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."

Comments

Money or Art?

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Money or Art?

[TheRaven64]

If that's the message you get from TFA, then I can only assume that you gave up after the first few paragraphs. I'd recommend going and reading the rest. I don't see how you can square that message with this quote from TFA, for example:

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:Money or Art?

[Austerity Empowers]

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:Money or Art?

[mr.mctibbs]

"I'm misunderstood" is a childish defense. "People misunderstood because I fucked up" is a contrite admission of failure.

Re:Money or Art?

[Solandri]

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.

Look for PC gaming, not mobile

[Kohlrabi82]

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:Look for PC gaming, not mobile

[Mr D from 63]

What goes around, comes around. Pixel art killed the white line graphics games like Pong. DAMN YOU PIXEL ART! You are reaping your just reward!

Re:Look for PC gaming, not mobile

[cheesybagel]

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.

Duelyst

[njen]

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...).

pixels? really?

[FranTaylor]

Do they even have pixels any more? I haven't seen one in years!

Decline of oekaki, too

[Waccoon]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad games

[geekd]

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.

Agree

[ledow]

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:Agree

[turp182]

Here's a guy (who I believe is available for hire) that does a bunch of 2D tutorials.

http://2dgameartforprogrammers...

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

[geekd]

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:Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad game

[ledow]

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?

Pixel art isn't automatically good art

[bluescrn]

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.

CRT vs TFT

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[sberge]

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.

Re:Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad game

[HiGuys]

There are a few things at work here, I think. And these might not all apply for you, because different people enjoy games for different reasons... some really enjoy stepping into other people's shoes to become, say, a soldier (which I couldn't care less about), and I'm sure that increased verisimilitude makes games more enjoyable for these people.

1. 1) Pixel art makes your brain work to fill in the gaps, and often involves strong patches of bright colour. I like this aesthetically, and wouldn't want to see it disappear. It's a bit like the difference between pointillism or impressionism and realism. All three are interesting.
2. 2) The iconicity of much pixel art makes it easy to understand the visuals in terms of interaction. The more realistic things get, the more it becomes an issue of what is interactive and what is not. And if games were entirely interactive, the costs would be staggering, and everything would become a sandbox-type game. I don't think that pointing arrows showing "you can click on this!" help, because then it becomes a matter of the game telling you what to do, not you exploring the game. I think that there are probably styles of game that are less affected by this than others, of course.
3. 3) Leading from (2), HD art is expensive. This means that companies can't make as much of it, and want to make sure that you see all of it. The result is that large, expansive, difficult games become shiny rollercoasters that play themselves.

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.

What I really miss: high quality sprite graphics

[foreverdisillusioned]

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.

Re:What I really miss: high quality sprite graphic

[EmeraldBot]

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:Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad game

[Chris Mattern]

Somebody who thinks a photograph is just a record doesn't understand photography at all.

Re:Artsy fartsy

[Mr D from 63]

artsy-fartsy

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

What is with this "HD"

[jellomizer]

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:What is with this "HD"

[bored]

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 number of fire maple games like The Lost City. I found these much more satisfying then nearly any game using a 3d engine I've played in the last 10 years. Even the old prerendered games like riven/etc look better IMHO. Realtime 3D/polygon rendering is cool for things that need 3D, but this idea that even isometric games (starcraft/etc) need to be 3D takes away from the experience.

I really was excited about the new xcom until I saw the screenshots and found out it was using cryengine. Not that there is anything wrong with that engine, I just wish someone would do a big budget game with something other than that, unreal, or idtech. The use of one of three game engines for 99% of the games released in the past few years means that they all have the same look/feel in my book.

Re:Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad game

[ScentCone]

Or painting.

I'll see your Pixel and raise you an ANSI

[wardrich86]

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.