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The Decline of Pixel Art
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."
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.
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.
Games like Duelyst are flying the flag for well made pixel art just fine. It seems to me that one developer has been having problems with their pixel art, and is projecting that onto the rest of the industry. THe Pixel art in Duelyst was actually one of the main things that had attracted me to the game in the first place. The fact that I found the game enjoyable *after* playing it was practically a bonus.
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...).
Do they even have pixels any more? I haven't seen one in years!
This makes me sad for a strange reason: i am so old ("masterbate with ascii art" old) that i remember some great pixel art (not just in games).
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Plenty of pixel games on Kongregate
The pixel art in older games was often drawn by experienced artists for games pushing the limits of what was possible at the time.
The latest crop of retro pixel fetichism is generally badly drawn and lazy.
"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 running into not only the expectation of hipster content, but technological obstacles as well. "Some devices pixelate Blarg [their game]. Some devices lack the colour. No matter how hard I worked to make the art in Blarg as good as I could, there's no way a given person should be expected to see past all those roadblocks. Making Blarg with pixel-art would have made it more resistant to making money." He says his studio is giving up on 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." "
...
In fairness, this is a cell phone game.
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.
"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 desktop, because why wouldn't it?
Some players end up seeing a few more pixels of game world on their screen than others, but that's all there is. If you're taking any available screen res instead of specifying a resolution then the device will not try to scale and blur things. It's not surprising that most shitty mobile devs and careless AAA devs suck at basic algebra for UI and resolution independent rendering, most don't care for pixel art. However, if you're a stickler for pixel art and you can't basic non-blurry upscaling working, then go back to 10th grade and try reading the damn API sometime instead of relying on some crappy "game framework" that's not designed for your application. It's REALLY not hard to "port" a game between platforms, most of the time in dev is in the art/audio and exploring/refining the game mechanics.
All that said, There has been a trend for the past few years of both web games and mobile games PUBLISHERS to favour purchasing high res &&|| polygonal graphics, and avoiding pixel art like the plague. This isn't a new thing. The average player really doesn't care about which aesthetic you chose as long as the gameplay is fun and the art is good.
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.
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.
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?
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?
The reason we had pixel art in the first place is that's what screens could display. Then, we got super-high resolution displays and the need for pixels went away. I can't even see the pixels on my LCD screen even though it's a foot away from my face right now. So why are they clinging to this outdated concept?
Because something in the artsy fartsy mind takes great delight in "we can do it much better now, but we're going to deliberately use the outdated method instead!" People don't understand why the graphics are blocky and give low ratings. Cue the anguished whining that people just don't understand great artists, smelly unwashed commoners don't deserve the kind of great art that we offer, etc., I think all of us know the rest of it from here by heart because we've heard it so many times.
It's not their fault for making crappy-looking graphics, it's everyone else's fault for failing to recognize artistic brilliance when we see it. If it IS popular, then it's bad art by definition (Leland D Howard, Norman Rockwell, etc.)
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
There's a lot of really poor pixel art, often being made by young/inexperienced indie devs - too young to have played games on hardware with real palette limitations and real hardware sprites.
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.
Hipster artist upset that the mainstream just can't appreciate how awesome his work is. Film at 11.
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 again - just use the MIDI soundbanks and a computer.
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 impressed by gimmicks.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
If you look at how a CRT television actually displayed games, you'd see there are blurring/dithering or other distortion. That's why some emulators have filters to make the screen look like a television.
I imagine that reusing and reskinning 3D models would be easier, and add that to the new engines with their more sophisticated technologies of making the graphics look way more crisp and better.
Pixel art on the other hand seems to need experienced artists who knows how to make good pixel art, plus reusing them must probably mean almost redoing/recoloring major 'parts' of it, if not all.
Additionally, some indie games have indeed 'revived' the pixel look of games, but then some of them aren't of good quality.
That's just my 2cents, I
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.
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
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 myself to adhere to those limitations because that's what they were. If I don't, then it's inauthentic, and once I start bending rules for convenience, why should I stick to the Mockingboard format at all? I might as well do cheesy MIDI with 16 channels and essentially no composition limits.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I was in to pixel art about ten years ago, and while you may have some respite in icons this is a dying art form. Embrace the tools that can make your artwork breach the 200x200 box! You don't have to use a 3d render tool as you have the skills to make something look real without it. Never the less, don't expect those who view your work to tolerate your pixelated BS into 2020.
