No worries!
In return, you'll have to suffer an exceptionally high-and-mighty-tone. Sorry! Don't hate me.



Is that so?
It might well be. I do remember that the games I wanted to create at first were all very similar to existing games. And it is very common to hear people shout that they want to create a game "just like X". Does that change with time? And if so, is it just your tastes changing, or is it realizing that you want to express yourself more clearly, which is impossible when sticking too close to which has been there before?
(Which is unfair to say. I'm exaggerating to make the point more clear. There might still be some truth there?)



(EDIT: Reading this again, I think I misunderstood your point. But "great quality" is a bit unclear - it's all subjective, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
Yet, I don't think the below adds anything at this point. For completeness' sake, it's still there.)

Does everyone want this?
Let's disregard some "obvious" points (like everyone wants a screen resolution high enough to work), and talk about certain art styles.

Like cartoon - cel-shading. There's millions of fans of anime out there. And a lot of them enjoy the distinctively japanese artstyle, with clear faces and lots of expressions of characters, and the (usually) somewhat more plain textures.
And I don't have to hide behind a "Many like it!"-statement here; I do think that this kind of artstyle can make for very compelling visuals (and it not being so close to realism may give you more options, too).

Yeah, it's the same point as before.
Just, you know, next time, before you put the sad smiley there, think about the limiations you have for a minute.
Yes, they're often annoying, but they do serve as very important limiters. They limit what you can do - which sounds like it's a bad thing, but it isn't. Most people, when given the opportunity to do (or create) anything simply draw a blank. They don't know what to do or make.
But as soon as you limit the possible options, you have a starting point - if only in knowing what it is you can't do. From there, you can figure out what it is that's important to your vision, and end up creating something amazing with the limitations.

I believe that this may be part of the reason that those who do their Game Jams with certain themes they have to stick to end up creating more than those who don't.

All this and I didn't even point to Minecraft, or any of the other successful games with "Retro visuals" out there to make my point!




Well - a loading screen can be many things. Look, a black screen with the text "Loading" at the bottom is very obviously telling me that the game is loading content (or in other words, that it isn't real).

A game that does the same thing, but at the same time shows a picture of me descending onto a planet is doing a better job. I'm probably not fooled, but it's not outright telling me that there's a technical reason for the pause. So the suspension of disbelief is shattered a little less - cracked only, maybe.

A game that instead keeps going and silently pretends I'm flying through clouds (with me controlling it, even), while streaming everything in the background does the best job (think Metroid Prime's doors). Here, I have no reason to assume that I'm out of the world for a second.
This is not so easy to accomplish with Acknex, but it's still doable.





Alright, let's think this through. So you have your game, and it runs amazingly on your computer. But there's a problem when you run it on your grandma's computer - it's not running fast enough!
"Oh", you say, "guess we render too much on the screen here". So you decrease the distance you can see, and thus, less polygons are rendered. It now runs on your grandma's computer (if she manages to configure the settings right), good job!

But what's that? Your great uncle calls and says the game isn't running fluidly!
"Blast", you say, "I cannot reduce the distance any further, or it's unplayable" (since you need to see a certain distance). "Guess I'll have to use models with a lower polycount".

So now you have to model every object in the game again with half the polygons, and it works on the computer of your great uncle.

... Until, of course, he's in the mission with the great space dogfight. What now?
"Well...", you say. You can tune down the effects, of course - use less particles, smaller graphics - but maybe that won't cut it. This is difficult - your AI routines simply take too long! Your alternative is to make them simpler, but now the game suffers, as the ships are suddenly much easier (or harder (superintelligent AI can be - depending on the task - simple to create)). You may allow that, but now someone is playing thorugh a different game (an anecdote: on some old FPS games, one of the tips for increasing the framerate was to lower the difficulty of AI opponents)


Do you see where this is going? Yeah, you can go some way with that, but at some point, you cannot reduce things or the game itself suffers. You can't make textures as small as you wish if you NEED the player to read something written on it. You can't simply remove explosions, since they're needed for the player to see that the opponent was defeated (and is no longer a threat).
And that's disregarding all the extra effort it takes - if you have to model everything in the game ten times for your detail levels*, your game will take so much longer to produce - and for what? So that 0.0000001% more people can play it?
It sucks to cut someone out of the experience, but it sucks even more if all you could ever do was work on one game and never finish as you try to make sure it works for everyone.



All that being said, yeah, if you're willing to produce more content after you're done with the game, sure, there's nothing stopping you from putting an update out.
Sidenote: You won't WANT to do that, though. Yeah, it's your dream project, yes, it's very exciting, I believe that! I know that feeling.
But also know this, after two, or three, or even more years of working on a game, you may want to work on something else. There surely is more than one game idea in you! It's always a balance act.




That's nice of you to say - you're welcome!


* - Look, you know about LOD. If you use that, you already have three versions, so simply not using the highest level would be an option. The above is a very simplified example.