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A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art (2015)

122 points by kick 7y ago

dang 7y ago
A thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12505615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12505615 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678
egypturnash 7y ago
2018: Dinofarm's third game is in early access on Steam. [screenshot of very pixelly art] http://www.dinofarmgames.com/jelly-bomber-in-early-access-on-steam/ http://www.dinofarmgames.com/jelly-bomber-in-early-access-on... 2019: Here's a concept painting for our next game. [image of some simple flat-color work] (http://www.dinofarmgames.com/alakaram-first-details/ http://www.dinofarmgames.com/alakaram-first-details/) There is a resolution threshold where fiddling with every pixel on the screen by hand becomes a terrible, counter-productive idea and that title screen for Auro at the top of the "renouncing pixel art" blog post is pretty close to that threshold.
jere 7y ago
I was on a podcast with Keith Burgun from Dinofarm recently. We talked about Auro among many other things. I only mention it because nobody ever talks about that game but it's one of my favorites: https://keithburgun.net/prospects-for-indie-devs-with-jeremiah-reid/ https://keithburgun.net/prospects-for-indie-devs-with-jeremi...
umvi 7y ago
Sigh, the unwashed masses ruin everything I suppose (by voting with their wallets). One of my favorite games of all time is Fire Emblem for GBA. It had custom, unique class animations that would play anytime a character got a critical[1]. They were just rare enough that I would get a hit of dopamine as soon as I saw the normal attack animation deviate to the critical animation. With these fond childhood memories I gifted my son Fire Emblem for 3DS which was highly rated. The critical animations were all procedural garbage (all classes just have a flash of light + anime face close up + particles + sound byte)! But it has 3d graphics, so I guess that's something. It's just like the Street Fighter example given in the article. My kids probably can't tell the difference, but for me it was like night and day. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn3IxjImGW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn3IxjImGW0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls0Nn_-hv-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls0Nn_-hv-8
- hrhei929 7y ago
  Seems to me that’s precisely what’s called for in the financial trade world. The concepts are well known and software packages make the process learnable by anyone. It’s discovered. It doesn’t tickle feudal traders fancy but the idea and technology haven’t vanished. I guess I don’t see the problem. The idea was discovered and refined and society at large it seems doesn’t want to satisfy your emotional preference, but it has provided cheap/easy ways for you to do so to your heart’s content though. “Kids these days aren’t nostalgic for the childhood experiences kids had last generation.” is just ... yep that’s how it has always worked.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  https://gfycat.com/leanuncomfortableleafhopper https://gfycat.com/leanuncomfortableleafhopper Check out dorcas emblem. The new FE is pretty good on its flair too. The animations are dynamic with circumstance had how much damage you have which is nifty
- Multicomp 7y ago
  Hey there! Just because you're the first Fire Emblem GBA player I've met on HN, may I ask which Fire Emblem game this was? Fire Emblem: The Blinding Blade FE6 Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword FE7 Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones FE8
  - umvi 7y ago
    It was just called "Fire Emblem" in North America, but I believe it was FE6 Edit: it was FE7
    - eropple 7y ago
      The American GBA games were FE7 and FE8. FE6 has only been localized by fans.
droopyEyelids 7y ago
Im not an expert, but I don't understand why dinofarm went for such high-res pixels that their pixel art ended up looking like shoddy non-pixel art. Seems like a misapplication of the technique, to me. In the article he explains how classic pixel art conjures an illusion by _implying_ shapes and textures... Does Auro even attempt that sort of magic? It seems like Auro's implications are explicitly drawn.
- ChrisClark 7y ago
  Yeah, that Auro art is way too high res for 'pixel art'. It just looks like someone scaled down, or pixelated, some smooth art. On a phone screen it probably just looks like it should be smooth art but it's running at the wrong resolution. Implying something is wrong with the game.
- knubie 7y ago
  It's not just the high resolution, but the hand-rendered anti-aliasing that gives it that pixelated look. Pixel art is most satisfying IMO when the lines are sharp and/or the dithering is clear.
- p1necone 7y ago
  Agreed - it really looks like hand drawn art that's been turned into "pixel art" in some kind of paint by numbers fashion. Just using the original hand drawn concept art probably would have looked better, but that doesn't mean that pixel art in general is a bad idea. Look at Stardew Valley for an example of a very popular game that's all pixel art. I don't see any reviews of that saying that it looks "pixelated" or "not getting" the art style. And it's not like Stardew even has amazing pixel art, it's just decent enough.
  - js8 7y ago
    I would certainly play another Simon the Sorcerer. Thimbleweed Park was nice, but its pixel art is less visually "rich".
deft 7y ago
The problem with this pixel art is its targetting 1080p for some bizzarre reason and just ends up looking like non anti-aliased graphics. Pixel art should look like this. https://twitter.com/zaebucca/status/1057312889160286215/photo/1 https://twitter.com/zaebucca/status/1057312889160286215/phot... Even scaled up 4x this looks gorgeous.
- kick 7y ago
  I don't agree with that! Early personal computers also had pixel art, and it was mind-blowing what was done with it. Watch this talk from Mark Ferrari, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/ http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/ Check out what he did with color cycling in this demo: it's amazing. I recommend looking at "May - Jungle Waterfall - Rain" to see how amazing this is. That's not a gif, it's a single image, just rotating the colors. That was to deal with storage constraints. Can you imagine? The techniques of early PC and applications are worth saving, too. The art shown in that tweet is amazing, too, but it's not the same thing! It's an entirely different thing, with entirely different constraints.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Those are all 640x480 though. In general a lot of the early computer style starts to blur the line from true "pixel art" into "low bit depth graphics".
- ekianjo 7y ago
  If you were making pixel art at like 4k definition this would look much better than what "pixel art" means today where the granularity is not at the pixel level but every block is at least 5 pixels wide to look "pixely" enough at large resolutions. The devs who do that are completely clueless.
