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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."
"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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
If you RTFA, he's not really griping that pixel art is disappearing. He's griping that pixel art was more skillfully drawn than 3D art.
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 (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.