The Decline of Pixel Art 175
An anonymous reader writes: Blake Reynolds, lead artist for a pair of popular mobile games, has put up a post about the decline of pixel art in games. He decries the current state of "HD fetishism" in the industry, saying that games with great pixel art get needlessly marked down in reviews for their pixelation, while games that have awful — but high-res — art get glowing praise. He walks through a number of examples showing how pixel art can be well done or poorly done, and how it can be extremely complex despite the lower resolution. But now pixel artists are running into not only the expectation of high-definition content, but technological obstacles as well. "Some devices blur Auro [their game]. Some devices stretch it. Some devices letterbox it. No matter how hard I worked to make the art in Auro as good as I could, there's no way a given person should be expected to see past all those roadblocks. Making Auro with higher-resolution art would have made it more resistant to constantly-changing sizes and aspect ratios of various devices." Reynolds says his studio is giving up on pixel art and embracing the new medium, and recommends other artists do the same. "Don't let the medium come between you and your audience. Speak in a language people can understand so that they can actually see what makes your work great without a tax."
Money or Art? (Score:5, Interesting)
There will always be people who will appreciate well made pixel art, just don't expect whole lot of money in it. Blake Reynolds griping about that and changing his niche is like someone complaining why nobody is buying his DOS application anymore in the year 2015.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The guy is saying how terrible it is that so few games use pixel art, and lays that on "HD fetishism" but then admits that pixel art is hard to make work well on a range of devices and because of that that he will no longer be doing any pixel art.
This can be translated: Guy whose claim to fame is pixel art is years behind the rest of the industry as to the facts of the matter of pixel art, and now he is forced to admit how behind he was but wants to blame "HD fetishism."
More pixels
Re:Money or Art? (Score:5, Informative)
Though I never intended for Auro to be a “retro-style” game, what I intended doesn’t matter at all, and it’s 100% my fault for failing to communicate in a language people understand.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
What is with this "HD" (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is 2D design vs 3D Rendering.
What I find to be the biggest point to that argument, is the bomb of Kings Quest 8, which killed the series.
Kings Quest Games were usually state of the art games, and they had a tendency to use new features for the game.
The first "3D" Perspective game, where the character can walk behind objects. By Kings Quest IV they started going big into quality sound. Kings Quest V Jumped into multi-media with VGA painted Graphics, and speech. Kings Quest VII, moved towards advanced 2d Animations to give more of a cartoon like feel. Then came Kings Quest VIII, It jumped on the 3d bandwagon, It looked like crap, we were use to beautiful impressive 2d worlds where it was a joy to get to a new screen, to a much larger, but very bland and repetitive 3d world. The 3d technology was too new back then. And they jumped to the technology without much insight of the quality of the universe.
"HD" Doesn't mean the end of quality 2d Games and graphics, It is just a tradeoff of how impressive of a world you want. If your game has a fixed camera angle. Then 2D may work to your advantage. Better hand drawn/photographic art, animation that doesn't need to follow physics, to give a better artistic effect. But if you need a world where you are looking in around, up and down... Then you may need to deal with some of the artististic quality loss for a 3D World.
Pixel art, and its older siblings Ascii/Ansi art, were perfected out of necessity. If you are stuck on 40x25 resolution, 80x25 resolution,160x200, 320x200, or 640x200 and the different modes meant you had different color pallets available, with screens with a low fuzzy dpi. Created creativity to create worlds that are more impressionistic of the character and less realistic.
Re: (Score:3)
he 3d technology was too new back then. And they jumped to the technology without much insight of the quality of the universe.
I assume your aware that there is a new kings quest in the making... King's Quest: Your Legacy Awaits, which when I initially saw the screen shots I was really sad. I guess they think 3d technology has evolved, but it still looks like ass in comparison to KQ7, which runs at much lower resolution.
There definitely a place for good hand drawn art in video games. See Machinarium, and a n
Re:Money or Art? (Score:5, Insightful)
His message is confused, possibly on purpose. The straw-man is "people" who don't like "pixelated" images. In fact "people" appreciate well done art, which he relies upon to try to make his point in the article, we are repeatedly asked to compare images and agree with him! But, and here's the real gist:
- Pixel art arose primarily due to device limitations: how does one create great art with huge, blocky pixels and a limited color palette? A genre was born
- Badly done, hid def art, frequently is preferred over well done pixel-art at lower resolutions. True enough, often non-artists can't see the mistakes or merely are less offended.
