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A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art (2015)

357 points by bpierre 10y ago

osi 10y ago
previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678
- Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
  Was just about to state this. At the very least it should be prefixed with (2015).
anc84 10y ago
(2015)
zeveb 10y ago
I really like the look of good, B&W pixel art. I think that games like Dark Castle and interfaces like HyperCard really benefited from it. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned though …
teekert 10y ago
If you like such games, play Radiant [0] I love that game, bought it years ago, keep returning to it. It's pixelated but it couldn't be more beautiful. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.hexage.radiant https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.hexage.rad...
- cwyers 10y ago
  I love Radiant. I love pretty much every game Hexage puts out. I don't think it's actually pixel art, though -- the impression I got is that it's mostly pixel-style vector graphics, they do a lot of stuff that you couldn't do if you imposed a pixel grid on the art that's consistent with the art assets. Look at the blue guy on the left here, for instance: https://lh5.ggpht.com/EyOXQmFzhQ8ie9AnQcq7mcYOaY_uiWY6M8Zis2ZlE4IriEX5ixq_TaPnf0NfKVZoexM=h900 https://lh5.ggpht.com/EyOXQmFzhQ8ie9AnQcq7mcYOaY_uiWY6M8Zis2... Yeah, he looks like a pixel art figure, but look at how he's canted. Look at the bloom on everything. Which may reinforce the author's point -- that there's tradeoffs to doing perfect pixel-by-pixel placement on modern devices, where everyone uses screens of different size and aspect-ratio, and that different techniques are needed to give people the best experience, even if you want to have a retro aesthetic.
  - teekert 10y ago
    You're right, it's not real pixel art. It just imitates that old look but the glows and the background is definitely smooth. Still, the simple graphics make the game imo.
Adverblessly 10y ago
I like pixel art, for many of the reasons mentioned in the article. In fact, for 2d games it is my favorite style. With that said, I think the example art the article provides for their game is not very good. Specifically I think there's far too much dithering going on, making it look like it was originally drawn in 32-bit color but then had the number of colors reduced by the pixel editing software (as opposed to the beauty of manually placed pixels). This is especially glaring in the UI elements, and is not the only fault in my opinion. I realize different people have different preferences, and I realize that pixel art is experiencing a surge in unpopularity, but I can't help but think they'd have better luck if their pixel art was better...
- TD-Linux 10y ago
  I agree. The title splash they gave is 584x360, which is well above what most people are used to as pixel art, and closer to the 640x480 of VGA PC games - where many had moved away from fully hand drawn pixel art. That aesthetic might still work on a large PC screen, but the other problem is that resolution is even higher than the iPhone's original resolution, evoking more of a feeling of "old non-hidpi app".
- squeaky-clean 10y ago
  I agree, when I first saw the splash image, I assumed that was the one being replaced! Because it doesn't look like pixel art, it looks like a high quality image was pixelated. By replicating reality so closely, you really easily see all the drawbacks of pixel art. Namely low resolution, and limited colors. Because it's not taking advantage of the medium of pixel art, but instead shoehorning realism into it. They complain about the shape of someone's arms in Street Fighter? Who cares about realism, these characters can shoot fireballs from their hands. Look at Link in Link’s Awakening! His head must weigh 3x more than his body. If you find a screenshot with his sword, it's even weirder. The sword is simultaneously smaller than his head, and yet larger than the entire rest of his body. And have you ever seen a tree or wall that looks like that? But it looks freaking fantastic at that resolution. I don't care if the author's art was entirely hand-made, it looks like a high quality image was pixelated by a computer. The art in King of Fighters' may have been done entirely by hand, but if the end results looks indistinguishable from a 3d render at low resolution with terrible aliasing, who cares what means was used to get the crappy look? The author restating things about "embracing the medium", but I don't believe they did.
billyjobob 10y ago
I think his problem is that he is stuck in the uncanny valley of 90s 16 bit pixel art, half way between the classic 8 bit style and modern photorealistic style. If you release a game in current_year with 320x200 resolution or lower and 16 colors I think it's obvious you were aiming for that aesthetic. If you go 640x480 256 or more colors then people can mistake that for an attempt at photorealism that just was badly implemented.
- creshal 10y ago
  Indeed. There's nothing wrong with good pixel art, but literally no artist knows how to do it, even when they claim they're pixel artists. The Diablo vs. FFTA example in the article demonstrates it well: Despite Diablo coming out earlier, while 2D art was very much a well-cultivated thing, the artists just didn't know how to get it right (too low contrasts, too much dithering, …). FFTA, meanwhile, just looks beautiful.
  - kodt 10y ago
    I agree that the artwork in FFTA holds up better today. However I think that had Diablo gone with a brighter color palette, and used pixel art closer in style to FFTA instead of 3D models converted to sprites, it would not have been nearly as successful as it was, nor would it have captured the mood it was going for. I also agree with his criticism of Goldeneye vs Grim Fandango. However, which of those games was more successful? Sometimes good art doesn't sell as well as flashy effects that may look antiquated in 5-10 years.
