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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

by 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.
    - dragontamer 11y ago
      I mentioned BlazBlue specifically because of their combination of 3D Art and 2D Art. The 2D art is as you said: very simplified. http://i.imgur.com/mDlQYar.gif http://i.imgur.com/mDlQYar.gif Count the number of colors on Jin Kisaragi. The smooth, defined lines going down "strong", hand-crafted pixel art lines. With massive sprites built for the high-definition era to boot. The 3D art gets a bit intricate and busy, but the 2D Sprites.
      - egypturnash 11y ago
        The question that immediately springs to my mind is "what did the 3D reference image look like". Rotoscoping (the animator's term for 'tracing reference footage') is an old, old process, almost as old as animation itself. You can do it well, by using the reference footage as a base to get the hard parts of the 3D motion down then putting that away and pushing the drawings, or you can do it poorly, by just tracing it and not really doing much to it otherwise. I would bet that if you superimposed that BlazBlue animation over the 3D reference, there would be a huge difference - that looks like it's had a lot of human thought put into it. (And then go look at Arc's latest game, Guilty Gear Xrd. Which is presented entirely 3D with some models that have had a LOT of love applied to them.)
  - kibwen 11y ago
    It's true that superb pixel art is harder to pull off than superb 3D models because of greater self-imposed limitations. However, it's also true that if you just want your art to be passable, it's easier to achieve that via low-res pixel art than via amateur 3D modeling. IOW, pixel art has both a lower barrier to entry and a higher skill cap.
    - dragontamer 11y ago
      If you want your 3D art to passable, you download a few models from online for a few hundred dollars and tweak the bone animations. IE: What Archer does with all of its 3D models of cars it sticks into the show.
      - kibwen 11y ago
        Which is exactly my point: if we're resorting to external assets, there are infinitely more spritesheets available online for the low, low price of free, because making decent sprites is such a comparatively small effort that even artists themselves attach less value to the task. (Which still isn't to devalue the effort that it takes to make good-looking sprites; I've tried, and damn do I suck at it.)
        dragontamer 11y ago
        That's not useful at all. You need a baseline of art, and then you need to tweak the animations to match your video game. A model may not have a "double-jump" animation but you can easily add one through bone manipulations with any 3d model. But if a sprite-sheet were missing the double-jump animation? You're either doing it yourself (hard pixel art style) or hiring someone else to do it.
- pshc 11y ago
  Yeah. It's like 24fps in film. In 60fps (HD) every flaw is apparent; film props of the wrong weight look fake, and insincere facial microexpressions give it away. Whereas in 24fps (pixelation), creators can get away with more as your brain fills in the gaps. There's also the bonus that it feels dream-like; larger than life. There's also the question of pixel-perfect platforming. HD platformers can feel sloppy and untrustworthy if not done right. It's easier to trust a pixelated platformer. (And yet I've never felt cheated by a jump in the polygonal New Super Mario Bros.)
gavanwoolery 11y ago
I think that the "formal" rules for pixel art have become more well defined with increased access to the internet, and you now see more of a tendency towards Japanese / console style pixel art (compare with Deluxe Paint-style pixel art seen in old PC games). I think that there is also a huge amount of "abuse" in these rules, some of which are definitely universally applicable as applied to pixel art, IMO - namely, using the same pixel size, and perhaps keeping the palette reduced as far as reasonable. There is quite a large amount of "bad" pixel art, probably more so than "good" pixel art, so it is easy to come to dislike the genre nowdays. But pixel art (at least "good" pixel art) is much harder to produce than vector art or unrestricted raster art, especially when it comes to animation (unless you are just rotating limbs, which is a "no-no" in pixel art rules).
pshc 11y ago
Many pixel games today take it further by adding shaders, lighting, semi-transparency, HDR, particle effects, etc. so a lot of them share this hybrid old-new look. It's charming if a) done tastefully and b) the animation/art is solid e.g. Towerfall Ascension.
- emsy 11y ago
  There are a few games that really nail the pixel art, but they are the exception among the flood of poorly done graphics. Those titles usually look different than most other pixel art games and don't fall into the lookalike pattern I mentioned before. I tend to generalize negatively in regards of pixel art because of the vast majority of the bad titles.
fgsfdsfgsfds 11y ago
A fundamental difference between Japanese and Western animation is their approach to motion. Western animation emphasized fluid motion, attempting to stick to the maximum framerate (24 FPS) allowed by the film medium as much as possible. This could produce striking results, but tended to limit artists to more simpler, slower, more deliberate stretch and squash movements that would make sense when interpolated across key frames. It was also very expensive to produce, which is part of why western studios have mostly abandoned traditional animation, and why the ones that still do 2D often use Flash to cheaply "tween" between keyframes to get fluid motion for the minimum amount of effort. Japanese animation, on the other hand, plays fast and loose with the rules. Very little is animated at the full 24 FPS, drifting around 12 to 8 to 6 FPS (called animating on twos, threes, or fours) for typical scenes. This allows for the user's attention to be captured by backgrounds and stills in expository scenes, and encourages a different style of exaggerated movement that emphasizes the ''feeling'' of the movement over brute force motion quality. It also allows the budget to be conserved for the most important scenes, sakuga ("moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action.") So called "key animators" work exclusively on these parts of an animation, and here, their skills in creating expressive motions shine when given the time and resources to completely bring a dramatic scene to life. As the game, comic, and animation artforms grew alongside one another, early games took direct influence from styles of animation native to their creators. The concept of sakuga fit Japanese games well, which would often sparingly animate unimportant "cannon fodder" enemies for the sake of saving budget and development time for elaborate boss monsters. In contrast, I was always struck by the fluidity of motion in Western games produced by groups like The Bitmap Brothers for the platforms like the Amiga, yet unimpressed by the gameplay underneath. It seemed almost as if these groups would spend so much time lavishly animating their characters, that they would forget they were making a game. Another important consideration is that more frames can work against an action game. Every frame of a sword swing, for instance, is another 16th of a second delay between the player's button press and the intended action occurring. A 1 or 2 frame anime-style sword swish fits perfectly into this mold, allowing for responsive control and an expression of energy. Whereas many Western games I played would lavishly animate the beginning of a jump, or thrust or swing of a sword, compromising the feel of responsiveness for the sake of the artist's ego. So if you notice the lack of frames in a modern "pixel art" game, then while the artists might have been lazy (the typical "pixelated platformer" drawn at a lower resolution than an Atari, with more colors than a SNES game), perhaps they instead were copying older Japanese artists without understanding the reasoning behind their animation choices. Or perhaps you just don't appreciate this style of animation.

