“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
As a teacher I've had the opposite problem: students whose email (sent from university email addresses) got caught in the SPAM filter. All of them had Russian names.
Even if everybody moves to FLAC or other lossless music format, musicians will still likely add in MP3 compression artifact sounds. After all, like with vinyl, it makes the music sound warmer.
Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of
compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz
audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and
rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear
preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at
128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including
a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise,
in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated
the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 -
particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass
hits, etc) rising over time.
... each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises.
In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of
sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said
that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to
music. It is a sound they are familiar with.
Vinyl in actual use has a much narrower range than CDs or MP3s. One things that is common, though, is for Vinyl to be mastered differently than the digital final result. So, it is entirely possible for the CD/MP3 release of a given song to have a much narrower dynamic range than a Vinyl release of a given song despite being released on demonstrably inferior technology.
Said differently, the limitations of a medium can lead to better decisions. What can be done with a limited toolset is often better than what can be done with an unlimited toolset.
In this specific case, it's not a result of the toolset, but a result of the consumer. The vinyl enthusiast is buying something they are a fan of at a higher price and expecting a quality product. The typical MP3 customer is buying it based on a 15 second sample. So, the 'loudness wars' still apply to many digital products, sadly.
They could still just as easily take the existing digital master and dial down the amplitude a bit to work with vinyl. This would be especially easy considering how few vinyl records they sell vs digital. But, many people are paying a premium for vinyl and expecting better sound.
Vinyl has been demonstrated to be able to cut and playback frequencies of up to 70khz, and many commercially released records from as far back as the 70s had data up to the mid 40khz range (and in fact this is required for quadraphonic playback).
Even if it's theoretically capable of doing that, I think the average cd player produces a better frequency range than the average record player. In any case, I thought the parent was talking about dynamic range, not frequency range.
Vinyl sounds nice to many people. It has likeable, some say 'musical', distortion.
A turntable with a nice amp and speakers is a novel treat to people who have grown up with low-bitrate mp3s and ear buds. Sounds different. And having to work a bit harder and paying attention means you tend to get more out of it.
Of course, a well-mastered CD and a nice pair of headphones also sounds great and might be a more accurate reproduction of what they heard in the studio.
Α FLAC player with a nice amp and speakers is an even nicer way, and, about the working hard part, I could say the same for waiting tables to buy your music.
I don't know, this all sounds like rationalization to me. Saying "I grew up with vinyl so it sounds more familiar to me" is fine, I grew up with 8-bit graphics and I like them, but they're not objectively better. Trying to rationalize this preference with things like "bigger pixels are easier to see" is a bit disingenuous, though.
"Loudness wars" has everything to do with mastering and very little to do with the actual medium. Yes, the onset of the loudness wars coincided with the rise of digital distribution, but you can master a record to be just as loud as a CD. On the other hand, you can't master a record to have as much dynamic range as a CD. That's why classical music enthusiasts tend to prefer CDs.
This reminded me of Ludum Dare right now, because the rankings for the most recent jam are just in: the top 100 is almost exclusively comprised of faux 8bit games. I don't mind the graphics so much, usually, because they are only retro to a point, and they do tend to cheat in places that enable the end results to be pretty. But if you look at the top 100 of sound/music rankings, almost all of those are absolutely jarring cacophonies.
Yes, the same thing is present in Android games. It's "pixel art", but the "pixels" aren't all the same size - like some parts the art is clearly 4x compared to some other bits - and then it's intermixed with high-res effects (lighting, gradients, flares, etc.)
> ... is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
I think the reason is that the effort these limitations assign to us -- the imagination we need to activate in order to overcome them -- is what attaches us to them.
A big thing about pixel art and it's issues today is that what he mentions as pixel art, isn't so.
I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc.
But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version.
However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played it on the SNES, it was rendered very differently, it was interlaced, scanlines were distinct, and each pixel was a bit of a blob.
Because of this, an image like Yoshi looked just fine, because we weren't looking at a blocky grid of squares. The brighter colored glowed around the darker colors, the darkness between the scanlines caused your brain to interpolate the lines. We got a nicer looking image.