  - jkaunisv1 10y ago
    So there exists good pixel art, but there does not exist any artist who can create good pixel art? FFTA was immaculately conceived I guess?
    - creshal 10y ago
      Well, almost no artist.
  - 10y ago
projektir 10y ago
I'm having trouble being convinced that this isn't more subjective than the author implies. I never liked how SFIV looked, either, but not because it works or doesn't work with the medium, I just think it looks awful. It may be problematic if one has to do things that are not really compatible with the medium, such as trying to put high poly models on a low-poly screen, but a lot of games cannot really achieve the right feel by working with the medium. One of the issues I have with a lot of retro-style games is that they're almost automatically limited into certain genres and feels. Diablo using properly pixelated art just wouldn't be Diablo anymore, and for all the muddy, I love how it looks to this day. I always liked the 2.5D style, really. But for me, this is subjective either way.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  > I never liked how SFIV looked, either, but not because it works or doesn't work with the medium, I just think it looks awful. Isn't that what he's saying?
  - projektir 10y ago
    Perhaps I'm misinterpreting his point, but the impression I got is that he things people like how SFIV looks because it's not pixelated, and that people dislike how other pixelated things look because of the "pixel tax". But, I think lots of people genuinely like how SFIV looks and have not played neither KOF III nor SFIII. Even if they see the bad animations they don't have a problem with it because they think it's part of the style. Just like, people like me genuinely like how Diablo looks and he things it's a muddy aliased mess.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      They "genuinely" like it, sure, but not because of the quality of the animation.
- dota_fanatic 10y ago
  Just chiming in to say Diablo on a CRT looks damn good, played it on one back in 2012 and as a kid back when it was released. Very immersive. On your typical LCD screen? Yech. The difference in quality of experience is huge. Diablo on a CRT looks better and feels better than Diablo 2 on any monitor imho, and is on par with Diablo 3's visuals (and still has a better feeling of physicality, unlike D3 where bodies are clipping left and right).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Devid2014 10y ago
Pixel art is really treble, I just hurt looking at it in some cases. So some people likes pixels and call it “art” and use such word combinations like “HD fetishism”. But I would say “Pixels fetishism” and “HD Art”. Of course badly made HD content can be bad too. P.S.: This is my purely subjective and personal taste. Other will disagree with this because they have other taste.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  Pixel art is really treble but it can't help it- the relative lack of shading and gradients means it will always have more high-frequency content than higher-resolution alternatives.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Pixel art is really treble, I just hurt looking at it in some cases. In the immortal words of Jeffrey Lebowski: "That's just, like, your opinion, man". (Which you admit too, but I think can't be emphasized enough).
- Retra 10y ago
  >Pixel art is really treble, I just hurt looking at it in some cases. Umm... You can find massive amounts of shockingly ugly non-pixel art too. Perhaps you are confusing bad art for pixel art.
carsongross 10y ago
"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." --Orson Welles
galfarragem 10y ago
'Stop looking for happiness in the same place where you lost it.'
bobsgame 10y ago
I love this article. Having invested myself into making a large pixel art game, it really inspires and resonates with me.
scandox 10y ago
> what I intended doesn’t matter at all I think it is very sad to hear any artist saying this. I think he's being noble and he certainly has rationalized the situation very convincingly ("embracing the medium"). It's a very delicate balance. On the one hand, yes you do not deserve an audience. All too often contempt for the audience is merely the sign of a lazy artist. On the other hand sometimes you must bite the hand that feeds - and keep biting. The best I know have that mixture: they desire glory and at the same time they have a tyrannical disregard for what others think. Ultimately, he's courting the high opinion of people whose opinions he doesn't respect, because they are influential.
- newman8r 10y ago
  I get that tone as well, but I think the author actually convinces himself by the end of the essay that his new outlook is actually a more mature one rather than the artistic compromise he initially describes.
runeb 10y ago
Have not read the article yet, but just wanted to say I'm really excited about Thimbleweed Park, the new adventure game from Ron Gilbert (maker of Manic Mansion and Monkey Island, among others). Pixel art and all. https://thimbleweedpark.com/ https://thimbleweedpark.com/
- Paul_S 10y ago
  It's a shame they didn't go all the way. The art will be low resolution but it will not limit itself and will use unlimited colours, transparency and high fidelity lighting effects. I hope they will at least avoid the grevious but surprisingly common sin of mixing sprites at different resolutions.
  - runeb 10y ago
    There is a pretty interesting development blog at https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/ https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/. Its been a while since I followed it, but at least in the beginning Ron was writing about the game engine design. They also touched upon what you are referring to, and at least for the in-game font you can switch to an old-style mode.
  - mrob 10y ago
