14 ms·

A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

440 points by dsil 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 11y ago
Beatiful article, slightly off into animation territorry but still. Taking distance from current technology and future is good. The Chun-Li dissected animation reminded me of Disney classes on how to convey emotions rather than simulate movements. And for Jazz lovers, search about Mitsuo Iso : www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvx7p6-lABw
- dragontamer 11y ago
  I've been trying to explain to people why Fire Emblem sprites were better than modern 3D Fire Emblem animations. Old GBA Game: http://lparchive.org/Fire-Emblem-Blazing-Sword/Update%2063/18-swordmaster.gif http://lparchive.org/Fire-Emblem-Blazing-Sword/Update%2063/1... Fire Emblem Awakening: https://youtu.be/ls0Nn_-hv-8?t=3m35s https://youtu.be/ls0Nn_-hv-8?t=3m35s I showed this to multiple people, and a lot of them seem to think the 3D animation was better. :-(
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    To be honest, I found neither impressive, both are pretty standard level animations in their domains.
    - dragontamer 11y ago
      Indeed. But the Fire Emblem sprites were redrawn with details from each of the characters in the game. Amelia from FE8 for example, was the only blonde female paladin, and her long-blonde hair would blow in the wind during her critical hit animation. The animations were incredibly personalized to the characters, a true feat for a game with several dozen playable characters (and random mooks to KO). In contrast, the 3D Art of FE:Awakening is clearly built off of recycled bone animations across multiple units. Furthermore, they were mostly recycled from FE9 and FE10. The level of effort needed to create the 2D sprites is clearly much higher than the level of effort for FE:Awakening's animations.
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        Sigh, the "benefits" of industrialisation and new tech. Fortunately I hope that 2d or 3d pros and cons are known and mastered enough so people can go back to produce artful games. Similarly to movies, early 2K era movies were speaking too much of CGI, now SFX aren't attractive anymore, you got to give density. ps: about the level of effort, I think it's not fair, 3d modeling and animating was hard, but more than that it made people focus on low level details rather than 'impressionist' ones. You had to care about all angles and didn't have time nor knowledge on what made a good animation. Same goes for old animations.
        dragontamer 11y ago
        Arc System Works is doing a good job actually with their 3D style in Guilty Gear Xrd. Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. is also quite excellent 3D Artwork. As is whatever the heck this is from: http://kotaku.com/sorry-yes-animation-is-also-games-art-1699334559 http://kotaku.com/sorry-yes-animation-is-also-games-art-1699... So solid, good 3D art exists, and is around. Gears of War also deserves a mention.
        agumonkey 11y ago
        True, I didn't want to dismiss good 3d artwork.
  - kibwen 11y ago
    Some of the Fire Emblem sprites were breathtakingly fluid, and you can't deny that they often look better than the jaggy polygons of the modern DS titles (similar to how the OP contrasts Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Diablo). My favorites were always the sprites for the "hero" unit: http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/fireemblem/images/3/38/FE6_Hero_Critical.gif/revision/latest?cb=20140207032928 http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/fireemblem/images/3/38/F...
    - dragontamer 11y ago
      Good point. Heroes probably had the best attack animations. Either them, or critical hit from the paladin. My favorite animations overall though were definitely swordmaster, specifically their "dodge" animation. They only moved like 3 or 4 pixels, so it was hard to tell that they actually dodged. But once you saw it, it was in fact amazing.
Kenji 11y ago
Plebs: 1 Artists: 0 (I agree with him)
YogeeKnows 11y ago
I hate pixel art anyway. One thing I'm pretty sure I always hate is pixel art.
pshc 11y ago
Yes! Thank you. I love the old pixel aesthetic, but today's art should fit today's constraints. Those classic games will always be around, awaiting your next nostalgia rush. Screw stagnation. Likewise, I like old Victorians and Art Deco, but I wouldn't be excited about one built today. No one would respect a 2015 medieval-style castle quite like one from 1515.
- DanAndersen 11y ago
  Agreed. It's like the tacky buildings in Las Vegas that mimic other buildings, or Disney World, or those faux-European cities built for tourists in China. I sure would love to see some new cathedrals built using the methods of centuries past, though.
- Tideflat 11y ago
  However, a medieval-style castle would still be cool if it was built in 2015.
  - marshray 11y ago
    Pretty sure the pyramids were the original massively pixelated structure.
dunstad 11y ago
It was interesting to see that the game Aero uses very nice looking (high resolution?) pixel art. I'm familiar with it in old games and in newer ones that choose to adopt a retro look, but I'd never seen someone attempt what they did. I probably would have been one of the people complaining about the game's 'pixellated' art, as a result. That said, I quite enjoyed the article, and some of those modern pixel art pieces linked were very impressive. I think overall his decision to make the switch is a good one though, if I can consider myself any kind of sample of his audience.
fgsfdsfgsfds 11y ago
Sounds like they should have been developing for PC instead of mobile. The average mobile user plays exploitative "freemium" garbage to kill time in lines. How can you expect them to appreciate the art behind it? Meanwhile, "retro"-style games are doing gangbusters on Steam, selling to people that actually appreciate those styles of art, music, and game design.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  While you have a point (and I've given you a +1 vote because of it), the fact remains that the "average person" I know thinks that Street Fighter 4 animations were better than Street Fighter 3. The Chun Li discussion happens a lot in my circle of friends, and I'm always in the minority. Very few people appreciate classic pixel art.
  - fgsfdsfgsfds 11y ago
    That's fair, but if you want to make art, there's no sense in trying to appeal to everyone. The guy that disregards pixel art probably wouldn't see your traditional art for what it really is, either. You can be depressed that the "mainstream" doesn't appreciate what you do, you can crush your spirit trying to pander to them, or you can have fun in your cozy niche with a small handful of fans and peers that really get you.
  - Tyr42 11y ago
    So, if we look to the digital art like Pixar, there are a lot of guidelines from traditional animation to make a scene come alive. * Squish and Stretch * Fallow through * Secondary Action These principles really help make dynamic scenes. If you look at the Chun Li animations, you can see that the older one does a better job of using these. I feel like if the HD version took advantage of these, it would look the best out of all of them, but it failed to reach its full potential in it's medium. Watch this early Pixar short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4NPQ8mfKU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4NPQ8mfKU0 See how alive and full of emotion the little lamp is?
    - 11y ago
emsy 11y ago
Pixel art games nowadays all look more or less the same. Actual games from the 90s didn't look alike at all. Also most games use pixel art as an excuse for lazy animations with a little amount of frames. I really wonder why everyone likes it so much and I often think maybe something is wrong with my taste :/
- MollyR 11y ago
  I often wondered if indie games tend to like pixel art because its cheaper and faster to produce.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    That's a pretty obvious yes isn't it? I thought that's why a lot of indie games are pixel games, just like why a lot of indy games are side scrollers. It's so much quicker to do.
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    Except when you look at the development methodology of the best-of-the-best pixel art games (BlazBlue, King of Fighters), the teams did 3D Animations for all of the characters and then re-traced them into 2D Pixel Art. Everyone who actually _does_ high-quality pixel art understands. Good Pixel-Art is much MUCH harder to do than good 3D. It lothes me to say it, but the blogpost is correct. Very few people understand this fact except for the artists who actually do go pixel art.
    - darkmighty 11y ago
      But for me some pixel artists miss (for me) a large part of the artistic value of pixel art: restricting complexity of the scene -- not just portraying things in blocks. The blocks aren't important at all, in fact they're pretty ugly if you're not a great pixel artist (hence the natural wish to find better upscaling algorithms). It's often overlooked the CRTs those art were made for were quite blurry and round, alleviating the blocky look. That's the right reason to defend using modern screens to their full capability with a certain simplified-art style.
DanAndersen 11y ago
This article reminded me of a trend I noticed when reading the book "Masters of Doom," which discussed (among other things) the graphical improvements that made games like Wolfenstein and Doom so impressive. Very often, the book's prose would start sentences something along the lines of "though the graphics were crude, etc etc etc." These sorts of lines, constantly repeated, irked me, not because they weren't technically true or anything, but because it's such a "looking-backward" point of view. At the time, that's not how people saw it. It was all about pushing forward the state of the art, and we miss something when we look back on it in that way. I guess in a similar way I've had the same feeling about "modern" pixel art, where it often seems to miss the point. By treating it as just an art style, it turns it from an exercise in conveying a vision despite limitations, into an effort to simplify and downsample because those are the most easily-recognized surface-level hallmarks of that period. For me, the magic of that era comes from seeing techniques like color cycling ( http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0 http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0 ), where the desire to get a certain effect led to interesting workarounds, rather than being satisfied with limitations because it's "retro."
