There are some great-looking pixel art phone games out there. Pixel Dungeon, Game Dev Story (and other Mobage games by the same developer). I haven't seen anyone claiming that the graphics are shit in those. This guy's game doesn't look all that great to be honest. However the points he's making about the public misunderstanding the craft that goes into pixel art are valid.
A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
171–180 of 194 posts
Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
#172Isn't all computer art pixel art?
Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can he be biased, beyond his love of pixel art? He more or less concludes pixel art is not the best choice, and he sides with the public's opinion on this issue . Read the comments. He is not blaming anyone for this "pixel tax". To my eyes, the SF4 Chun Li is infinitely inferior to SF3, and I'm not even an animator. And haven't played either game, so I truly have no preconceptions at all in this case.
The Chun Li comparison reminds me a lot of the messy transition between 2D and 3D of games like Final Fantasy and Mortal Kombat. In Mortal Kombat, the typical shaolin monk character has a typical "shoot fireball" special move. In the latest SNES game, a badass dragon made of fire shoots out of his hand and explodes on contact with the enemy. In the next game, for the PlayStation, it looks like he is flinging a flamin…
The thing that set Mortal Kombat apart back in the day -- besides blood and gore -- was its use of digitized video of live actors as its character sprites. This couldn't be done in the 3D era, and up Through Mortal Kombat (2011) the 3D character models looked hella goofy when compared with real people.
Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vinyl in actual use has a much narrower range than CDs or MP3s. One things that is common, though, is for Vinyl to be mastered differently than the digital final result. So, it is entirely possible for the CD/MP3 release of a given song to have a much narrower dynamic range than a Vinyl release of a given song despite being released on demonstrably inferior technology.
That is simply NOT TRUE. Vinyl has been demonstrated to be able to cut and playback frequencies of up to 70khz, and many commercially released records from as far back as the 70s had data up to the mid 40khz range (and in fact this is required for quadraphonic playback).
And FM radio can handle frequencies well beyond that.
Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Deus Ex offers a contrasting example. It's almost as old as Half Life (2000 vs 1998), but I think it ages better because the appeal is different. Story/dialog/writing/role-play don't go out of style as quickly as graphics/gun-play.
I replayed Deus Ex recently, and was surprised at how bad it looked, especially the character models. It was so bad that it was ruining my immersion. However, my brain eventually forgot about this and I could continue play, and eventually I stopped seeing crude low-poly models and instead saw just "people".
Deus Ex wasn't noted as a good-looking game at release.
Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this specific case, it's not a result of the toolset, but a result of the consumer. The vinyl enthusiast is buying something they are a fan of at a higher price and expecting a quality product. The typical MP3 customer is buying it based on a 15 second sample. So, the 'loudness wars' still apply to many digital products, sadly.
The loudness wars aren't physically possible on vinyl, they aren't prevented by customer preference but instead by physics. Photographing in black and white forces the photographer to concentrate on light, shadow, and texture. There are several art forms where the artist picks a set of restrictions to work in and that exploration can create great things. The demoscene creates mind-blowing works because they have to w…
They could still just as easily take the existing digital master and dial down the amplitude a bit to work with vinyl. This would be especially easy considering how few vinyl records they sell vs digital. But, many people are paying a premium for vinyl and expecting better sound.
Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
If you consider yourself a visual designer and can't begin to understand how to make a design "pop", "edgy" or "less liney" I think the problem is with you. Just call yourself a developer and be done with it.
Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lacki…
Are you implying that Players of paid games do not fall into the same two categories?
No, i am absolutely and determinedly not saying they do not fall into the same two categories.
I'm not implying, i'm explicitly saying that people who primarily play games that are either sold up-front and without any IAP, or only with IAP that unlocks the full-game part of a "free demo", are, on average over the entire population, are most likely to be found in the third category of people who either have enough experience with games that are not menschenverachtend or are able to recognize games that are menschenverachtend, and avoid those consciously, and are thus also more likely to have the experience or attention to appreciate small detail art decisions.
These two statements are wildly different.
Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
#179Agreed. Some of the greatest film movies ever created are black and white, ironical because most of them were recorded in two colors but the color was lost(as the only copy that not degraded over time were the black and white television copies). But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it. Even Chaplin got nearly ban…
>But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it. For any given object, over a large enough population, most people won't be exposed to it; those that are won't understand it. Hit TV shows might reach 10M viewers in the US - out of 350M. FWIW I think the OPs move is slightly premature: there's a movie coming out soon cal…
Maybe, but that movie looks like a ( bomb from here. The animators didn't read this blog post or understand how to make good looking pixelated art.
Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
#180I 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.
Artist/author here! To be clear, when I said her body is like a whip cracking, it's because a kung fu artist doing that kind of movement in real life would look like a whip cracking. When I said arms don't work that way, I mean that his anatomy is literally deformed to the point of not even looking human. I am not using a double standard. Though, even if both figures were deformed beyond what is absolutely realistic,…
Oh come on. SF3 Chun-Li is absolutely not a low-res sample of how a human body actually looks. It is a stylized exaggeration.