Quoted from wesman:Levi, you often cop this diminishing and negating attitude, (sometimes just in general) but frequently towards people that are new to the board.
To be fair the amount of new people who say stupid things without taking the time to understand the community or the hobby seems to just keep rising. I just tune it all out generally, one reason why I don't post much these days, but I don't blame anyone for getting cranky over it. Levi is just the Jiminy Cricket of Pinside's conscience, saying things so everyone else does have to.
I'm not an animator, but I have worked on a pinball game display, and I have a background in UI and UX and design, so I have thoughts on this topic. Rather than add to the yelling I'll post them.
I think it all breaks down into roughly these buckets:
1) Budget
2) Time
3) Creativity
4) Assets
5) Expectations
Budget is simple enough, even if you don't know what the true costs are. Good people are hard to find, and they usually like to be paid for their time. The more people and more time your concept takes to execute the more money it costs. There are finite limits you can't break if you want to finish your game and not go out of business. Pinball might be expensive, but the units sold are very low, and the physical costs are very high. Any video game that sold as much as a modern pin would be a colossal failure. It's pointless to compare them.
Time is just the ever present bitch hanging over everything. Time is money, but time is also getting things out the door so you have a product. Regardless of ambition or even budget if you don't have the time you don't have it. It will differ from company to company, but most can't afford years to work on a single game's animation.
Creativity is the wild card. Most LCD pin displays are in my opinion not very creative. That doesn't mean they're bad, it just means they're very formulaic and don't take many risks or try new ideas. If you don't have a huge budget or a ton of time you can make up for that with creative thinking. You're not making a video game, you're not making a movie, and you don't need to make the same game your competitors are making. There's more to animation than 3D rendered scenes or comic book frames or slot machine style graphics. But you'd hardly know that from looking at pinball.
Assets change everything about your approach. On Alien we had things we could use, and things we couldn't. Mostly that was actors we could have on screen or not. That dictated everything about our approach (along with the tech we had available, we had to work within the limits of the software). What we made from scratch, what we edited from films, how it all came together, that was about the assets. Original games come with no assets generally. That's both easier and harder. When it comes to actually filling minutes on a screen though it's mostly harder. Pre-baked assets can be used in a lot of ways, but they're a very huge and useful crutch.
Expectations are the hidden cost you gotta factor. If you're doing 3D graphics for instance, well, people are going to compare them to video games and movies. And probably find you lacking, since you don't have the team or budget. This is where creativity can help, if you don't follow established formulas it's easier to stand on your own and stand out.
There's more to it than that. How you display information, scores, etc, but that's not generally about animation per se. Balancing those 5 things isn't easy. And I'm leaving out a very important part that's not directly animation, and that's the hardware/software support for your ideas. What can you do dynamically in real time, what's pre-canned? There's a budget and a time cost for that too. Engineering time, code development, graphic hardware in the game, etc.
I don't think budgets, time, or assets are going to meaningfully change. People should probably change their expectations. And I'd like to see companies be more creative.