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    How so? I think that the ratio of "pixels" to the displays pixels needs to change given the resolution of the final display device. What shouldn't be happening is the viewport scaling -- instead the viewport should change its size to match the display device and upscale/downscale (without smoothing) along an integer multiple to achieve the desired effect
weinzierl 7y ago
> Evidently, even some retro game enthusiasts want to get rid of pixels so badly that they would rather have a computer smear the art like runny makeup than appreciate the pixel art for what it is. A few years back, the Hebrew University and Microsoft set out to “depixelize” pixel art through a new anti-aliasing(pixel-smoothing) algorithm. I don't care what you have to do, just GET RID OF THOSE SQUARES! > The hand-placement of the squares is precisely what makes this kind of art valuable. If anyone besides artists should appreciate that, it’s retro game enthusiasts. When even they are splintering on this issue, I think it’s time to face the chiptunes. What the younger generations that didn't experience the heyday of ultra low-res CRT displays don't understand is that graphics wasn't perceived as blocky so much. The displays were usually so mushy that everything looked kind of smooth. It was more like an pointillistic painting observed from a far distance than what is known as pixel art today. Of course the LCD of the game-boy is a different story - and probably one source where this misconception comes from - but arcade and home computer era was not very pixely.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  This. A pixel is a point sample, not a tiny square - even in pixel art. That's why "upscaling" pixel art even to seemingly ludicrous extents is in fact quite appropriate. If you interpolate with a Gaussian kernel, it will yield something very much like what CRT's display, but in a purely digital interpolation you can do a lot better than that. A Lanczos-based resampling gives you a 'watercolor'-like effect that optimally accounts for every single pixel in the original image, while keeping the upsampled image smooth with no "pixelation" whatsoever. (Pixel-art specific algorithms are appropriate to images or sprites with a small color palette, where it is desirable to keep this constraint and generate sharp boundaries between differently-colored areas. Even then, the point is basically to keep things smooth while optimally accounting for what's in the original image.)
  - p1necone 7y ago
    Scaling filters like 2xSal look godawful to me (and seem to hide detail), but a bit of blur and scanlines looks great. Makes sense that the type of distortion that the art was made for would be the best for scaling it to me.
friendlybus 7y ago
Auro is closer to black and white than Peggle. I don't know why the artist chose a washed out colour palette. A victory screen is supposed to be saturated happiness. The creatures are weird and in the not good way, what the hell is the pink slug noodle creature? I don't get the story world or why crawling endless grey tiles in the dark is fun. The guy has all that classical goodness in his skill but what they chose to make with it is very questionable. I'd suggest Auro was more about a transition for the artist than it was about making a salable game.
- npinsker 7y ago
  This is a little harsh, but I totally agree -- IMO this is far from good pixel art. One of the main benefits of pixel art (as I see it; I'm not an expert) is that proper use of outlines can call your attention to important elements in the scene. There's none of this in Auro, partially because the resolution is so high, but even UI elements like text and buttons lack weight and outline. The splash image at the top has no focal point and lacks contrast, as do the character designs (especially the blob and gray thing at the bottom). Overall it comes across as very dreary, not at all relaxing or fun to look at. Contrast this with the Pokemon environment from elsewhere in this thread (https://twitter.com/zaebucca/status/1057312889160286215 https://twitter.com/zaebucca/status/1057312889160286215) which is gorgeous and fun. It perfectly draws your attention to the key elements of the scene.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    Yeah outlines are one of many techniques that can make good art. The problem is in the overarching form, any technique or art style would have been sunk by the decisions the artist made. The good news is the guy has the skill which can succeed on it's own, given it's channeling a positive story. Drawing that well and constructing scenes that well is a fine art that takes a lot of time and effort. The high fantasy tree-man fighting with a staff on the ground was not the king in 2015, it was the outlaw. Had he committed to an outlaw version of Gandalf or Link from Zelda, he would have had a story that fit the times and likely how he felt as an artist. This depressed faded king surrounded by water and off-beat monsters is an unsolvable conflict that benefits no-one.
DonHopkins 7y ago
With all the microscopic retinal pixels to spare that we have now, it would be interesting to explore non-rectangular pixel art, like triangles and hexagons.
- kick 7y ago
  Right? There's a lot of territory to cover here. Really exciting!
- egypturnash 7y ago
  https://marmoset.co/hexels/ https://marmoset.co/hexels/
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Amazing tool! Thanks for pointing that out. Nice how it combines pixels and geometric shapes together in one tool, and supports mixing and combining all kinds of grids and pixels, even random Voronoi cells! It's on sale for only 8 EUR on Steam so I'll give it a try, since it looks so fun. The right-click pie menus was worth the price of admission! At the opposite end of the abstraction spectrum from "Pixel Art" is Bert Monroy's amazing hyper-resolution photo-realistic art. He combines Illustrator together with Photoshop, ping-ponging back and forth between both tools. He's taught many classes and produced lots of videos showing how he works and teaching the tools he uses. Times Square – On display at the Make Software Change the World Exhibit at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA: This is the largest image I have ever created, pushing the boundaries of the software and hardware as far as they can go. It was unveiled at the Photo Plus Expo in New York on October 28, 2010 as a work in progress. A 25 foot light box was constructed to display the piece that has been printed on a new material being introduced by Epson. • The image size is 60 inches by 300 inches. • The flattened file weighs in at 6.52 Gigabytes. • It took four years to create. • The painting is comprised of almost fifteen thousand individual Photoshop and Illustrator files. • Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains over 700,000 layers. http://www.bertmonroy.com/timessquare/timessquare.html http://www.bertmonroy.com/timessquare/timessquare.html Bert Monroy, Photoshop Artist Photoshop Hall of Famer Bert Monroy talks about creating his largest piece to date “Times Square.” At 6.52 gigapixels, “Times Square” contains over 750,000 layers and depicts dozens of digital imaging artists and pioneers, as well as Monroy’s family and friends. This clip is from a full-length interview, conducted for CHM's upcoming exhibition, “Make Software: Change the World!,” opening January 28, 2017. Don’t miss your chance to see “Times Square” on display in “Make Software.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JVgBWCPlFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JVgBWCPlFQ Amsterdam Mist (2014): My Amsterdam Mist is the culmination of twenty-two months of work. Every element in the image was meticulously created pixel-by-pixel using Adobe® Photoshop® and Adobe® Illustrator®. It is the first piece to be inspired by the shot rather than the scene itself. http://www.bertmonroy.com/amsterdammist/amsterdammist.html http://www.bertmonroy.com/amsterdammist/amsterdammist.html