- Devices are screwing up his pixel art in some cases, making it look terrible. Can you blame users, here? No. I don't fully understand what is happening on some devices, but certainly not all devices have the same sized pixels, not all devices have SQUARE pixels, and when scaling happens various algorithms of unspecified quality are applied to render the image. It is a mathematical truth that a higher resolution source will produce a better display image.
- Here's what he didn't say, but is heavily implied: High Definition pixel art takes far too much work. The "pixel tax".
So if you boil down his argument it ends up being HD pixel art is cost prohibitive, but HD artwork gives more bang/buck, so our best option is to deliver lower quality art instead. Which is rational, but not ideal. However it is ignoring the obvious:
- Figure out why some devices improperly display his art, fix if possible ($$$)
- Create better tools for delivering HD pixel art ($$$)
The last one seems strange I guess, but his entire point was that pixel art was an evolved style. Various techniques and methods were created to do it well. With significantly improved technology, many of those techniques are out of vogue or utterly useless. At the same time, modern tools & animations are lacking in fidelity, not all of which can be fairly blamed on lazy-artists: there is still a need for pixel-art (by some definition), but the sheer magnitude of pixels and the multitudinous array of colors available makes it a daunting task. Better tools and techniques are needed to produce higher resolution computer art.
Personally I prefer hand drawn art in this style over 3D models for many types of games, so I will miss it. But I can't help but agree that low-res is probably not the right solution.
Re: (Score:2)
It's just easier to use 2D vector art to do the same job. Vector art also supports gradients if you want. At least some engines do.
What I suspect however is that he is going to miss the bandwagon *again* and will be jumping to 2D vector while everyone else will be jumping to 3D.
Re: (Score:2)
He's trying to claim that sprites from Street Fighter III and King of Fighters is pixel art, when it's certainly not. Those games are very obviously made using standard raster art techniques and tools.
Re:Money or Art? (Score:5, Informative)
IMHO the difference boils down to how the art is/was made for games - pixel art was animated, 3D art is mostly motion captured. That means the exaggerated actions you're familiar with in cartoons (jaw drops, deformed stretches and squished bounces) are in pixel art, but are missing from most 3D game animation. After nearly a century of drawing movies and flip art, animators had learned a whole bunch of subtle cues our brains use to perceive and interpret motion, and created exaggerated animations that exploited those cues to make the animated motion eye-candy and enjoyable to watch. As motion capture replaces animation, that knowledge is being lost. Same for drawing pictures with a limited resolution. Like in mosaics and impressionistic paintings, pixel artists had learned how to exploit cues our brains use to interpret shapes to imply there was more detail in the picture than there really was. That knowledge isn't in as much danger of being lost because it's been around a lot longer, but it's no longer as much in demand.
That's really what he's complaining about. Go watch some of the dancing in Disney's Sleeping Beauty [youtube.com] (1959). Watch the way her dress and hair moves while she's dancing. It's so realistic you could almost swear it was motion captured. In a way it was. Some animator spent hundreds of hours watching film of how people's hair and clothes move while they danced that scene in real life, then used that knowledge to draw the cels in that movie in what your brain interprets as realistic motion. Nowadays, you just motion capture it and transfer it straight onto a 3D model via computer, without ever having to learn why it looks realistic. Which parts of the motion are what's important for your brain to perceive it as right or wrong. And thus which parts you could exaggerate for greater impact like the Chun-li animation in TFA.
Re: (Score:2)
I think they also use equations to calculate motion. Especially when you're talking about objects where the number of elements (e.g. hair) and other issues make motion capture difficult [princeton.edu]. And they're good at it. I recall several years ago an old DOS game (probably the last one I played) where the motion rendering was so impressive I felt like I was actually in the floating boat.
Re: (Score:2)
It's so realistic you could almost swear it was motion captured. In a way it was. Some animator spent hundreds of hours watching film of how people's hair and clothes move while they danced that scene in real life, then used that knowledge to draw the cels in that movie in what your brain interprets as realistic motion. Nowadays, you just motion capture it and transfer it straight onto a 3D model via computer, without ever having to learn why it looks realistic.
Sorry, but that's not quite correct. Disney was famous for their use of rotoscoping, which basically involves filming live actors and then tracing their movements to create animations. Basically it was motion captured, just in 2D with far more primitive technology.
http://www.lomography.com/maga... [lomography.com] etc.
Look for PC gaming, not mobile (Score:4, Interesting)
Pixel art is very alive and kicking on PC, with some great recent releases, like Crypt of the Necrodancer, Titan Souls, etc. Maybe there is just the wrong audience on mobile.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
A small nitpick here; pixel art is alive and kicking in indie games. Naturally most of them are on the PC because of the low entry cost for developers.