    I'm not a fan of the lighting effects, but the Javascript animation on the web page does one thing I think is fully justified - "misaligned" pixel art, i.e. sprites positioned over the background by fractional pixels. I think this is beneficial because it greatly improves motion quality. Even with high framerates, and even with CRT or strobed LCD style low persistence displays, if you're snapping everything to a grid then the only way to get perfectly sharp motion is to limit movement speeds so everything stays naturally aligned to the grid. You could think of it as a temporal analog to font hinting. Some games do this, but it severely restricts the design possibilities, so I think allowing misaligned art is a good tradeoff. Unless you're using dithered transparency it doesn't cause any obvious artifacts. Nintendo does this with the pixel art in Mario Maker and I haven't seen any complaints.
  - shdon 10y ago
    Yes, they will mix sprites at different resolutions. Ron has stated multiple times that it is possible to enable a "true" low resolution mode, to the point where he'll get quite grumpy if you bring it up on the comments. He's also said that he thinks it is tinted (or tainted) by nostalgia and not something you'd actually want to use for more than a few seconds just to try it out. They have explicitly said that they're not going for an adventure game in the truly old style, but for something that feels like it is.
sly010 10y ago
I am not a gamer, but when I play I go with indie games. I really enjoyed the visuals of "The Last Door" and "Fez" and "Superbrothers - Sword & Sworcery" much more so than any 3d game. The sad truth is 3D games are now cheaper to produce and work at arbitrary resolution, so the big studios will just keep popping them out because it's just so easy.
Keyframe 10y ago
I draw, I paint (more than draw), I animate. Daily. So, I have a bit of a different perspective on this. Pixel art is one of the hardest disciplines I've tried. It's ridiculous. I wouldn't do it again. I only spent with it a bit to see what it takes, and it takes A LOT. If it's not outstanding, it won't get noticed as well. So, it's really tough on psyche. Somewhat like animation. There's another thing I want to mention. I have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs. Magical scanline blends them together and looking at the pixel art on CRT is different than on anything else. Almost like they are anti-aliased, but they're not (smudged). I think that's a key component today we are missing from enjoying pixel art. When it was dominant in game industry, you couldn't see actual pixels. Today, they are fetishised.
- creshal 10y ago
  > have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs What about the thousands of games for hand-held consoles, which have always used LCDs, and were using pixel art for much longer than their counterparts elsewhere out of sheer necessity?
  - Keyframe 10y ago
    Smaller screens though.
    - creshal 10y ago
      You could (and can) still clearly identify individual pixels on them. (Especially when you're a kid and keep your nose mere inches off the screen.)
      - Keyframe 10y ago
        Maybe, but you have to lean in very close: http://imgur.com/a/ovuhZ http://imgur.com/a/ovuhZ This is on AGS-101, probably the best screen (backlit) of old handhelds. Whole screen is a fine grid of pixel units which are visible and negate (interlace with) pixels in pixel art. Also, when things start moving, it becomes a blur - due to both laggy screen and small size of it. I've seen some graphics demos (and games) overlaying grid mesh over art and it looks better, more like original seen here. Your point stands in theory, but in practice it also doesn't look anything like pixel art on modern screens. edit: to be clear, I'm mostly talking about the edges on the sprites. That's where it's most visible. It's not as clinical or smudged as on modern monitors / upscales.
reedlaw 10y ago
The problem with pixel art games is they tend to emphasize style over content. Game designers should strive to make the best possible game and allow a style to emerge from that, not the other way around.
parenthephobia 10y ago
I think the problem here is that there's a distinction between "pixel art" and "art created observing obsolete technical limitations". Additionally, just because a piece of art is technically impressive, doesn't mean people should find it artistically impressive. When we only had 16 colours, it was harder to make great-looking art, but that difficulty didn't make the art look better. The essence of pixel art is that (it seems that) every pixel is placed with care. An image which uses 45 colours but looks like a dithered version of a full-colour image does not look like every pixel is placed with care. Quite the opposite: it looks like the image you're looking at isn't even the image the artist wanted you to see. Hyper Light Drifter has great "pixel art", but couldn't have been achieved on a 16-bit display (without either noticeable banding or dithering). But, the way it uses colour is clearly inspired by great 4-bit artistry. Although there are many more than 16 colors, neighbouring hues are contrasting, blending is used to indicate glows or shadows, and blurring is used to indicate depth.
wccrawford 10y ago
>It takes a lot effort to explain how this: >has much better art than this: ... Shitty dither. That didn't take long. Even in Bubsy, the things that weren't dithered weren't nearly as bad as the ones that were. It has other problems, too, but they would become more apparent if the artist had refused to dither. Then they'd be a lot easier to talk about, such as the horrible shapes for everything except bubsy himself. The problem with that background in bubsy wasn't the "pixel art", it was the art. I'm betting that artist couldn't draw well in any medium.
- veli_joza 10y ago
