed like it was a pretty neutral thing) so haven’t bothered putting more into subsequent games as they take time I’m pretty short on. I’d only do it in the future if I felt like it because it didn’t seem like something most readers particularly wanted to have.

In addition to that, there’s been some heavy push back from some quarters about character portraits as some readers would prefer to imagine their own characters, so putting those in could actually hurt your game. I often like non-human and scene images. I’m on the fence about character portraits myself and would like the option to have them turned off if they don’t gel with what I’m imagining.

Above reasons, also because it costs money if the writer isn’t also an artist. For example I’m not good with humans in drawings, so the last thing I’d want to do is put some close up character shots in a game I was creating. To do that I’d need to hire an artist, and with the amount it’d cost it’s likely that it would be non-viable for any of my games at least to afford, especially if few people wanted them so it wouldn’t translate to more people wanting to read it because of the images included.

Final reason is adding a heap of images is going to make your game larger to download and keep on your phone.

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In my case I prefer the use of images for landscape, cities or/and maps (territories).

However, I would avoid that for the characters because they will “clash” with the appearance we readers think or imagine.

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There are already some character art pictures in some choice of games releases like choice of the vikings, but I can’t say they were necessarily a good idea to help the reader visualize the characters (and, subjectively speaking, I didn’t like the art at all).

I’m all for more images, as long as art style changes from creepy caricatureish one. Also preferable the art and images be in the same style as cover/title/main image(i don’t know what is the correct term, someone please enlighten me).

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On the omnibus app, it’s labeled “Box Art,” which I find rather charmingly old-fashioned.

At the risk of redundancy, this is my view too.

With one exception: I absolutely love a good map. They serve a practical purpose (reference guide for the reader if they want to double check whereabouts they are in the town/region), a thematic one (if presented in the style of the genre/period being written about), and they’re very unlikely to fall foul of messing with people’s imaginations and expectations (because they’re just depicting locations in a space in a pretty objective way).

Very much pro map inclusion :world_map:

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