There is no extra marketing value in having pixelated art these days unless nostalgia is used as a selling point. Because of this it is very unlikely to see pixel art from the large studios. It is only made by people who appreciate the art for the people that appreciate the art.
It's a bit like jazz that way, you have to be in the circlejerk to fully appreciat
Re: (Score:1)
"unlike jazz it is not obnoxious to everyone else."
I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you mean that there aren't people who dislike it, then I'd beg to differ, it's really an "I can't do hi-res, so I'll leave that to your imagination" style. I doesn't really look good unless you're a circlejerk. If you're talking about circlejerks being obnoxious to others, then of course there are those.
Re: (Score:2)
it's really an "I can't do hi-res, so I'll leave that to your imagination" style.
If you read the article you would see examples of the hi-res that does not look good. That horrible scene with the chipmunk flying through the air with purple mountains in the background. There is too much distraction with all the little dots all over the place. Just because you have high resolution does not mean it makes a good picture.
Re: (Score:1)
One studio failed at creating a pixel art game. That speaks more about this studio's professionalism, than about pixel art in itself, I feel they will fail the same way at providing a good Hi-Res game.
>> Reynolds says his studio is giving up on pixel art and embracing the new medium, and recommends other artists do the same.
Somehow android game titles like Pixel Dungeon, Gemini Rue, Sword and Socrecy and Anodyne managed to pull it off with pixel art and are feeling fine. Sour grapes and the fox, anyon
Re: (Score:3)
One problem that "artists" usually have is that the graphics look excellent while the gameplay sucks donkey balls because they have no technical ability whatsoever. But I don't know what happened in this case.
Re: (Score:2)
"pixel" blocky art is also a cost saving measure.
it's like shooting in SD so you can save a bit of money on the props.
not all bad as such. but that's what it is. it's cheaper, faster and easier to create "pixel art" which is passable than really good looking vector art.
also you can see this in them just using them for sprites, and going on to rotate, scale and whatever those sprites NOT in a pixel fashion. the whole presentation is not in low resolution mode. only assets that would take different artists an
Re: (Score:2)
"pixel" blocky art is also a cost saving measure.
Not at all - good pixel art takes way more man hours to produce than good 3D art. Heck, even bad pixel art does. It's much harder to convey an idea in a limited pallete and limited resolution than it is with all that beautiful smooth space available.
Personally, I hate the result, but that doesn't mean it's easy to make.
Re: (Score:2)
but unlike jazz it is not obnoxious to everyone else.
No, I can assure you, I find pixel art actively obnoxious. Not only does it look terrible (IMO), but someone actively put extra effort into making it look terrible.
Re: (Score:2)
Pixel art is also big stuff in the h-game scene still, mainly because it's easy to produce and there's quite a few people who make good money creating sprites and pixel for the games that use it. Plus it has a very low entrance level for people wanting to make their own games, since many people use RPGmaker or GameMaker. So if you don't want to pay someone, you can learn how to do it on your own. There isn't the huge gap between pixel/sprite work as there is with 3D rendering for example.
Re: (Score:2)
This story was penned purely to create discussion. Clearly there is a live pixel-art community and industry.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It's alive and kicking on mobile too. Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP [wikipedia.org] started off on iOS before coming to PC a year later. Wayward Souls [metro.co.uk] is another one with graphics that look like something you'd expect from an SNES-era or PS1-era game, yet the folks I've talked to say that it plays like a Demon Souls or Dark Souls game.
If anything, I'd think that pixel art is seeing a major resurgence following the popularity of games with low graphical fidelity like Minecraft and a host of other indie titles that
Duelyst (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, MInecraft is hugely popular and could be considered under the pixel art category, look closely at the textures on the blocks, they look like pixels to me (or more accruately texels...but who is being that pedantic...).
Re: (Score:2)
The graphics in Duelyst look, to me, like rasterized vector graphics or traced graphics not actual pixel art.
Re: (Score:2)
pixels? really? (Score:5, Funny)
Do they even have pixels any more? I haven't seen one in years!
Re: (Score:2)
i am so old... (Score:1)
FTFY (Score:2)
"Some Guy, lead artist for a game, has put up a post about the decline of quality art in games. He decries the current state of "Pixel fetishism" in the industry, saying that games with great art get needlessly marked down in reviews for their 'quality', while games that have awful — but pixel — art get glowing praise. He walks through a number of examples showing how art can be well done or poorly done, and how it can be extremely complex despite the higher resolution. But now artists are runni
Decline of oekaki, too (Score:3)
Pixel art in games has always been pretty well respected, even before retro became a thing. What's really surprised me has been the decline of pixel art in general outside of gaming.