ljm 7y ago
It's maybe besides the point but I think there's always been a time and a place for this, in the indie scene. For example, Kitty Horrorshow[1] and Puppet Combo[2] are are responsible for a lot of art-house (typically horror) games that emulate the PS1 era of 3D graphics. It's an art-form now. My favourite 2D, pixel-based one is The Last Door. It's basic as all hell. And still you have more games taking retro to the next level, like Faith[3]. I think we're in an amazing place where new technology can give us old experiences. [1] https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io [2] https://puppetcombo.com https://puppetcombo.com [3] https://airdorf.itch.io/faith https://airdorf.itch.io/faith
- Riverheart 7y ago
  Check out "Deep Sleep" and "Don't Escape" if you like pixel horror.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
previously... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12505615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12505615
- quasimodem 7y ago
  Yeesh, yes why does this article get so much traction when it's reposted so frequently? We get it. It ain't art unless it divides people.
rs23296008n1 7y ago
I'm thinking the gist of it is that pixel-art is a art style like abstract art, Pointillism, impressionism, cubism, and all the other schools portraying realism but in a very particular and deliberate way. Basically theres a set of techniques, theres a discipline, theres a way of doing it "primitive" or low style like the Rambo example and a way of doing it in high style, like the Mighty Final Fight example. Its not retro as such, its about using a limited color range of square tiles to convey a image with some kind of meaning. Pixel-art adds animation as well which is interesting. The comments about the critics "not getting it" are as old as the "art critic" profession itself. Different critics are at different levels of understanding, including none-at-all. I wonder if that auro game would have the same affect if it had high resolution graphics instead? Probably not. Different aesthetic, different audience. Dwarf fortress versus Starcraft.
0kl 7y ago
> Problems arise when it comes time to convey to a non-artist what constitutes quality art. The first mistake is selling art to non-artists. The general population buys games for entertainment, and similar to any art (music, movies, paintings) for entertainment, it is rarely the most artistic that is selected. > The shoddy SFIV received a higher art score than one of the best looking games to date, and I believe it’s all due to a pixel tax. The second mistake is believing IGN, or the general consumer, is evaluating the art when they explicitly state “graphics”. There’s a place for pixel art - even for ascii art (<3 df), but you have to be ready to not be loved by people that aren’t interested in “art,” but entertainment.
- lstodd 7y ago
  I must disagree with your assertion that only artists can recognise and appreciate art. This is artistism. Please be ashamed of partaking in this vile trend.
  - 0kl 7y ago
    I definitely not trying to say that. I’m trying to say that when someone like me (general public) is looking at art _for entertainment_ my wants are different than when I’m looking at something as art. If I’m enjoying something as art, that puts me into a different category, but when purchasing a game for fun, or music as background noise, or a decorative painting I am in a totally different mindset than when I am engaging with those same things with a mind towards their artistic qualities. The intentionality of the viewer matters, and the author, IMO, fails to recognize that a lot of people, myself included, often come to games with the intentionality of playing a game, not necessarily judging its artistic qualities. We sometimes do, but I think it would be bad faith to argue that we all are always appreciating every “artistic quality” of a work all the time - I know I’ve enjoyed a bad game, movie, show, or song more than once.
lstodd 7y ago
Just try OpenXcom plus {Piratez, Area51, XcomFiles, 40K} mods. What can be done with the original UFO:EU/XCOM:UD palette is just unbelievable. And that's just 14 colors in 16 shades, and very much fixed at that.
tomc1985 7y ago
"Technology’s primary function is to make human life as easy and efficient as possible." This is an aside, but that is not technology's role. Tech is supposed to empower us, and act as mind-amplification devices, to make us smarter, faster, and better. The above statement underscores everything that is wrong with tech and how we (edit- as consumers) are on track to completely squander its potential.
- taneq 7y ago
  Tech is built by millions of different people, all of whom have different goals for it. It’s not ‘meant’ to do any one thing.
tomc1985 7y ago
In addition to my previous comment, I think this post touches on a conundrum that I've debated with some of my other artist friends: Is it the artists responsibility to make art for his audience? Or is it the audience's responsibility to try and understand the artist and his motivations? I think these questions explain a lot about the art world that regular folks simply don't understand, like the kind of abstract, "modern" art that is often derided for appearing low-effort. Indeed I have been to galleries and exhibitions filled with what appears to be genuinely low-effort cash-ins and been chided for disliking it because it appeared to lack quality. It is very difficult to differentiate between the Pollocks/Warhols and said low-effort cash-ins, and articulating what separates them from the rest is something I struggle with. All I can really say to that effect is that the je ne sais quoi has something to do with the feeling of zen that only comes from a mature and developed sense of composition -- in that Pollock chose his "sloppy" aesthetic when he could have chosen to follow the precient style -- that many amateurs and pretenders simply lack.
- fnord123 7y ago
  >Is it the artists responsibility to make art for his audience? Or is it the audience's responsibility to try and understand the artist and his motivations? I don't have a better metaphor, but the artist is a sheepdog. The audience are sheep. The artist's ideas are the pen. Even if going to the pen is great, the artist still needs to connect with the audience to get them there. He can't just stand next to the pen and think wow, I'm so clever. Which sheep and how many does the sheepdog want? The art literati? To have prints of their work in every home? Investors who will give them a storied name and convince people that the work has a je ne se quoi?
- egypturnash 7y ago
