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Bad pixel art is a pet peeve of mine. This is really advanced advice compared the problem most games have: - pixels of different sizes - rotating (!) pixels

• ido 4y ago
  A lot of these are stylistic choices (or could be at least) rather than mistakes.
  • d_tr 4y ago
    And / or saving time and money because the artists need to draw less pixels by hand.
• Beltalowda 4y ago
  Why are any of these things "bad"? Back in the day pixel art was constrained by technical limitations, but now you can use the same style but with less technical constraints, and include these sort of things. It's not "true" pixel art from 1990, but that doesn't make it "bad".
  • ceph_ 4y ago
    For the same reason people like the hiss and pops of a record, film grain, or even VHS tracking artifacts. Yesterday's technical limitations become today's aesthetic. But the real answer is they aren't inherently bad. People don't actually need it to conform to the past limitations. More that they want it to feel authentic to the nostalgic memory they have in their head. For example, games like Shovel Knight go for an 8bit style, but they're not limited to an 8 bit color space, NES sprite limitations, etc.
    • Beltalowda 4y ago
      I get all that; I really enjoy the sound of some "imperfections" of old blues and jazz records, but I also don't consider any modern records which doesn't replicate those "imperfections" to be bad.
    • Narishma 4y ago
      It's been a while since I played Shovel Knight, but I don't remember it having any of the issues OP talks about.
      • ceph_ 4y ago
        It doesn't. I was using it as an example of it being done right, without actually following the limitations of the NES. But you can see from the article linked by one of the other replies the dev team put in a lot of effort to make it as close to authentic as possible.
    • frosted-flakes 4y ago
      I'm not sure about Shovel Knight because I've never played it, but Mina the Hollower (also by Yacht Club) actually does conform to the those limitations. It's based on the art style of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and does so quite accurately. https://www.yachtclubgames.com/games/mina-the-hollower https://www.yachtclubgames.com/games/mina-the-hollower
      • monkpit 4y ago
        Check out La Mulana.. the original version of the game conforms to the limitations of the MSX, but remakes do not. There’s plenty of room to do things either way! A post from the author about the remade art: https://la-mulana.com/en/blog/graphic_full_remake.html https://la-mulana.com/en/blog/graphic_full_remake.html Compared to the art from the screenshots on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La-Mulana https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La-Mulana
    • a_e_k 4y ago
      Shovel Knight used the 54-color NES palette, with 4 additional "cheater" colors: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/breaking-the-nes-for-shovel-knight https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/breaking-the-nes-for-sh...
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • barrysteve 4y ago
    The techniques he mentioned don't serve the higher principle. Adding lights from a lighting engine over the top of sprites with baked shading, might make a pretty image but it is not pushing pixel art forwards. Scaling and rotating can produce poor quality sprites. P.s. Ashford is the best.
    • greymalik 4y ago
      Who’s Ashford?
      • brazzy 4y ago
        Reference to the username "Beltalowda", a character in "The Expanse" book and TV series.
  • stelonix 4y ago
    Some people on twitter take offense when opinions such as parent's are said, but I believe he has a point. I'm talking specifically about the amount of colors and also the use of tiles instead of a discrete art. There's something to limited color space that those people do not seem to understand, be it the ones saying such critique, or the ones getting mad at it. We see color quantization in any realistic painting after the renaissance. Limiting the color space actually makes the pixel art look more realistic, because then every shade or shadow fits the overall drawings. Once you go Stardew Valley, sure it's pixel art, but just like a Picasso is great, it's not a Caravaggio, it's not "realistic" when it comes to how lighting reflects off surfaces. Then there's the use of tiles/repeating background parts or having a full canvas where every pixel is unique. Although it's nice to look at, there's just too much information for the brain to process. That kind of art is nice, but in a game it's distracting. I personally call that kind of art pixel paintings and separate it from classic pixel art with tiles and limited colors. It might be all just rose tinted glasses of nostalgia, but I firmly believe there's some science to what I just described. Look at any Caravaggio painting but especially portraits to see how limited the color space really is, how sometimes he uses shades of a color to give the impression of a very distant (color-space-wise) second color. It's really about that.
  • skybrian 4y ago
    The article explicitly says it’s okay to disagree. Agreement or disagreement on art style isn’t really the point. If you see pixel art differently and can decide for yourself which effects you want to use then you’ve learned something.