I've been a long-time fanatic over oekaki art, which is essentially pixel art drawn directly on the web using Java applets or (rarely) Flash. The impromptu nature of the medium means most art will be done in 5-30 minutes, and the applets generally don't allow you to import a canvas, so the art is done from scratch and is all your own work. The communities are fairly small, dedicated, and consist mostly of artists. The most popular Java applets favor the pencil tool over airbrushes, an intentionally limited palette, and have special masking and dithering tools which results in most oekakis having a distinctive look. It's wicked fun, and much more creative and engaging than boards like 4chan.
Oekaki boards are generally hosted as standalone web sites. Since the rise of social networks, oekaki has all but disappeared, both the BBSes and the artwork style. The Java applets rarely work these days due to everyone's (and Oracle's) hateboner over applets, so there's really no way to draw online anymore.
What I find most interesting, though, is that everyone trying to write an HTML5-based paint program these days is trying to make a full-fledged painting application, complete with airbrush tools, transparent layers, and sometimes even trying to integrate complex features like the magic wand (and very badly). Performance and drawing lag is horrible. Why are there no pixel art or oekaki HTML5 apps? Pixel art is wicked fast with HTML5 canvas, so a good pixel art application would be ideal, but apparently nobody has an interest in doing this when they can write a bad Photoshop clone nobody wants. Even DeviantArt, which has a drawing app called Muro, has written their crappy paint app with an airbrush tool, and it's impossible to make even good art with that app, let alone pixel art.
It's getting increasingly difficult to keep my BBS alive due to the death of Java on the web. I may have to hire someone to write an HTML5 program for me.
damn noobs (Score:2, Informative)
"Some devices blur Auro [their game]. Some devices stretch it. Some devices letterbox it. No matter how hard I worked to make the art in Auro as good as I could, there's no way a given person should be expected to see past all those roadblocks.
This is bullshit. Here's what I do for proper pixel art: Use GL_NEAREST (no blur on scaling). Compute the upscale factor such that the 1px:1 game unit viewport is within some bounds, ergo, a fleixble viewport size that's "close enough" to avoid letterboxing. Render UI with placment coordinates anchored to an edge: absolute and/or percentage pixels from top, left, right, bottom. Middle is 50% from any of those anchors. This gives flexible UI inside the flexible viewport. This works on both mobile and d
Flexible viewport has caused problems (Score:2)
Compute the upscale factor such that the 1px:1 game unit viewport is within some bounds, ergo, a fleixble viewport size that's "close enough" to avoid letterboxing.
"Flexible viewport" can reveal more or less of the map than intended. More provides the player with excess information that may distract or spoil; less denies the player information on which the map design relies. If your game is designed for a 320x224 pixel window, what scale factor do you use for a device with 480x320 pixels?
Less has noticeably hurt playability in two games that I've played. There's one jump in the platform game Hello Kitty World that works well on the original console with its 256x240 pi
Re: (Score:2)
So if you are designing a game for mobile platforms from the get go, you'd design it in such a way that revealing an extra bit of map is not an issue.
Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad games (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm 45. I played Space Invaders in my local bowling alley when it came out - with my limited allowance. I was 10 (it took a while to get the midwest USA).
I hate pixel art. It reminds me of bad games. Why limit yourself to an outdated method?
Gameplay is king, but appearance is important.
Pixel art holds zero nostalgia for me. Give me something that looks good, and plays great, and I will buy it. Pixelated graphics do NOT look good.
Re:Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad game (Score:5, Insightful)
For the same reason that some people still choose to paint rather than photograph.
Pixelated graphics are only a sign of displaying the art at the wrong resolution, not a symptom of the art itself. There's nothing stopping someone doing pixel art in HD, or just running in a slightly lower res.
Give me something that plays great and I'll buy it. The particular decisions they've taken over artwork really are second-place to that.
This is why I like the indie games at the moment. Good ideas and playable games and they've just pulled back the artwork and not spent millions and years on expensive 3D models with perfect texturing.
Associating the graphics with the quality of the games themselves is quite telling - some of the best games I've ever played have sucky graphics. Master of Orion, anyone? Where your "ships" are a strip of pixels 3 high and 5 wide (or thereabouts) as they travel between planets? Who cares?
Re: (Score:1)
A photograph is a record, while a painting is a creation
Not sure how that relates to pixels vs vectors?
Re:Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad game (Score:5, Insightful)
Somebody who thinks a photograph is just a record doesn't understand photography at all.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad game (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, one more thing: do you remember the beautiful glow that some of these games gave off? Just a few months ago I had the opportunity to try Asteroids in the original. The bullets that you shoot are mesmerising.