  As an artist, this is a thing I grapple with constantly. I've been lucky enough to find a path where I can make art that is mostly designed around what pleases myself, and accrete a modest audience that wants enough of the same things and can't find it many other places. I'm almost paying my bills on it nowadays. Gallery art is its own thing, greatly divorced from "getting good at drawing" and "making art that speaks to a lot of people". Making art that you have to be a rarified aesthete to understand what simply doesn't appeal to all those peons is a route to making work that stupidly rich assholes can be persuaded makes them look like Important People Of Taste to own, especially when everyone knows that your last piece went for a very large number; it's investment games, status games, and probably no small amount of money-laundering.
dleslie 7y ago
The artist's first problem is their concern for reviewers; the only critique that matters is that of the purchaser. These days video game criticism is all about driving page views; and negativity draws eyes better than the alternative.
- eloisant 7y ago
  Except purchasers read reviews, and look at the metacritic score...
  - mantap 7y ago
    The vast majorly of games I buy are from word of mouth or from seeing it on YouTube or Twitch. I think game reviews are somewhat of an anachronism when you can just watch the game to see if you'd like it.
cmroanirgo 7y ago
> Paradoxically, good artists also embrace limitations. Limitations force ingenuity and innovation, as well as push a form forward. This statement is not limited to pixel graphics. In the mid 90's writing a 3D game the artist would come to me with a tank using 300 or so vertices. I did the math. "No" I responded "it needs to be as few as possible, maybe 100, but preferably less". And then I'd show them their art in the game and they'd understand, gnash their teeth and optimise. We had interesting conversations when using Level Of Detail (LOD) and I'd limit him to 6, a cube. (Because it was maybe 2 pixels in size after rasterisation). I think he ended up giving me one using 5 vertices: after the texture was applied it looked good. Everytime, challenge accepted and passed. Graphics guys can be awesome (& and awesomely challenging)
tus88 7y ago
What a mind numbing read. Did anyone get to to the "why"?
jchw 7y ago
I think I agree with a lot of this but I don’t think pixel art is going to die. Arbitrarily low fidelity artwork is a thing that started out as a niche thing mostly popular in indie game titles and gradually spread to a wider audience. I don’t think this was an accident. The problem with embracing limitations on modern machines is that there increasingly aren’t many to embrace. Sure, modern AAA games will gladly grow to use all available resources, but if you are being relatively efficient you really have to work to monopolize a modern computer. I think there is beauty in embracing limitations and there is increasingly not very many of them on modern computers... but I still love chiptunes and pixel art, and I think there’s a sizable population of people who do, even if they maybe do not understand why they do. I suspect that the number of people who appreciate these arts are growing rather than shrinking and what we’re really seeing is growing pains of the aesthetic going very mainstream.
danwills 7y ago
> A few years back, the Hebrew University and Microsoft set out to “depixelize” pixel art through a new anti-aliasing (pixel-smoothing) algorithm. I'm a big fan of the pixel art look and I thought this was an interesting story, but this quote revealed fundamental misunderstanding about anti-aliasing. AA is not just smoothing. Sometimes high quality AA will actually yield a sharper result. Even the example image near the quote shows the result of the algorithms is clearly sharper (contains higher frequency features) than the original. Magnified-pixel edges really should not be considered a form of sharpness.
naddynarwhal 7y ago
I took a look at the Kickstarter page for Auro, and I’m gonna have to agree with the reviewers here. His art isn’t “pixel art;” it’s just low res art without aliasing. The characters’ resolution don’t even seem to match the background’s resolution. He may be able to tell good animation from bad animation, but I can’t say he’s a very good artist.
olodus 7y ago
That IGN review of KoF mentioned in the article is heartbreaking. That animation is super good. It is good enough that I was quite sure they must have had a 3D model to work with. That might be what the reviewer thought too and kinda what the whole article argues, kinda. 2D Pixel artists maybe got too good. Good enough to not be compared against other art of the same kind but 3D anti-aliased HD content.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  even then you need some good 2D artist to control and tune the 3D pipeline, the factorio blog is littered with extremely interesting details about their art pipeline and rendering engine and how everything ties together to produce the scene layers, from how zoom interacts with mipmaps, the performance issue with overlapping smoke textures having each their alpha, animation temporal aliasing, tone mapping lights an baked textures etc.
b0rsuk 7y ago
I was a bit surprised when I found out a couple of my (board)gaming friends actually like pixel art. I'm talking guys at least 10 years younger than me. I guess they simply don't remember the times of VGA graphics and they don't associate it with low tech or obsolete. The most anti-pixel people I know are all those who remember the rapidly changing graphics of the Moore's Law era.
wruza 7y ago
>”quite good” (IGN) I have no words that could describe my disgust for this characterization and stay in hn guidelines. If they dare to call that art “quite good”, they deserve no art ever.
boublepop 7y ago
Great piece, but it comes off as a misdirected attempt at a defense when you look at the actual images from their game. The characters look amazing in isolation, but thrown into that horribly flat homogeneous board with the ugly interface components in clashing colors with harsh edges and it all just looks completely off. And if they truly were not aiming at retro what’s up with the horrible 80ies gradient font that clashes as well? And yes I’d describe it as pixelated, because it doesn’t look like this is intentional on the interface, it looks like a bad compression of a thrown in overlay by someone who recently started playing around with photoshop. With so much effort spent individually on the characters it’s confusing why the end product looks that bad. My first instinct is that it feels like a case of having an amazing artist on the characters and a new inexperienced artist in the interface and board, with no intercommunication and an inexperienced manager overseeing both just going “the interface with nothing in it looks ok” “The characters on a blank background look ok” “let’s ship”. It’s not enough that individual parts look good when you focus on them. You need the sum-product to look great and that means the visual styles and elements need to fit together. That just does not seem to be the case for Auro. With the great focus on character art and animation by the author In the article it makes you wonder if the interface was just an afterthought to them.

