I draw, I paint (more than draw), I animate. Daily. So, I have a bit of a different perspective on this. Pixel art is one of the hardest disciplines I've tried. It's ridiculous. I wouldn't do it again. I only spent with it a bit to see what it takes, and it takes A LOT. If it's not outstanding, it won't get noticed as well. So, it's really tough on psyche. Somewhat like animation.
There's another thing I want to mention. I have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs. Magical scanline blends them together and looking at the pixel art on CRT is different than on anything else. Almost like they are anti-aliased, but they're not (smudged). I think that's a key component today we are missing from enjoying pixel art. When it was dominant in game industry, you couldn't see actual pixels. Today, they are fetishised.
> When it was dominant in game industry, you couldn't see actual pixels.
Exactly! I didn't like the author's dig at rescaling algorithms, but he seems to be forgetting that pixels never looked like that! The pixel art he likes so much was never like what he does today. This article has good screenshots, although I think they're emulated:
If you like pixel art, go ahead and make pixel art. Some of the artwork in the article is stunning, and I like the aesthetic a lot. However, don't romanticize it and claim that old games looked like that, because they just didn't.
I think better scalers and shaders that can reproduce the look of CRTs are a nice effort, since I want to play old games the way I actually remember them, not with visible pixels that were completely alien the first time I played Zelda on an emulator.
I don't know, I don't buy into this. The pixels weren't as crisp as they are when you're emulating these games, but I certainly remember them existing. Looking at those screenshots, you absolutely can tell that those images are built out of pixels. Also, like someone else mentioned, what about handheld consoles that very clearly displayed pixels? It wasn't like everyone thought that was some crazy new idea.
They aren't wrong. Regarding the comments and images in the linked article, there's a key point made there that's fundamentally wrong. Let me pick out a quote:
"We all get how pixels basically work. A computer divides a display into squares, and each square can be assigned one RGB value at a time. The total squares supported by the hardware is the device’s “resolution.” This square grid is the smallest possible subdivision of detail available to an artist."
This is the bit that's fundamentally wrong. Pixels are not squares. And never have been. They are "point samples". The fact that "magnified" pixel art displayed here compounds the error by displaying big squares rather than using an appropriate reconstruction filter doesn't help correct the misconception.
In the case of pixel art, they are not point samples. The signal is not band-limited and the "aliasing" is deliberate and controlled. It's the same technique as font hinting.
This is a totally valid artistic choice, and they are welcome to do that. I certainly enjoy it myself when it's well done.
But... it's not pixel art anymore, it's square art. And if people want to create neo-pointilist/neo-divisionist artwork based upon a grid of coloured squares that's fine. But it's not pixels.
Nope, it's exactly pixel art, because in the real world pixels were never simply point samples - indeed, few things are because they're not physically possible. (It's a reasonably approximation for audio, mostly because there's a truly massive amount of oversampling happening behind the scenes to make it work.) Pixel art takes advantage of the fact that pixels are not point samples and never were.
I can understand it being annoying, especially if you have a DSP background, but the name is well established. Language changes over time and "pixel" has gained another meaning. I don't think you're going to convince anybody to switch to "neo-pointilist".
Reminds me of how recent scholarship shows that Greek statues weren't the blank-eyed white marble figures that influenced Western Art but were often brightly painted with additional features added.
yeah I always find that to be interesting - they look more like curios from mexico at that point than those dignified, time weathered monuments we're accustomed to.
I'm not a fan of the simulated CRT filters that try to make a game look like it did on an old television. Instead, I prefer the filters that intelligently scale pixel art as though rendered at a higher resolution, such as hq4x.
To be fair, pc games running at 320*200 most certainly did look like that - big pixels with hard edges. But very few games ape the EGA palette, all the NES-looking pixel games look like tech thst never existed. EGA was a pretty short period between cga and VGA, much of PC gaming was blocky, but high color... and had a bigger focus on strategy and puzzle games because of the keyboard/mouse input, which isn't really reflected in the indie world's love for pixelly platformers.
I think you mean the CGA palette, the one used in the CGA text mode and as the default palette in some of the EGA and VGA graphics modes. EGA could pick from a palette of 64 colors.
It is worth mentioning that there was a clear visible difference between NTSC and PAL, so even on the same screen, playing the same game, things would look different in Europe and America (and I believe also in Japan)
I strongly disagree (and have so in the past here on HN). Pixel art really did look like that back then. High quality, top of the line RGB monitors you'd find in arcade games looked like that. The Amiga, IBM PC and Macintosh looked like that. The Neo Geo Pocket Color, Wonderswan and Gameboy Advance looked like that.
Images you've linked to exhibit 'blended' pixel edges I am talking about. Also, top of the line monitors were not those Wells Gardner and similar monitors in arcade cabinets. Top of the line CRTs were/are broadcast reference monitors by SONY and to a lesser extent JVC and others. I have a BVM-20F1E. It looks better, sharper, than regular CRTs (mostly due to high line number) but it exhibits same 'effect'.
I have a theory what contributes to that 'blended' effect. Well, at least for the most part. It's the masking in-front of the beam. If you look at the sister comment here I made with portable AGS-101 screen from Gameboy SP, it's the same effect. Most prominent while moving. That (resolution) masking grid (with squares on LCD or oblongs on CRTs) somehow interacts with neighbouring pixels and blends all together. It's not from the composite signal, that's for sure. I know, because I run my consoles with RGB output and I still don't see that sharp look that doesn't look right.
> have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs
What about the thousands of games for hand-held consoles, which have always used LCDs, and were using pixel art for much longer than their counterparts elsewhere out of sheer necessity?
Maybe, but you have to lean in very close: http://imgur.com/a/ovuhZ This is on AGS-101, probably the best screen (backlit) of old handhelds. Whole screen is a fine grid of pixel units which are visible and negate (interlace with) pixels in pixel art. Also, when things start moving, it becomes a blur - due to both laggy screen and small size of it. I've seen some graphics demos (and games) overlaying grid mesh over art and it looks better, more like original seen here.
Your point stands in theory, but in practice it also doesn't look anything like pixel art on modern screens.
edit: to be clear, I'm mostly talking about the edges on the sprites. That's where it's most visible. It's not as clinical or smudged as on modern monitors / upscales.
> I have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs.
I think this is very insightful. I learned about this when setting up a home MAME arcade. The vector-graphic games looked perfect, but Space Harrier and other pixel-based games looked wrong to me, less impressive than I remembered as a kid. The forums told me I could try running a pixel-smudging mask to make the games look right, but it would be graphics-card-intensive. Instead, I went out and found an old used CRT monitor and everything looks great.
Oh, I envy you! As soon as I get more (living) space, that's what I want to do. ASAP. I just have to figure out how to make an elegant mechanism to run both horizontal and vertical monitor alignment (tate or whatever the name is). Few of my favorite games run like that and I want then to have fullscreen glory.
Gamasutra published an in-depth article last year on how the developer of Super Win the Game implemented a shader to emulate the scanline (and phosphor decay) of CRTs. It's eyeopening, and was the first time I realized why my emulated NES classics looked so different from what I remembered from my youth.
And if you ask how, the answer is: analog. Every transition was driven by the analog circuits, the phosphor response was analog. Analog all around, but especially to form the pixels one after another: all the transitions, response curves, persitences, dispersions working their own magic.
You definitely could see pixels. They just weren't simple flat-colour squares with sharp edges. The appearance of a pixel was influenced by its neighbours, the viewing angle, and what that pixel was doing previously.
Great artists that worked in the medium knew how to make art within the restrictions of the medium that didn't look like it had been restricted by the medium; as great artists do in any medium.
Well, it really depends on the scale. If you do small sprites then it can be really satisfying.
Pixel art is a niche but it is still alive and I have been considering to investigate up-scaling methods that are more suitable for it.
For example there is a game OpenTTD (https://www.openttd.org) that is based on the pixel art and while attempts have been made to great higher resolution graphics based on the renders then most of these attempts, with some exceptions, have fallen flat. So people play with mixed graphics and such methods could make it more enjoyable if the up scaling of the lower resolution sprites would work better.
I already knew about this, but it always blows my mind when I see it. Composite was magic. Dark magic, but still magic. Life is a lot easier today for us in film and video though, I would not like to go back except for nostalgia.
I like pixel art, for many of the reasons mentioned in the article. In fact, for 2d games it is my favorite style.
With that said, I think the example art the article provides for their game is not very good. Specifically I think there's far too much dithering going on, making it look like it was originally drawn in 32-bit color but then had the number of colors reduced by the pixel editing software (as opposed to the beauty of manually placed pixels). This is especially glaring in the UI elements, and is not the only fault in my opinion.
