It's a really good pixel art tool, but I think their licensing strategy is particularly interesting to the hn audience. The tool is open source, but they don't distribute binaries for free. So if you just want to use it, you can buy a copy like normal software, but if you've got the technical ability to do so, you could just build a binary yourself from source. Always struck me as such a good compromise.
Aseprite started out open source, went closed source and back to open source. It's nice to see them opensource again/ Libresprite was built out of Aseprite close sourcing future versions. I honestly wasn't aware it was open source again.
They say that's because they are re-writing it from scratch. That's just looking at their website, though, I'd never heard of it before and happy with Aesprite.
Aseprite recently added some truly unique features for creating tessellated tiles. I have always struggled with creating good looking tiles, and the process is much easier for me now.
Is this in the beta branch? I feel like the main branch hasn't gotten a lot of updates in ages. I haven't used aseprite for a while but I did finally switch to the beta since it has been getting most of the love lately.
I love Pixel Art - yet I often don‘t like how a lot of games try to approach it in a „modern“ way so I started to create my own dream pixel art game (working ob it >5 years now):
Beautiful design. The feel reminds me of my childhood, some of the best 2d platformers came out mid/end of 90’s right around the 3d hype. Rayman, Yoshi’s Island...
I didn't know Rastan at all. It's kind of crazy, you always think you know all the games from that time and yet you stumble across one every now and then where you think, that would have been my thing back then :)
This has made me super nostalgic, thanks for sharing this!
I definitely look fondly back on the days of the old phpBB forums. So much knowledge shared freely and without any motive other than sharing knowledge and wisdom with their community.
Of course I’m a biased since those were my teenage years and the world in your teenage years is always the best lol.
I don't know how many times I have read this set of forum posts on pixel art throughout the years. It is always one of my go to resources when I get that urge to build a 2d pixel game. Well, I haven't finished a game and I can't do pixel art, but it still is a great resource to go back to, at least for the memories.
A tip to ease anyone interested in making pixel art: instead of starting from scratch (very hard), for beginners it's much easier to take a high res image and down sampling it as a template. The down sampling algorithm will create many issues as mentioned in this guide, but you can then edit on a single pixel level following the principles of the guide.
I've been something like this with Pixaki on the iPad - that allows for a reference layer which means you don't need to downsample, just fit the pixels where you want them to be accordingly. Helps in the learning of "how would this translate to pixels?" too.
I spent several years in that community ca. 2004-2008.
If this type of art is something that you would like to do, I would highly recommend hanging around there. They do challenges and share tricks about how they do what they do. They also have very strict policies, which makes it a game of it’s own.
I finished my game development graduation now in May. My graduation project was a pixel art based beat-em up as we used to have in the 80s and 90s (like double dragon and crime). I loved to work with pixel art and I feel that I can draw (and animate) pretty much everthing that I want/need.
However I would like to pursue any kind of graduation in that area, online for sure, but not certifications like udemy, coursera and etc, mainly because I like the loop: learn, homework, feedback, improve work, feedback and so on. I would like to learn "Art" but with Pixel art as main topic. There is such thing?
In the mid 2000s there was a whole community of pixel art for signatures in forums about Runescape. I don't know if this community still exists today (the game certainly does), but it was quite something. Random examples:
On the note of pixel art, anyone have any interesting techniques for 3D -> 2D Pixel Art?
Of course the difficulty here is producing good quality pixel art from three dimensions. Often it simply ends up worse. Nonetheless i've been researching this and toying with it for a while. Notably for producing art in different isometric projections which would be very difficult to do by hand.
I've had to wing it in a number of situations where I'd needed to draw a small sprite or touch up a picture by placing individual pixels. I now see that I've fallen into the pit of hugging banding quite often, which explains why my edits were sufficient, but always lacked something undefinable. Thanks for sharing!
One interesting thing about neural net generation of images is that up until recently, pixel art didn't work at all. Attempts at using GANs to learn Pokemon pixel art etc always failed miserably. The release of CLIP turned out to enable pretty good pixel art generation, and it's only gotten better - DALL-E 2 also can just do pixel art.
It's a really good pixel art tool, but I think their licensing strategy is particularly interesting to the hn audience. The tool is open source, but they don't distribute binaries for free. So if you just want to use it, you can buy a copy like normal software, but if you've got the technical ability to do so, you could just build a binary yourself from source. Always struck me as such a good compromise.