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A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

dinofarmgames.com

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Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#61

Post by jimminy »

Mithaldu wrote: post #25

It's a little weird that he spends so much time criticizing others and doesn't even once acknowledge that his art style (proportions, anatomy) look definitely weird. (Downright ugly and off-putting to me.) Part of the reason his art gets put down by others might be that they also feel it's ugly, but don't quite know how to express it and pin it on the pixels. Further, as someone who works on games, the decision as to…

I agree, that he fails to acknowledge the issues with his own art. I agreed with him through most of the article, but when it came time for him to get to his stuff, the forced dithering was immediately off-putting, and is actually something that causes older games to feel dated to me.

Pixel-art is great, when it is crisp. Most of his examples are crisp and well animated, until you get to his. The characters are oddly proportioned, but I can deal with that, and at least they were pretty crisp, but the interface around them was horrible.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#62

Post by jefurii »

dceddia wrote: post #50
vacri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Half Life came out, it was amazing. I went back to retry it half a year ago, and it looked awful. And what was a wonderful intro sequence was now unskippable minutes of a slow ride past crude polygons and very low detail environments. It was interesting seeing how my opinions had changed.

Funny, as I was reading the parent post my mind jumped to Half Life too. What an amazing game! Part of me wishes I could un-see all the stuff that came after it, so that I could go back and play it with my original excitement intact. Instead, it seems my mind is happy to find flaws at every turn and compare how it actually looks to how good I remember it to be. It's even worse with older games. I tried to play the or…

Part of me wishes I could un-see all the stuff that came after it, so that I could go back and play it with my original excitement intact.

You're in luck: "Black Mesa is a re-envisioning of Valve Software's classic science fiction first person shooter, Half-Life. ... All-new music, voice acting, choreography and added dialogue give way to a more expansive and immersive experience than ever before."

http://www.blackmesasource.com/

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#63

Post by fgsfdsfgsfds »

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?

I meant to imply that they (in the typical case) don't really have an interest in games as a medium, and are simply looking for small distractions to fill gaps in their lives. If they don't appreciate the games themselves, I don't expect them to appreciate the art behind them either.

But since you went there, I do think that exclusively playing freemium slot machine games is an indicator of bad taste. Just as someone that exclusively eats at fast food restaurants probably has bad taste in food (yeah, I made a fast food analogy).

I feel sorry for the kids that grew up with smart phones and have never known a game that wasn't vapid and exploitative. There are worse fates, but still.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#64

Post by Tideflat »

pshc wrote: post #6

Yes! Thank you. I love the old pixel aesthetic, but today's art should fit today's constraints. Those classic games will always be around, awaiting your next nostalgia rush. Screw stagnation. Likewise, I like old Victorians and Art Deco, but I wouldn't be excited about one built today. No one would respect a 2015 medieval-style castle quite like one from 1515.

However, a medieval-style castle would still be cool if it was built in 2015.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#65

Post by fgsfdsfgsfds »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #48
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.

There's this cognitive dissonance with a lot of game devs who damn well know mobile is a ghetto, but want the big bucks mobile can occasionally deliver. So they try to justify mobile development thinking they'll be the ones who make the "mature" game that will be "appreciated." Instead, freemium mouthbreathers leave 1 star reviews because "it looks funny on my phone." Don't blame the game or the style. Blame your cho…

You hit the nail on the head.

Funding is also a big part of it. It's much easier to get funding for a mobile game than for an indie PC game, even though the mobile game is significantly less likely to make a return on investment. So perhaps some mobile devs know they aren't going to make it, but take the money anyway so that they can work on something on someone else's dime, while they build up experience and add another piece to their portfolio.

I'm not convinced it's a worthwhile trade, however, if it makes you lose your faith in humanity and your art form in the process.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#66

Post by dragontamer »

darkmighty wrote: post #23
dragontamer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when you look at the development methodology of the best-of-the-best pixel art games (BlazBlue, King of Fighters), the teams did 3D Animations for all of the characters and then re-traced them into 2D Pixel Art. Everyone who actually _does_ high-quality pixel art understands. Good Pixel-Art is much MUCH harder to do than good 3D. It lothes me to say it, but the blogpost is correct. Very few people understand t…

But for me some pixel artists miss (for me) a large part of the artistic value of pixel art: restricting complexity of the scene -- not just portraying things in blocks. The blocks aren't important at all, in fact they're pretty ugly if you're not a great pixel artist (hence the natural wish to find better upscaling algorithms). It's often overlooked the CRTs those art were made for were quite blurry and round, allev…

I mentioned BlazBlue specifically because of their combination of 3D Art and 2D Art. The 2D art is as you said: very simplified.

http://i.imgur.com/mDlQYar.gif

Count the number of colors on Jin Kisaragi. The smooth, defined lines going down "strong", hand-crafted pixel art lines. With massive sprites built for the high-definition era to boot.

The 3D art gets a bit intricate and busy, but the 2D Sprites.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#67

Post by dragontamer »

kibwen wrote: post #59
dragontamer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

That's not useful at all.

You need a baseline of art, and then you need to tweak the animations to match your video game. A model may not have a "double-jump" animation but you can easily add one through bone manipulations with any 3d model.

But if a sprite-sheet were missing the double-jump animation? You're either doing it yourself (hard pixel art style) or hiring someone else to do it.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#68

Post by nyolfen »

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

--Brian Eno

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#69

Post by agumonkey »

vacri wrote: post #40
DanAndersen wrote: post #13

This article reminded me of a trend I noticed when reading the book "Masters of Doom," which discussed (among other things) the graphical improvements that made games like Wolfenstein and Doom so impressive. Very often, the book's prose would start sentences something along the lines of "though the graphics were crude, etc etc etc." These sorts of lines, constantly repeated, irked me, not because they weren't technic…

When Half Life came out, it was amazing. I went back to retry it half a year ago, and it looked awful. And what was a wonderful intro sequence was now unskippable minutes of a slow ride past crude polygons and very low detail environments. It was interesting seeing how my opinions had changed.

I love when I revisit some old amazement and the magic is still there. When I see some old arcade games (SEGA chasing games) I'm still amazed at how pretty and swift they are.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#70

Post by dragontamer »

agumonkey wrote: post #41
dragontamer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. But the Fire Emblem sprites were redrawn with details from each of the characters in the game. Amelia from FE8 for example, was the only blonde female paladin, and her long-blonde hair would blow in the wind during her critical hit animation. The animations were incredibly personalized to the characters, a true feat for a game with several dozen playable characters (and random mooks to KO). In contrast, the 3…

Sigh, the "benefits" of industrialisation and new tech. Fortunately I hope that 2d or 3d pros and cons are known and mastered enough so people can go back to produce artful games. Similarly to movies, early 2K era movies were speaking too much of CGI, now SFX aren't attractive anymore, you got to give density. ps: about the level of effort, I think it's not fair, 3d modeling and animating was hard, but more than that…

Arc System Works is doing a good job actually with their 3D style in Guilty Gear Xrd. Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. is also quite excellent 3D Artwork.

As is whatever the heck this is from: http://kotaku.com/sorry-yes-animation-is-also-games-art-1699...

So solid, good 3D art exists, and is around. Gears of War also deserves a mention.

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