Bloom (Score:2)
Oh, one more thing: do you remember the beautiful glow that some of these games gave off? Just a few months ago I had the opportunity to try Asteroids in the original. The bullets that you shoot are mesmerising.
In other words, MOAR BLOOM [wikipedia.org].
What I really miss: high quality sprite graphics (Score:3)
But the alternative in the 2D universe is all too often Flash or Flash-style animation, which IMO is a harbinger of cheesiness and not very attractive looking at all. It's very garish and cartoony--given the choice between the two I think I'd rather have pixel art, sinc
Re: (Score:3)
While I don't actively hate it pixel art, I agree it's overused. If you're not specifically going for a retro vibe, I don't really see it as attractive. I think decrying the decline of this 'art form' is definitely premature at this point. But the alternative in the 2D universe is all too often Flash or Flash-style animation, which IMO is a harbinger of cheesiness and not very attractive looking at all. It's very garish and cartoony--given the choice between the two I think I'd rather have pixel art, since (for me) it's a bit easier on the eyes, draws less attention to itself once you've been playing it for a bit. What I really miss is that one art form that has been absolutely massacred by the trio of pixel art, flash graphics and (the ever easier to implement) 3D graphics--high quality sprite artwork. Think late 90s / early 2000s RTSes and CRPGs like Starcraft, Diablo 1/2, Fallout 1/2, Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, etc. If you have any of these games a high resolution makeover (the sad part is, in many cases higher resolution versions of many of the sprites probably existed on the artists' hard drives at the time) and they would look rather good. Improve the animations a bit (either by using 2.5D or by generating 2D sprites from 3D models) and I really think it could rival many of today's 3D games, for at least somewhat less money. (I'm not sure how much quality 2D artists cost vs. high end 3D graphics, so I couldn't say for sure how much less.) Scaling to different resolutions would be an issue, but not an impossible one and on the plus side you wouldn't have to worry about graphics card performance at all... But alas, the AAA developers simply aren't going to sully themselves with such oldschool nonsense, and the indie developers are inevitably going to gravitate towards pixel art or cartoony Flash art due to the cost savings.
THIS. Seriously people, go play a Metal Slug game sometime - some of the sprite work of the late 90's is absolutely amazing, and the detail and crispness is unrivaled by even modern day graphics. I really wish high quality sprite work came back, honestly, because it looks gorgeous. People often pay attention to the other two extreme ends of the spectrum (pixel art and then 3D high res graphics), but the middle ground has completely disappeared...
Re: (Score:2)
It takes a lot of time to do it so eventually people just started using 3D rendered models rendered into 2D sprites and shit. The articles goes in this regarding Diablo and I know it happened in several other games as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Same here (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But he's not referencing those early 8bit grfx, but rather the good old time of big shiny colourful 16bit pixel art (amiga, snes, genesis/megadrive, etc).
Just look at some of those games and tell me they look bad or that you can't figure out what the sprite looks like, these are nothing like the grafics you get on an Atari 2600.
Re: (Score:2)
I disagree. I think pixelated graphics can look better than high-res. Mainly because pixelated art leaves more to the imagination. Your brain fills in the details. Some 2D games that use high-res pictures don't appeal to me because I don't like the art style, like, for example, the faces of the characters. I have never experienced this "issue" with retro-themed 2D games that use more pixelated art.
Re: (Score:2)
Amen, brother! Pixel art was great when that's all that was possible. Compared to what's possible now it's just plain ugly. Oh, sure, there are a very few modern games that really benefit from the retro style. Good for them. Most, though, merely do it because good art is hard. Really good pixel art is hard, too, but barely passable pixel art is a lot easier th
Re: (Score:2)
> Pixelated graphics do NOT look good.
Say [blogspot.com] what [thealmightyguru.com] again? [steamstatic.com]
Agree (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm writing a game at the moment, it'll never be more than hobbyist-level stuff but I can't do the art AT ALL.
I had a guy do it. Mainly because, instead of fancy 3D models and bog-standard textures and copy/paste, they were willing to create pixel art from scratch. Sure, it didn't look "HD", it didn't scale without using HQ3X scalers, etc. but - it took a great deal of skill and was how I wanted the game to look. I don't get why everything has to be "proper" 3D, for decades games just weren't. I don't get why even the 2D games are displayed using 3D models, or rendered from 3D models. And if your chosen art-style is cartoon-y, then pixel art suits it a lot more.