You are saying that images consist of little dots? Nooo, now I cannot watch computer graphics anymore without seeing the dots! Look at what you have done!!!
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 art, but most people don't recognize bad art". It has always been that way. Even more, most people these days will have trouble appreciating even the classic black-and-white movies, even though they know a-priori that it is art. Past a certain point it's very difficult to see past the outdated technological limitations.
I remember when I first saw the Amiga games with their original CRT displays. They looked flawless and beautiful. You rarely saw "pixels" as such. Then, many years later I tried Amiga games in an emulator. The games looked horrible. Must have been a bad memory OR the fact that the screen was blurry.
I remember seeing some high end Targa/Vista graphics card demo in 1990..1992. They marketed it as the "photorealistic graphics" but most of that was probably attributable to the blurring effect of the displays.
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.
Pixels are a quantized version of whatever it is you want to portray. Pixel art is doing that quantization manually, when the computer could do it for you, rasterizing to whatever resolution it needs. Therefore the artwork should all be in vector form. They've been doing it that way for Fonts since the late 1980s, it's really about time all other graphics caught up.
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What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
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.
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.
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Only that the authors mentions High resolution pixel art more than once. He distinctively says that his point is not unnecessary limitations. This part of his argument shows where he points out that high res pixel art is different than technical up-scaling. He's basically pointing out the difference between drawing and digital photography. Most 3D games today are closer to digital photography than they are to drawing, so he is pretty much correct. I only disagree with him that there are a lot of modern games that do have beautiful pixel art.
Replying to my own message: just use youtube and search for "crt" and "arcade". There are real pixels visible ("final fight"). However there are pixels visible when you use tft:s.
Shovel Knight has pixel graphics, but they're either displayed stretched or there's a post processing pass that distorts the clean pixels. You can't turn this off, which is absolutely bamboozling to me.
You can see that clearly on this screenshot (from super adventures).
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.
I guess they have a problem with people moving on from consoles to gui as well...whiny little bi...
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 from some other type of theatre plays. There is a reason why there are only a few frames done for the animation and there is a reason why the characters in theatre plays behave as if "over acting". People can't see their faces.
I'm with you on this. I was just slightly too old for the Nintendo generation (grew up with a PC anyway), and I believe nostalgia for old Nintendo and Super NES games is what drives the whole pixel art thing. I don't personally see any more value in that art style than I do in the crappy old CGA graphics that he shows an example of in the article.
Old guy. For the same gameplay enjoyment, I will take a nice graphic over pixelized art. I will accept pixelized art only if the gameplay is superior to the non pixelized one. But as you note , this is an acceptance of a lower visual technology for the sake of better gameplay. In absence of better gameplay, screw hold on from dark ages.
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Who's saying that? Did you read the article?
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.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Pixel art will die slowly, until few hipsters rediscover it, as a cool alternative to overproduced game rendering. Just saying...
Pixel art is a cheap way to get your graphics done nowadays. The low resolution means you have to be a little creative to make things look recognizable, but at the same time you can ignore lots of fine detail that you would've had to draw out neatly, had you used something more high-res.
When I see pixel art in modern games, I see it as a means to save time and money on graphics. I don't see it as attractive because I grew up with low resolution video games.
Most of the time, I play a game because it's fun, and gameplay merely requires functional graphics, not pretty ones.
Shit, just look at nethack or dwarf fortress. I think those games may take it a bit too far even, as I always use a simple graphical tileset so it's a bit easier to see what is what.
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 graphics at too low a resolution then badly scaled them, not an explicit statement about pixels as an artform. Either go big on pixels or go HD, anything in between is a rendering error and users will see the error not the intent.
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)
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.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
A photograph is a record, while a painting is a creation
Not sure how that relates to pixels vs vectors?
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...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Somebody who thinks a photograph is just a record doesn't understand photography at all.
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.