I realize different people have different preferences, and I realize that pixel art is experiencing a surge in unpopularity, but I can't help but think they'd have better luck if their pixel art was better...
I agree, when I first saw the splash image, I assumed that was the one being replaced! Because it doesn't look like pixel art, it looks like a high quality image was pixelated. By replicating reality so closely, you really easily see all the drawbacks of pixel art. Namely low resolution, and limited colors. Because it's not taking advantage of the medium of pixel art, but instead shoehorning realism into it.
They complain about the shape of someone's arms in Street Fighter? Who cares about realism, these characters can shoot fireballs from their hands. Look at Link in Link’s Awakening! His head must weigh 3x more than his body. If you find a screenshot with his sword, it's even weirder. The sword is simultaneously smaller than his head, and yet larger than the entire rest of his body. And have you ever seen a tree or wall that looks like that? But it looks freaking fantastic at that resolution.
I don't care if the author's art was entirely hand-made, it looks like a high quality image was pixelated by a computer. The art in King of Fighters' may have been done entirely by hand, but if the end results looks indistinguishable from a 3d render at low resolution with terrible aliasing, who cares what means was used to get the crappy look? The author restating things about "embracing the medium", but I don't believe they did.
> The art in King of Fighters' may have been done entirely by hand, but if the end results looks indistinguishable from a 3d render at low resolution
The irony is the particular King of Fighters they reference had character models/animations that were originally produced as 3D renders [1] and then used as the basis for the artists to draw over/fine tune in order to save time during production (since the previous games took so long to finish the animations). So in the context of the article it's an interesting though overlooked detail that could have been a decent bridge into the point about transitioning to 3D.
> They complain about the shape of someone's arms in Street Fighter? Who cares about realism, these characters can shoot fireballs from their hands
Animations and design are still important even when what's being representing isn't based in reality. It's the same reason CG was for a long time critiqued, and continues to be, for instances where there are 'floaty' characters or the animation/physics seem 'off'. 2D can often take more artistic liberties and isn't so stringently expected to be 'realistic' compared to CG. And while that comparison in the article was a bit out of place, considering the real difference is animator talent and visual style, it showed how mature the 2D animation scene was at the time, and it has to be said the animations of Street Fighter III Third Strike are among the best 2D animations in any commercial game.
>They complain about the shape of someone's arms in Street Fighter? Who cares about realism, these characters can shoot fireballs from their hands.
Well, the whole point is to make them shoot fireballs out of their hands in a convincing fashion. So having the non-fantastic elements of the animation be convincing is especially important.
I agree. The title splash they gave is 584x360, which is well above what most people are used to as pixel art, and closer to the 640x480 of VGA PC games - where many had moved away from fully hand drawn pixel art. That aesthetic might still work on a large PC screen, but the other problem is that resolution is even higher than the iPhone's original resolution, evoking more of a feeling of "old non-hidpi app".
Interestingly the author actually ends up supporting that point too. All the examples they use of Pixel art are in support of an aesthetic that, while it was forced upon them at the time, is of a certain forced low-resolution style.
Their game however is pixel art for... well no obvious reason other than they like pixel art. There is no reason in the aesthetic of the game to be pixel art. It doesn't look like it's supposed to be pixel art.
So generally I'm not surprised they're moving away from pixel art - they had no reason to use it in the first place!
If you're not going for a low resolution aesthetic then why on earth would you use pixel art which is exactly for that style?
Or if you're going for that oldschool vibe. Shovel Knight's artwork would be great in any other game, but without the oldschool mechanics to match, it loses something.
One of the major charms of pixel art is that it is so poor at being "HD" that it doesn't get to express HD content. For instance, you can't look at Link's face and tell what emotion he's feeling. This is good thing! This makes it easy for the player to imprint their own emotions on the character. He feels what you feel because the only feelings there are your own.
But when you dig in with this excruciatingly detailed expressive pixel art style, you lose that charm. You're expressing what HD images already can express, and it feels like you've just made a pixelated HD image.
I think his problem is that he is stuck in the uncanny valley of 90s 16 bit pixel art, half way between the classic 8 bit style and modern photorealistic style. If you release a game in current_year with 320x200 resolution or lower and 16 colors I think it's obvious you were aiming for that aesthetic. If you go 640x480 256 or more colors then people can mistake that for an attempt at photorealism that just was badly implemented.