Finding a 2D isometric, pixel-artist is the hardest thing in the world (hint; anyone available?). Nobody seems to want to do it at all. I'm sure it's no harder than picking up Blender and having to create a 3D model but it's not the "in-thing". Seriously, my guy churned out isometric sprites 32-pixel wide by 64-tall in minutes each, using nothing more than MS Paint, which would have taken half-a-day to model and then render in the right view and had to use Blender or similar.
Sure, if you're just after slapping in placeholders or using free models, it might work, but not everything WANTS to be 3D-rendered, shiny with shadows, bump textures, etc. and all the other stuff. I'm trying to make a game in a certain look and that look doesn't involve 3D.
For some reason, it's like every artist in the world has suddenly decided the paintbrush is old hat and we have to use spray-guns instead. Fine, for trying different media, experimentation, the odd artwork, or even your particular specialist niche. But why does EVERYTHING have to be 3D-modelled even when the game isn't 3D?
Similarly, yes, I could have specified an isometric vector game and scaled as appropriate. But, that's not the look I want.
Honestly, I'm so bored of games having to be rendered all in the same way rather than the way that suits the game best. Indie games like Prison Architect and retro-games are my only way to get away from the norm, it seems. Sure, I like GTA5 as much as the next guy, but - for instance - something like Heroes of Might and Magic, I still prefer the old flat-2D versions.
Re: (Score:3)
Here's a guy (who I believe is available for hire) that does a bunch of 2D tutorials.
http://2dgameartforprogrammers... [blogspot.com]
Website is crap design (seriously, you put the historical browsing tool 2-3 pages down on the page???) but the tutorials are good (I suck at graphics but am able to do some of the stuff he talks about).
Lately I've been loving the pixalized game Corporate Lifestyle Simulator (as well as FTL). But I like all types of games, Fallout 3 is probably my favorite of all time.
I don't watch black & white movies anymore, ei (Score:3, Interesting)
Times marches on. Technology advances.
Some people will hold to the old ways, and complain while the rest of us advance with the times.
When those people are "Horse and Buggy Makers," we ridicule them. Why should we coddle pixel artists?
Re: (Score:2)
Because it's not a technology, but an art-form?
It's like saying that painting is old-hat and only digital-photography can be done from now on - why would anyone "paint" or "sketch" or "draw"? God, what heathens!
All are still equally prized, skilled and valid and used according to the requirements of a particular project. Sure, we still get digital artists and artworks that are just a computer showing a JPEG, but... come on. It's like saying that now we have MIDI, nobody should pick up a real instrument a
Re: (Score:1)
Because it's not a technology, but an art-form?
It's like saying that painting is old-hat and only digital-photography can be done from now on - why would anyone "paint" or "sketch" or "draw"? God, what heathens!
No, it's like saying that digital photography with the first wave of digital cameras is more artful than digital photography with the most recent professional cameras. What the author actually means to say is that his "art" in working within unnecessary limitations to produce a very artful result is not appreciated by people who mostly think "that picture would have been much better at a higher resolution".
I read TFA (I know, I know) and the whole thing basically boils down to "good art is better than bad
Re: (Score:2)
Because it's not a technology, but an art-form?
It's like saying that painting is old-hat and only digital-photography can be done from now on - why would anyone "paint" or "sketch" or "draw"? God, what heathens!
No one is saying that though. Some guy is moaning his pixel art isn't being heralded as the best thing ever.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Pixel art isn't automatically good art (Score:4, Insightful)
You end up with several pixel sizes on screen, rotating pixels(!), super-smooth gradients, and inconsistent use of palettes. And then there's the resolution/scaling problems on top making things look worse. To older gamers/retro game enthusiasts, it can often just look a mess.
Creating good pixel art is hard. Some of the greatest pixel art (e.g. Bitmap Brothers games) came from working with severe limitations, such as 16-color screen modes, which led to some very creative use of palettes and dithering.
Game engine that emulates old console's video chip (Score:2)
Say someone created an engine that emulates the S-PPU and S-DSP chips in a Super NES. Then a game written in native or Java or C# or JavaScript code can output graphics and audio by sending display lists and waveform playback commands to those emulated chips. Would a game created with such an engine feel more authentic?
Hipster artist upset... (Score:1)
Hipster artist upset that the mainstream just can't appreciate how awesome his work is. Film at 11.
CRT vs TFT (Score:3, Interesting)
Pixel art died when we switched from old style CRTs to TFTs. The art of C64/Amiga/PC(CGA/VGA) era looks good in CRTs because of the blurring. With TFTs we have to increase the resolution and colors.
crt (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The age of the square, visible pixel was actually a pretty short period between blurry CRTs and retina LCDs. Pixel art was originally created for CRT, which blurs the pixels. Artists developed techniques to take advantage of this.