The vast majority of games that employ pixel art do so because they want to have an art budget of $1.50. While some games really wouldn't be the same without it (like Retro City Rampage), I'm pretty sick of seeing every lazy asshole indie dev using pixel art and slapping the word "retro" on their terrible game. It's gotten to the point that pixel art is a good way to weed out games I don't want to play. Turns out you can absolutely judge a book by its cover.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
-Styopa
The most successful independent game of all time is essentially 3D pixel art.
Because it's not a method, it's a style.
Take a good hard look folks... this is what happens when you feed a troll... you get trolled harder!.
Pixel art games are more popular now than they have been since the 1980's.
Someone is mad because pixel art is declining? I suppose people were upset when movies became talkies too.
Or painting.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
What a load of bullshit, everyone knows that bigger numbers are better.
That's why all my art goes up to 11.
If you can't see why going up to 11 is better the you just don't understand art.
And I have always hated 3D games since the first time I saw one.
I'll try to make this as simple as possible. You are an idiot. Ok I'm done.
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.
No. Pixelated graphics DO look good. They look better than HD 2D that 99% of the time just looks like cheap Flash vector bullshit, which everyone uses because it's easy to make.
See how easy this is, stating opinion as fact?
Also you must hate tile murals. And any sort of impressionism. Because hey, why LIMIT yourself to low-detail techniques when you can go high detail, right? It's not as if limitations breed creativity, haha! Imagine that!
Well shit, why limit ourselves to pianos and string instruments anymore when we've got dubstep? Why limit ourselves to painting when we can piss in bottles instead (that's MODERN art you know, not some outdated paint and brush barbarism)? Why limit ourselves to logic and reason when we've got the much newer and therefore much better social justice ideology that's based on feelings and psychosis?
Good quality pixel art is very beautiful and requires a lot of skill and effort to make, but I guess all you care about is novelty. Are you sure you aren't actually twelve years old?
...sucks. I lived through the end of it and I just could NOT wait for each iteration og video cards/consoles bringing higher and higher resolution and more colors.
The only excuse for pixel art today is that you're too cheapass to hire decent artists OR can't afford them as pixel art is still utter shit as is cell shaded cartoony graphics.
It's all about art direction. I know I'd rather go back and play a "pixelated" game that still looks relatively beautiful compared to a game that tried to be "state of the art" and just looks like ass today. That said, it's not about "pixels", and that's what the author was apparently trying to convey. Everyone here just reacted exactly like he predicted.
Is the problem so much the use of flash, or the people using the tools and not applying details that could give the art a less cartoony appearance?
People like to pretend this is like some easy "vinyl vs digital" tech issue when it's really one of artistic effort. It's more about which SONGS from the vinyl days we're still listening to today, and why they're still worth hearing compared to modern music, even though they're re-mastered from scratchy old recordings.
If you can honestly go back and tell me that a game that tried to look "state of the art" even 5 years ago looks better than a game that just tried to have nice art direction, then you're the one coddling the wrong people. Mario 64 looks like garbage today and is 99% seams and glue, but Super Mario World is still at worst quaintly retro and feels solid. Let's stop pretending that this is a simple matter of time marching on when it's one of what we SHOULD be bringing into the future (quality rather than quantity).
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Have I elicited an emotional response gamer-boy? Why don't you fire up DOOM for MSDOS and shoot balls of light at pixelated monsters until your screen is covered in pixelated blood? I hear retro games played off the floppy disk drive have joined the ranks of Betamax and Vinyl to become retro art forms now.
I'd tell you to shove an NES controller up your ass and see if it cures the butt-hurt but the sharp corners of a rectangular prism might hearken back to the days before Steve Jobs broke all the corners off of geometry and started wearing black turtlenecks/killing his pancreas with fruit pesticides.
Look everybody! I'm a troll spewing obscenity on the internet! I'm an ARTIST!
You know: just like the guy taking a GPU capable of 4K renders and wasting his shader cores on rendering 100x OpenGL quads to make a single monotone square and calling it a "pixel". Because "Minecraft" or something? He justifies it by making vague references to pointer arithmetic, but we all know the real reason he is stuck in flatland is because he tried making "just another generic Voxel engine" for his senior project at "The Art Institute of FAFSA-Money" and realized that quaternions are much harder than Cartesian coordinates for people who studied art in college after they failed HS Algebra.