  For me, it doesn't work because background is too vibrant and clashing with characters. If you would de-saturate the background (or use only cold colors), I suspect just that small change would make the art work.
sgarman 10y ago
I think this is simply what happens when you mix art and creating a commodity. It's Britney Spears vs (your favorite artist). They are both art of course but one targets a much larger demographic then the other. Seems like our author realizes he has more passion for creating a popular and understandable game then he does for art.
- galfarragem 10y ago
  https://sivers.org/starv https://sivers.org/starv
musesum 10y ago
I used to hand anti-alias pixel fonts. There was a tool called Grasp that our shop used to create animated ads back in the early 90's. It only supported two color pixel fonts. Wrote a tool to take a single font sheet bitmap and parse out each letter. Each letter had 4 shades of grey. So, would create 4 fonts that would render in 4 passes. To make a master bitmap, we'd scan a font sheet into a PCX file hand it over to an artist with the instructions: "make it smooth". Hours upon hours of: zoom-in-click-click-click-zoom-out-review-repeat. Poor artist. I wonder what kind of lament a vector artist will have, decades from now. And what will take its place. [edit] vector
- egypturnash 10y ago
  I've been using Illustrator as my main medium[1] since 2000. Mostly I bitch about it doing terrible things when I open up older files, and the occasional update that's a crashfest for me even after I remove all plugins. (I'm currently running the last release because CC 2015.3 is one of those.) I don't think anything is going to take the place of vector tools, especially as screen DPI continues to increase. I keep flirting with Affinity Designer[2], which does some very interesting things with integrating raster effects to create a very scalable but very painterly look. But I've got a decade and a half of sunk cost into Illustrator that keeps pulling me back. 1: http://egypt.urnash.com http://egypt.urnash.com 2: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/
greggman 10y ago
lots of people (myself included) like pixel art. Hey, I'm going to this (http://pixelartpark.com/ http://pixelartpark.com/) I think one issue is that most people don't appreciate or understand the limits. This comes up in the demoscene. The demoscene makes realtime demos. The fact that they are realtime (or 4k or 1k or 256b) makes them interesting to people who understand the limits. But to most people outside the scene they're just mediocre effects because they aren't aware of the limits and instead are used to Star Wars: the Force Awakens effects or Pixar or whatever. The same is true for pixel art. Many people like pixel art because of nostalgia. Others like it for the creativity within limits. But, probably most people, aren't aware of the limits so to them it's just not latest AAA game level of art. It kinda sucks but there's lots of things the masses don't like/don't get. Fortunately there seem to be enough who do like these types of things.
int_19h 10y ago
IMO, a lot of people who say they like pixel art, don't actually want the pixellation or the low color count. What they want is the overall drawing style that it produces, with prominent contours and bright but soft colors. This all is also achievable with ultra-high resolutions and millions of colors - it just doesn't happen "automatically".
egypturnash 10y ago
IIRC this was the second time Reynolds has announced he was pretty much Done with pixel art. I seem to remember a post like this around the time they finished 100 Trials. And then they did Auro, with everything obsessively pixelled. Looks like it stuck this time; http://www.dinofarmgames.com/forum/index.php?threads/battle-blast-lanes-of-death.2244/ http://www.dinofarmgames.com/forum/index.php?threads/battle-... is a thread on Dino Farms' forums with some bits from a game they're working on. Personally I'm not sure the comic booky ink outline style is working for him yet but hey, he's learning an entire new way of working, possibly an entirely new art toolchain, and that takes time.
fzeroracer 10y ago
It reads like the artist was looking for an excuse to stop drawing pixel art rather than any sort of further introspection as to why Auro might be encountering issues. It's utterly ridiculous that he thinks that the retro-game market is somehow splintering on the issue of making the pixels go away as increasingly sprite filters are being viewed in a negative light versus getting the experience as it actually was at the time. The whole 'But customers want HD!' era has long since ended, with many of the most popular hits on PC games being pixel-based. The issue was never fully the artwork, but the cutthroat nature of the mobile market. That said, the artwork of Auro reeks of faux-retroism and unlike Shovel Knight which embraced it, it seems like they were only really willing to go half-way.
jbb555 10y ago
Interesting article but very subjective. I don't really agree with his idea of what is "better".
mikejmoffitt 10y ago
High-res pixel art is tough - to create, and sometimes to enjoy. When the goal of pixel art is to create something interesting when imposing resolution constraints, the significance of a single pixel is reduced when working with such a high resolution. Further, if the viewer's display is _close_ to the art's native resolution, but not at least one integer multiple higher, the art is going to be smeared as no scaling technique will deal with such a small scaling transition well. With that in mind, Auro looks like it'd have trouble looking good on any of the devices it was intended for, and indeed looking more like aliasing ("pixellation") to the average user. The author acknowledges this in the article: "Some devices blur Auro. Some devices stretch it. Some devices letterbox it. No matter how hard I worked to make the art in Auro as good as I could, there’s no way a given person should be expected to see past all those roadblocks."