122 points by kick 7y ago

dang 7y ago

A thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12505615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12505615 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678

egypturnash 7y ago

2018: Dinofarm's third game is in early access on Steam. [screenshot of very pixelly art] http://www.dinofarmgames.com/jelly-bomber-in-early-access-on-steam/ http://www.dinofarmgames.com/jelly-bomber-in-early-access-on... 2019: Here's a concept painting for our next game. [image of some simple flat-color work] (http://www.dinofarmgames.com/alakaram-first-details/ http://www.dinofarmgames.com/alakaram-first-details/) There is a resolution threshold where fiddling with every pixel on the screen by hand becomes a terrible, counter-productive idea and that title screen for Auro at the top of the "renouncing pixel art" blog post is pretty close to that threshold.

jere 7y ago

I was on a podcast with Keith Burgun from Dinofarm recently. We talked about Auro among many other things. I only mention it because nobody ever talks about that game but it's one of my favorites: https://keithburgun.net/prospects-for-indie-devs-with-jeremiah-reid/ https://keithburgun.net/prospects-for-indie-devs-with-jeremi...

umvi 7y ago

Sigh, the unwashed masses ruin everything I suppose (by voting with their wallets). One of my favorite games of all time is Fire Emblem for GBA. It had custom, unique class animations that would play anytime a character got a critical[1]. They were just rare enough that I would get a hit of dopamine as soon as I saw the normal attack animation deviate to the critical animation. With these fond childhood memories I gifted my son Fire Emblem for 3DS which was highly rated. The critical animations were all procedural garbage (all classes just have a flash of light + anime face close up + particles + sound byte)! But it has 3d graphics, so I guess that's something. It's just like the Street Fighter example given in the article. My kids probably can't tell the difference, but for me it was like night and day. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn3IxjImGW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn3IxjImGW0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls0Nn_-hv-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls0Nn_-hv-8

hrhei929 7y ago
Seems to me that’s precisely what’s called for in the financial trade world. The concepts are well known and software packages make the process learnable by anyone. It’s discovered. It doesn’t tickle feudal traders fancy but the idea and technology haven’t vanished. I guess I don’t see the problem. The idea was discovered and refined and society at large it seems doesn’t want to satisfy your emotional preference, but it has provided cheap/easy ways for you to do so to your heart’s content though. “Kids these days aren’t nostalgic for the childhood experiences kids had last generation.” is just ... yep that’s how it has always worked.
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
https://gfycat.com/leanuncomfortableleafhopper https://gfycat.com/leanuncomfortableleafhopper Check out dorcas emblem. The new FE is pretty good on its flair too. The animations are dynamic with circumstance had how much damage you have which is nifty
Multicomp 7y ago
Hey there! Just because you're the first Fire Emblem GBA player I've met on HN, may I ask which Fire Emblem game this was? Fire Emblem: The Blinding Blade FE6 Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword FE7 Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones FE8
- umvi 7y ago
  It was just called "Fire Emblem" in North America, but I believe it was FE6 Edit: it was FE7
  - eropple 7y ago
    The American GBA games were FE7 and FE8. FE6 has only been localized by fans.

droopyEyelids 7y ago

Im not an expert, but I don't understand why dinofarm went for such high-res pixels that their pixel art ended up looking like shoddy non-pixel art. Seems like a misapplication of the technique, to me. In the article he explains how classic pixel art conjures an illusion by _implying_ shapes and textures... Does Auro even attempt that sort of magic? It seems like Auro's implications are explicitly drawn.

ChrisClark 7y ago
Yeah, that Auro art is way too high res for 'pixel art'. It just looks like someone scaled down, or pixelated, some smooth art. On a phone screen it probably just looks like it should be smooth art but it's running at the wrong resolution. Implying something is wrong with the game.
knubie 7y ago
It's not just the high resolution, but the hand-rendered anti-aliasing that gives it that pixelated look. Pixel art is most satisfying IMO when the lines are sharp and/or the dithering is clear.
p1necone 7y ago
Agreed - it really looks like hand drawn art that's been turned into "pixel art" in some kind of paint by numbers fashion. Just using the original hand drawn concept art probably would have looked better, but that doesn't mean that pixel art in general is a bad idea. Look at Stardew Valley for an example of a very popular game that's all pixel art. I don't see any reviews of that saying that it looks "pixelated" or "not getting" the art style. And it's not like Stardew even has amazing pixel art, it's just decent enough.
- js8 7y ago
  I would certainly play another Simon the Sorcerer. Thimbleweed Park was nice, but its pixel art is less visually "rich".

deft 7y ago

The problem with this pixel art is its targetting 1080p for some bizzarre reason and just ends up looking like non anti-aliased graphics. Pixel art should look like this. https://twitter.com/zaebucca/status/1057312889160286215/photo/1 https://twitter.com/zaebucca/status/1057312889160286215/phot... Even scaled up 4x this looks gorgeous.

kick 7y ago
I don't agree with that! Early personal computers also had pixel art, and it was mind-blowing what was done with it. Watch this talk from Mark Ferrari, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/ http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/ Check out what he did with color cycling in this demo: it's amazing. I recommend looking at "May - Jungle Waterfall - Rain" to see how amazing this is. That's not a gif, it's a single image, just rotating the colors. That was to deal with storage constraints. Can you imagine? The techniques of early PC and applications are worth saving, too. The art shown in that tweet is amazing, too, but it's not the same thing! It's an entirely different thing, with entirely different constraints.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Those are all 640x480 though. In general a lot of the early computer style starts to blur the line from true "pixel art" into "low bit depth graphics".
ekianjo 7y ago
If you were making pixel art at like 4k definition this would look much better than what "pixel art" means today where the granularity is not at the pixel level but every block is at least 5 pixels wide to look "pixely" enough at large resolutions. The devs who do that are completely clueless.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  How so? I think that the ratio of "pixels" to the displays pixels needs to change given the resolution of the final display device. What shouldn't be happening is the viewport scaling -- instead the viewport should change its size to match the display device and upscale/downscale (without smoothing) along an integer multiple to achieve the desired effect

