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A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

dinofarmgames.com

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Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#91

Post by broken »

nyolfen wrote: post #68

“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 distort…

Speaking of that 8-bit sound, check Rob Hubbard's outstanding composition for 'Monty on the Run' (1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EcgruWlXnQ

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#92

Post by mrob »

kalleboo wrote: post #88
astrange wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 aes…

> Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place Some did. For instance, I played games like LucasArts adventure games and WarCraft 1 on a Mac with a Trinitron display, which faithfully showed the blocks in all their glory. I imagine the experience was similar for other PC games. Not all pixel art was made for NTSC TVs.

The article even shows a screenshot from Link's Awakening, which was intended to be displayed on an LCD with sharp pixels.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#93

Post by agumonkey »

dragontamer wrote: post #70
agumonkey wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, I didn't want to dismiss good 3d artwork.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#94

Post by mguillemot »

fgsfdsfgsfds wrote: post #65
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ano…

I'm working on a PC game and spoke to a lot of potential investors, and this is spot on.

"Funding an original game that has already proved itself by actual sales, on a proven and stable platform?" Not interested.

"Giving away a few millions to take a crap-shot chance at a totally unethical business on a overcrowded platform?" Yes please!

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#95

Post by teraflop »

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…

No source for this, but I remember hearing an interesting anecdote some time ago, and I'd love to know whether there's any truth to it:

Back in the 50's or so, when the major American animation studios had a couple decades of experience under their belt but anime was just getting off the ground, some Japanese animators took a trip to Hollywood to learn how the industry worked in the US. They were given a tour of a major animation studio, but through some kind of miscommunication, they came away with the impression that the studio was spending an order of magnitude fewer resources (time, money, manpower) than they actually were.

When they returned to Japan, they budgeted their productions using those lowered expectations, forcing their animators to cut corners and squeeze as much expressiveness into as few frames as possible. Which in turn led to audiences getting used to that style of animation, and created the recognizable Japanese aesthetic that has persisted to this day.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#96

Post by greggman »

Tyr42 wrote: post #86
zeidrich wrote: post #60

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…

For anyone else interested in scaling up pixel art, there are alternative methods to just using nearest neighbour, such as EPX or something. I found this article on Datagenics to be pretty solid: http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december32013/index.html

I liked this one too

http://www.piratehearts.com/blog/2014/03/28/crt-simulation/

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#97

Post by Terr_ »

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 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.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#98

Post by kibibu »

agumonkey wrote: post #69
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.

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.

Daytona USA still looks phenomenal in my opinion

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#99

Post by wodenokoto »

zeidrich wrote: post #60

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…

Maybe in the states. PAL and NTSC versions of games looks very different.

Living in Europe, I could hardly recognize my favorite games when I saw them in American movies, or tv-show. i wonder how the Japanese PAL would render it, because despite being PAL it's still different from Europe.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#100

Post by wodenokoto »

This is a great article and I feel one of the most important points are being drowned in discussing the merits of pixel art or what art is here in the comment section.

The most important thing is the part about speaking the language of the users. And especially "the users don't owe you their time"

These are principles that are extremely important if you want to build a product that reaches people and change their lives. Be it in the marketing department, engineering, UX or as this article, art work.

Another great point is that we can produce great art/products/UX while speaking the users language.

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