When you blow it up to 500% on a crisp LCD panel it doesn't look the same. What used to be smooth lines are now stair steps. And just the same way that he complains about Auro being blurred or stretched, when you display pixel art designed for a CRT on an OLED display at 600% nearest neighbor scaling, it doesn't work.
I like the symbolic style of pixel art. But we don't have the same limitations. When people made great art for the NES, it's because that's what they had to work with. We have more to work with.
It's one thing to represent things in a symbolic, simplistic or minimalistic style. It's another thing to feign technological disadvantage.
The SNES supported interlaced video modes, but Super Mario World did not use them. Early consoles achieved progressive scan by sending all the fields at the same polarity (eg. only odd field or only even fields), violating the NTSC standard. This is the reason why they had obvious scanlines on CRTs. Because this is a non-standard mode some modern TVs and capture cards will fail to support it and show interlacing artifacts, but this is not how it looked originally.
> It's one thing to represent things in a symbolic, simplistic or minimalistic style. It's another thing to feign technological disadvantage.
Different in what ways? It's a perfectly valid and common artistic resource to "feign disadvantage", limiting the colors, the subject, the perspective or, yes, the resolution.
If I understood the article, the author acknowledges the historical limitations of the "pixelated look", states he and an "insular" community of artists like it by choice, and at the same time he also acknowledges to the general public, the pixelated look is bizarre (what he calls the "pixel tax"), and therefore he understands he must change with the times. And in the end, he more or less concludes that good art is good art, regardless of the specific style.
I agree with your sentiment, I think the author makes some decent points but is pretty biased towards an aesthetic he prefers and the art tools he's most familiar with. The sf4 example is particularly demonstrating of that, people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation, that doesn't make it lower quality animation, it's a trade off of the medium. And art is about the overall impression it leaves on the viewer, not the technical specifics about how the pants look odd on 2 frames of a 100 frame motion
How can he be biased, beyond his love of pixel art? He more or less concludes pixel art is not the best choice, and he sides with the public's opinion on this issue. Read the comments. He is not blaming anyone for this "pixel tax".
To my eyes, the SF4 Chun Li is infinitely inferior to SF3, and I'm not even an animator. And haven't played either game, so I truly have no preconceptions at all in this case.
The Chun Li comparison reminds me a lot of the messy transition between 2D and 3D of games like Final Fantasy and Mortal Kombat.
In Mortal Kombat, the typical shaolin monk character has a typical "shoot fireball" special move. In the latest SNES game, a badass dragon made of fire shoots out of his hand and explodes on contact with the enemy. In the next game, for the PlayStation, it looks like he is flinging a flaming turd at his opponent. Final Fantasy had similar problems in the transition from awesome 2D (FFVI) to awful 3D (FFVII).
Both Mortal Kombat and Final Fantasy eventually got 3D high definition graphics right, in my opinion. I hope eventually the artists will be as good and as experienced at making 3D art as they were at making 2D art in the SNES era.
The thing that set Mortal Kombat apart back in the day -- besides blood and gore -- was its use of digitized video of live actors as its character sprites. This couldn't be done in the 3D era, and up Through Mortal Kombat (2011) the 3D character models looked hella goofy when compared with real people.
SF4 has bad animation because it mixes mostly realistic motions with cartoonish anatomy. SF3 consistently uses cartoonish style for both. The only obvious reason somebody might prefer SF4 is if they really hate pixel art. I've played far more SF4 than SF3 and I still prefer the SF3 look.
> people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation
So who wants to start writing a 3D package designed around making those kinds of things as easy as possible? With a way to easily drop them into a game and fire it off in realtime?
Maybe not you, but maybe someone reading the comments here just found a side project.
The big tactics 2D cartoonists use to stylize motion are squash and stretch, smears, and multiple images. How can these be represented efficiently in data structures? How can you make it easy for a character to leap into the air and turn into a giant eyeball with arms and legs sticking off of it[1]? And how can you make it easy for a non-techie artist to make it happen? This is probably not a quick weekend hack.