I think this critique is just plain wrong on its face. A huge number of both game reviewers and players recognize good pixel art as great, and don't assign it a "pixel tax".
Look at Hyper Light Drifter. Every one who's seen that game agrees that it looks amazing, among the best looking games of the year (a year which includes technical powerhouses like Doom, Uncharted 4 and Overwatch).
In previous years, games like Fez, Superbrothers and Hotline Miami have gotten similar accolades. Even a game which is adheres to super-strict arbitrary pixel art restrictions like Shovel Knight was highly praised.
If people didn't particularly appreciate the art on the author's game, I'm going to say that it has very little to do with the fact that it used pixel art. The "pixel tax" is fictional.
No, I'd say the pixel tax is a real thing. There is an attitude among many gamers and game producers that if a game doesn't have the latest and greatest definition of resolution, 3d graphics, high poly count, or latest-graphics-tech-buzzwords-du-jour, it isn't good, or at least, not as good as it could have been [1]. And I'm not making that up either. I used to hold that attitude myself. I recall back in middle school and high school thinking that as soon as I could afford the latest-and-greatest Pentium IIs and a 3d-accelerated graphics card instead of the old 486 I was suck with, then, and only then, would I finally be able to play modern games and experience True Fun. Until then, I would just have to bide my time and continue to try to be content with the now-irrelevant glories of yesteryear, like Doom 2, and Privateer.
Some years later, I realized that I'd logged as many hours in UT99 as I had in emulated playthoughs of Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger, not because the graphics of UT99 were amazeballs (which they were for their time), but because like Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger, UT99 was actually _fun to play_. But when I attempted convey that idea -- that perhaps graphics were not the sole driver of fun factor -- to a game dev who had moments before been bitching about the hacks his team had to do make 3d performant on the Playstation 2, he responded that nope, a game _has_ to be 3d, or it isn't any good.
Is that a silly attitude? Sure. But it still exists. And to dismiss the possibility of such an attitude I think misses the author's point that it is more important to focus on making the best game art one can in the medium to hand, than to focus on an art style that arose from past limitations over everything else.
Also, why did the dev have to pull crazy hacks to make 3d performant on the PS2? I mean, if he was trying for something particularly impressive, or xbox-level graphics, sure, but the PS2 was built for manipulating polygons. It was, in a very real sense, the last console that was so aggressively optimized for one use case.
I was working on a version of Tetris (Tetris Worlds) for the Game Boy Advance, and the team that was doing the PS2 version was having problems with performance. For Tetris.
A lot of the PS2's speed came from vector processing; not sure how great the tools were for taking advantage of vector math. Didn't code on one myself. Also possible they were just using too many polygons; it's easy to kill your performance when you push your polygon numbers too high, or if you have too much overdraw and you blow past the pixel fill rate. (The design of the game had various animations happening in the background, which no player could ever see because of course you're paying attention to the Tetris board in the middle...not my idea; I just implemented what they asked for.)
I didn't have performance problems on the Game Boy Advance because even though my CPU was slower, I was in 2d-land. It was funny to me that they eschewed the C++ engine and rewrote their in C because "performance!", while they ended up with performance problems and I didn't, but what can you do...
Oh, I logged plenty of hours in Quake as well, Quake 2 especially, but not because OMG! Graphics! as I thought at the time, but because I was having fun.
As for the game dev, I don't know, I didn't ask. I might be mis-remembering and he might have been bitching about the PS1 instead of the PS2. shrug
>While we're discussing how high tech isn't required in a game, I feel the need to say that they aren't mutually exculsive, either.
That's fair. I think part of the whole pixel art thing is a backlash against modern graphics tech, born of one-too-many experiences with a game that, while using the latest and greatest tech to achieve visually-stunning results, was no fun to play. Taken to the extreme, it can easily become a reverse-pixel-tax attitude: A game using modern graphics tech wont be fun, or at least, not as fun as it could have been.
Such an attitude is as equally silly as a pixel-tax attitude, and I think part of what drove the the author to write the original article is realizing such.
Actually, literal cases the of the reverse pixel tax, while rare, is very visible: When you try to create a game that's technically impressive, or even one that's not especially so, and you don't have the time or technical chops to back it, you wind up in a bad situation: Assassin's Creed: Unity would have been the mess it was without this, but the attempt to be technically impressive and up the crowds just made the problems worse, and further highlighted the embarassing pop-in, and embarrasing problems prior games never had.