weinzierl 7y ago

> Evidently, even some retro game enthusiasts want to get rid of pixels so badly that they would rather have a computer smear the art like runny makeup than appreciate the pixel art for what it is. A few years back, the Hebrew University and Microsoft set out to “depixelize” pixel art through a new anti-aliasing(pixel-smoothing) algorithm. I don't care what you have to do, just GET RID OF THOSE SQUARES! > The hand-placement of the squares is precisely what makes this kind of art valuable. If anyone besides artists should appreciate that, it’s retro game enthusiasts. When even they are splintering on this issue, I think it’s time to face the chiptunes. What the younger generations that didn't experience the heyday of ultra low-res CRT displays don't understand is that graphics wasn't perceived as blocky so much. The displays were usually so mushy that everything looked kind of smooth. It was more like an pointillistic painting observed from a far distance than what is known as pixel art today. Of course the LCD of the game-boy is a different story - and probably one source where this misconception comes from - but arcade and home computer era was not very pixely.

zozbot234 7y ago
This. A pixel is a point sample, not a tiny square - even in pixel art. That's why "upscaling" pixel art even to seemingly ludicrous extents is in fact quite appropriate. If you interpolate with a Gaussian kernel, it will yield something very much like what CRT's display, but in a purely digital interpolation you can do a lot better than that. A Lanczos-based resampling gives you a 'watercolor'-like effect that optimally accounts for every single pixel in the original image, while keeping the upsampled image smooth with no "pixelation" whatsoever. (Pixel-art specific algorithms are appropriate to images or sprites with a small color palette, where it is desirable to keep this constraint and generate sharp boundaries between differently-colored areas. Even then, the point is basically to keep things smooth while optimally accounting for what's in the original image.)
- p1necone 7y ago
  Scaling filters like 2xSal look godawful to me (and seem to hide detail), but a bit of blur and scanlines looks great. Makes sense that the type of distortion that the art was made for would be the best for scaling it to me.

friendlybus 7y ago

Auro is closer to black and white than Peggle. I don't know why the artist chose a washed out colour palette. A victory screen is supposed to be saturated happiness. The creatures are weird and in the not good way, what the hell is the pink slug noodle creature? I don't get the story world or why crawling endless grey tiles in the dark is fun. The guy has all that classical goodness in his skill but what they chose to make with it is very questionable. I'd suggest Auro was more about a transition for the artist than it was about making a salable game.

npinsker 7y ago
This is a little harsh, but I totally agree -- IMO this is far from good pixel art. One of the main benefits of pixel art (as I see it; I'm not an expert) is that proper use of outlines can call your attention to important elements in the scene. There's none of this in Auro, partially because the resolution is so high, but even UI elements like text and buttons lack weight and outline. The splash image at the top has no focal point and lacks contrast, as do the character designs (especially the blob and gray thing at the bottom). Overall it comes across as very dreary, not at all relaxing or fun to look at. Contrast this with the Pokemon environment from elsewhere in this thread (https://twitter.com/zaebucca/status/1057312889160286215 https://twitter.com/zaebucca/status/1057312889160286215) which is gorgeous and fun. It perfectly draws your attention to the key elements of the scene.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  Yeah outlines are one of many techniques that can make good art. The problem is in the overarching form, any technique or art style would have been sunk by the decisions the artist made. The good news is the guy has the skill which can succeed on it's own, given it's channeling a positive story. Drawing that well and constructing scenes that well is a fine art that takes a lot of time and effort. The high fantasy tree-man fighting with a staff on the ground was not the king in 2015, it was the outlaw. Had he committed to an outlaw version of Gandalf or Link from Zelda, he would have had a story that fit the times and likely how he felt as an artist. This depressed faded king surrounded by water and off-beat monsters is an unsolvable conflict that benefits no-one.

DonHopkins 7y ago

With all the microscopic retinal pixels to spare that we have now, it would be interesting to explore non-rectangular pixel art, like triangles and hexagons.

kick 7y ago
Right? There's a lot of territory to cover here. Really exciting!
egypturnash 7y ago
https://marmoset.co/hexels/ https://marmoset.co/hexels/
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Amazing tool! Thanks for pointing that out. Nice how it combines pixels and geometric shapes together in one tool, and supports mixing and combining all kinds of grids and pixels, even random Voronoi cells! It's on sale for only 8 EUR on Steam so I'll give it a try, since it looks so fun. The right-click pie menus was worth the price of admission! At the opposite end of the abstraction spectrum from "Pixel Art" is Bert Monroy's amazing hyper-resolution photo-realistic art. He combines Illustrator together with Photoshop, ping-ponging back and forth between both tools. He's taught many classes and produced lots of videos showing how he works and teaching the tools he uses. Times Square – On display at the Make Software Change the World Exhibit at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA: This is the largest image I have ever created, pushing the boundaries of the software and hardware as far as they can go. It was unveiled at the Photo Plus Expo in New York on October 28, 2010 as a work in progress. A 25 foot light box was constructed to display the piece that has been printed on a new material being introduced by Epson. • The image size is 60 inches by 300 inches. • The flattened file weighs in at 6.52 Gigabytes. • It took four years to create. • The painting is comprised of almost fifteen thousand individual Photoshop and Illustrator files. • Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains over 700,000 layers. http://www.bertmonroy.com/timessquare/timessquare.html http://www.bertmonroy.com/timessquare/timessquare.html Bert Monroy, Photoshop Artist Photoshop Hall of Famer Bert Monroy talks about creating his largest piece to date “Times Square.” At 6.52 gigapixels, “Times Square” contains over 750,000 layers and depicts dozens of digital imaging artists and pioneers, as well as Monroy’s family and friends. This clip is from a full-length interview, conducted for CHM's upcoming exhibition, “Make Software: Change the World!,” opening January 28, 2017. Don’t miss your chance to see “Times Square” on display in “Make Software.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JVgBWCPlFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JVgBWCPlFQ Amsterdam Mist (2014): My Amsterdam Mist is the culmination of twenty-two months of work. Every element in the image was meticulously created pixel-by-pixel using Adobe® Photoshop® and Adobe® Illustrator®. It is the first piece to be inspired by the shot rather than the scene itself. http://www.bertmonroy.com/amsterdammist/amsterdammist.html http://www.bertmonroy.com/amsterdammist/amsterdammist.html

