What Makes Sword Designs Ugly (also: Fixing Them!)

Fantasy weapons especially in video games come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and styles... from realistic to ludicrous, and everything in between. Some of them are cool looking, some are intricately ornamented, and some are, well... hideous. Obviously whether you like or dislike a particular design is largely subjective opinion. However, there are more objective considerations in art design as well that can make or break aesthetics.

This is the condensed, edited form of a livestream in which we talked about a number of examples to figure out exactly what makes them unappealing (or at less appeal to fewer people than they could). I also photoshopped a few of them to see how much they can be improved with fairly simple changes to proportions and the position of certain elements.

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** Music credits **

"Red Curtain" by HorrorPen
https://opengameart.org/content/red-c...
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY 3.0)

"EDM Is Not My thing" by Snabish
https://opengameart.org/content/edm-i...
CC BY 3.0

Outro:
"Highland Storm" by The Slanted Room Records
https://theslantedroom.github.io/stev...
Used with artist's permission


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