- vacri 11y ago
  When Half Life came out, it was amazing. I went back to retry it half a year ago, and it looked awful. And what was a wonderful intro sequence was now unskippable minutes of a slow ride past crude polygons and very low detail environments. It was interesting seeing how my opinions had changed.
  - dceddia 11y ago
    Funny, as I was reading the parent post my mind jumped to Half Life too. What an amazing game! Part of me wishes I could un-see all the stuff that came after it, so that I could go back and play it with my original excitement intact. Instead, it seems my mind is happy to find flaws at every turn and compare how it actually looks to how good I remember it to be. It's even worse with older games. I tried to play the original X-Wing in DOSBox a while back, and wow, I couldn't believe it. Did it really look that bad back then? Maybe my 486 DX2 and 14" CRT made it look better somehow.
yzh 11y ago
This is relevant: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/
- pyrocat 11y ago
  yes, they bring it up in the article several times.
gavanwoolery 11y ago
It is the duty of an artist to fulfill their vision, not someone else's. For this reason, many prominent artists go unknown in their lifetime. The masses are attracted to "bad" art like Thomas Kinkade (I use quotes because the art is not actually bad, just lacks the originality that art connoisseurs seek). I would actually argue that you will have to make a choice between being a popular artist and being good artist (there is some overlap though). And it may well be the case that you don't have the luxury to make this choice. For me personally, I think that good pixel art is timeless (emphasis on "good"). It gives an artist a limited canvas and forces them to be creative. You can instantly deduce an artist's skill based on how well they can convey a concept with a limited palette and resolution. An unlimited palette and high resolution actually magnifies the flaws in art, IMO (leaves less to the imagination). I find that in many modern 3D games, the suspension of disbelief is destroyed when I walk up to a character and see blurry textures and pointed polygonal edges. For an idea of what good pixel art looks like (at least according to my opinion and many others), check out Henk Nieborg's work: http://www.henknieborg.nl/gallery_pixels.html http://www.henknieborg.nl/gallery_pixels.html
- Goronmon 11y ago
  And it may well be the case that you don't have the luxury to make this choice. Which, unfortunately, is usually the case when it comes to game development.
  - pan69 11y ago
    Or any sort of development for that matter. I've never worked with a client who said; "Yeah, sure. What ever you think is best". When someone else pays the bills, you're either used as extension to Photoshop or used as a glorified typist.
    - jamesdelaneyie 11y ago
      Odd comment. Clients in my work consistently pay us to do 'What we think is best' because that's what they're paying us for. Sometimes we do production work, but more often than not we're directing and advising the client toward their goal, then creating the things that get them there. They don't know how to get there, we do. But probably we're in different industries.
EdSharkey 11y ago
I think pixel art by itself is rad and has an audience that appreciates it. For games though, even beyond the problem of the audience not getting the point, in the age of retina displays there are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want. If one was so inclined to stick with blocky pixel art, one could always render the bitmaps' pixels as filled vector rectangles and the target display would autoscale those rectangles without blurring them (unless they became subpixel-sized.) But, I personally think a high resolution pixel art style in games is just going to confuse the consumer. Box shots no longer sell a game, trailer videos do. Are you going for high detail but low color count and 24fps animation? That does seem like a strange choice when I write it like that. Low resolution pixel art (320 pixels wide or tall) makes a statement, and I think the consumers get the "retro" style the developer is going for there. But then why would an artist with a pencil and a budget ever want to restrict themselves like that? I don't know what Ubisoft did in recent Rayman titles, but it looks like 3D or 2D vector art. The animations are super fluid, scale very nicely, and are super fun to watch! I suppose as the author suggests at the end, hand-placed curves could be a good substitute for hand-placed blocks.
- kibwen 11y ago
  The new Rayman games are absolutely a joy to behold. The majority of the visuals in the game are 2D, though the engine also supports 3D models, and I'm not certain if the 2D assets are sprites or vector illustrations. There's a pretty neat demonstration of the engine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoLpPw864eA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoLpPw864eA
  - keeganpoppen 11y ago
    that engine looked really cool. the level editor setup the have is especially cool, and very Bret Victor-esque.
- astrange 11y ago
  > There are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want. Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place. The pixels in Atari/NES games were made to go through the various distortions in the video pipeline (composite crossover, scanlines, flickering, misaligned electron guns and all that) that left them with all the hard edges blurred off. The aesthetic is totally based on people running emulators showing you the framebuffer in a way it was never meant to be seen.
dragontamer 11y ago
I should note that Arc System Works has also renounced Pixel Art as per Guilty Gear Xrd. :-( (Arc System Works are the masters behind BlazBlue's Pixel Art) Granted, their 3D Artwork is quite good now, so maybe they can succeed in the transition. But fewer and fewer major developers (and even small, niche developers) are producing pixel art. "WayForward Games" has an interesting vector art style however which gets the classic feel down. Its technique is more akin to a high-quality Newground game however, as opposed to the nostalgic Pixel Art feel. And artists know that vector art is easier to do. Still, WayForward (Ducktales Remastered, Shaente Half Genie Hero) might be one of the last great 2D Artists still around today.
Mithaldu 11y ago
It's a little weird that he spends so much time criticizing others and doesn't even once acknowledge that his art style (proportions, anatomy) look definitely weird. (Downright ugly and off-putting to me.) Part of the reason his art gets put down by others might be that they also feel it's ugly, but don't quite know how to express it and pin it on the pixels. Further, as someone who works on games, the decision as to what kind of art style is used, most often is not a decision to aim for something specific, but a question of money. Art doesn't happen on its own, you either have to make it yourself, or find someone else to make it (who makes something that looks good) AND then pay them, often also for many many revisions and additions. For a small team simple sprites that remain appealing and consistent even when scaled up can be the choice simply because anything else is prohibitively expensive.
- jimminy 11y ago
  I agree, that he fails to acknowledge the issues with his own art. I agreed with him through most of the article, but when it came time for him to get to his stuff, the forced dithering was immediately off-putting, and is actually something that causes older games to feel dated to me. Pixel-art is great, when it is crisp. Most of his examples are crisp and well animated, until you get to his. The characters are oddly proportioned, but I can deal with that, and at least they were pretty crisp, but the interface around them was horrible.
  - the_af 11y ago
    I didn't like his art style either, but I don't think it invalidates the rest of the article.
  - DinoFarmBlake 11y ago
    Author/artist here! I'm sorry you're not into Auro's art, but I just popped in to clear something up. At no point do I laud my own work as all that great. I can't speak to how good I am. I do my best, and that's all I can do. Full disclosure, the only reason I included it at all was to plug it. We're a small, new company and need all the help we can get. I also think it's a little strange to hear that I spend no time on my art's issues when the whole article is basically saying the entire art direction was a big mistake. I'm not a graphic designer, yet I had to make every art asset in the game. I have to wear many hats, and I wear some better than others. I'm always learning, always pushing, always questioning, always trying to improve. Pretty much every example I gave of pixel art is insanely better than I am. That doesn't bother me. There will always be someone better, and there will always be someone worse. Besides, even if my work was the most ghastly thing you've ever seen, it wouldn't make my arguments any more or less valid. If you think my positions are incorrect, I don't see how that has to do with how much or how little I discuss my own work. That said, I'll be the first to fuss and fuss and fuss over the flaws and shortcomings in my work. I'm my own worst enemy. Does it make you feel better to hear that?
amelius 11y ago
A lot of this also applies to rendering fonts at small point sizes.
sparkzilla 11y ago