357 points by bpierre 10y ago

osi 10y ago

previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678

Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
Was just about to state this. At the very least it should be prefixed with (2015).

anc84 10y ago

(2015)

zeveb 10y ago

I really like the look of good, B&W pixel art. I think that games like Dark Castle and interfaces like HyperCard really benefited from it. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned though …

teekert 10y ago

If you like such games, play Radiant [0] I love that game, bought it years ago, keep returning to it. It's pixelated but it couldn't be more beautiful. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.hexage.radiant https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.hexage.rad...

cwyers 10y ago
I love Radiant. I love pretty much every game Hexage puts out. I don't think it's actually pixel art, though -- the impression I got is that it's mostly pixel-style vector graphics, they do a lot of stuff that you couldn't do if you imposed a pixel grid on the art that's consistent with the art assets. Look at the blue guy on the left here, for instance: https://lh5.ggpht.com/EyOXQmFzhQ8ie9AnQcq7mcYOaY_uiWY6M8Zis2ZlE4IriEX5ixq_TaPnf0NfKVZoexM=h900 https://lh5.ggpht.com/EyOXQmFzhQ8ie9AnQcq7mcYOaY_uiWY6M8Zis2... Yeah, he looks like a pixel art figure, but look at how he's canted. Look at the bloom on everything. Which may reinforce the author's point -- that there's tradeoffs to doing perfect pixel-by-pixel placement on modern devices, where everyone uses screens of different size and aspect-ratio, and that different techniques are needed to give people the best experience, even if you want to have a retro aesthetic.
- teekert 10y ago
  You're right, it's not real pixel art. It just imitates that old look but the glows and the background is definitely smooth. Still, the simple graphics make the game imo.

Adverblessly 10y ago

I like pixel art, for many of the reasons mentioned in the article. In fact, for 2d games it is my favorite style. With that said, I think the example art the article provides for their game is not very good. Specifically I think there's far too much dithering going on, making it look like it was originally drawn in 32-bit color but then had the number of colors reduced by the pixel editing software (as opposed to the beauty of manually placed pixels). This is especially glaring in the UI elements, and is not the only fault in my opinion. I realize different people have different preferences, and I realize that pixel art is experiencing a surge in unpopularity, but I can't help but think they'd have better luck if their pixel art was better...

TD-Linux 10y ago
I agree. The title splash they gave is 584x360, which is well above what most people are used to as pixel art, and closer to the 640x480 of VGA PC games - where many had moved away from fully hand drawn pixel art. That aesthetic might still work on a large PC screen, but the other problem is that resolution is even higher than the iPhone's original resolution, evoking more of a feeling of "old non-hidpi app".
squeaky-clean 10y ago
I agree, when I first saw the splash image, I assumed that was the one being replaced! Because it doesn't look like pixel art, it looks like a high quality image was pixelated. By replicating reality so closely, you really easily see all the drawbacks of pixel art. Namely low resolution, and limited colors. Because it's not taking advantage of the medium of pixel art, but instead shoehorning realism into it. They complain about the shape of someone's arms in Street Fighter? Who cares about realism, these characters can shoot fireballs from their hands. Look at Link in Link’s Awakening! His head must weigh 3x more than his body. If you find a screenshot with his sword, it's even weirder. The sword is simultaneously smaller than his head, and yet larger than the entire rest of his body. And have you ever seen a tree or wall that looks like that? But it looks freaking fantastic at that resolution. I don't care if the author's art was entirely hand-made, it looks like a high quality image was pixelated by a computer. The art in King of Fighters' may have been done entirely by hand, but if the end results looks indistinguishable from a 3d render at low resolution with terrible aliasing, who cares what means was used to get the crappy look? The author restating things about "embracing the medium", but I don't believe they did.

billyjobob 10y ago

I think his problem is that he is stuck in the uncanny valley of 90s 16 bit pixel art, half way between the classic 8 bit style and modern photorealistic style. If you release a game in current_year with 320x200 resolution or lower and 16 colors I think it's obvious you were aiming for that aesthetic. If you go 640x480 256 or more colors then people can mistake that for an attempt at photorealism that just was badly implemented.

creshal 10y ago
Indeed. There's nothing wrong with good pixel art, but literally no artist knows how to do it, even when they claim they're pixel artists. The Diablo vs. FFTA example in the article demonstrates it well: Despite Diablo coming out earlier, while 2D art was very much a well-cultivated thing, the artists just didn't know how to get it right (too low contrasts, too much dithering, …). FFTA, meanwhile, just looks beautiful.
- kodt 10y ago
  I agree that the artwork in FFTA holds up better today. However I think that had Diablo gone with a brighter color palette, and used pixel art closer in style to FFTA instead of 3D models converted to sprites, it would not have been nearly as successful as it was, nor would it have captured the mood it was going for. I also agree with his criticism of Goldeneye vs Grim Fandango. However, which of those games was more successful? Sometimes good art doesn't sell as well as flashy effects that may look antiquated in 5-10 years.
- jkaunisv1 10y ago
  So there exists good pixel art, but there does not exist any artist who can create good pixel art? FFTA was immaculately conceived I guess?
  - creshal 10y ago
    Well, almost no artist.
- 10y ago