I'm a troll because some dude said so, and his motivation totally almost definitely WASN'T because my torpedo of truth hurt his tender-Generation-Y-participation-trophy-feelings to the point of unbearable levels of bad-feels.
I've never heard anybody bicker about Pixel art before. Heck, there are plenty of pixel art-based games out there. The Binding of Isaac, Monaco, Hotline Miami, etc. The list goes on. What the world REALLY needs, is more love for ANSI art. Now there's a difficult medium to work with.
The conscious AI robots that hunted down every last one of us.
I'm fuzzy on the details, but Flash animation lends itself to a particular style. The Drawn Together series vs. the standalone movie is an interesting example of someone taking traditional animation and (for the movie) switching to Flash for the cost savings. They tried to keep the style the same and it was fairly similar but when you looked at the movements of the characters they carried the unmistakable hallmark of being Flash animation.
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 pixels (240x208 safe area). But when it was ported to a handheld platform as Balloon Kid, that jump became a leap of faith because the player could not see the other side on the 160x144 pixel display. The same happened with Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (8-bit). It was released for two platforms that shared an architecture but different screen sizes: 256x192 pixels (240x192 safe area) for the console and 160x144 for the handheld. The first boss was much harder on the handheld because so much was out of view.
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.
The guy I quoted said that.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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?
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.
How would you go about scaling, say, 256x208 to 1920x1080 without any sort of distortion?
I remember painting in watercolor in kindergarten, but I'm not so shortsighted as to dismiss it as childish. There are accomplished artists who paint in watercolor because they like the aesthetic.
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 the same could be said of 2D graphics. Metal Slug wasn't beloved because its graphics were typical of the time (or even of today's pixel art.) For every King of Fighters, there were a hundred more Bubsies.
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.
"This generation?" You're more than a decade late. Try to keep up.
I'm a Yemenite fisherman who drowns illegal immigrants off the coast of Italy for a living, you insensitive clod!
A bit of both. Nothing stopping you from traditional animation in Flash, but there are much better tools for that. For cartoon fans, hearing a cartoon uses Flash causes groaning because it's a sacrifice of good animation for the sake of saving money; why animate all the frames of animation involved in an arm moving, when you can just translate, rotate, and tween between two keyframes? It looks incredibly cheesy and cheap, but the who cares? As long as kids are just barely interested enough to slog through commercials to watch it.
Pixel art has it's place.
Pixelated sprites are iconographic representations of concepts. Or thoughts. Or feelings. Doing so properly takes a degree of skill and imagination.
You can do the same thing with high res art but the potential for creating /bad/ and distracting high res art is much greater. Sometimes constraints do set you free.
Remember when 3D was new? Flat shaded, zero-to-very-shitty textures. Awkward movement. Shitty animations. Blocky, low poly models. Most early 3D games were visually and aesthetically inferior to their 2D. They were bad, and the "new, better" tech outright killed some previously excellent game franchises.
Pixel art works well in high concept games - Games that do one thing, or one new thing, and do it well. (IE stuff you will never, ever ,ever ,ever see from large studious) The art is there to clearly convey concepts and not to jerk off your video card.
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?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Stern Pinball still does it I hope they don't copy the other guys and go full LCD (to high up and takes to much from the game)
No, he didn't.
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 than barely passable HD art. Nothing says "not enough budget to hire an artist, just have the programmer do it" like pixel art.
Most "glorious 8-bit retro style" games would look a lot better with HD artwork. It doesn't have to be photo-realistic; stylized cartoony artwork is great in most cases. Let's just admit that the choice to use pixel art is almost always a budgetary decision, not one driven by the higher artistic vision.
(Ghost Control, I'm looking at you! Put your game in the XCom: Enemy Unknown engine and it would rock!)
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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 might make sense to favor another aesthetic over pixel art. That, however, does not mean pixel art isn't a legitimate style.
I read the article and thought Blake Reynolds made some compelling arguments. However, I think he's also missing the point. I took a look at the game, Auro, that spawned this discussion and I wasn't really impressed. I don't think what we have here is a failing of pixel art but rather some poor aesthetic decisions.