ljm 7y ago

It's maybe besides the point but I think there's always been a time and a place for this, in the indie scene. For example, Kitty Horrorshow[1] and Puppet Combo[2] are are responsible for a lot of art-house (typically horror) games that emulate the PS1 era of 3D graphics. It's an art-form now. My favourite 2D, pixel-based one is The Last Door. It's basic as all hell. And still you have more games taking retro to the next level, like Faith[3]. I think we're in an amazing place where new technology can give us old experiences. [1] https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io [2] https://puppetcombo.com https://puppetcombo.com [3] https://airdorf.itch.io/faith https://airdorf.itch.io/faith

Riverheart 7y ago
Check out "Deep Sleep" and "Don't Escape" if you like pixel horror.

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

previously... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9533678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12505615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12505615

quasimodem 7y ago
Yeesh, yes why does this article get so much traction when it's reposted so frequently? We get it. It ain't art unless it divides people.

rs23296008n1 7y ago

I'm thinking the gist of it is that pixel-art is a art style like abstract art, Pointillism, impressionism, cubism, and all the other schools portraying realism but in a very particular and deliberate way. Basically theres a set of techniques, theres a discipline, theres a way of doing it "primitive" or low style like the Rambo example and a way of doing it in high style, like the Mighty Final Fight example. Its not retro as such, its about using a limited color range of square tiles to convey a image with some kind of meaning. Pixel-art adds animation as well which is interesting. The comments about the critics "not getting it" are as old as the "art critic" profession itself. Different critics are at different levels of understanding, including none-at-all. I wonder if that auro game would have the same affect if it had high resolution graphics instead? Probably not. Different aesthetic, different audience. Dwarf fortress versus Starcraft.

0kl 7y ago

> Problems arise when it comes time to convey to a non-artist what constitutes quality art. The first mistake is selling art to non-artists. The general population buys games for entertainment, and similar to any art (music, movies, paintings) for entertainment, it is rarely the most artistic that is selected. > The shoddy SFIV received a higher art score than one of the best looking games to date, and I believe it’s all due to a pixel tax. The second mistake is believing IGN, or the general consumer, is evaluating the art when they explicitly state “graphics”. There’s a place for pixel art - even for ascii art (<3 df), but you have to be ready to not be loved by people that aren’t interested in “art,” but entertainment.

lstodd 7y ago
I must disagree with your assertion that only artists can recognise and appreciate art. This is artistism. Please be ashamed of partaking in this vile trend.
- 0kl 7y ago
  I definitely not trying to say that. I’m trying to say that when someone like me (general public) is looking at art _for entertainment_ my wants are different than when I’m looking at something as art. If I’m enjoying something as art, that puts me into a different category, but when purchasing a game for fun, or music as background noise, or a decorative painting I am in a totally different mindset than when I am engaging with those same things with a mind towards their artistic qualities. The intentionality of the viewer matters, and the author, IMO, fails to recognize that a lot of people, myself included, often come to games with the intentionality of playing a game, not necessarily judging its artistic qualities. We sometimes do, but I think it would be bad faith to argue that we all are always appreciating every “artistic quality” of a work all the time - I know I’ve enjoyed a bad game, movie, show, or song more than once.

lstodd 7y ago

Just try OpenXcom plus {Piratez, Area51, XcomFiles, 40K} mods. What can be done with the original UFO:EU/XCOM:UD palette is just unbelievable. And that's just 14 colors in 16 shades, and very much fixed at that.

tomc1985 7y ago

"Technology’s primary function is to make human life as easy and efficient as possible." This is an aside, but that is not technology's role. Tech is supposed to empower us, and act as mind-amplification devices, to make us smarter, faster, and better. The above statement underscores everything that is wrong with tech and how we (edit- as consumers) are on track to completely squander its potential.

taneq 7y ago
Tech is built by millions of different people, all of whom have different goals for it. It’s not ‘meant’ to do any one thing.

tomc1985 7y ago

In addition to my previous comment, I think this post touches on a conundrum that I've debated with some of my other artist friends: Is it the artists responsibility to make art for his audience? Or is it the audience's responsibility to try and understand the artist and his motivations? I think these questions explain a lot about the art world that regular folks simply don't understand, like the kind of abstract, "modern" art that is often derided for appearing low-effort. Indeed I have been to galleries and exhibitions filled with what appears to be genuinely low-effort cash-ins and been chided for disliking it because it appeared to lack quality. It is very difficult to differentiate between the Pollocks/Warhols and said low-effort cash-ins, and articulating what separates them from the rest is something I struggle with. All I can really say to that effect is that the je ne sais quoi has something to do with the feeling of zen that only comes from a mature and developed sense of composition -- in that Pollock chose his "sloppy" aesthetic when he could have chosen to follow the precient style -- that many amateurs and pretenders simply lack.