Going by your UID, I'm guessing you were too young to have been there. The glory days of pixel art was the 80s and early 90s with resolutions of 320x240 and less as well as 4-256 colors simply because you had no other choice. Those were very visible, even on the CRT. A good example is comparing TES II: Daggerfall, released in 1996 which was the last of the "pixelated" generation with 320x200x256 color and TES III: Morrowind in 2002, which was a damn beauty with up to 1600x1200x16.7mio color and all of this
The Decline of Chiptunes (Score:2)
Similarly one could ask "why are so few artists making 8-bit chiptunes these days, voluntarily restricting themselves to the limits of a pair of AY3-8910 chips?" The answer is: because it's passé, plain and simple. I still do it (some, far from exclusively), but even some of the other people on the same project don't understand why I am sticking religiously to either 3 notes + 1 noise in mono, or 6 + 2 in hard-panned stereo, with no exceptions. (OK, for Berlioz I used exactly double that.) I force myse
Use an 8-channel sampler (Score:2)
It's not cheating to use an 8-channel sampler, so long as you stick to it and don't use more than a certain total waveform size in a single piece. That'd be Super NES-authentic.
Confused (Score:2)
The guy is confused. Art != looks good.
Just look at paintings, in comparison van Gogh was a pixel artist while Rembrandt made proper high-definition 3D, yet both have made works that are considered great art.
When people complain about pixelation it's because nearly everyone cares about what looks good and not about good art.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on your definition.
To me, art isn't some arty-farty defintion about what the artists "means" or "feels" or whatever junk.
Art is a thing that looks good, and that takes skill to create. By my definition "modern art" isn't art. It's just boxes on a canvas, or soiled beds in a museum, as it takes no skill to create.
I invite you to go to pixeljoint.net, for instance, where the galleries of artwork are FABULOUS - beautiful, genius use of the tools at hand, and not something that just anyone could recre
Re: (Score:2)
Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Completing an art college does not make you an artist, it makes you a craftsman at best.
Having people willing to hand over their own money for what you've created makes you an artist.
This does not include government subsidies and grants; that's OTHER people's money.
FWIW, I do like some of modern art. Skill shouldn't be any factor; if somebody can create something mindnumbingly awesome with minimal technical skill, I'd still consider it art, because it's still
Re: (Score:2)
Georges Seurat was a pixel artist.
"A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" is really something to see in person because it's so big (2m high, 3m wide) and Seurat's pointillist style makes you wonder how he actually was able to paint it. It's almost worth the trip to the Art Institute of Chicago on its own.
Manual Quantization (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have any clue how fonts render in small (or overlay large) sizes?
It's called font-hinting. Because when you just take a vector and stretch it to the desired pixel size, you often end up with junk not resembling the vector at all.
So font designers then have to go and "hint" the font for specific point-sizes - what's "hinting"? Pixel art, basically, for those font-sizes. They say "put a pixel here" or not depending on what makes it look better at that particular size.
Vectors are not, and never have
Re: (Score:1)
It's called font-hinting. Because when you just take a vector and stretch it to the desired pixel size, you often end up with junk not resembling the vector at all.
Thats only true for very small fonts which are bordering on illegible, where sometimes they even just include bitmapped variants because you're approaching the point where the vector is not useful since a pixel takes up 20-30% of character. The rules change at this scale.
Vectors are not, and never have been the be-all and end-all of graphics. Take a paintbrush-artist using a particular stipple effect - to just encode their strokes as vectors means it won't render at small or very large sizes effectively either. It's just not that simple.
This is true, but no one is reducing it to drawing lines of fixed width with no other attributes, are they? I mean other than you. Either way, certainly vector graphics are not always the best way to store information about a particular
Re: (Score:2)
Orly.
https://developer.apple.com/li... [apple.com]
Strange. Seems their official app guidelines are to supply icons in multiple raster sizes and it picks the best one to use...
"Capable" and "Actually Utilises" are very different things.
P.S. Display PDFs natively just means it has a library to do so. It says nothing about the underlying system. I can display PDF's "natively" on Windows, it's called the Reader app.
Manyland... (Score:2)
Art or process? (Score:1)
The more I read about "pixel art" the more it seems a process. First you have to have constrained media: mainly low resolution or long viewing distance. Probably noisy environments and bad lighting. Add to this blurry CRTs and limited memory. They guy at dinofarmgames.com says "It’s among the best 2D animation ever made in a video game" and "SFIII’s animation is orders of magnitude better than SFIV’s". I would say it's just different. The same reason why Hamlet's performance is different f
Fuck This Ultra-Modern Pixel Art (Score:2)
If you ask me, where we wrong was pushing for this ultra-realistic pixel art when we already had the truly engaging expression of ASCII art. It's still a struggle to make ASCII art work with modern screen sizes and non-standard (80 x 25) layouts...but we must persevere, lest the unwashed heathen masses that consume our art fail to understand it.