Guilty Gear Xrd does a lot of this; can it be done in a game with a lot more characters running around at once?
Maybe in the states. PAL and NTSC versions of games looks very different.
Living in Europe, I could hardly recognize my favorite games when I saw them in American movies, or tv-show. i wonder how the Japanese PAL would render it, because despite being PAL it's still different from Europe.
Was there ever Japanese PAL? If so I cannot find any references to it.
The PAL games indeed look different from the NTSC because they are different games. Other than the obvious difference in the video configuration there are usually content differences due to local laws, different marketing policies and technical limitations (e.g. an NTSC games in general did not have to support as many languages as PAL ones).
For anyone else interested in scaling up pixel art, there are alternative methods to just using nearest neighbour, such as EPX or something. I found this article on Datagenics to be pretty solid:
It's linked to on that page, but here's a good paper on scaling/interpolating pixel art. They use a lot of SNES sprites as examples. Some of these are implemented in emulators so you can play around with them a little.
It is the duty of an artist to fulfill their vision, not someone else's. For this reason, many prominent artists go unknown in their lifetime. The masses are attracted to "bad" art like Thomas Kinkade (I use quotes because the art is not actually bad, just lacks the originality that art connoisseurs seek). I would actually argue that you will have to make a choice between being a popular artist and being good artist (there is some overlap though). And it may well be the case that you don't have the luxury to make this choice.
For me personally, I think that good pixel art is timeless (emphasis on "good"). It gives an artist a limited canvas and forces them to be creative. You can instantly deduce an artist's skill based on how well they can convey a concept with a limited palette and resolution. An unlimited palette and high resolution actually magnifies the flaws in art, IMO (leaves less to the imagination). I find that in many modern 3D games, the suspension of disbelief is destroyed when I walk up to a character and see blurry textures and pointed polygonal edges.
For an idea of what good pixel art looks like (at least according to my opinion and many others), check out Henk Nieborg's work:
> For me personally, I think that good pixel art is timeless (emphasis on "good")
Agreed about the timelessness. I find good pixel art more timeless than other forms of good videogame art. I thought about it and I think it's actually a case of abstractness, not pixelation. Pixel art is often more abstract. Another example of good non-pixelated game art that has this same quality is Another World's, which I find awesome.
I believe slightly more abstract game art -- slightly abstract, I'm not talking cubism here! -- is more appealing to me because of something related to Scott McCloud's concept of "closure", as explained in his book "Understanding Comics". This concept for me was the main takeaway of the book. When something is more abstract, having elided some aspects -- be it character details, animation frames, whatever -- your brain "fills in the gaps". And I think when my brain "fills in the gaps", the art itself ages better. The less my brain has to imagine the details not explicitly put there by the artist, the worse the art ages for me.
Not sure if this applies to other forms of art, but for me it definitely applies to videogame art, and is part of why I tend to like pixel art.
Another World's style is making a comeback in a way, with the low-poly movement (not identical, but along the same lines). See below if you don't know what style I am referring too:
Or any sort of development for that matter. I've never worked with a client who said; "Yeah, sure. What ever you think is best". When someone else pays the bills, you're either used as extension to Photoshop or used as a glorified typist.
If you consider yourself a visual designer and can't begin to understand how to make a design "pop", "edgy" or "less liney" I think the problem is with you. Just call yourself a developer and be done with it.
Odd comment. Clients in my work consistently pay us to do 'What we think is best' because that's what they're paying us for. Sometimes we do production work, but more often than not we're directing and advising the client toward their goal, then creating the things that get them there. They don't know how to get there, we do. But probably we're in different industries.
This article reminded me of a trend I noticed when reading the book "Masters of Doom," which discussed (among other things) the graphical improvements that made games like Wolfenstein and Doom so impressive. Very often, the book's prose would start sentences something along the lines of "though the graphics were crude, etc etc etc."
These sorts of lines, constantly repeated, irked me, not because they weren't technically true or anything, but because it's such a "looking-backward" point of view. At the time, that's not how people saw it. It was all about pushing forward the state of the art, and we miss something when we look back on it in that way.