by emsy 11y ago

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.
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    I mentioned BlazBlue specifically because of their combination of 3D Art and 2D Art. The 2D art is as you said: very simplified. http://i.imgur.com/mDlQYar.gif http://i.imgur.com/mDlQYar.gif Count the number of colors on Jin Kisaragi. The smooth, defined lines going down "strong", hand-crafted pixel art lines. With massive sprites built for the high-definition era to boot. The 3D art gets a bit intricate and busy, but the 2D Sprites.
    - egypturnash 11y ago
      The question that immediately springs to my mind is "what did the 3D reference image look like". Rotoscoping (the animator's term for 'tracing reference footage') is an old, old process, almost as old as animation itself. You can do it well, by using the reference footage as a base to get the hard parts of the 3D motion down then putting that away and pushing the drawings, or you can do it poorly, by just tracing it and not really doing much to it otherwise. I would bet that if you superimposed that BlazBlue animation over the 3D reference, there would be a huge difference - that looks like it's had a lot of human thought put into it. (And then go look at Arc's latest game, Guilty Gear Xrd. Which is presented entirely 3D with some models that have had a LOT of love applied to them.)
- kibwen 11y ago
  It's true that superb pixel art is harder to pull off than superb 3D models because of greater self-imposed limitations. However, it's also true that if you just want your art to be passable, it's easier to achieve that via low-res pixel art than via amateur 3D modeling. IOW, pixel art has both a lower barrier to entry and a higher skill cap.
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    If you want your 3D art to passable, you download a few models from online for a few hundred dollars and tweak the bone animations. IE: What Archer does with all of its 3D models of cars it sticks into the show.
    - kibwen 11y ago
      Which is exactly my point: if we're resorting to external assets, there are infinitely more spritesheets available online for the low, low price of free, because making decent sprites is such a comparatively small effort that even artists themselves attach less value to the task. (Which still isn't to devalue the effort that it takes to make good-looking sprites; I've tried, and damn do I suck at it.)
      - dragontamer 11y ago
        That's not useful at all. You need a baseline of art, and then you need to tweak the animations to match your video game. A model may not have a "double-jump" animation but you can easily add one through bone manipulations with any 3d model. But if a sprite-sheet were missing the double-jump animation? You're either doing it yourself (hard pixel art style) or hiring someone else to do it.
pshc 11y ago
Yeah. It's like 24fps in film. In 60fps (HD) every flaw is apparent; film props of the wrong weight look fake, and insincere facial microexpressions give it away. Whereas in 24fps (pixelation), creators can get away with more as your brain fills in the gaps. There's also the bonus that it feels dream-like; larger than life. There's also the question of pixel-perfect platforming. HD platformers can feel sloppy and untrustworthy if not done right. It's easier to trust a pixelated platformer. (And yet I've never felt cheated by a jump in the polygonal New Super Mario Bros.)