This article has several very important points that any creator should keep in mind 1) The medium is the message. In other words the medium determines the art. In his case, the higher-resolution of phone screens determines that his message must change to take advantage of the screen's capabilities. For example, when TV started it used radio and play formats for presentation. It wasn't until years later, that people began to explore the visual storytelling aspects of the media. It takes a while for people to discover how each medium should be used most effectively. 2) The meaning of a communication is the response you get [1]. When your audience is saying that your game is retro and old-fashioned, they are not lying -- that's what it means to them. You can try an educate them, but you are going against their understanding of point 1, or you can work to their expectations. Good luck to the guy, he really gets it. [1]http://coachingleaders.emotional-climate.com/nlp-presuppositions-8-the-meaning-of-communication-is-the-response-you-get/ http://coachingleaders.emotional-climate.com/nlp-presupposit...
TrevorJ 11y ago
As technology moves forward, more and more tools are at our disposal. The trick then, is choosing the right tool for to communicate the look and feel you want, in support of the story and world you are creating. I feel like the author is so close to the issue that they lost the forest for the trees: there will always be some games that benefit from the pixel art, it just takes a full and proper understanding of what they style instantly communicates to your audience.
Htsthbjig 11y ago
Agreed. Some of the greatest film movies ever created are black and white, ironical because most of them were recorded in two colors but the color was lost(as the only copy that not degraded over time were the black and white television copies). But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it. Even Chaplin got nearly bankrupt trying to stay with silent pictures. Most people can't understand that making a movie without sound is actually harder than with it, as a movie without sound feels weird and you have to apply lots of work in order to fight this limitation. So it just does not make economical sense when 99% of the people do not understand the work behind and you have to make something 99 times more expensive to those that do in order to live of your work.
- javajosh 11y ago
  >But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it. For any given object, over a large enough population, most people won't be exposed to it; those that are won't understand it. Hit TV shows might reach 10M viewers in the US - out of 350M. FWIW I think the OPs move is slightly premature: there's a movie coming out soon called Pixels that will certainly raise the profile of this style: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2120120/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2120120/
  - sukilot 11y ago
    Maybe, but that movie looks like a ( bomb from here. The animators didn't read this blog post or understand how to make good looking pixelated art.
vacri 11y ago
I found it interesting that the author denigrated a fighter from Street Fighter IV with 'arms don't work that way', then immediately turns around and says that the pixel art for the next fighter is far better because 'she looks like a whip cracking', despite spines not working that way. It feels like the author is applying different standards at times.
- jff 11y ago
  I'd say he stuck to two standards: Old good. Japanese good.
  - DinoFarmBlake 11y ago
    I couldn't name 10 Animes. I'm not weeaboo by any metric. I will say that I think Japanese art tends to be finer, but not always. I think our culture grapples with being macho, or gritty or realistic. I think it rubs against "the rule of good." Anyway, whether or not something is old is immaterial. Pixar is making some of my favorite animation period, and they keep getting better. AND they're American. By all means, dismantle my argument. I would be happy to discuss. I don't think ad hominem is the best place to start. Thanks a lot for reading, either way!
- DinoFarmBlake 11y ago
  Artist/author here! To be clear, when I said her body is like a whip cracking, it's because a kung fu artist doing that kind of movement in real life would look like a whip cracking. When I said arms don't work that way, I mean that his anatomy is literally deformed to the point of not even looking human. I am not using a double standard. Though, even if both figures were deformed beyond what is absolutely realistic, there could still be well-executed and poorly-executed iterations.
  - sukilot 11y ago
    Oh come on. SF3 Chun-Li is absolutely not a low-res sample of how a human body actually looks. It is a stylized exaggeration.
forrestthewoods 11y ago
Reads heavily like sour grapes to me. =\
Eric_WVGG 11y ago
The thing that bothers me about pixel-art is that too many young artists are obsessed with the past, and not exploring the possibilities of the new technologies, tools and modes of thinking that are available to them. It's as if every musician under twenty was content to play in the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Don't get me wrong, I love pixel art — Paul Robertson and the Sword & Sworcery guys are doing some of my favorite work — but if the artists of yesterday were stuck in their own pasts… you know?
emptybits 11y ago
I worked in games in the early and late 1990s. It's hard for me to know if my love of great pixel art and great chip tunes is some romantic attachment to my childhood and early professional career, or if it's a sincere appreciation of great art in absolute terms. But I'm inclined to agree with Igor Stravinksy: "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution."
zeidrich 11y ago
A big thing about pixel art and it's issues today is that what he mentions as pixel art, isn't so. I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc. But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version. However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played it on the SNES, it was rendered very differently, it was interlaced, scanlines were distinct, and each pixel was a bit of a blob. Because of this, an image like Yoshi looked just fine, because we weren't looking at a blocky grid of squares. The brighter colored glowed around the darker colors, the darkness between the scanlines caused your brain to interpolate the lines. We got a nicer looking image. When you blow it up to 500% on a crisp LCD panel it doesn't look the same. What used to be smooth lines are now stair steps. And just the same way that he complains about Auro being blurred or stretched, when you display pixel art designed for a CRT on an OLED display at 600% nearest neighbor scaling, it doesn't work. I like the symbolic style of pixel art. But we don't have the same limitations. When people made great art for the NES, it's because that's what they had to work with. We have more to work with. It's one thing to represent things in a symbolic, simplistic or minimalistic style. It's another thing to feign technological disadvantage.
- soup10 11y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, I think the author makes some decent points but is pretty biased towards an aesthetic he prefers and the art tools he's most familiar with. The sf4 example is particularly demonstrating of that, people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation, that doesn't make it lower quality animation, it's a trade off of the medium. And art is about the overall impression it leaves on the viewer, not the technical specifics about how the pants look odd on 2 frames of a 100 frame motion
  - the_af 11y ago
    How can he be biased, beyond his love of pixel art? He more or less concludes pixel art is not the best choice, and he sides with the public's opinion on this issue. Read the comments. He is not blaming anyone for this "pixel tax". To my eyes, the SF4 Chun Li is infinitely inferior to SF3, and I'm not even an animator. And haven't played either game, so I truly have no preconceptions at all in this case.
nyolfen 11y ago
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” --Brian Eno
- guelo 11y ago
  Great quote. "Too momentous for the medium" reminded me of the intensity created by Sleigh Bell's purposefully overblown beats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSHJjYwGJNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSHJjYwGJNA
  - kremlin 11y ago
    That was something I thought of immediately as well. And Times New Viking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQJvAXOohoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQJvAXOohoU
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- broken 11y ago
  Speaking of that 8-bit sound, check Rob Hubbard's outstanding composition for 'Monty on the Run' (1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EcgruWlXnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EcgruWlXnQ
  - pestaa 11y ago
    A friend of mine composed a great list of chiptunes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtCIrnpefsWr_nJJENh9oiVm0b10pMxZE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtCIrnpefsWr_nJJENh9o...
rnprince 11y ago
Schoenberg, on writing four-voice chorales: "Even in the limitations of the individual voices, in their relative incompleteness, there are advantages.* The necessity for utilizing them within the narrow range of their effectiveness demands characteristic usage and treatment consistent with the material. Thus the pupil learns by this simple example to heed an important principle of handicraft: to make characteristic use of the strengths and shortcomings of the material at hand. "*I am taking such pains with these things ... to establish explicitly that these principles are not derived from aesthetics but from practical considerations. If what is known as aesthetics does in fact contain much that is merely practical handling of the material, and if what is known as symmetry is perhaps often not much more than an organization of the material that reveals a sensible regard for its properties, yet I consider it worthwhile to set down these observations. For the conditions of practicality can change, if we take a different view of the material and if the purpose changes." --Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre
eigenbom 11y ago
Pixel art may have come from the limitations and formats of the past, but it'll continue to evolve and change like other art styles. It's simple to get into and complex to master. There are some good points in the article, but pixel art in games (or art heavily influenced by pixel art) is a style that many people enjoy, especially when it is done well. It's very puzzle-like and you have to think economically when creating larger pieces. Pixel art and low poly art are fundamental art styles of gaming, I think partially because they are so overtly digital. I think my favourite pixel artists show how the medium is always changing and getter better, e.g., Paul Robertson, Pixels Huh, Yuriy Gusev (Fool), Barney Cumming, and Mrmo Tarius. PS. I'm a game developer and also run a pixel art on community on Twitter called @Pixel_Dailies. Come check us out sometime. :)
ryanobjc 11y ago
This feels like a "modern art" moment. The key question is, who is your audience? For a lot of modern art the audience is other insiders. And also, possibly, buyers. The average person may not find it so compelling. And so it is here as well.
wodenokoto 11y ago
This is a great article and I feel one of the most important points are being drowned in discussing the merits of pixel art or what art is here in the comment section. The most important thing is the part about speaking the language of the users. And especially "the users don't owe you their time" These are principles that are extremely important if you want to build a product that reaches people and change their lives. Be it in the marketing department, engineering, UX or as this article, art work. Another great point is that we can produce great art/products/UX while speaking the users language.
- DinoFarmBlake 11y ago
  Author/artist here! Thank you so much for bringing it back around. And it's important to point out that I am in no way proposing that we "dumb down" or "pander." I think we should always be pushing as hard as we can and producing ambitious, excellent work as much as we can. We should sacrifice money and time to see it through and really add something of value and enrichment to the world! I just think we should do that in a language people already speak. That's a lower level than all these finer points, fun as they are to discuss ;). Thanks for reading!
beloch 11y ago
Limitations often breed art. Compare what George Lucas did when he was on a shoe-string budget to what he did when money was no object... frequently directly to what he made when he was on a budget. Pixel art is appreciated by people because they can see the limitation and appreciate how the artist worked around it. However, restricting yourself to pixel art does mean adopting a limitation voluntarily when you probably also have a lot of other ones to deal with too. Sometimes one more limitation is one limitation too many. Pixel art is very trendy right now, but it probably won't remain so forever. Shooting film in black and white used to be all that was possible. Then it became what was cheap. Today, we still see some B&W films for aesthetic reasons, but it's very uncommon. Pixel art will probably become very similar to B&W film eventually. Seldom used, but used for a specific effect when it is used. There's room for plenty of aesthetics besides pixel art and "HD" though. With modern displays, there's no reason that games can't borrow aesthetics from other mediums. Watercolors, comic book print, you name it. Heck, even though it's similar to pixels, I'd kill to see a good game created to look like a Byzantine mosaic! Adopting these limitations when appropriate offers artists a chance to take on problems nobody has seen handled before, and it's therefore more interesting than just working with the same artificial limitation everyone else is currently working with. I'd just like to expand on the idea of a mosaic aesthetic a little bit more. It may seem like mosaics are just irregularly shaped pixels, but it's actually much more than that. Mosaics were made out of a variety of materials that scattered and reflected light in very different ways. Some tiles were matte, some colored glass, and others backed in gold leaf to amp up their reflectivity. Mosaic tiles were also angled to reflect light very strategically, allowing the artist to make some features grab your eye. A mosaic-based game would require a virtual mosaic toolset that would give artists the ability to simulate different tile materials and angles and a lighting engine to render the results. The resulting image would have complexity on a much smaller scale than a single tile.
_pmf_ 11y ago
I think today it's much, much more effort to make a decent pixel art game than to make a generic Unity 3D game (which look all the same to me; I hate them).
spoiler 11y ago
This is great! It reminds me of some of the stuff I did once upon a time. Here's a small collection of what I saved/salvaged over time[1]. We were a small group of friends who wanted to make a Harry Potter MMO (post-trio era, if anyone cares). Well, we did make it, but we were young, didn't know how shit about marketing and that stuff, and it never launched properly. So, the first M of MMO was never achieved, sadly[1]. I still know shit about marketing and that stuff, now that I think about it. In the end there was a big (personal) argument and people divided into two groups and we parted ways on not-so-good-terms. [1]: http://nino.miletich.me/public/pixel_art/ http://nino.miletich.me/public/pixel_art/ Note: not all of it is my work, in fact most probably isn't. I don't even remember what is what isn't; we colaborated on a lot of stuff. I was mostly the programmer/developer and not the artist for the project. [2]: Maybe not so much sadly, since WB is apprantly very aggressive towards fan-made products that get a bit of attention.
cyxxon 11y ago
While I understood the obsession with pixel art, I never really emotionally "got it". For me, it is more about what to do with the technology available to do, and then making the best out of that. And that does not mean going photorealistic if you can, but just create a look that fits the product. XIII, Borderlands, World of Warcraft come to mind - competing products of the same time had a much more "real" look, but these titles actually stood out and aged well. The author mentions Grim Fandango, which is in the same vein. None of these is retro or pixel art, just done with an overarching style that is not at the maximum of what was possible at the games creation.
toxicFork 11y ago
Here's the discussion on the gamedev subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/35poc6/a_pixel_artist_renounces_pixel_art_an_article/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/35poc6/a_pixel_arti...
ilitirit 11y ago
The irony about KOF XIII is that purists hate the spritework in that game and it's predecessor because it's not true pixel art. http://www.noe-v.com/images/articles/terry_sprites01.jpg http://www.noe-v.com/images/articles/terry_sprites01.jpg KOF XII/XIII sprites were rotoscoped from 3D models. They did this because pixel art is far more expensive. For reference, SNK stated that it costed them around $1m per 3D character in KOF XIII. But the savings come with tweaking the models when they rebalance moves. They can just alter the model. 2D sprites have to be redrawn. SNK Playmore published a great article which I cannot seem to find now with details on their technique. The reason purists don't like the look of the game though is because SNK was traditionally known for superb pixel art. http://images.wikia.com/snk/images/e/e8/Kof99park3bglite.gif http://images.wikia.com/snk/images/e/e8/Kof99park3bglite.gif
csbrooks 11y ago
This part struck home to me: 'Many developers who try to achieve the retro aesthetic overlook how much magnification is going on, resulting in not one, but several different resolutions at once. Not only can this be unsightly, but it’s “showing its strings,”which defeats the purpose of limiting your resolution in the first place.' For some reason I find that really jarring.
erikb 11y ago
I have to agree deeply. Purism just for the sake of it is not dealing with the end users demands. A pixel artist does pixel art because he deeply cares about the pixels. But the user doesn't necessarily about the pixels. Most of them care more about that the game's story and interactions are as convincing as possible. Finding the right tools to achieve that is the right way to go.
StronglyTyped 11y ago
Isn't all computer art pixel art?
- cosarara97 11y ago
  No. http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&PID=139318#139318 http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&PI...
Grue3 11y ago
There are some great-looking pixel art phone games out there. Pixel Dungeon, Game Dev Story (and other Mobage games by the same developer). I haven't seen anyone claiming that the graphics are shit in those. This guy's game doesn't look all that great to be honest. However the points he's making about the public misunderstanding the craft that goes into pixel art are valid.
bitwize 11y ago
I love pixel art. And I'm going to keep making games with pixel art. Why? Not because I want to evoke retro nostalgia. Simply because the asset pipeline is easier to manage. I avail myself of high resolutions and millions of colors, but even with those you can create great pixel art even in a simple paint program and from there it is easy to load into a game and draw on the screen. Plus, well done pixel art reads incredibly clearly -- compare pixelated Mario with the 3D-rendered, mushy Mario used in Mario vs. Donkey Kong. For 2D gaming pixel art gets the job done and requires minimal tooling and middleware. That's why I love it.
karmakaze 11y ago
The 'depixelize' reference [1] is an MS page with samples. I mostly find the hq4x (upto 8x) then EPX most pleasing. The 'Ours' (presumably meaning MS/Xbox) makes everything look like Inuit art completely losing any original sense. [1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/supplementary/multi_comparison.html http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/...