I guess in a similar way I've had the same feeling about "modern" pixel art, where it often seems to miss the point. By treating it as just an art style, it turns it from an exercise in conveying a vision despite limitations, into an effort to simplify and downsample because those are the most easily-recognized surface-level hallmarks of that period.
For me, the magic of that era comes from seeing techniques like color cycling ( http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0 ), where the desire to get a certain effect led to interesting workarounds, rather than being satisfied with limitations because it's "retro."
When Half Life came out, it was amazing. I went back to retry it half a year ago, and it looked awful. And what was a wonderful intro sequence was now unskippable minutes of a slow ride past crude polygons and very low detail environments. It was interesting seeing how my opinions had changed.
I love when I revisit some old amazement and the magic is still there. When I see some old arcade games (SEGA chasing games) I'm still amazed at how pretty and swift they are.
I think Deus Ex offers a contrasting example. It's almost as old as Half Life (2000 vs 1998), but I think it ages better because the appeal is different.
Story/dialog/writing/role-play don't go out of style as quickly as graphics/gun-play.
I replayed Deus Ex recently, and was surprised at how bad it looked, especially the character models. It was so bad that it was ruining my immersion.
However, my brain eventually forgot about this and I could continue play, and eventually I stopped seeing crude low-poly models and instead saw just "people".
I think the most bang-for-your-buck comes from upgrading the rendering system, so that the shadows/shading works better. Having ten shades of olive-black in dark environments was always annoying.
Your memory may be playing tricks on you. Check out this series at Rock, Paper Shotgun where a writer who remembers Deus Ex as the Best Game Ever!!!!! plays through it: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/deusexy/
Funny, as I was reading the parent post my mind jumped to Half Life too. What an amazing game! Part of me wishes I could un-see all the stuff that came after it, so that I could go back and play it with my original excitement intact. Instead, it seems my mind is happy to find flaws at every turn and compare how it actually looks to how good I remember it to be.
It's even worse with older games. I tried to play the original X-Wing in DOSBox a while back, and wow, I couldn't believe it. Did it really look that bad back then? Maybe my 486 DX2 and 14" CRT made it look better somehow.
Part of me wishes I could un-see all the stuff that came after it, so that I could go back and play it with my original excitement intact.
You're in luck:
"Black Mesa is a re-envisioning of Valve Software's classic science fiction first person shooter, Half-Life. ... All-new music, voice acting, choreography and added dialogue give way to a more expansive and immersive experience than ever before."
I worked in games in the early and late 1990s. It's hard for me to know if my love of great pixel art and great chip tunes is some romantic attachment to my childhood and early professional career, or if it's a sincere appreciation of great art in absolute terms.
But I'm inclined to agree with Igor Stravinksy:
"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution."
It's a little weird that he spends so much time criticizing others and doesn't even once acknowledge that his art style (proportions, anatomy) look definitely weird. (Downright ugly and off-putting to me.) Part of the reason his art gets put down by others might be that they also feel it's ugly, but don't quite know how to express it and pin it on the pixels.
Further, as someone who works on games, the decision as to what kind of art style is used, most often is not a decision to aim for something specific, but a question of money. Art doesn't happen on its own, you either have to make it yourself, or find someone else to make it (who makes something that looks good) AND then pay them, often also for many many revisions and additions. For a small team simple sprites that remain appealing and consistent even when scaled up can be the choice simply because anything else is prohibitively expensive.
I agree, that he fails to acknowledge the issues with his own art. I agreed with him through most of the article, but when it came time for him to get to his stuff, the forced dithering was immediately off-putting, and is actually something that causes older games to feel dated to me.
Pixel-art is great, when it is crisp. Most of his examples are crisp and well animated, until you get to his. The characters are oddly proportioned, but I can deal with that, and at least they were pretty crisp, but the interface around them was horrible.
I'm sorry you're not into Auro's art, but I just popped in to clear something up.
At no point do I laud my own work as all that great. I can't speak to how good I am. I do my best, and that's all I can do. Full disclosure, the only reason I included it at all was to plug it. We're a small, new company and need all the help we can get.
I also think it's a little strange to hear that I spend no time on my art's issues when the whole article is basically saying the entire art direction was a big mistake.
I'm not a graphic designer, yet I had to make every art asset in the game. I have to wear many hats, and I wear some better than others. I'm always learning, always pushing, always questioning, always trying to improve. Pretty much every example I gave of pixel art is insanely better than I am. That doesn't bother me. There will always be someone better, and there will always be someone worse. Besides, even if my work was the most ghastly thing you've ever seen, it wouldn't make my arguments any more or less valid. If you think my positions are incorrect, I don't see how that has to do with how much or how little I discuss my own work. That said, I'll be the first to fuss and fuss and fuss over the flaws and shortcomings in my work. I'm my own worst enemy. Does it make you feel better to hear that?
Sounds like they should have been developing for PC instead of mobile. The average mobile user plays exploitative "freemium" garbage to kill time in lines. How can you expect them to appreciate the art behind it?
Meanwhile, "retro"-style games are doing gangbusters on Steam, selling to people that actually appreciate those styles of art, music, and game design.
There's this cognitive dissonance with a lot of game devs who damn well know mobile is a ghetto, but want the big bucks mobile can occasionally deliver. So they try to justify mobile development thinking they'll be the ones who make the "mature" game that will be "appreciated." Instead, freemium mouthbreathers leave 1 star reviews because "it looks funny on my phone."
Don't blame the game or the style. Blame your chosen audience.
Funding is also a big part of it. It's much easier to get funding for a mobile game than for an indie PC game, even though the mobile game is significantly less likely to make a return on investment. So perhaps some mobile devs know they aren't going to make it, but take the money anyway so that they can work on something on someone else's dime, while they build up experience and add another piece to their portfolio.
I'm not convinced it's a worthwhile trade, however, if it makes you lose your faith in humanity and your art form in the process.
While you have a point (and I've given you a +1 vote because of it), the fact remains that the "average person" I know thinks that Street Fighter 4 animations were better than Street Fighter 3.
The Chun Li discussion happens a lot in my circle of friends, and I'm always in the minority. Very few people appreciate classic pixel art.
So, if we look to the digital art like Pixar, there are a lot of guidelines from traditional animation to make a scene come alive.
* Squish and Stretch
* Fallow through
* Secondary Action
These principles really help make dynamic scenes. If you look at the Chun Li animations, you can see that the older one does a better job of using these.
I feel like if the HD version took advantage of these, it would look the best out of all of them, but it failed to reach its full potential in it's medium.
I can't directly compare the SF3 and SF4 animations: they're just totally different art forms.
That said, as somebody who loves pixel art, I still really love what Capcom did with SF4's art style.
The artists of SF4 definitely took a bold direction; the SF4 games don't really look like any other 3D fighting games. The characters are cartoonish without falling back on the crutch of cel shading; they're realistic without looking like drab psuedo-photo-realism. To me they look like childrens' action figures, fighting it out on the screen.
As the author says, SF4 could have been animated better. Specifically it probably would have benefited from some squash-and-stretch as he suggests.
It's also worth noting that SF3's traditional cel animation, while awesome, also has room for improvement. The animation style isn't very consistent from character to character. In a lot of cases (Chun Li in particular) it's not even consistent between her various moves.
> The artists of SF4 definitely took a bold direction; the SF4 games don't really look like any other 3D fighting games. The characters are cartoonish without falling back on the crutch of cel shading; they're realistic without looking like drab psuedo-photo-realism. To me they look like childrens' action figures, fighting it out on the screen.
Actually, Arc System Works ironically was the one who pushed the envelope here.
SF4 took a huge number of cues from Battle Fantasia. The "Super-Attack Zoom-in" animation, the dynamic camera movement, "Super Freeze", and so forth.
Its ironic, because Arc System Works made Battle Fantasia as a "learning project". In various interviews, Arc System Works noted that they had very little 3D skill and needed to train everyone up on 3D Animation skills, and the best way to do that was to make a 3D-animated video game.