fnord123 7y ago
>Is it the artists responsibility to make art for his audience? Or is it the audience's responsibility to try and understand the artist and his motivations? I don't have a better metaphor, but the artist is a sheepdog. The audience are sheep. The artist's ideas are the pen. Even if going to the pen is great, the artist still needs to connect with the audience to get them there. He can't just stand next to the pen and think wow, I'm so clever. Which sheep and how many does the sheepdog want? The art literati? To have prints of their work in every home? Investors who will give them a storied name and convince people that the work has a je ne se quoi?
egypturnash 7y ago
As an artist, this is a thing I grapple with constantly. I've been lucky enough to find a path where I can make art that is mostly designed around what pleases myself, and accrete a modest audience that wants enough of the same things and can't find it many other places. I'm almost paying my bills on it nowadays. Gallery art is its own thing, greatly divorced from "getting good at drawing" and "making art that speaks to a lot of people". Making art that you have to be a rarified aesthete to understand what simply doesn't appeal to all those peons is a route to making work that stupidly rich assholes can be persuaded makes them look like Important People Of Taste to own, especially when everyone knows that your last piece went for a very large number; it's investment games, status games, and probably no small amount of money-laundering.

dleslie 7y ago

The artist's first problem is their concern for reviewers; the only critique that matters is that of the purchaser. These days video game criticism is all about driving page views; and negativity draws eyes better than the alternative.

eloisant 7y ago
Except purchasers read reviews, and look at the metacritic score...
- mantap 7y ago
  The vast majorly of games I buy are from word of mouth or from seeing it on YouTube or Twitch. I think game reviews are somewhat of an anachronism when you can just watch the game to see if you'd like it.

cmroanirgo 7y ago

> Paradoxically, good artists also embrace limitations. Limitations force ingenuity and innovation, as well as push a form forward. This statement is not limited to pixel graphics. In the mid 90's writing a 3D game the artist would come to me with a tank using 300 or so vertices. I did the math. "No" I responded "it needs to be as few as possible, maybe 100, but preferably less". And then I'd show them their art in the game and they'd understand, gnash their teeth and optimise. We had interesting conversations when using Level Of Detail (LOD) and I'd limit him to 6, a cube. (Because it was maybe 2 pixels in size after rasterisation). I think he ended up giving me one using 5 vertices: after the texture was applied it looked good. Everytime, challenge accepted and passed. Graphics guys can be awesome (& and awesomely challenging)

tus88 7y ago

What a mind numbing read. Did anyone get to to the "why"?

jchw 7y ago

I think I agree with a lot of this but I don’t think pixel art is going to die. Arbitrarily low fidelity artwork is a thing that started out as a niche thing mostly popular in indie game titles and gradually spread to a wider audience. I don’t think this was an accident. The problem with embracing limitations on modern machines is that there increasingly aren’t many to embrace. Sure, modern AAA games will gladly grow to use all available resources, but if you are being relatively efficient you really have to work to monopolize a modern computer. I think there is beauty in embracing limitations and there is increasingly not very many of them on modern computers... but I still love chiptunes and pixel art, and I think there’s a sizable population of people who do, even if they maybe do not understand why they do. I suspect that the number of people who appreciate these arts are growing rather than shrinking and what we’re really seeing is growing pains of the aesthetic going very mainstream.

danwills 7y ago

> A few years back, the Hebrew University and Microsoft set out to “depixelize” pixel art through a new anti-aliasing (pixel-smoothing) algorithm. I'm a big fan of the pixel art look and I thought this was an interesting story, but this quote revealed fundamental misunderstanding about anti-aliasing. AA is not just smoothing. Sometimes high quality AA will actually yield a sharper result. Even the example image near the quote shows the result of the algorithms is clearly sharper (contains higher frequency features) than the original. Magnified-pixel edges really should not be considered a form of sharpness.

naddynarwhal 7y ago

I took a look at the Kickstarter page for Auro, and I’m gonna have to agree with the reviewers here. His art isn’t “pixel art;” it’s just low res art without aliasing. The characters’ resolution don’t even seem to match the background’s resolution. He may be able to tell good animation from bad animation, but I can’t say he’s a very good artist.

olodus 7y ago

That IGN review of KoF mentioned in the article is heartbreaking. That animation is super good. It is good enough that I was quite sure they must have had a 3D model to work with. That might be what the reviewer thought too and kinda what the whole article argues, kinda. 2D Pixel artists maybe got too good. Good enough to not be compared against other art of the same kind but 3D anti-aliased HD content.

LoSboccacc 7y ago
even then you need some good 2D artist to control and tune the 3D pipeline, the factorio blog is littered with extremely interesting details about their art pipeline and rendering engine and how everything ties together to produce the scene layers, from how zoom interacts with mipmaps, the performance issue with overlapping smoke textures having each their alpha, animation temporal aliasing, tone mapping lights an baked textures etc.

b0rsuk 7y ago

I was a bit surprised when I found out a couple of my (board)gaming friends actually like pixel art. I'm talking guys at least 10 years younger than me. I guess they simply don't remember the times of VGA graphics and they don't associate it with low tech or obsolete. The most anti-pixel people I know are all those who remember the rapidly changing graphics of the Moore's Law era.

wruza 7y ago

>”quite good” (IGN) I have no words that could describe my disgust for this characterization and stay in hn guidelines. If they dare to call that art “quite good”, they deserve no art ever.

boublepop 7y ago

Great piece, but it comes off as a misdirected attempt at a defense when you look at the actual images from their game. The characters look amazing in isolation, but thrown into that horribly flat homogeneous board with the ugly interface components in clashing colors with harsh edges and it all just looks completely off. And if they truly were not aiming at retro what’s up with the horrible 80ies gradient font that clashes as well? And yes I’d describe it as pixelated, because it doesn’t look like this is intentional on the interface, it looks like a bad compression of a thrown in overlay by someone who recently started playing around with photoshop. With so much effort spent individually on the characters it’s confusing why the end product looks that bad. My first instinct is that it feels like a case of having an amazing artist on the characters and a new inexperienced artist in the interface and board, with no intercommunication and an inexperienced manager overseeing both just going “the interface with nothing in it looks ok” “The characters on a blank background look ok” “let’s ship”. It’s not enough that individual parts look good when you focus on them. You need the sum-product to look great and that means the visual styles and elements need to fit together. That just does not seem to be the case for Auro. With the great focus on character art and animation by the author In the article it makes you wonder if the interface was just an afterthought to them.