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A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

dinofarmgames.com

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Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#51

Post by astrange »

EdSharkey wrote: post #20

I think pixel art by itself is rad and has an audience that appreciates it. For games though, even beyond the problem of the audience not getting the point, in the age of retina displays there are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want. If one was so inclined to stick with blocky pixel art, one could always render the bitmaps' pixels as filled vector rectangles an…

> There are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want.

Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place. The pixels in Atari/NES games were made to go through the various distortions in the video pipeline (composite crossover, scanlines, flickering, misaligned electron guns and all that) that left them with all the hard edges blurred off.

The aesthetic is totally based on people running emulators showing you the framebuffer in a way it was never meant to be seen.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#52

Post by panic »

fgsfdsfgsfds wrote: post #8

Sounds like they should have been developing for PC instead of mobile. The average mobile user plays exploitative "freemium" garbage to kill time in lines. How can you expect them to appreciate the art behind it? Meanwhile, "retro"-style games are doing gangbusters on Steam, selling to people that actually appreciate those styles of art, music, and game design.

The average mobile user plays exploitative "freemium" garbage to kill time in lines. How can you expect them to appreciate the art behind it?

How does your second statement follow from the first? Does choosing to play freemium mobile games somehow mean you have poor artistic taste?

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#53

Post by pan69 »

Goronmon wrote: post #47
gavanwoolery wrote: post #17

It is the duty of an artist to fulfill their vision, not someone else's. For this reason, many prominent artists go unknown in their lifetime. The masses are attracted to "bad" art like Thomas Kinkade (I use quotes because the art is not actually bad, just lacks the originality that art connoisseurs seek). I would actually argue that you will have to make a choice between being a popular artist and being good artist…

And it may well be the case that you don't have the luxury to make this choice. Which, unfortunately, is usually the case when it comes to game development.

Or any sort of development for that matter. I've never worked with a client who said; "Yeah, sure. What ever you think is best". When someone else pays the bills, you're either used as extension to Photoshop or used as a glorified typist.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#54

Post by pradn »

fgsfdsfgsfds wrote: post #37
emsy wrote: post #9

Pixel art games nowadays all look more or less the same. Actual games from the 90s didn't look alike at all. Also most games use pixel art as an excuse for lazy animations with a little amount of frames. I really wonder why everyone likes it so much and I often think maybe something is wrong with my taste :/

A fundamental difference between Japanese and Western animation is their approach to motion. Western animation emphasized fluid motion, attempting to stick to the maximum framerate (24 FPS) allowed by the film medium as much as possible. This could produce striking results, but tended to limit artists to more simpler, slower, more deliberate stretch and squash movements that would make sense when interpolated across…

Thank you for your detailed explanation.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#55

Post by emptybits »

I worked in games in the early and late 1990s. It's hard for me to know if my love of great pixel art and great chip tunes is some romantic attachment to my childhood and early professional career, or if it's a sincere appreciation of great art in absolute terms.

But I'm inclined to agree with Igor Stravinksy:

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution."

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#56

Post by gavanwoolery »

Goronmon wrote: post #47
gavanwoolery wrote: post #17

It is the duty of an artist to fulfill their vision, not someone else's. For this reason, many prominent artists go unknown in their lifetime. The masses are attracted to "bad" art like Thomas Kinkade (I use quotes because the art is not actually bad, just lacks the originality that art connoisseurs seek). I would actually argue that you will have to make a choice between being a popular artist and being good artist…

And it may well be the case that you don't have the luxury to make this choice. Which, unfortunately, is usually the case when it comes to game development.

Almost always in commercial game development. If you are doing something more casual (hobby, Ludum Dare, etc) you might have more freedom.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#57

Post by Mithaldu »

panic wrote: post #52
fgsfdsfgsfds wrote: post #8

Sounds like they should have been developing for PC instead of mobile. The average mobile user plays exploitative "freemium" garbage to kill time in lines. How can you expect them to appreciate the art behind it? Meanwhile, "retro"-style games are doing gangbusters on Steam, selling to people that actually appreciate those styles of art, music, and game design.

The average mobile user plays exploitative "freemium" garbage to kill time in lines. How can you expect them to appreciate the art behind it? How does your second statement follow from the first? Does choosing to play freemium mobile games somehow mean you have poor artistic taste?

Good question. It's also fairly simple to answer. Players of freemium games fall into two categories:

People who have some emotional draw to it (maybe they like the art) and play it despite recognizing that the mobile freemium game industry is a giant social engineering experiment aimed at extracting money by exploiting weaknesses in the unaware human mentality.

People who don't recognize this, either by simply lacking awareness, or lacking enough experience to draw a comparison to non-exploitative games. Regardless of which it is, in both of these case, on average over the entire population, it is fair to assume that they will either not be attentive enough to appreciate details in the art, or won't even have enough knowledge to draw a useful comparison to other kinds of art.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#58

Post by jff »

vacri wrote: post #43

I found it interesting that the author denigrated a fighter from Street Fighter IV with 'arms don't work that way', then immediately turns around and says that the pixel art for the next fighter is far better because 'she looks like a whip cracking', despite spines not working that way. It feels like the author is applying different standards at times.

I'd say he stuck to two standards: Old good. Japanese good.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#59

Post by kibwen »

dragontamer wrote: post #39
kibwen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that superb pixel art is harder to pull off than superb 3D models because of greater self-imposed limitations. However, it's also true that if you just want your art to be passable , it's easier to achieve that via low-res pixel art than via amateur 3D modeling. IOW, pixel art has both a lower barrier to entry and a higher skill cap.

If you want your 3D art to passable, you download a few models from online for a few hundred dollars and tweak the bone animations. IE: What Archer does with all of its 3D models of cars it sticks into the show.

Which is exactly my point: if we're resorting to external assets, there are infinitely more spritesheets available online for the low, low price of free, because making decent sprites is such a comparatively small effort that even artists themselves attach less value to the task.

(Which still isn't to devalue the effort that it takes to make good-looking sprites; I've tried, and damn do I suck at it.)

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#60

Post by zeidrich »

A big thing about pixel art and it's issues today is that what he mentions as pixel art, isn't so.

I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc.

But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version.

However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played it on the SNES, it was rendered very differently, it was interlaced, scanlines were distinct, and each pixel was a bit of a blob.

Because of this, an image like Yoshi looked just fine, because we weren't looking at a blocky grid of squares. The brighter colored glowed around the darker colors, the darkness between the scanlines caused your brain to interpolate the lines. We got a nicer looking image.

When you blow it up to 500% on a crisp LCD panel it doesn't look the same. What used to be smooth lines are now stair steps. And just the same way that he complains about Auro being blurred or stretched, when you display pixel art designed for a CRT on an OLED display at 600% nearest neighbor scaling, it doesn't work.

I like the symbolic style of pixel art. But we don't have the same limitations. When people made great art for the NES, it's because that's what they had to work with. We have more to work with.

It's one thing to represent things in a symbolic, simplistic or minimalistic style. It's another thing to feign technological disadvantage.

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