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For me, pixel art is a technical limitation. I don't see the point of romanticising a technical limitation. What limitation are we going to do next? Retro low-p

For me, pixel art is a technical limitation. I don't see the point of romanticising a technical limitation. What limitation are we going to do next? Retro low-poly 3D models? A soundtrack consisting of six songs only? Distributing the game on 13 floppy disks? Games that never get updates? Low quality collision objects? Null-model cable multiplayer? game_demo.exe file download from CNET.com? Anti-piracy methods by having to look up words from a book?

mysterydip 7y ago
low-poly (and often untextured) 3D models is already a style being used in indie gamedev, seeme like it came into vogue a year or two ago. chiptunes are also a stylistic choice some games make over full hi def sounds and music.
- failrate 7y ago
  Lopoly and pixel art also has the advantage of being cheaper and faster to produce at an acceptable quality. Indies cannot produce AAA quality assets.
  - mopsi 7y ago
    They also tend to age better because they never tried to look realistic in the first place. Cartoonish remains cartoonish, but realistic becomes dated.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Going off on a tangent, I'd really love to see a game that pushed production values within the artificial constraint of zero texture, just flat shaded geometry, while maxing out modern hardware. That would be the computer graphics style I dreamt of while growing up between X-Wing on the PC and Money for Nothing on MTV.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    If you've ever watched any of the "Mind's Eye" CGI videos (which were just older CGI of the 70s, 80s, and some early 90s set to music) - you can get an idea of what your fantasy might look like in full motion. Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone). Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can hide low-count vertex polys). The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not sure)...
roywiggins 7y ago
Sure. https://gamasutra.com/view/news/248019/How_5_years_of_burning_ambition_brought_Retro_City_Rampage_to_DOS.php https://gamasutra.com/view/news/248019/How_5_years_of_burnin...
vidarh 7y ago
A technical limitation itself is insufficient, but a lot of art is on purpose limited in order to force focus on certain things. E.g. black and white photography is often used to emphasise composition and lighting more. Specific palettes. Specific sets of instruments - a classical composition will not usually be for "some random number and set of musicians" but written for or arranged for, say, a quartet or a symphony orchestra. Both visual art and music tends to follow a whole range of rules to match certain styles. And yes, reducing size is also a choice - the demo scene takes that very seriously for a good reason: it again forces a different focus. A non-size constrained demo category emphasizes cooperation and teams working on different parts, and project management and is a totally different thing than, say, a 4K demo where you have to focus on reducing a single concept to its essence. A direct size constraint may not be that important for most games (though for some it is: people still develop cartridge games for the Commodore 64 for example), but resolution and palette constraints do act as implicit size constraints too to a great extent. Well done pixel art is just a form of minimalism in art that focuses on shading and composition and exploiting patterns and how we interpret pictures. Just reducing resolution of a picture almost always produces bad pixel art. E.g. r/pixelart on Reddit includes this rule: Art must be comprised mostly of pixel art using pixel-level manipulation. Color reductions, index painting, computer generated, oekaki, aliased digital painting etc. are not permitted unless they have been cleaned up by hand afterwards or were posted with the [WIP] tag. And people there get very picky about this, to the point that some people object to even fairly basic paint application tools (I've argued with people who claimed that a pixel based "spray" tool is not suitable for pixel art, for example, because there's not sufficient thought behind each pixel placement; I don't agree with that, but I do agree with the overall idea that you need to pay attention on a pixel level, and tweak things that does not look right). Taking e.g. a photography and color reducing it and reducing the resolution does not result in good pixel art - it results in pictures that are messy and unclear and that often lose a lot more detail vs. a proper pixel art rendition of the same scene. Similarly reduced palettes forces much more conscious thinking about composition to make it make sense. Modern pixel art, like modern chip tunes of course have different motivations from "authentic" art made because the constraints were real constraints of the hardware, but it's really no different from people who e.g. choose to compose for piano even though they could compose for a synth and be free to include sounds no piano can reproduce. We have not entirely abandoned piano music just because we now have more flexible instruments available.
that_jojo 7y ago
There's a major gap between 'technically superior' and 'subjectively superior'. You sound pretty out of touch here in a time when LPs and casettes have made a comeback, chiptunes are pretty hip, some artists have literally released albums on floppy disk, and, as already mentioned, contrary to your own sarcasm low-poly graphics are already a an indie game trope. Just because something has more impressive metrics doesn't make it fun.
magashna 7y ago
That's like calling a book a technical limitation compared to a movie.
willis936 7y ago
Art is not functional. All things you listed are things no one is bringing back. If linen became obsolete hundreds of years ago why do people still wear it?
bonestamp2 7y ago
True, but that technical limitation inadvertently created a "style" and some people like that style even if the technology now exists to make art with more detail. For example, just because the technology exists to make a virtually unlimited range of sounds and effects doesn't mean that we should abolish simple acoustic music... some people like that style, which originally existed because that's all the technology that was available.
ajuc 7y ago
Some limitations are very useful for creating innovative art styles. If Muslim artists weren't restricted from painting people and animals they wouldn't create the decorative motives they created. If early sound chips in personal computers weren't restricted chiptune genre wouldn't be created. And you can certainly make art using restrictions that aren't enforced on you - restrictions often inspire people and make it easier to create. That being said while I love chip tunes and I like some old games made with pixel art I don't particulary like it in the new games, but that's just my opinion, lots of people have different preferences. Also from gamedev POV pixel art allowed many modern indie games to be created which wouldn't be created otherwise. That's a plus in my book. > Low quality collision objects? Funny that you mentioned this - some collision detection bugs in starcraft 2 were introduced on purpose to mimic bugs in starcraft 1 because these bugs increased the skill cap (people learnt to abuse them to get ahead of their opponents and community liked that because it was another thing you had to learn to master the game). See "mineral walk" :)

mysterydip 7y ago

low-poly (and often untextured) 3D models is already a style being used in indie gamedev, seeme like it came into vogue a year or two ago. chiptunes are also a stylistic choice some games make over full hi def sounds and music.