The style doesn't work with the type of game that it is. More critically, he went for a pseudo HD pixel style. As he himself states, he wasn't going for a retro look, although it does hark back to mid 90s sprite-based PC games. But this is a style suited to larger displays, not the mobile screens for which it's been built. At that size those graphics just end up looking slightly off. And while the individual graphics look great, crammed together in the game the whole thing feels just a bit off.
Early in my design career I was taught one important rule: when you design something make sure it looks intentional. Go too subtle and you risk it looking like a mistake. That's what happened with Auro.
He might have actually had a better response if he had gone with the larger pixels of so many other games out there. In any case, he deserves credit for trying to be different.
Excellent post. I'll make some minor additions:
Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Starcraft, Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Planescape Torment all had 3d rendered graphics as sprites.
I watch Gaslight at least once every two years. Ingrid Bergman is amazing. So was Defender. Nothing better than hitting Smart Bomb and making a ton of pixels.
So many games came out in past few years which fit this definition:"indie 2D platformer with pixelated (retro) graphics and a gimmick". I can't fault critics for docking points when developpers implement such an overused style. It's just been done so many times before, and probably better.
> Pixelated graphics do NOT look good.
Say what again?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
However the player wants it to be displayed. That includes:
* Pixel aspect ratio: square pixels (even if the system would never display them as such, like the Master System or SNES), or whatever arbitrary size they like.
* Whether they want it to fill the screen to the edges, or beyond (to simulate common overscan on computers like the Amiga which could present pixels within the full PAL field where few TVs could actually show them), or whether they want to display with massive borders (say, if they wanted to use their LED monitor to mimic a Game Boy's 160x144 LCD pixels one to one in a 3-inch-or-so diagonal rectangle).
* Inter/intrapixel post processing: to simulate common artifacts present during signal generation from the console (like dot crawl into s-video or composite) or on the screen (imperfect CRT blobby pixels blending together) or some other custom function that works within or without the conceptual world of the graphics to perform some other effect (Super eagle on the sprite layer only, sure why not?).
* Interframe post process: some people have fond memories of GB ghosting. Let 'em have it if they want it.
You really can please all the people all the time, if your software is capable of supplying the things they want.
The moment you make a solid decision, you're disappointing the people who don't want what you want.
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.
You really can please all the people all the time, if your software is capable of supplying the things they want.
For most people, a reasonable default is high on the list of "the things they want". Out-of-box experience is very important with the short-form games common on mobile. I imagine that most short-form reviewers of a mobile app will not want to touch every combination of settings. As Havoc Pennington pointed out, an "unbreak my application please" checkbox buried in a huge settings list is not acceptable. This means a game has to look good without explicit configuration. Some people will complain if there are massive borders by default to ensure lack of blur; others will complain if there is blur by default to ensure lack of massive borders. So given the problem of scaling art intended to be viewed at 256x208 with 8:7 pixel aspect ratio to multiple modern devices, what are the "good defaults that Just Work" as Havoc put it?
Somebody who thinks a photograph is just a record doesn't understand photography at all.
My photography is a record in one I can think, of the vision I had behind making the pic but certainly isn't one of reality. Even leaving post processing out of it to prove even capture stage is heavily influenced by the shooters view and not objective. Lighting with flash/strobes means the lighting is nowhere near record of reality. Add focal length distortions/exaggerations from wide angle depth "stretching" to compression in telephoto, various amount of bokeh, narrow dynamic range (regardless of 12-14bit raw capture it ends up in 6-8bit display formats from rendering on 8bit monitors to print)..... that is just the basics to start and you have something VERY different from both what the human eye sees.
The reality of what is there is different again to the what the eye sees and what we see normally isn't even that but is our brains interpretation of the info which is different again depending on your processing model (such as top down visual) hence the arguments over that blue/black/white/gold dress which came down to top down processing of some peoples brains filling in blanks is you like incorrectly NOT whiteblalance as some articles suggested because they didn't take into account viewers of same screen at same time (identical lighting etc) saw it different but the scientific press tend to be rather uneducated.