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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
by 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 agoThe 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 agothat 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.
- kalleboo 11y ago> Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place Some did. For instance, I played games like LucasArts adventure games and WarCraft 1 on a Mac with a Trinitron display, which faithfully showed the blocks in all their glory. I imagine the experience was similar for other PC games. Not all pixel art was made for NTSC TVs.
- mrob 11y agoThe article even shows a screenshot from Link's Awakening, which was intended to be displayed on an LCD with sharp pixels.
- brymaster 11y agoExcept that Game Boy games didn't look like that screenshot either. The point being that programmers and artists took advantage of the screens (be it a handheld LCD or CRT television) to compliment their artwork and achieve effects they couldn't pull off by their pixels alone. One can see a Cg shader here that attempts to recreate the look of an actual Game Boy screen, complete with several characteristics including motion blur and contrast settings: http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2013/04/customizing-harlequins-gameboy-cg-pixel.html http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2013/04/customizing-harlequi...
- mrob 11y agoMotion blur isn't relevant to static images, and Link's Awakening uses flip scrolling so most of the screen is static most of the time.
- rodgerd 11y ago> ...there are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want. "These days, thought, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness"