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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

by 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.

by runeb 10y ago

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.