• codeflo 4y ago
  I think the points you mention are easily noticed by people who lived in that era as anachronisms. At least that's true for me. And yet, Minecraft does all of those things and more, and I liked its style. I think it really depends on how well it's done.
• fleabitdev 4y ago
  I share your preferences, but it's a rock and a hard place. Performing any of the tasks you listed by hand is extremely labour-intensive. Doing without those features is a harsh creative limitation - in my experience, the result isn't "this game feels retro", but instead "this game feels oddly flat, repetitive and static", which is much less forgivable. I've worked on a game which aimed for authentically retro pixel art, but in hindsight I think it was a silly misallocation of resources. There's a reason it's so uncommon nowadays. If I were to try again, I'd at least include high-resolution 2D transforms in the engine, and possibly dynamic lighting too. I briefly explored the possibility of developing a style-preserving realtime rotation algorithm for sprites, but it's a hard problem.
  • moth-fuzz 4y ago
    how exactly is it a hard problem? You don’t have to rotate the sprite by sining and cosining pixels by hand, you can just render to the same resolution as your sprites and it’ll look fine. The problem is that most indie games render at 2x or 3x or more natively.
    • fleabitdev 4y ago
      Nearest-neighbour, low-resolution rotation produces unpleasant results when the sprite contains fine details with a thickness of one or two pixels, e.g. outlines: https://imgur.com/a/UiAZ49z https://imgur.com/a/UiAZ49z Artistic preferences are subjective, but I expect most players would find that rotated sprite unappealing. This is especially true when the rotation is animated - the aliasing causes a distracting, staticky, random-noise effect which gives the impression that the sprite's fine details are chaotically changing. It's almost the aesthetic opposite of what most pixel artists are aiming for.
      • flobosg 4y ago
        > Nearest-neighbour, low-resolution rotation produces unpleasant results… That’s the reason why some games use versions of the rotated sprites that have been tweaked by hand. See also tools like RotSprite (http://info.sonicretro.org/RotSprite http://info.sonicretro.org/RotSprite).
• bluescrn 4y ago
  I'd agree with most of those, but I'll disagree on dynamic lighting. It's quite possible to do that tastefully without sacrificing the integrity of the underlying pixels. 'Enter the Gungeon' is one example of that. The lighting adds atmosphere, doesn't harm the pixel art, and it's not distractingly over-the-top.
• MattRix 4y ago
  There are two main categories of pixel art in games. In one category it’s about retro authenticity and these games are defined by the fact that their final buffer is the same low resolution as their art. They also often feature limited palettes, especially ones that were actually used on retro consoles. There’s also a second category of pixel art, where the style is more modern. The art is still low res, but the final screen buffer is high res. This is where you’re more likely to see stuff like smooth rotating sprites and lighting effects. You may have a preference for one style or the other, but neither style is bad or “wrong”. Most people who use the modern style are doing it on purpose. There are fantastic looking games in both categories.
  • fleabitdev 4y ago
    Can you recommend any games in the first category? I surveyed the indie-game landscape a couple of years back, specifically looking for games in your first category, but struggled to find any recent examples. 2D transforms, alpha-blending and lighting effects seem to be the standard now.
    • derjames 4y ago
      Empire Strikes Back remake for c64 https://megastyle.itch.io/esb-by-megastyle https://megastyle.itch.io/esb-by-megastyle
    • lozenge 4y ago
      Cave Story, Shovel Knight?
    • MattRix 4y ago
      There are a bunch of retro inspired games (ex Shovel Knight) that do the retro inspired thing. More interesting is a game like Celeste, where it has a 3D level select but during the actual gameplay, the characters move in integers and the screen buffer is still fixed at a low resolution.
      • Jasper_ 4y ago
• TeaDude 4y ago
  Scaling and rotating sprites definitely used to be overused but I don't think they're that bad considering they were featured in many classic consoles (GBA, DS, Sega Saturn, PS1 etc.) and too many arcade boards to count I dislike lighting though (unless it's implemented tastefully) and I think normal maps look absolutely disgusting in any situation. E: Also, overuse of shaders is discouraged. Especially non-pixel effects like blurring.
• HellDunkel 4y ago
  These are artistic choices, not proof of bad art. Take a look at „Hell is other Demons“ eg - it breaks a few of those rules and does a phenomenal job at pixel art.
• mathstuf 4y ago
  Where do you rate the latest Square Enix art style as shown in Octopath Traveler? I think ut uses quite a few of these and it looks great to me at least.