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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."
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 appreciate the technical merits of it, but unlike jazz it is not obnoxious to everyone else.
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?
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.
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.
Its worse than that.
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 isn't worse.
"His name was James Damore."
Somebody who thinks a photograph is just a record doesn't understand photography at all.
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.