Meanwhile, the latest Call of Duty makes a hojillion dollars, still running on a heavily modified Quake 3 engine, with relatively unimpressive graphics for its time. Meanwhile meanwhile, Valve makes another smash hit, still running off of a heavily modified Quake 1 engine.
> In previous years, games like Fez, Superbrothers and Hotline Miami have gotten similar accolades. Even a game which is adheres to super-strict arbitrary pixel art restrictions like Shovel Knight was highly praised.
Don't see how you're disagreeing with the parent comment with these examples.
Indeed. There's nothing wrong with good pixel art, but literally no artist knows how to do it, even when they claim they're pixel artists.
The Diablo vs. FFTA example in the article demonstrates it well: Despite Diablo coming out earlier, while 2D art was very much a well-cultivated thing, the artists just didn't know how to get it right (too low contrasts, too much dithering, …). FFTA, meanwhile, just looks beautiful.
I agree that the artwork in FFTA holds up better today. However I think that had Diablo gone with a brighter color palette, and used pixel art closer in style to FFTA instead of 3D models converted to sprites, it would not have been nearly as successful as it was, nor would it have captured the mood it was going for.
I also agree with his criticism of Goldeneye vs Grim Fandango. However, which of those games was more successful?
Sometimes good art doesn't sell as well as flashy effects that may look antiquated in 5-10 years.
OTOH, going from 3d to pixel isn't necessarily a bad idea: you just have to do the conversion by hand. This is how id made the artwork for doom: they took clay models, and turned them into pixel art.
I'm having trouble being convinced that this isn't more subjective than the author implies. I never liked how SFIV looked, either, but not because it works or doesn't work with the medium, I just think it looks awful.
It may be problematic if one has to do things that are not really compatible with the medium, such as trying to put high poly models on a low-poly screen, but a lot of games cannot really achieve the right feel by working with the medium. One of the issues I have with a lot of retro-style games is that they're almost automatically limited into certain genres and feels.
Diablo using properly pixelated art just wouldn't be Diablo anymore, and for all the muddy, I love how it looks to this day. I always liked the 2.5D style, really. But for me, this is subjective either way.
Just chiming in to say Diablo on a CRT looks damn good, played it on one back in 2012 and as a kid back when it was released. Very immersive. On your typical LCD screen? Yech. The difference in quality of experience is huge.
Diablo on a CRT looks better and feels better than Diablo 2 on any monitor imho, and is on par with Diablo 3's visuals (and still has a better feeling of physicality, unlike D3 where bodies are clipping left and right).
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting his point, but the impression I got is that he things people like how SFIV looks because it's not pixelated, and that people dislike how other pixelated things look because of the "pixel tax". But, I think lots of people genuinely like how SFIV looks and have not played neither KOF III nor SFIII. Even if they see the bad animations they don't have a problem with it because they think it's part of the style.
Just like, people like me genuinely like how Diablo looks and he things it's a muddy aliased mess.
I think the problem here is that there's a distinction between "pixel art" and "art created observing obsolete technical limitations". Additionally, just because a piece of art is technically impressive, doesn't mean people should find it artistically impressive.
When we only had 16 colours, it was harder to make great-looking art, but that difficulty didn't make the art look better. The essence of pixel art is that (it seems that) every pixel is placed with care. An image which uses 45 colours but looks like a dithered version of a full-colour image does not look like every pixel is placed with care. Quite the opposite: it looks like the image you're looking at isn't even the image the artist wanted you to see.
Hyper Light Drifter has great "pixel art", but couldn't have been achieved on a 16-bit display (without either noticeable banding or dithering). But, the way it uses colour is clearly inspired by great 4-bit artistry. Although there are many more than 16 colors, neighbouring hues are contrasting, blending is used to indicate glows or shadows, and blurring is used to indicate depth.
I think it is very sad to hear any artist saying this. I think he's being noble and he certainly has rationalized the situation very convincingly ("embracing the medium").
It's a very delicate balance. On the one hand, yes you do not deserve an audience. All too often contempt for the audience is merely the sign of a lazy artist. On the other hand sometimes you must bite the hand that feeds - and keep biting. The best I know have that mixture: they desire glory and at the same time they have a tyrannical disregard for what others think.