440 points by dsil 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Beatiful article, slightly off into animation territorry but still. Taking distance from current technology and future is good. The Chun-Li dissected animation reminded me of Disney classes on how to convey emotions rather than simulate movements. And for Jazz lovers, search about Mitsuo Iso : www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvx7p6-lABw

dragontamer 11y ago
I've been trying to explain to people why Fire Emblem sprites were better than modern 3D Fire Emblem animations. Old GBA Game: http://lparchive.org/Fire-Emblem-Blazing-Sword/Update%2063/18-swordmaster.gif http://lparchive.org/Fire-Emblem-Blazing-Sword/Update%2063/1... Fire Emblem Awakening: https://youtu.be/ls0Nn_-hv-8?t=3m35s https://youtu.be/ls0Nn_-hv-8?t=3m35s I showed this to multiple people, and a lot of them seem to think the 3D animation was better. :-(
- agumonkey 11y ago
  To be honest, I found neither impressive, both are pretty standard level animations in their domains.
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    Indeed. But the Fire Emblem sprites were redrawn with details from each of the characters in the game. Amelia from FE8 for example, was the only blonde female paladin, and her long-blonde hair would blow in the wind during her critical hit animation. The animations were incredibly personalized to the characters, a true feat for a game with several dozen playable characters (and random mooks to KO). In contrast, the 3D Art of FE:Awakening is clearly built off of recycled bone animations across multiple units. Furthermore, they were mostly recycled from FE9 and FE10. The level of effort needed to create the 2D sprites is clearly much higher than the level of effort for FE:Awakening's animations.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      Sigh, the "benefits" of industrialisation and new tech. Fortunately I hope that 2d or 3d pros and cons are known and mastered enough so people can go back to produce artful games. Similarly to movies, early 2K era movies were speaking too much of CGI, now SFX aren't attractive anymore, you got to give density. ps: about the level of effort, I think it's not fair, 3d modeling and animating was hard, but more than that it made people focus on low level details rather than 'impressionist' ones. You had to care about all angles and didn't have time nor knowledge on what made a good animation. Same goes for old animations.
      - dragontamer 11y ago
        Arc System Works is doing a good job actually with their 3D style in Guilty Gear Xrd. Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. is also quite excellent 3D Artwork. As is whatever the heck this is from: http://kotaku.com/sorry-yes-animation-is-also-games-art-1699334559 http://kotaku.com/sorry-yes-animation-is-also-games-art-1699... So solid, good 3D art exists, and is around. Gears of War also deserves a mention.
        agumonkey 11y ago
        True, I didn't want to dismiss good 3d artwork.
- kibwen 11y ago
  Some of the Fire Emblem sprites were breathtakingly fluid, and you can't deny that they often look better than the jaggy polygons of the modern DS titles (similar to how the OP contrasts Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Diablo). My favorites were always the sprites for the "hero" unit: http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/fireemblem/images/3/38/FE6_Hero_Critical.gif/revision/latest?cb=20140207032928 http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/fireemblem/images/3/38/F...
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    Good point. Heroes probably had the best attack animations. Either them, or critical hit from the paladin. My favorite animations overall though were definitely swordmaster, specifically their "dodge" animation. They only moved like 3 or 4 pixels, so it was hard to tell that they actually dodged. But once you saw it, it was in fact amazing.

Kenji 11y ago

Plebs: 1 Artists: 0 (I agree with him)

YogeeKnows 11y ago

I hate pixel art anyway. One thing I'm pretty sure I always hate is pixel art.

pshc 11y ago

Yes! Thank you. I love the old pixel aesthetic, but today's art should fit today's constraints. Those classic games will always be around, awaiting your next nostalgia rush. Screw stagnation. Likewise, I like old Victorians and Art Deco, but I wouldn't be excited about one built today. No one would respect a 2015 medieval-style castle quite like one from 1515.

DanAndersen 11y ago
Agreed. It's like the tacky buildings in Las Vegas that mimic other buildings, or Disney World, or those faux-European cities built for tourists in China. I sure would love to see some new cathedrals built using the methods of centuries past, though.
Tideflat 11y ago
However, a medieval-style castle would still be cool if it was built in 2015.
- marshray 11y ago
  Pretty sure the pyramids were the original massively pixelated structure.

dunstad 11y ago

It was interesting to see that the game Aero uses very nice looking (high resolution?) pixel art. I'm familiar with it in old games and in newer ones that choose to adopt a retro look, but I'd never seen someone attempt what they did. I probably would have been one of the people complaining about the game's 'pixellated' art, as a result. That said, I quite enjoyed the article, and some of those modern pixel art pieces linked were very impressive. I think overall his decision to make the switch is a good one though, if I can consider myself any kind of sample of his audience.

fgsfdsfgsfds 11y ago

Sounds like they should have been developing for PC instead of mobile. The average mobile user plays exploitative "freemium" garbage to kill time in lines. How can you expect them to appreciate the art behind it? Meanwhile, "retro"-style games are doing gangbusters on Steam, selling to people that actually appreciate those styles of art, music, and game design.

dragontamer 11y ago
While you have a point (and I've given you a +1 vote because of it), the fact remains that the "average person" I know thinks that Street Fighter 4 animations were better than Street Fighter 3. The Chun Li discussion happens a lot in my circle of friends, and I'm always in the minority. Very few people appreciate classic pixel art.
- fgsfdsfgsfds 11y ago
  That's fair, but if you want to make art, there's no sense in trying to appeal to everyone. The guy that disregards pixel art probably wouldn't see your traditional art for what it really is, either. You can be depressed that the "mainstream" doesn't appreciate what you do, you can crush your spirit trying to pander to them, or you can have fun in your cozy niche with a small handful of fans and peers that really get you.
- Tyr42 11y ago
  So, if we look to the digital art like Pixar, there are a lot of guidelines from traditional animation to make a scene come alive. * Squish and Stretch * Fallow through * Secondary Action These principles really help make dynamic scenes. If you look at the Chun Li animations, you can see that the older one does a better job of using these. I feel like if the HD version took advantage of these, it would look the best out of all of them, but it failed to reach its full potential in it's medium. Watch this early Pixar short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4NPQ8mfKU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4NPQ8mfKU0 See how alive and full of emotion the little lamp is?
  - 11y ago

emsy 11y ago

Pixel art games nowadays all look more or less the same. Actual games from the 90s didn't look alike at all. Also most games use pixel art as an excuse for lazy animations with a little amount of frames. I really wonder why everyone likes it so much and I often think maybe something is wrong with my taste :/

MollyR 11y ago
I often wondered if indie games tend to like pixel art because its cheaper and faster to produce.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  That's a pretty obvious yes isn't it? I thought that's why a lot of indie games are pixel games, just like why a lot of indy games are side scrollers. It's so much quicker to do.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  Except when you look at the development methodology of the best-of-the-best pixel art games (BlazBlue, King of Fighters), the teams did 3D Animations for all of the characters and then re-traced them into 2D Pixel Art. Everyone who actually _does_ high-quality pixel art understands. Good Pixel-Art is much MUCH harder to do than good 3D. It lothes me to say it, but the blogpost is correct. Very few people understand this fact except for the artists who actually do go pixel art.
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    But for me some pixel artists miss (for me) a large part of the artistic value of pixel art: restricting complexity of the scene -- not just portraying things in blocks. The blocks aren't important at all, in fact they're pretty ugly if you're not a great pixel artist (hence the natural wish to find better upscaling algorithms). It's often overlooked the CRTs those art were made for were quite blurry and round, alleviating the blocky look. That's the right reason to defend using modern screens to their full capability with a certain simplified-art style.