I suppose we could supply them with a README.TXT file to tell them what the art is trying to say to their monkey brains.
Vinyla vs CDs (Score:1)
the uncanny valley (Score:2)
In the comments he accidentally stumbles on the real problem, without really understanding.
Pixel art as a more expressive form, sure, it's easier than trying to bend 3D or vector art to your vision.
Pixels as a statement, no problem there. It completely misunderstands what artists were trying to achieve back in the day when all game art was pixel art and the work went into making it not look like a bunch of pixels. But I can go with a deliberate style.
The screenshot of his game just looks like they drew the
There's more than 2 types of art style (Score:1)
The author thinks that pixel art style is the only alternartive to realistic, which is false. Look at Prince of Persia, or Borderlands (both of which have very good looking stylised art)
Re: (Score:2)
Prince of Persia was made for the Apple II, whose practical resolution was 280x192 on black-white edges or 140x192 with color. True, it was rotoscoped from a videotape of an actor, but it's still very much low-res pixel art.
Most pixel art is bullshit (Score:2)
It's not just pixel artists! (Score:2)
Dammit, nobody appreciates frescoes anymore.
And what about blacksmiths? Marginalised, trivialized and pushed to the curb as if people have better ways to do things?
Deeply unfair.
Minecraft anyone? (Score:2)
The most successful independent game of all time is essentially 3D pixel art.
What a load of chuff (Score:1)
People were mad about talkies too. (Score:1)
the 90s were great (Score:1)
And I have always hated 3D games since the first time I saw one.
I'll see your Pixel and raise you an ANSI (Score:2)
Fad no longer popular anymore (Score:2)
Sound the alarms! Pop artists of one particular style are no longer being appreciated as much as they were 3 years ago. Will they now have to suffer in obscurity? change the style of art they practice? oh woe is me?
Bigger pixels. (Score:2)
A lot of people seem to be missing the point here. Pixel art is a visual style; just like cel shading, voxel graphics or realistic 3D common to most FPSs. That this particular aesthetic was borne out of technical limitations is irrelevant. All art styles had their foundation in something, some of those being technological advancements in ceramics, pigments or metallurgy.
Of course, certain art styles are more popular than others. If you're looking at this from the perspective of a commercial enterprise it mi
It's just too common at this point (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
3D doesn't mean 'suspended disbelief', he's saying a lot of 3D graphics out there are just plain shit because no particular talent is being used to define their style. And he's right! You're probably having a hard time realizing that because this generation of gaming has provided a bunch of tools to make everything look bumpy. You haven't seen much of that before so just seeing the effect looks 'cool'. In a few years from now you're gonna say 'huh, not as nice as I remembered'. Right now you're being imp
Re: (Score:2)
Pixel art has a lot going for it, and it's not really "artsy fartsy."
"Artsy fartsy" is when too much emphasis is placed on the styling rather than substance. See "Oni and the Blind Forest" as a recent example: HD graphics, very pretty, story is pretentious as fuck. The pretty graphics are really the only thing that game has going for it.
That doesn't mean HD graphics are artsy either, I'm just saying that art style is not the only measure of pretentiousness.
On the other hand, pixel art games have a more mini
Re: (Score:3)
English
Adjective
artsy-fartsy (comparative artsy-fartsier, superlative artsy-fartsiest)
(informal) A frivolous or dismissive description of someone or something that is artistic or pretentiously artistic.
Related terms
hoity-toity
highfalutin
See also
fancy-schmancy
Re: (Score:2)
How would you go about scaling, say, 256x208 to 1920x1080 without any sort of distortion?
Good defaults that Just Work (Score:2)
However the player wants it to be displayed.
How does a player who lacks the time to specify how it shall be displayed want it to be displayed?
square pixels (even if the system would never display them as such, like the Master System or SNES)
Incidentally, the exact pixel aspect ratio for Master System, NES, Genesis H32 mode, and Super NES is 8:7. This can be calculated from their pixel clock rate (945/176 MHz), the nominal scanline width of Rec. 601 (704 cycles of a 13.5 MHz clock), and the 240-pixel height and 4:3 shape of the visible portion of an NTSC field. I've been collecting other platforms' pixel clock rates and PARs as well [pineight.com].
You really can please all the people all the time, if your software is capable of supplying the things they want.
For most people