81–90 of 90 posts
Kind of a "draw the rest of the fucking owl" step there at the end.
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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…
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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.
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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.…
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For the same reason people like the hiss and pops of a record, film grain, or even VHS tracking artifacts. Yesterday's technical limitations become today's aesthetic. But the real answer is they aren't inherently bad. People don't actually need it to conform to the past limitations. More that they want it to feel authentic to the nostalgic memory they have in their head. For example, games like Shovel Knight go for a…
It's been a while since I played Shovel Knight, but I don't remember it having any of the issues OP talks about.
That to me, is more artistic because instead of making a statement yourself through careful colorization, depth representation, and characterization as this article does, the Superbrothers’ art style relied on your mind making interpretations based on what wasn’t there.
I like the second version. The final version looks like some kind of monkey/Sun-Wukong.
He says specifically that the final one is his own style and it might not appeal to some readers as much as the second one.
Bad pixel art is a pet peeve of mine. This is really advanced advice compared the problem most games have: - pixels of different sizes - rotating (!) pixels - scaling pixels - smooth gradients with millions of colours - dynamic lighting overlayed on top ... I could go on :(