projektir 10y ago

I'm having trouble being convinced that this isn't more subjective than the author implies. I never liked how SFIV looked, either, but not because it works or doesn't work with the medium, I just think it looks awful. It may be problematic if one has to do things that are not really compatible with the medium, such as trying to put high poly models on a low-poly screen, but a lot of games cannot really achieve the right feel by working with the medium. One of the issues I have with a lot of retro-style games is that they're almost automatically limited into certain genres and feels. Diablo using properly pixelated art just wouldn't be Diablo anymore, and for all the muddy, I love how it looks to this day. I always liked the 2.5D style, really. But for me, this is subjective either way.

emodendroket 10y ago
> I never liked how SFIV looked, either, but not because it works or doesn't work with the medium, I just think it looks awful. Isn't that what he's saying?
- projektir 10y ago
  Perhaps I'm misinterpreting his point, but the impression I got is that he things people like how SFIV looks because it's not pixelated, and that people dislike how other pixelated things look because of the "pixel tax". But, I think lots of people genuinely like how SFIV looks and have not played neither KOF III nor SFIII. Even if they see the bad animations they don't have a problem with it because they think it's part of the style. Just like, people like me genuinely like how Diablo looks and he things it's a muddy aliased mess.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    They "genuinely" like it, sure, but not because of the quality of the animation.
dota_fanatic 10y ago
Just chiming in to say Diablo on a CRT looks damn good, played it on one back in 2012 and as a kid back when it was released. Very immersive. On your typical LCD screen? Yech. The difference in quality of experience is huge. Diablo on a CRT looks better and feels better than Diablo 2 on any monitor imho, and is on par with Diablo 3's visuals (and still has a better feeling of physicality, unlike D3 where bodies are clipping left and right).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Devid2014 10y ago

Pixel art is really treble, I just hurt looking at it in some cases. So some people likes pixels and call it “art” and use such word combinations like “HD fetishism”. But I would say “Pixels fetishism” and “HD Art”. Of course badly made HD content can be bad too. P.S.: This is my purely subjective and personal taste. Other will disagree with this because they have other taste.

mwfunk 10y ago
Pixel art is really treble but it can't help it- the relative lack of shading and gradients means it will always have more high-frequency content than higher-resolution alternatives.
coldtea 10y ago
>Pixel art is really treble, I just hurt looking at it in some cases. In the immortal words of Jeffrey Lebowski: "That's just, like, your opinion, man". (Which you admit too, but I think can't be emphasized enough).
Retra 10y ago
>Pixel art is really treble, I just hurt looking at it in some cases. Umm... You can find massive amounts of shockingly ugly non-pixel art too. Perhaps you are confusing bad art for pixel art.

carsongross 10y ago

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." --Orson Welles

galfarragem 10y ago

'Stop looking for happiness in the same place where you lost it.'

bobsgame 10y ago

I love this article. Having invested myself into making a large pixel art game, it really inspires and resonates with me.

scandox 10y ago

> what I intended doesn’t matter at all I think it is very sad to hear any artist saying this. I think he's being noble and he certainly has rationalized the situation very convincingly ("embracing the medium"). It's a very delicate balance. On the one hand, yes you do not deserve an audience. All too often contempt for the audience is merely the sign of a lazy artist. On the other hand sometimes you must bite the hand that feeds - and keep biting. The best I know have that mixture: they desire glory and at the same time they have a tyrannical disregard for what others think. Ultimately, he's courting the high opinion of people whose opinions he doesn't respect, because they are influential.

newman8r 10y ago
I get that tone as well, but I think the author actually convinces himself by the end of the essay that his new outlook is actually a more mature one rather than the artistic compromise he initially describes.

runeb 10y ago

Have not read the article yet, but just wanted to say I'm really excited about Thimbleweed Park, the new adventure game from Ron Gilbert (maker of Manic Mansion and Monkey Island, among others). Pixel art and all. https://thimbleweedpark.com/ https://thimbleweedpark.com/

