Examples of games on the same or lower budget than Jeff Vogel's which manage to look better:
Made by a small team of indie devs who self-funded it with their own savings, essentially. Went through a long cycle of development, and changed artstyle at some point (I remember some very old AoD screenshots where it was 2D isometric). Still ended up profitable enough for the devs to go into full time development.
Russian-made Fallout clone that raised 33k on Kickstarter, a fraction of what Queen's Wish raised. Decent quality 3D graphics with a distinct post-soviet style to them.
Cheap indie RPG made by a one-man team. Doesn't look great, but doesn't look terrible either. The visuals are decent enough, and most importantly, the choices of colors are harmonious enough to not be hard on the eyes. The proportions of objects look right and the perspective is fine, too. This is what low budget indie should look like.
Game made by a single Serbian madman. Characters and environments blend in well with each other. Again, colors are tasteful enough that they don't hurt your eyes. The tilesets themselves aren't that high quality either but it still looks atmospheric due to a good use of lighting. Whoever was responsible for the art direction knew what he was doing and used the limited resources to good effect.
A lite RPG with a story that feels like it was first written as an erotic fanfic. Yet the visual style of it is pretty damn decent. Characters and environments fit well to each other, the tileset has a tasteful choice of colors, and just like with Underrail, skillful use of lighting lends it a nice atmosphere.
Bit of an unfair comparison because Shadowrun Returns had a much larger budget than any of Vogel's games, but the same principle applies. The devs made 3 games on that engine, re-using their high quality assets in each one. Nobody ever complained about asset re-use there, because the visuals just look fucking great. High quality tileset combined with low poly 3D characters for a greater variety of equipment displayed on the characters. High quality 2D + 3D characters is truly the best choice. Yes, those high quality assets weren't cheap, but if you re-use them for future games it's an investment that pays off. Also, since Vogel somehow made the choice of shitty perspective for Queen's Wish because he wants to port the game to tablets and phones:
this game was also officially released on Android platforms.
Zombie survival RPG. Like in Shadowrun, it uses 2D environments with 3D characters for greater flexibility. Again, it doesn't have super top AAA quality tilesets, but the tilesets are tastefully colored and give off a nice vibe fitting to the zombie apocalypse setting. It looks simple, but it looks beautiful. It also looks very clean and not messy at all. One glance at the screen lets you easily spot everything that is of interest: buildings, objects, NPCs, etc.
Meanwhile, Queen's Wish:
Really, Jeff? Really? A messy perspective that's hard to read, character models that don't blend well with the environment (in fact, they don't blend at all - they look like they're drawn from a wholly different perspective), assets that look like they could be sold as an RPG Maker asset package, character portraits that look like Poser 3D models people on DeviantArt use for cheap fetish art. People have said for years that they'd like you to use a better artstyle, and this is what you're going for? This is the kind of visual style a Kickstarter that makes almost 100k gets you? Which is
more than twice the amount of money ATOM RPG's Kickstarter brought in, mind you.
How is this in any way justifiable?
In comparison to those other games which also had budget limits, this looks like a cheap RPG Maker game with assets that don't fit together. These other games look like someone sat down, said "I want my game to look like this", and then gave his artists precise instructions; these artists then worked together to make their assets all blend in well with the overall art direction. This looks like a bunch of random, disjointed elements slapped together willy-nilly with no regard to the overall impression they're supposed to have on the player. Some elements of it, like the samey Poser 3D looking character portraits, even look cheap, like someone just went with the cheapest option that required the least amount of effort.
Look at all the other games I posted screenshots of above, Jeff.
Can you still justify your artstyle in face of those?