Ultimately, he's courting the high opinion of people whose opinions he doesn't respect, because they are influential.
I get that tone as well, but I think the author actually convinces himself by the end of the essay that his new outlook is actually a more mature one rather than the artistic compromise he initially describes.
High-res pixel art is tough - to create, and sometimes to enjoy. When the goal of pixel art is to create something interesting when imposing resolution constraints, the significance of a single pixel is reduced when working with such a high resolution.
Further, if the viewer's display is _close_ to the art's native resolution, but not at least one integer multiple higher, the art is going to be smeared as no scaling technique will deal with such a small scaling transition well.
With that in mind, Auro looks like it'd have trouble looking good on any of the devices it was intended for, and indeed looking more like aliasing ("pixellation") to the average user. The author acknowledges this in the article: "Some devices blur Auro. Some devices stretch it. Some devices letterbox it. No matter how hard I worked to make the art in Auro as good as I could, there’s no way a given person should be expected to see past all those roadblocks."
IMO, a lot of people who say they like pixel art, don't actually want the pixellation or the low color count. What they want is the overall drawing style that it produces, with prominent contours and bright but soft colors. This all is also achievable with ultra-high resolutions and millions of colors - it just doesn't happen "automatically".
If you like such games, play Radiant [0] I love that game, bought it years ago, keep returning to it. It's pixelated but it couldn't be more beautiful.
I love Radiant. I love pretty much every game Hexage puts out. I don't think it's actually pixel art, though -- the impression I got is that it's mostly pixel-style vector graphics, they do a lot of stuff that you couldn't do if you imposed a pixel grid on the art that's consistent with the art assets. Look at the blue guy on the left here, for instance:
Yeah, he looks like a pixel art figure, but look at how he's canted. Look at the bloom on everything. Which may reinforce the author's point -- that there's tradeoffs to doing perfect pixel-by-pixel placement on modern devices, where everyone uses screens of different size and aspect-ratio, and that different techniques are needed to give people the best experience, even if you want to have a retro aesthetic.
You're right, it's not real pixel art. It just imitates that old look but the glows and the background is definitely smooth. Still, the simple graphics make the game imo.
I used to hand anti-alias pixel fonts. There was a tool called Grasp that our shop used to create animated ads back in the early 90's. It only supported two color pixel fonts.
Wrote a tool to take a single font sheet bitmap and parse out each letter. Each letter had 4 shades of grey. So, would create 4 fonts that would render in 4 passes.
To make a master bitmap, we'd scan a font sheet into a PCX file hand it over to an artist with the instructions: "make it smooth". Hours upon hours of: zoom-in-click-click-click-zoom-out-review-repeat. Poor artist.
I wonder what kind of lament a vector artist will have, decades from now. And what will take its place.
I've been using Illustrator as my main medium[1] since 2000. Mostly I bitch about it doing terrible things when I open up older files, and the occasional update that's a crashfest for me even after I remove all plugins. (I'm currently running the last release because CC 2015.3 is one of those.)
I don't think anything is going to take the place of vector tools, especially as screen DPI continues to increase. I keep flirting with Affinity Designer[2], which does some very interesting things with integrating raster effects to create a very scalable but very painterly look. But I've got a decade and a half of sunk cost into Illustrator that keeps pulling me back.
>It takes a lot effort to explain how this:
>has much better art than this:
... Shitty dither. That didn't take long. Even in Bubsy, the things that weren't dithered weren't nearly as bad as the ones that were.
It has other problems, too, but they would become more apparent if the artist had refused to dither. Then they'd be a lot easier to talk about, such as the horrible shapes for everything except bubsy himself.
The problem with that background in bubsy wasn't the "pixel art", it was the art. I'm betting that artist couldn't draw well in any medium.
For me, it doesn't work because background is too vibrant and clashing with characters. If you would de-saturate the background (or use only cold colors), I suspect just that small change would make the art work.
Have not read the article yet, but just wanted to say I'm really excited about Thimbleweed Park, the new adventure game from Ron Gilbert (maker of Manic Mansion and Monkey Island, among others). Pixel art and all.
It's a shame they didn't go all the way. The art will be low resolution but it will not limit itself and will use unlimited colours, transparency and high fidelity lighting effects. I hope they will at least avoid the grevious but surprisingly common sin of mixing sprites at different resolutions.