Paul_S 10y ago
It's a shame they didn't go all the way. The art will be low resolution but it will not limit itself and will use unlimited colours, transparency and high fidelity lighting effects. I hope they will at least avoid the grevious but surprisingly common sin of mixing sprites at different resolutions.
- runeb 10y ago
  There is a pretty interesting development blog at https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/ https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/. Its been a while since I followed it, but at least in the beginning Ron was writing about the game engine design. They also touched upon what you are referring to, and at least for the in-game font you can switch to an old-style mode.
- mrob 10y ago
  I'm not a fan of the lighting effects, but the Javascript animation on the web page does one thing I think is fully justified - "misaligned" pixel art, i.e. sprites positioned over the background by fractional pixels. I think this is beneficial because it greatly improves motion quality. Even with high framerates, and even with CRT or strobed LCD style low persistence displays, if you're snapping everything to a grid then the only way to get perfectly sharp motion is to limit movement speeds so everything stays naturally aligned to the grid. You could think of it as a temporal analog to font hinting. Some games do this, but it severely restricts the design possibilities, so I think allowing misaligned art is a good tradeoff. Unless you're using dithered transparency it doesn't cause any obvious artifacts. Nintendo does this with the pixel art in Mario Maker and I haven't seen any complaints.
- shdon 10y ago
  Yes, they will mix sprites at different resolutions. Ron has stated multiple times that it is possible to enable a "true" low resolution mode, to the point where he'll get quite grumpy if you bring it up on the comments. He's also said that he thinks it is tinted (or tainted) by nostalgia and not something you'd actually want to use for more than a few seconds just to try it out. They have explicitly said that they're not going for an adventure game in the truly old style, but for something that feels like it is.

sly010 10y ago

I am not a gamer, but when I play I go with indie games. I really enjoyed the visuals of "The Last Door" and "Fez" and "Superbrothers - Sword & Sworcery" much more so than any 3d game. The sad truth is 3D games are now cheaper to produce and work at arbitrary resolution, so the big studios will just keep popping them out because it's just so easy.

Keyframe 10y ago

I draw, I paint (more than draw), I animate. Daily. So, I have a bit of a different perspective on this. Pixel art is one of the hardest disciplines I've tried. It's ridiculous. I wouldn't do it again. I only spent with it a bit to see what it takes, and it takes A LOT. If it's not outstanding, it won't get noticed as well. So, it's really tough on psyche. Somewhat like animation. There's another thing I want to mention. I have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs. Magical scanline blends them together and looking at the pixel art on CRT is different than on anything else. Almost like they are anti-aliased, but they're not (smudged). I think that's a key component today we are missing from enjoying pixel art. When it was dominant in game industry, you couldn't see actual pixels. Today, they are fetishised.

creshal 10y ago
> have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs What about the thousands of games for hand-held consoles, which have always used LCDs, and were using pixel art for much longer than their counterparts elsewhere out of sheer necessity?
- Keyframe 10y ago
  Smaller screens though.
  - creshal 10y ago
    You could (and can) still clearly identify individual pixels on them. (Especially when you're a kid and keep your nose mere inches off the screen.)
    - Keyframe 10y ago
      Maybe, but you have to lean in very close: http://imgur.com/a/ovuhZ http://imgur.com/a/ovuhZ This is on AGS-101, probably the best screen (backlit) of old handhelds. Whole screen is a fine grid of pixel units which are visible and negate (interlace with) pixels in pixel art. Also, when things start moving, it becomes a blur - due to both laggy screen and small size of it. I've seen some graphics demos (and games) overlaying grid mesh over art and it looks better, more like original seen here. Your point stands in theory, but in practice it also doesn't look anything like pixel art on modern screens. edit: to be clear, I'm mostly talking about the edges on the sprites. That's where it's most visible. It's not as clinical or smudged as on modern monitors / upscales.

reedlaw 10y ago

The problem with pixel art games is they tend to emphasize style over content. Game designers should strive to make the best possible game and allow a style to emerge from that, not the other way around.

parenthephobia 10y ago

I think the problem here is that there's a distinction between "pixel art" and "art created observing obsolete technical limitations". Additionally, just because a piece of art is technically impressive, doesn't mean people should find it artistically impressive. When we only had 16 colours, it was harder to make great-looking art, but that difficulty didn't make the art look better. The essence of pixel art is that (it seems that) every pixel is placed with care. An image which uses 45 colours but looks like a dithered version of a full-colour image does not look like every pixel is placed with care. Quite the opposite: it looks like the image you're looking at isn't even the image the artist wanted you to see. Hyper Light Drifter has great "pixel art", but couldn't have been achieved on a 16-bit display (without either noticeable banding or dithering). But, the way it uses colour is clearly inspired by great 4-bit artistry. Although there are many more than 16 colors, neighbouring hues are contrasting, blending is used to indicate glows or shadows, and blurring is used to indicate depth.

wccrawford 10y ago

>It takes a lot effort to explain how this: >has much better art than this: ... Shitty dither. That didn't take long. Even in Bubsy, the things that weren't dithered weren't nearly as bad as the ones that were. It has other problems, too, but they would become more apparent if the artist had refused to dither. Then they'd be a lot easier to talk about, such as the horrible shapes for everything except bubsy himself. The problem with that background in bubsy wasn't the "pixel art", it was the art. I'm betting that artist couldn't draw well in any medium.

veli_joza 10y ago
For me, it doesn't work because background is too vibrant and clashing with characters. If you would de-saturate the background (or use only cold colors), I suspect just that small change would make the art work.