gavanwoolery 11y ago

I think that the "formal" rules for pixel art have become more well defined with increased access to the internet, and you now see more of a tendency towards Japanese / console style pixel art (compare with Deluxe Paint-style pixel art seen in old PC games). I think that there is also a huge amount of "abuse" in these rules, some of which are definitely universally applicable as applied to pixel art, IMO - namely, using the same pixel size, and perhaps keeping the palette reduced as far as reasonable. There is quite a large amount of "bad" pixel art, probably more so than "good" pixel art, so it is easy to come to dislike the genre nowdays. But pixel art (at least "good" pixel art) is much harder to produce than vector art or unrestricted raster art, especially when it comes to animation (unless you are just rotating limbs, which is a "no-no" in pixel art rules).

pshc 11y ago

Many pixel games today take it further by adding shaders, lighting, semi-transparency, HDR, particle effects, etc. so a lot of them share this hybrid old-new look. It's charming if a) done tastefully and b) the animation/art is solid e.g. Towerfall Ascension.

emsy 11y ago
There are a few games that really nail the pixel art, but they are the exception among the flood of poorly done graphics. Those titles usually look different than most other pixel art games and don't fall into the lookalike pattern I mentioned before. I tend to generalize negatively in regards of pixel art because of the vast majority of the bad titles.

fgsfdsfgsfds 11y ago

A fundamental difference between Japanese and Western animation is their approach to motion. Western animation emphasized fluid motion, attempting to stick to the maximum framerate (24 FPS) allowed by the film medium as much as possible. This could produce striking results, but tended to limit artists to more simpler, slower, more deliberate stretch and squash movements that would make sense when interpolated across key frames. It was also very expensive to produce, which is part of why western studios have mostly abandoned traditional animation, and why the ones that still do 2D often use Flash to cheaply "tween" between keyframes to get fluid motion for the minimum amount of effort. Japanese animation, on the other hand, plays fast and loose with the rules. Very little is animated at the full 24 FPS, drifting around 12 to 8 to 6 FPS (called animating on twos, threes, or fours) for typical scenes. This allows for the user's attention to be captured by backgrounds and stills in expository scenes, and encourages a different style of exaggerated movement that emphasizes the ''feeling'' of the movement over brute force motion quality. It also allows the budget to be conserved for the most important scenes, sakuga ("moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action.") So called "key animators" work exclusively on these parts of an animation, and here, their skills in creating expressive motions shine when given the time and resources to completely bring a dramatic scene to life. As the game, comic, and animation artforms grew alongside one another, early games took direct influence from styles of animation native to their creators. The concept of sakuga fit Japanese games well, which would often sparingly animate unimportant "cannon fodder" enemies for the sake of saving budget and development time for elaborate boss monsters. In contrast, I was always struck by the fluidity of motion in Western games produced by groups like The Bitmap Brothers for the platforms like the Amiga, yet unimpressed by the gameplay underneath. It seemed almost as if these groups would spend so much time lavishly animating their characters, that they would forget they were making a game. Another important consideration is that more frames can work against an action game. Every frame of a sword swing, for instance, is another 16th of a second delay between the player's button press and the intended action occurring. A 1 or 2 frame anime-style sword swish fits perfectly into this mold, allowing for responsive control and an expression of energy. Whereas many Western games I played would lavishly animate the beginning of a jump, or thrust or swing of a sword, compromising the feel of responsiveness for the sake of the artist's ego. So if you notice the lack of frames in a modern "pixel art" game, then while the artists might have been lazy (the typical "pixelated platformer" drawn at a lower resolution than an Atari, with more colors than a SNES game), perhaps they instead were copying older Japanese artists without understanding the reasoning behind their animation choices. Or perhaps you just don't appreciate this style of animation.