DanAndersen 11y ago

This article reminded me of a trend I noticed when reading the book "Masters of Doom," which discussed (among other things) the graphical improvements that made games like Wolfenstein and Doom so impressive. Very often, the book's prose would start sentences something along the lines of "though the graphics were crude, etc etc etc." These sorts of lines, constantly repeated, irked me, not because they weren't technically true or anything, but because it's such a "looking-backward" point of view. At the time, that's not how people saw it. It was all about pushing forward the state of the art, and we miss something when we look back on it in that way. I guess in a similar way I've had the same feeling about "modern" pixel art, where it often seems to miss the point. By treating it as just an art style, it turns it from an exercise in conveying a vision despite limitations, into an effort to simplify and downsample because those are the most easily-recognized surface-level hallmarks of that period. For me, the magic of that era comes from seeing techniques like color cycling ( http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0 http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0 ), where the desire to get a certain effect led to interesting workarounds, rather than being satisfied with limitations because it's "retro."

vacri 11y ago
When Half Life came out, it was amazing. I went back to retry it half a year ago, and it looked awful. And what was a wonderful intro sequence was now unskippable minutes of a slow ride past crude polygons and very low detail environments. It was interesting seeing how my opinions had changed.
- dceddia 11y ago
  Funny, as I was reading the parent post my mind jumped to Half Life too. What an amazing game! Part of me wishes I could un-see all the stuff that came after it, so that I could go back and play it with my original excitement intact. Instead, it seems my mind is happy to find flaws at every turn and compare how it actually looks to how good I remember it to be. It's even worse with older games. I tried to play the original X-Wing in DOSBox a while back, and wow, I couldn't believe it. Did it really look that bad back then? Maybe my 486 DX2 and 14" CRT made it look better somehow.

yzh 11y ago

This is relevant: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/

pyrocat 11y ago
yes, they bring it up in the article several times.

gavanwoolery 11y ago

It is the duty of an artist to fulfill their vision, not someone else's. For this reason, many prominent artists go unknown in their lifetime. The masses are attracted to "bad" art like Thomas Kinkade (I use quotes because the art is not actually bad, just lacks the originality that art connoisseurs seek). I would actually argue that you will have to make a choice between being a popular artist and being good artist (there is some overlap though). And it may well be the case that you don't have the luxury to make this choice. For me personally, I think that good pixel art is timeless (emphasis on "good"). It gives an artist a limited canvas and forces them to be creative. You can instantly deduce an artist's skill based on how well they can convey a concept with a limited palette and resolution. An unlimited palette and high resolution actually magnifies the flaws in art, IMO (leaves less to the imagination). I find that in many modern 3D games, the suspension of disbelief is destroyed when I walk up to a character and see blurry textures and pointed polygonal edges. For an idea of what good pixel art looks like (at least according to my opinion and many others), check out Henk Nieborg's work: http://www.henknieborg.nl/gallery_pixels.html http://www.henknieborg.nl/gallery_pixels.html

Goronmon 11y ago
And it may well be the case that you don't have the luxury to make this choice. Which, unfortunately, is usually the case when it comes to game development.
- pan69 11y ago
  Or any sort of development for that matter. I've never worked with a client who said; "Yeah, sure. What ever you think is best". When someone else pays the bills, you're either used as extension to Photoshop or used as a glorified typist.
  - jamesdelaneyie 11y ago
    Odd comment. Clients in my work consistently pay us to do 'What we think is best' because that's what they're paying us for. Sometimes we do production work, but more often than not we're directing and advising the client toward their goal, then creating the things that get them there. They don't know how to get there, we do. But probably we're in different industries.

EdSharkey 11y ago

I think pixel art by itself is rad and has an audience that appreciates it. For games though, even beyond the problem of the audience not getting the point, in the age of retina displays there are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want. If one was so inclined to stick with blocky pixel art, one could always render the bitmaps' pixels as filled vector rectangles and the target display would autoscale those rectangles without blurring them (unless they became subpixel-sized.) But, I personally think a high resolution pixel art style in games is just going to confuse the consumer. Box shots no longer sell a game, trailer videos do. Are you going for high detail but low color count and 24fps animation? That does seem like a strange choice when I write it like that. Low resolution pixel art (320 pixels wide or tall) makes a statement, and I think the consumers get the "retro" style the developer is going for there. But then why would an artist with a pencil and a budget ever want to restrict themselves like that? I don't know what Ubisoft did in recent Rayman titles, but it looks like 3D or 2D vector art. The animations are super fluid, scale very nicely, and are super fun to watch! I suppose as the author suggests at the end, hand-placed curves could be a good substitute for hand-placed blocks.

kibwen 11y ago
The new Rayman games are absolutely a joy to behold. The majority of the visuals in the game are 2D, though the engine also supports 3D models, and I'm not certain if the 2D assets are sprites or vector illustrations. There's a pretty neat demonstration of the engine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoLpPw864eA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoLpPw864eA
- keeganpoppen 11y ago
  that engine looked really cool. the level editor setup the have is especially cool, and very Bret Victor-esque.
astrange 11y ago
> There are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want. Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place. The pixels in Atari/NES games were made to go through the various distortions in the video pipeline (composite crossover, scanlines, flickering, misaligned electron guns and all that) that left them with all the hard edges blurred off. The aesthetic is totally based on people running emulators showing you the framebuffer in a way it was never meant to be seen.

dragontamer 11y ago

I should note that Arc System Works has also renounced Pixel Art as per Guilty Gear Xrd. :-( (Arc System Works are the masters behind BlazBlue's Pixel Art) Granted, their 3D Artwork is quite good now, so maybe they can succeed in the transition. But fewer and fewer major developers (and even small, niche developers) are producing pixel art. "WayForward Games" has an interesting vector art style however which gets the classic feel down. Its technique is more akin to a high-quality Newground game however, as opposed to the nostalgic Pixel Art feel. And artists know that vector art is easier to do. Still, WayForward (Ducktales Remastered, Shaente Half Genie Hero) might be one of the last great 2D Artists still around today.

Mithaldu 11y ago

It's a little weird that he spends so much time criticizing others and doesn't even once acknowledge that his art style (proportions, anatomy) look definitely weird. (Downright ugly and off-putting to me.) Part of the reason his art gets put down by others might be that they also feel it's ugly, but don't quite know how to express it and pin it on the pixels. Further, as someone who works on games, the decision as to what kind of art style is used, most often is not a decision to aim for something specific, but a question of money. Art doesn't happen on its own, you either have to make it yourself, or find someone else to make it (who makes something that looks good) AND then pay them, often also for many many revisions and additions. For a small team simple sprites that remain appealing and consistent even when scaled up can be the choice simply because anything else is prohibitively expensive.

jimminy 11y ago
I agree, that he fails to acknowledge the issues with his own art. I agreed with him through most of the article, but when it came time for him to get to his stuff, the forced dithering was immediately off-putting, and is actually something that causes older games to feel dated to me. Pixel-art is great, when it is crisp. Most of his examples are crisp and well animated, until you get to his. The characters are oddly proportioned, but I can deal with that, and at least they were pretty crisp, but the interface around them was horrible.
- the_af 11y ago
  I didn't like his art style either, but I don't think it invalidates the rest of the article.
- DinoFarmBlake 11y ago
  Author/artist here! I'm sorry you're not into Auro's art, but I just popped in to clear something up. At no point do I laud my own work as all that great. I can't speak to how good I am. I do my best, and that's all I can do. Full disclosure, the only reason I included it at all was to plug it. We're a small, new company and need all the help we can get. I also think it's a little strange to hear that I spend no time on my art's issues when the whole article is basically saying the entire art direction was a big mistake. I'm not a graphic designer, yet I had to make every art asset in the game. I have to wear many hats, and I wear some better than others. I'm always learning, always pushing, always questioning, always trying to improve. Pretty much every example I gave of pixel art is insanely better than I am. That doesn't bother me. There will always be someone better, and there will always be someone worse. Besides, even if my work was the most ghastly thing you've ever seen, it wouldn't make my arguments any more or less valid. If you think my positions are incorrect, I don't see how that has to do with how much or how little I discuss my own work. That said, I'll be the first to fuss and fuss and fuss over the flaws and shortcomings in my work. I'm my own worst enemy. Does it make you feel better to hear that?

amelius 11y ago

A lot of this also applies to rendering fonts at small point sizes.

sparkzilla 11y ago

This article has several very important points that any creator should keep in mind 1) The medium is the message. In other words the medium determines the art. In his case, the higher-resolution of phone screens determines that his message must change to take advantage of the screen's capabilities. For example, when TV started it used radio and play formats for presentation. It wasn't until years later, that people began to explore the visual storytelling aspects of the media. It takes a while for people to discover how each medium should be used most effectively. 2) The meaning of a communication is the response you get [1]. When your audience is saying that your game is retro and old-fashioned, they are not lying -- that's what it means to them. You can try an educate them, but you are going against their understanding of point 1, or you can work to their expectations. Good luck to the guy, he really gets it. [1]http://coachingleaders.emotional-climate.com/nlp-presuppositions-8-the-meaning-of-communication-is-the-response-you-get/ http://coachingleaders.emotional-climate.com/nlp-presupposit...