Then a few years later, Capcom basically takes all the cues from Battle Fantasia and added a decent-style on top of it (the "Black Lines" and a unique style of cel-shading). And of course, Capcom's SF4 cast was much larger, more detailed animation and all that. Nonetheless, it is clear that it was Arc System Works that pushed the envelope in their experiments with the one-off Battle Fantasia.
IMO, Arc System Works has done 3D a massive favor here with Battle Fantasia, and they are once again pushing the envelope with Guilty Gear Xrd.
Not to hate on SF4's style of course. I think I prefer Capcom's SF4 style over say... Tekken, DOA or even MvC3. And Capcom definite added a lot of "love" in the art-style. But the _core_ of the animation techniques were more or less copied from Battle Fantasia years earlier.
Super Smash Bros always had the right idea with the attacks however. If you watch SSB:M carefully, the bones of the various characters expand with the hitboxes. For example, Mario's FAir attack has a huge exaggerated fist, and other characters shrink/ grow with their hitboxes. (Which adds for some interesting strategies / counter-strategies, since hitbox / hurtbox manipulation is a major element of high-level Fighting Games).
The Super Smash Brothers series has been the best at communicating the hurtboxes and hitboxes in a 3D environment. And it looks like Guilty Gear Xrd is finally a 2nd series that finally communicates those important cues as well.
----------------------------
Still, it is clear that the 3D Artwork style of SF4 is still relatively new and isn't as a refined of artwork. Again, the Chun-Li animation from SF3 is near the peak of Capcom's animation prowess, while SF4 is probably better described as a great first step for Capcom (even if it is in many ways copied over from Battle Fantasia).
Despite that fact, people are wow'ed by the the zooms, the buttery smooth animations, dynamic camera angles and automated shading. Things that honestly didn't take much effort on the part of SF4 artists. Heck, all of those things basically come for free when you use 3D Models.
I wasn't impressed with Battle Fantasia's animation at all. I thought it was kind of poor, actually, compared to other 360/PS3 efforts like the Soul Calibur games of the day. That's not to say you're wrong; we just had very different impressions of it. What animation techniques are you referring to when you talk about Battle Fantasia's innovations? (I'm not an animator; I'm surely missing some things there)
Again, Battle Fantasia was a learning project for Arc System Works. It was never meant to be an advanced artform. Which is why it is deeply ironic that almost all modern 2D fighting games using 3d art are based on Battle Fantasia camera mechanics.
Compare the super-attack animations between SF4 and Battle Fantasia. And note the following similarities:
1. The 'Super Zoom' that changes the camera angle, to focus on the character performing the super-attack.
2. The 'freeze frame' mechanics: which "pause" all other 3D animations while the super-attack user remains fully animated.
3. The way the background melts into a new environment, and then melts back into the stage as the super-attack either hits the opponent... or misses.
True, SF4 has better character models, better backgrounds, and better animations. But the camera mechanics were all invented and pioneered by Battle Fantasia.
Hasn't the zoom thing been around forever? It goes back at least as far as Rival School and probably earlier games I can't remember - I think Soul Edge did it too?
Rival Schools also changed the background during supers/knockouts, although it was just "fade to blacks" and 2D overlays rather than a new environment. But looking at this video of Battle Fantasia supers (been so long since I played it!) that's all that game did as well:
The "freeze other animations while the super move executes" thing is such a minor stylistic thing that I'm having trouble really thinking of it as an innovation and to boot... is that even what Battle Fantasia does? I mean look at this super: the steam in the background is still animating:
John Kricfalusi always laughs at and criticizes Pixar animation. Mainly because he's a hipster (even looks and dresses the part) who wants to go back to the good ole days of Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, etc. For most Pixar or other 3D animated productions, there just isn't enough squash and stretch or exaggeration to appeal to old time animation enthusiasts.
I think it's possible though. It's been done to a limited extent in video games: note how Link's sword arm and sword grow when he takes a swing in Wind Waker.
That's fair, but if you want to make art, there's no sense in trying to appeal to everyone. The guy that disregards pixel art probably wouldn't see your traditional art for what it really is, either. You can be depressed that the "mainstream" doesn't appreciate what you do, you can crush your spirit trying to pander to them, or you can have fun in your cozy niche with a small handful of fans and peers that really get you.