Yes, they will mix sprites at different resolutions. Ron has stated multiple times that it is possible to enable a "true" low resolution mode, to the point where he'll get quite grumpy if you bring it up on the comments. He's also said that he thinks it is tinted (or tainted) by nostalgia and not something you'd actually want to use for more than a few seconds just to try it out.
They have explicitly said that they're not going for an adventure game in the truly old style, but for something that feels like it is.
There is a pretty interesting development blog at https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/. Its been a while since I followed it, but at least in the beginning Ron was writing about the game engine design. They also touched upon what you are referring to, and at least for the in-game font you can switch to an old-style mode.
I'm not a fan of the lighting effects, but the Javascript animation on the web page does one thing I think is fully justified - "misaligned" pixel art, i.e. sprites positioned over the background by fractional pixels. I think this is beneficial because it greatly improves motion quality. Even with high framerates, and even with CRT or strobed LCD style low persistence displays, if you're snapping everything to a grid then the only way to get perfectly sharp motion is to limit movement speeds so everything stays naturally aligned to the grid. You could think of it as a temporal analog to font hinting. Some games do this, but it severely restricts the design possibilities, so I think allowing misaligned art is a good tradeoff. Unless you're using dithered transparency it doesn't cause any obvious artifacts. Nintendo does this with the pixel art in Mario Maker and I haven't seen any complaints.
The problem with pixel art games is they tend to emphasize style over content. Game designers should strive to make the best possible game and allow a style to emerge from that, not the other way around.
lots of people (myself included) like pixel art. Hey, I'm going to this (http://pixelartpark.com/)
I think one issue is that most people don't appreciate or understand the limits. This comes up in the demoscene. The demoscene makes realtime demos. The fact that they are realtime (or 4k or 1k or 256b) makes them interesting to people who understand the limits. But to most people outside the scene they're just mediocre effects because they aren't aware of the limits and instead are used to Star Wars: the Force Awakens effects or Pixar or whatever.
The same is true for pixel art. Many people like pixel art because of nostalgia. Others like it for the creativity within limits. But, probably most people, aren't aware of the limits so to them it's just not latest AAA game level of art.
It kinda sucks but there's lots of things the masses don't like/don't get. Fortunately there seem to be enough who do like these types of things.
I think this is simply what happens when you mix art and creating a commodity. It's Britney Spears vs (your favorite artist). They are both art of course but one targets a much larger demographic then the other. Seems like our author realizes he has more passion for creating a popular and understandable game then he does for art.
It reads like the artist was looking for an excuse to stop drawing pixel art rather than any sort of further introspection as to why Auro might be encountering issues. It's utterly ridiculous that he thinks that the retro-game market is somehow splintering on the issue of making the pixels go away as increasingly sprite filters are being viewed in a negative light versus getting the experience as it actually was at the time.
The whole 'But customers want HD!' era has long since ended, with many of the most popular hits on PC games being pixel-based. The issue was never fully the artwork, but the cutthroat nature of the mobile market.
That said, the artwork of Auro reeks of faux-retroism and unlike Shovel Knight which embraced it, it seems like they were only really willing to go half-way.
IIRC this was the second time Reynolds has announced he was pretty much Done with pixel art. I seem to remember a post like this around the time they finished 100 Trials. And then they did Auro, with everything obsessively pixelled.
Looks like it stuck this time; http://www.dinofarmgames.com/forum/index.php?threads/battle-... is a thread on Dino Farms' forums with some bits from a game they're working on. Personally I'm not sure the comic booky ink outline style is working for him yet but hey, he's learning an entire new way of working, possibly an entirely new art toolchain, and that takes time.
I am not a gamer, but when I play I go with indie games.
I really enjoyed the visuals of "The Last Door" and "Fez" and "Superbrothers - Sword & Sworcery" much more so than any 3d game.
The sad truth is 3D games are now cheaper to produce and work at arbitrary resolution,
so the big studios will just keep popping them out because it's just so easy.
Pixel art is really treble but it can't help it- the relative lack of shading and gradients means it will always have more high-frequency content than higher-resolution alternatives.
There's another thing I want to mention. I have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs. Magical scanline blends them together and looking at the pixel art on CRT is different than on anything else. Almost like they are anti-aliased, but they're not (smudged). I think that's a key component today we are missing from enjoying pixel art. When it was dominant in game industry, you couldn't see actual pixels. Today, they are fetishised.