TrevorJ 11y ago

As technology moves forward, more and more tools are at our disposal. The trick then, is choosing the right tool for to communicate the look and feel you want, in support of the story and world you are creating. I feel like the author is so close to the issue that they lost the forest for the trees: there will always be some games that benefit from the pixel art, it just takes a full and proper understanding of what they style instantly communicates to your audience.

Htsthbjig 11y ago

Agreed. Some of the greatest film movies ever created are black and white, ironical because most of them were recorded in two colors but the color was lost(as the only copy that not degraded over time were the black and white television copies). But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it. Even Chaplin got nearly bankrupt trying to stay with silent pictures. Most people can't understand that making a movie without sound is actually harder than with it, as a movie without sound feels weird and you have to apply lots of work in order to fight this limitation. So it just does not make economical sense when 99% of the people do not understand the work behind and you have to make something 99 times more expensive to those that do in order to live of your work.

javajosh 11y ago
>But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it. For any given object, over a large enough population, most people won't be exposed to it; those that are won't understand it. Hit TV shows might reach 10M viewers in the US - out of 350M. FWIW I think the OPs move is slightly premature: there's a movie coming out soon called Pixels that will certainly raise the profile of this style: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2120120/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2120120/
- sukilot 11y ago
  Maybe, but that movie looks like a ( bomb from here. The animators didn't read this blog post or understand how to make good looking pixelated art.

vacri 11y ago

I found it interesting that the author denigrated a fighter from Street Fighter IV with 'arms don't work that way', then immediately turns around and says that the pixel art for the next fighter is far better because 'she looks like a whip cracking', despite spines not working that way. It feels like the author is applying different standards at times.

jff 11y ago
I'd say he stuck to two standards: Old good. Japanese good.
- DinoFarmBlake 11y ago
  I couldn't name 10 Animes. I'm not weeaboo by any metric. I will say that I think Japanese art tends to be finer, but not always. I think our culture grapples with being macho, or gritty or realistic. I think it rubs against "the rule of good." Anyway, whether or not something is old is immaterial. Pixar is making some of my favorite animation period, and they keep getting better. AND they're American. By all means, dismantle my argument. I would be happy to discuss. I don't think ad hominem is the best place to start. Thanks a lot for reading, either way!
DinoFarmBlake 11y ago
Artist/author here! To be clear, when I said her body is like a whip cracking, it's because a kung fu artist doing that kind of movement in real life would look like a whip cracking. When I said arms don't work that way, I mean that his anatomy is literally deformed to the point of not even looking human. I am not using a double standard. Though, even if both figures were deformed beyond what is absolutely realistic, there could still be well-executed and poorly-executed iterations.
- sukilot 11y ago
  Oh come on. SF3 Chun-Li is absolutely not a low-res sample of how a human body actually looks. It is a stylized exaggeration.

forrestthewoods 11y ago

Reads heavily like sour grapes to me. =\

Eric_WVGG 11y ago

The thing that bothers me about pixel-art is that too many young artists are obsessed with the past, and not exploring the possibilities of the new technologies, tools and modes of thinking that are available to them. It's as if every musician under twenty was content to play in the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Don't get me wrong, I love pixel art — Paul Robertson and the Sword & Sworcery guys are doing some of my favorite work — but if the artists of yesterday were stuck in their own pasts… you know?

emptybits 11y ago

I worked in games in the early and late 1990s. It's hard for me to know if my love of great pixel art and great chip tunes is some romantic attachment to my childhood and early professional career, or if it's a sincere appreciation of great art in absolute terms. But I'm inclined to agree with Igor Stravinksy: "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution."

zeidrich 11y ago

A big thing about pixel art and it's issues today is that what he mentions as pixel art, isn't so. I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc. But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version. However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played it on the SNES, it was rendered very differently, it was interlaced, scanlines were distinct, and each pixel was a bit of a blob. Because of this, an image like Yoshi looked just fine, because we weren't looking at a blocky grid of squares. The brighter colored glowed around the darker colors, the darkness between the scanlines caused your brain to interpolate the lines. We got a nicer looking image. When you blow it up to 500% on a crisp LCD panel it doesn't look the same. What used to be smooth lines are now stair steps. And just the same way that he complains about Auro being blurred or stretched, when you display pixel art designed for a CRT on an OLED display at 600% nearest neighbor scaling, it doesn't work. I like the symbolic style of pixel art. But we don't have the same limitations. When people made great art for the NES, it's because that's what they had to work with. We have more to work with. It's one thing to represent things in a symbolic, simplistic or minimalistic style. It's another thing to feign technological disadvantage.

soup10 11y ago
I agree with your sentiment, I think the author makes some decent points but is pretty biased towards an aesthetic he prefers and the art tools he's most familiar with. The sf4 example is particularly demonstrating of that, people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation, that doesn't make it lower quality animation, it's a trade off of the medium. And art is about the overall impression it leaves on the viewer, not the technical specifics about how the pants look odd on 2 frames of a 100 frame motion
- the_af 11y ago
  How can he be biased, beyond his love of pixel art? He more or less concludes pixel art is not the best choice, and he sides with the public's opinion on this issue. Read the comments. He is not blaming anyone for this "pixel tax". To my eyes, the SF4 Chun Li is infinitely inferior to SF3, and I'm not even an animator. And haven't played either game, so I truly have no preconceptions at all in this case.

nyolfen 11y ago

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” --Brian Eno

guelo 11y ago
Great quote. "Too momentous for the medium" reminded me of the intensity created by Sleigh Bell's purposefully overblown beats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSHJjYwGJNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSHJjYwGJNA
- kremlin 11y ago
  That was something I thought of immediately as well. And Times New Viking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQJvAXOohoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQJvAXOohoU
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
broken 11y ago
Speaking of that 8-bit sound, check Rob Hubbard's outstanding composition for 'Monty on the Run' (1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EcgruWlXnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EcgruWlXnQ
- pestaa 11y ago
  A friend of mine composed a great list of chiptunes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtCIrnpefsWr_nJJENh9oiVm0b10pMxZE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtCIrnpefsWr_nJJENh9o...

rnprince 11y ago

Schoenberg, on writing four-voice chorales: "Even in the limitations of the individual voices, in their relative incompleteness, there are advantages.* The necessity for utilizing them within the narrow range of their effectiveness demands characteristic usage and treatment consistent with the material. Thus the pupil learns by this simple example to heed an important principle of handicraft: to make characteristic use of the strengths and shortcomings of the material at hand. "*I am taking such pains with these things ... to establish explicitly that these principles are not derived from aesthetics but from practical considerations. If what is known as aesthetics does in fact contain much that is merely practical handling of the material, and if what is known as symmetry is perhaps often not much more than an organization of the material that reveals a sensible regard for its properties, yet I consider it worthwhile to set down these observations. For the conditions of practicality can change, if we take a different view of the material and if the purpose changes." --Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre

eigenbom 11y ago

Pixel art may have come from the limitations and formats of the past, but it'll continue to evolve and change like other art styles. It's simple to get into and complex to master. There are some good points in the article, but pixel art in games (or art heavily influenced by pixel art) is a style that many people enjoy, especially when it is done well. It's very puzzle-like and you have to think economically when creating larger pieces. Pixel art and low poly art are fundamental art styles of gaming, I think partially because they are so overtly digital. I think my favourite pixel artists show how the medium is always changing and getter better, e.g., Paul Robertson, Pixels Huh, Yuriy Gusev (Fool), Barney Cumming, and Mrmo Tarius. PS. I'm a game developer and also run a pixel art on community on Twitter called @Pixel_Dailies. Come check us out sometime. :)

ryanobjc 11y ago

This feels like a "modern art" moment. The key question is, who is your audience? For a lot of modern art the audience is other insiders. And also, possibly, buyers. The average person may not find it so compelling. And so it is here as well.

wodenokoto 11y ago

This is a great article and I feel one of the most important points are being drowned in discussing the merits of pixel art or what art is here in the comment section. The most important thing is the part about speaking the language of the users. And especially "the users don't owe you their time" These are principles that are extremely important if you want to build a product that reaches people and change their lives. Be it in the marketing department, engineering, UX or as this article, art work. Another great point is that we can produce great art/products/UX while speaking the users language.