failrate 7y ago
Lopoly and pixel art also has the advantage of being cheaper and faster to produce at an acceptable quality. Indies cannot produce AAA quality assets.
- mopsi 7y ago
  They also tend to age better because they never tried to look realistic in the first place. Cartoonish remains cartoonish, but realistic becomes dated.
usrusr 7y ago
Going off on a tangent, I'd really love to see a game that pushed production values within the artificial constraint of zero texture, just flat shaded geometry, while maxing out modern hardware. That would be the computer graphics style I dreamt of while growing up between X-Wing on the PC and Money for Nothing on MTV.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  If you've ever watched any of the "Mind's Eye" CGI videos (which were just older CGI of the 70s, 80s, and some early 90s set to music) - you can get an idea of what your fantasy might look like in full motion. Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone). Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can hide low-count vertex polys). The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not sure)...

roywiggins 7y ago

Sure. https://gamasutra.com/view/news/248019/How_5_years_of_burning_ambition_brought_Retro_City_Rampage_to_DOS.php https://gamasutra.com/view/news/248019/How_5_years_of_burnin...

vidarh 7y ago

A technical limitation itself is insufficient, but a lot of art is on purpose limited in order to force focus on certain things. E.g. black and white photography is often used to emphasise composition and lighting more. Specific palettes. Specific sets of instruments - a classical composition will not usually be for "some random number and set of musicians" but written for or arranged for, say, a quartet or a symphony orchestra. Both visual art and music tends to follow a whole range of rules to match certain styles. And yes, reducing size is also a choice - the demo scene takes that very seriously for a good reason: it again forces a different focus. A non-size constrained demo category emphasizes cooperation and teams working on different parts, and project management and is a totally different thing than, say, a 4K demo where you have to focus on reducing a single concept to its essence. A direct size constraint may not be that important for most games (though for some it is: people still develop cartridge games for the Commodore 64 for example), but resolution and palette constraints do act as implicit size constraints too to a great extent. Well done pixel art is just a form of minimalism in art that focuses on shading and composition and exploiting patterns and how we interpret pictures. Just reducing resolution of a picture almost always produces bad pixel art. E.g. r/pixelart on Reddit includes this rule: Art must be comprised mostly of pixel art using pixel-level manipulation. Color reductions, index painting, computer generated, oekaki, aliased digital painting etc. are not permitted unless they have been cleaned up by hand afterwards or were posted with the [WIP] tag. And people there get very picky about this, to the point that some people object to even fairly basic paint application tools (I've argued with people who claimed that a pixel based "spray" tool is not suitable for pixel art, for example, because there's not sufficient thought behind each pixel placement; I don't agree with that, but I do agree with the overall idea that you need to pay attention on a pixel level, and tweak things that does not look right). Taking e.g. a photography and color reducing it and reducing the resolution does not result in good pixel art - it results in pictures that are messy and unclear and that often lose a lot more detail vs. a proper pixel art rendition of the same scene. Similarly reduced palettes forces much more conscious thinking about composition to make it make sense. Modern pixel art, like modern chip tunes of course have different motivations from "authentic" art made because the constraints were real constraints of the hardware, but it's really no different from people who e.g. choose to compose for piano even though they could compose for a synth and be free to include sounds no piano can reproduce. We have not entirely abandoned piano music just because we now have more flexible instruments available.

that_jojo 7y ago

There's a major gap between 'technically superior' and 'subjectively superior'. You sound pretty out of touch here in a time when LPs and casettes have made a comeback, chiptunes are pretty hip, some artists have literally released albums on floppy disk, and, as already mentioned, contrary to your own sarcasm low-poly graphics are already a an indie game trope. Just because something has more impressive metrics doesn't make it fun.

magashna 7y ago

That's like calling a book a technical limitation compared to a movie.

willis936 7y ago

Art is not functional. All things you listed are things no one is bringing back. If linen became obsolete hundreds of years ago why do people still wear it?

bonestamp2 7y ago

True, but that technical limitation inadvertently created a "style" and some people like that style even if the technology now exists to make art with more detail. For example, just because the technology exists to make a virtually unlimited range of sounds and effects doesn't mean that we should abolish simple acoustic music... some people like that style, which originally existed because that's all the technology that was available.

ajuc 7y ago

Some limitations are very useful for creating innovative art styles. If Muslim artists weren't restricted from painting people and animals they wouldn't create the decorative motives they created. If early sound chips in personal computers weren't restricted chiptune genre wouldn't be created. And you can certainly make art using restrictions that aren't enforced on you - restrictions often inspire people and make it easier to create. That being said while I love chip tunes and I like some old games made with pixel art I don't particulary like it in the new games, but that's just my opinion, lots of people have different preferences. Also from gamedev POV pixel art allowed many modern indie games to be created which wouldn't be created otherwise. That's a plus in my book. > Low quality collision objects? Funny that you mentioned this - some collision detection bugs in starcraft 2 were introduced on purpose to mimic bugs in starcraft 1 because these bugs increased the skill cap (people learnt to abuse them to get ahead of their opponents and community liked that because it was another thing you had to learn to master the game). See "mineral walk" :)