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Pixel Art: Common Mistakes (2020)

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Re: Pixel Art: Common Mistakes (2020)

#71

Post by MattRix »

fleabitdev wrote: post #29
MattRix wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two main categories of pixel art in games. In one category it’s about retro authenticity and these games are defined by the fact that their final buffer is the same low resolution as their art. They also often feature limited palettes, especially ones that were actually used on retro consoles. There’s also a second category of pixel art, where the style is more modern. The art is still low res, but the fina…

Can you recommend any games in the first category? I surveyed the indie-game landscape a couple of years back, specifically looking for games in your first category, but struggled to find any recent examples. 2D transforms, alpha-blending and lighting effects seem to be the standard now.

There are a bunch of retro inspired games (ex Shovel Knight) that do the retro inspired thing. More interesting is a game like Celeste, where it has a 3D level select but during the actual gameplay, the characters move in integers and the screen buffer is still fixed at a low resolution.

Re: Pixel Art: Common Mistakes (2020)

#72

Post by flobosg »

fleabitdev wrote: post #50
moth-fuzz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how exactly is it a hard problem? You don’t have to rotate the sprite by sining and cosining pixels by hand, you can just render to the same resolution as your sprites and it’ll look fine. The problem is that most indie games render at 2x or 3x or more natively.

Nearest-neighbour, low-resolution rotation produces unpleasant results when the sprite contains fine details with a thickness of one or two pixels, e.g. outlines: https://imgur.com/a/UiAZ49z Artistic preferences are subjective, but I expect most players would find that rotated sprite unappealing. This is especially true when the rotation is animated - the aliasing causes a distracting, staticky, random-noise effect w…

> Nearest-neighbour, low-resolution rotation produces unpleasant results…

That’s the reason why some games use versions of the rotated sprites that have been tweaked by hand. See also tools like RotSprite (http://info.sonicretro.org/RotSprite).

Re: Pixel Art: Common Mistakes (2020)

#73

Post by MattRix »

esotericsean wrote: post #51
burntoutfire wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That post is also full of pre-indieapocalypse charm. It assumes that a decent, finished game will get its author the recognition

That is still true today. This is going to sound a bit harsh but the market really is flooded with bad to mediocre games and people who think they’ve created a masterpiece. If you take a look at /r/gamedev it’s full of people sharing their games and asking why they weren’t successful. It’s easy to see by looking at any of those games exactly why. They don’t look good. Games that are actually good do get the recogniti…

This is just not true. There are tons of good games that don’t get anywhere near the attention and sales that they would have during the early 2010s. In fact the only way this is true is if your definition of “good game” is “commercially successful game”.

Easy examples to point out are things like Tumbleseed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/457890/TumbleSeed/ or Mushroom 11: https://store.steampowered.com/app/243160/Mushroom_11/

And those are both 5 years old and things have only gotten harder since then!

Re: Pixel Art: Common Mistakes (2020)

#74

Post by erik »

fleabitdev wrote: post #29
MattRix wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two main categories of pixel art in games. In one category it’s about retro authenticity and these games are defined by the fact that their final buffer is the same low resolution as their art. They also often feature limited palettes, especially ones that were actually used on retro consoles. There’s also a second category of pixel art, where the style is more modern. The art is still low res, but the fina…

Can you recommend any games in the first category? I surveyed the indie-game landscape a couple of years back, specifically looking for games in your first category, but struggled to find any recent examples. 2D transforms, alpha-blending and lighting effects seem to be the standard now.

Celeste uses high resolution dialogue text, but its gameplay is strict about the pixel grid.

Loop Hero is strict about its pixel art and uses a fixed 16-colour palette that is reminiscent of the Commodore 64.

Baba Is You has visuals that you could basically render on a ZX Spectrum.

And in addition to doing pixel art well, these are all pretty great games.

Re: Pixel Art: Common Mistakes (2020)

#75

Post by omginternets »

erik wrote: post #70
omginternets wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the indieapocalypse? I googled it but all the results are commentary pieces that assume you already know what it is.

There was a window, from about 2007 to 2013, where basically any decently well made indie game that came to market would be financially successful. But the trick was, to get your game to market you had to establish a relationship with Microsoft, Valve, or whoever controlled the platform you were targeting. Around 10 years ago the platforms started to open up and it got a lot easier to get a game into the marketplace.…

Thanks for the explanation. I payed a bit of attention to the indie gaming scene years ago (must have been circa 2012 ... has it been 10 years already?!), so it's always nice to hear stories from that little corner of the internet. :)

Re: Pixel Art: Common Mistakes (2020)

#76

Post by armchairhacker »

MattRix wrote: post #73
esotericsean wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still true today. This is going to sound a bit harsh but the market really is flooded with bad to mediocre games and people who think they’ve created a masterpiece. If you take a look at /r/gamedev it’s full of people sharing their games and asking why they weren’t successful. It’s easy to see by looking at any of those games exactly why. They don’t look good. Games that are actually good do get the recogniti…

This is just not true. There are tons of good games that don’t get anywhere near the attention and sales that they would have during the early 2010s. In fact the only way this is true is if your definition of “good game” is “commercially successful game”. Easy examples to point out are things like Tumbleseed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/457890/TumbleSeed/ or Mushroom 11: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431…

Idk how much attention and sales you're talking about, but Mushroom 11 seemed to be successful. I actually heard of it before because it got featured on the App Store, and on the Steam page IGN gave it a 9/10.

Re: Pixel Art: Common Mistakes (2020)

#77

Post by Jasper_ »

MattRix wrote: post #71
fleabitdev wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend any games in the first category? I surveyed the indie-game landscape a couple of years back, specifically looking for games in your first category, but struggled to find any recent examples. 2D transforms, alpha-blending and lighting effects seem to be the standard now.

There are a bunch of retro inspired games (ex Shovel Knight) that do the retro inspired thing. More interesting is a game like Celeste, where it has a 3D level select but during the actual gameplay, the characters move in integers and the screen buffer is still fixed at a low resolution.

Shovel Knight actually has a high-resolution render buffer and "subpixel" movement, but nobody seems to notice because the rules are mostly held in-place.

Re: Pixel Art: Common Mistakes (2020)

#78

Post by Termitiono »

MattRix wrote: post #73
esotericsean wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still true today. This is going to sound a bit harsh but the market really is flooded with bad to mediocre games and people who think they’ve created a masterpiece. If you take a look at /r/gamedev it’s full of people sharing their games and asking why they weren’t successful. It’s easy to see by looking at any of those games exactly why. They don’t look good. Games that are actually good do get the recogniti…

This is just not true. There are tons of good games that don’t get anywhere near the attention and sales that they would have during the early 2010s. In fact the only way this is true is if your definition of “good game” is “commercially successful game”. Easy examples to point out are things like Tumbleseed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/457890/TumbleSeed/ or Mushroom 11: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431…

Tumbleweed is known I think but the genre is not very big
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