sgarman 10y ago

I think this is simply what happens when you mix art and creating a commodity. It's Britney Spears vs (your favorite artist). They are both art of course but one targets a much larger demographic then the other. Seems like our author realizes he has more passion for creating a popular and understandable game then he does for art.

galfarragem 10y ago
https://sivers.org/starv https://sivers.org/starv

musesum 10y ago

I used to hand anti-alias pixel fonts. There was a tool called Grasp that our shop used to create animated ads back in the early 90's. It only supported two color pixel fonts. Wrote a tool to take a single font sheet bitmap and parse out each letter. Each letter had 4 shades of grey. So, would create 4 fonts that would render in 4 passes. To make a master bitmap, we'd scan a font sheet into a PCX file hand it over to an artist with the instructions: "make it smooth". Hours upon hours of: zoom-in-click-click-click-zoom-out-review-repeat. Poor artist. I wonder what kind of lament a vector artist will have, decades from now. And what will take its place. [edit] vector

egypturnash 10y ago
I've been using Illustrator as my main medium[1] since 2000. Mostly I bitch about it doing terrible things when I open up older files, and the occasional update that's a crashfest for me even after I remove all plugins. (I'm currently running the last release because CC 2015.3 is one of those.) I don't think anything is going to take the place of vector tools, especially as screen DPI continues to increase. I keep flirting with Affinity Designer[2], which does some very interesting things with integrating raster effects to create a very scalable but very painterly look. But I've got a decade and a half of sunk cost into Illustrator that keeps pulling me back. 1: http://egypt.urnash.com http://egypt.urnash.com 2: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/

greggman 10y ago

lots of people (myself included) like pixel art. Hey, I'm going to this (http://pixelartpark.com/ http://pixelartpark.com/) I think one issue is that most people don't appreciate or understand the limits. This comes up in the demoscene. The demoscene makes realtime demos. The fact that they are realtime (or 4k or 1k or 256b) makes them interesting to people who understand the limits. But to most people outside the scene they're just mediocre effects because they aren't aware of the limits and instead are used to Star Wars: the Force Awakens effects or Pixar or whatever. The same is true for pixel art. Many people like pixel art because of nostalgia. Others like it for the creativity within limits. But, probably most people, aren't aware of the limits so to them it's just not latest AAA game level of art. It kinda sucks but there's lots of things the masses don't like/don't get. Fortunately there seem to be enough who do like these types of things.

int_19h 10y ago

IMO, a lot of people who say they like pixel art, don't actually want the pixellation or the low color count. What they want is the overall drawing style that it produces, with prominent contours and bright but soft colors. This all is also achievable with ultra-high resolutions and millions of colors - it just doesn't happen "automatically".

egypturnash 10y ago

IIRC this was the second time Reynolds has announced he was pretty much Done with pixel art. I seem to remember a post like this around the time they finished 100 Trials. And then they did Auro, with everything obsessively pixelled. Looks like it stuck this time; http://www.dinofarmgames.com/forum/index.php?threads/battle-blast-lanes-of-death.2244/ http://www.dinofarmgames.com/forum/index.php?threads/battle-... is a thread on Dino Farms' forums with some bits from a game they're working on. Personally I'm not sure the comic booky ink outline style is working for him yet but hey, he's learning an entire new way of working, possibly an entirely new art toolchain, and that takes time.

fzeroracer 10y ago

It reads like the artist was looking for an excuse to stop drawing pixel art rather than any sort of further introspection as to why Auro might be encountering issues. It's utterly ridiculous that he thinks that the retro-game market is somehow splintering on the issue of making the pixels go away as increasingly sprite filters are being viewed in a negative light versus getting the experience as it actually was at the time. The whole 'But customers want HD!' era has long since ended, with many of the most popular hits on PC games being pixel-based. The issue was never fully the artwork, but the cutthroat nature of the mobile market. That said, the artwork of Auro reeks of faux-retroism and unlike Shovel Knight which embraced it, it seems like they were only really willing to go half-way.

jbb555 10y ago

Interesting article but very subjective. I don't really agree with his idea of what is "better".

mikejmoffitt 10y ago

High-res pixel art is tough - to create, and sometimes to enjoy. When the goal of pixel art is to create something interesting when imposing resolution constraints, the significance of a single pixel is reduced when working with such a high resolution. Further, if the viewer's display is _close_ to the art's native resolution, but not at least one integer multiple higher, the art is going to be smeared as no scaling technique will deal with such a small scaling transition well. With that in mind, Auro looks like it'd have trouble looking good on any of the devices it was intended for, and indeed looking more like aliasing ("pixellation") to the average user. The author acknowledges this in the article: "Some devices blur Auro. Some devices stretch it. Some devices letterbox it. No matter how hard I worked to make the art in Auro as good as I could, there’s no way a given person should be expected to see past all those roadblocks."