DinoFarmBlake 11y ago
Author/artist here! Thank you so much for bringing it back around. And it's important to point out that I am in no way proposing that we "dumb down" or "pander." I think we should always be pushing as hard as we can and producing ambitious, excellent work as much as we can. We should sacrifice money and time to see it through and really add something of value and enrichment to the world! I just think we should do that in a language people already speak. That's a lower level than all these finer points, fun as they are to discuss ;). Thanks for reading!

beloch 11y ago

Limitations often breed art. Compare what George Lucas did when he was on a shoe-string budget to what he did when money was no object... frequently directly to what he made when he was on a budget. Pixel art is appreciated by people because they can see the limitation and appreciate how the artist worked around it. However, restricting yourself to pixel art does mean adopting a limitation voluntarily when you probably also have a lot of other ones to deal with too. Sometimes one more limitation is one limitation too many. Pixel art is very trendy right now, but it probably won't remain so forever. Shooting film in black and white used to be all that was possible. Then it became what was cheap. Today, we still see some B&W films for aesthetic reasons, but it's very uncommon. Pixel art will probably become very similar to B&W film eventually. Seldom used, but used for a specific effect when it is used. There's room for plenty of aesthetics besides pixel art and "HD" though. With modern displays, there's no reason that games can't borrow aesthetics from other mediums. Watercolors, comic book print, you name it. Heck, even though it's similar to pixels, I'd kill to see a good game created to look like a Byzantine mosaic! Adopting these limitations when appropriate offers artists a chance to take on problems nobody has seen handled before, and it's therefore more interesting than just working with the same artificial limitation everyone else is currently working with. I'd just like to expand on the idea of a mosaic aesthetic a little bit more. It may seem like mosaics are just irregularly shaped pixels, but it's actually much more than that. Mosaics were made out of a variety of materials that scattered and reflected light in very different ways. Some tiles were matte, some colored glass, and others backed in gold leaf to amp up their reflectivity. Mosaic tiles were also angled to reflect light very strategically, allowing the artist to make some features grab your eye. A mosaic-based game would require a virtual mosaic toolset that would give artists the ability to simulate different tile materials and angles and a lighting engine to render the results. The resulting image would have complexity on a much smaller scale than a single tile.

_pmf_ 11y ago

I think today it's much, much more effort to make a decent pixel art game than to make a generic Unity 3D game (which look all the same to me; I hate them).

spoiler 11y ago

This is great! It reminds me of some of the stuff I did once upon a time. Here's a small collection of what I saved/salvaged over time[1]. We were a small group of friends who wanted to make a Harry Potter MMO (post-trio era, if anyone cares). Well, we did make it, but we were young, didn't know how shit about marketing and that stuff, and it never launched properly. So, the first M of MMO was never achieved, sadly[1]. I still know shit about marketing and that stuff, now that I think about it. In the end there was a big (personal) argument and people divided into two groups and we parted ways on not-so-good-terms. [1]: http://nino.miletich.me/public/pixel_art/ http://nino.miletich.me/public/pixel_art/ Note: not all of it is my work, in fact most probably isn't. I don't even remember what is what isn't; we colaborated on a lot of stuff. I was mostly the programmer/developer and not the artist for the project. [2]: Maybe not so much sadly, since WB is apprantly very aggressive towards fan-made products that get a bit of attention.

cyxxon 11y ago

While I understood the obsession with pixel art, I never really emotionally "got it". For me, it is more about what to do with the technology available to do, and then making the best out of that. And that does not mean going photorealistic if you can, but just create a look that fits the product. XIII, Borderlands, World of Warcraft come to mind - competing products of the same time had a much more "real" look, but these titles actually stood out and aged well. The author mentions Grim Fandango, which is in the same vein. None of these is retro or pixel art, just done with an overarching style that is not at the maximum of what was possible at the games creation.

toxicFork 11y ago

Here's the discussion on the gamedev subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/35poc6/a_pixel_artist_renounces_pixel_art_an_article/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/35poc6/a_pixel_arti...

ilitirit 11y ago

The irony about KOF XIII is that purists hate the spritework in that game and it's predecessor because it's not true pixel art. http://www.noe-v.com/images/articles/terry_sprites01.jpg http://www.noe-v.com/images/articles/terry_sprites01.jpg KOF XII/XIII sprites were rotoscoped from 3D models. They did this because pixel art is far more expensive. For reference, SNK stated that it costed them around $1m per 3D character in KOF XIII. But the savings come with tweaking the models when they rebalance moves. They can just alter the model. 2D sprites have to be redrawn. SNK Playmore published a great article which I cannot seem to find now with details on their technique. The reason purists don't like the look of the game though is because SNK was traditionally known for superb pixel art. http://images.wikia.com/snk/images/e/e8/Kof99park3bglite.gif http://images.wikia.com/snk/images/e/e8/Kof99park3bglite.gif

csbrooks 11y ago

This part struck home to me: 'Many developers who try to achieve the retro aesthetic overlook how much magnification is going on, resulting in not one, but several different resolutions at once. Not only can this be unsightly, but it’s “showing its strings,”which defeats the purpose of limiting your resolution in the first place.' For some reason I find that really jarring.

erikb 11y ago

I have to agree deeply. Purism just for the sake of it is not dealing with the end users demands. A pixel artist does pixel art because he deeply cares about the pixels. But the user doesn't necessarily about the pixels. Most of them care more about that the game's story and interactions are as convincing as possible. Finding the right tools to achieve that is the right way to go.

StronglyTyped 11y ago

Isn't all computer art pixel art?

cosarara97 11y ago
No. http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&PID=139318#139318 http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&PI...

Grue3 11y ago

There are some great-looking pixel art phone games out there. Pixel Dungeon, Game Dev Story (and other Mobage games by the same developer). I haven't seen anyone claiming that the graphics are shit in those. This guy's game doesn't look all that great to be honest. However the points he's making about the public misunderstanding the craft that goes into pixel art are valid.

bitwize 11y ago

I love pixel art. And I'm going to keep making games with pixel art. Why? Not because I want to evoke retro nostalgia. Simply because the asset pipeline is easier to manage. I avail myself of high resolutions and millions of colors, but even with those you can create great pixel art even in a simple paint program and from there it is easy to load into a game and draw on the screen. Plus, well done pixel art reads incredibly clearly -- compare pixelated Mario with the 3D-rendered, mushy Mario used in Mario vs. Donkey Kong. For 2D gaming pixel art gets the job done and requires minimal tooling and middleware. That's why I love it.

karmakaze 11y ago

The 'depixelize' reference [1] is an MS page with samples. I mostly find the hq4x (upto 8x) then EPX most pleasing. The 'Ours' (presumably meaning MS/Xbox) makes everything look like Inuit art completely losing any original sense. [1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/supplementary/multi_comparison.html http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/...