I meant to imply that they (in the typical case) don't really have an interest in games as a medium, and are simply looking for small distractions to fill gaps in their lives. If they don't appreciate the games themselves, I don't expect them to appreciate the art behind them either.
But since you went there, I do think that exclusively playing freemium slot machine games is an indicator of bad taste. Just as someone that exclusively eats at fast food restaurants probably has bad taste in food (yeah, I made a fast food analogy).
I feel sorry for the kids that grew up with smart phones and have never known a game that wasn't vapid and exploitative. There are worse fates, but still.
Good question. It's also fairly simple to answer. Players of freemium games fall into two categories:
People who have some emotional draw to it (maybe they like the art) and play it despite recognizing that the mobile freemium game industry is a giant social engineering experiment aimed at extracting money by exploiting weaknesses in the unaware human mentality.
People who don't recognize this, either by simply lacking awareness, or lacking enough experience to draw a comparison to non-exploitative games. Regardless of which it is, in both of these case, on average over the entire population, it is fair to assume that they will either not be attentive enough to appreciate details in the art, or won't even have enough knowledge to draw a useful comparison to other kinds of art.
No, i am absolutely and determinedly not saying they do not fall into the same two categories.
I'm not implying, i'm explicitly saying that people who primarily play games that are either sold up-front and without any IAP, or only with IAP that unlocks the full-game part of a "free demo", are, on average over the entire population, are most likely to be found in the third category of people who either have enough experience with games that are not menschenverachtend or are able to recognize games that are menschenverachtend, and avoid those consciously, and are thus also more likely to have the experience or attention to appreciate small detail art decisions.
KOF XII/XIII sprites were rotoscoped from 3D models. They did this because pixel art is far more expensive. For reference, SNK stated that it costed them around $1m per 3D character in KOF XIII. But the savings come with tweaking the models when they rebalance moves. They can just alter the model. 2D sprites have to be redrawn.
SNK Playmore published a great article which I cannot seem to find now with details on their technique.
The reason purists don't like the look of the game though is because SNK was traditionally known for superb pixel art.
I should note that Arc System Works has also renounced Pixel Art as per Guilty Gear Xrd. :-( (Arc System Works are the masters behind BlazBlue's Pixel Art)
Granted, their 3D Artwork is quite good now, so maybe they can succeed in the transition. But fewer and fewer major developers (and even small, niche developers) are producing pixel art.
"WayForward Games" has an interesting vector art style however which gets the classic feel down. Its technique is more akin to a high-quality Newground game however, as opposed to the nostalgic Pixel Art feel. And artists know that vector art is easier to do. Still, WayForward (Ducktales Remastered, Shaente Half Genie Hero) might be one of the last great 2D Artists still around today.
Beatiful article, slightly off into animation territorry but still. Taking distance from current technology and future is good.
The Chun-Li dissected animation reminded me of Disney classes on how to convey emotions rather than simulate movements. And for Jazz lovers, search about Mitsuo Iso : www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvx7p6-lABw
Some of the Fire Emblem sprites were breathtakingly fluid, and you can't deny that they often look better than the jaggy polygons of the modern DS titles (similar to how the OP contrasts Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Diablo).
My favorites were always the sprites for the "hero" unit:
Good point. Heroes probably had the best attack animations. Either them, or critical hit from the paladin.
My favorite animations overall though were definitely swordmaster, specifically their "dodge" animation. They only moved like 3 or 4 pixels, so it was hard to tell that they actually dodged. But once you saw it, it was in fact amazing.
But the Fire Emblem sprites were redrawn with details from each of the characters in the game. Amelia from FE8 for example, was the only blonde female paladin, and her long-blonde hair would blow in the wind during her critical hit animation.
The animations were incredibly personalized to the characters, a true feat for a game with several dozen playable characters (and random mooks to KO).
In contrast, the 3D Art of FE:Awakening is clearly built off of recycled bone animations across multiple units. Furthermore, they were mostly recycled from FE9 and FE10.
The level of effort needed to create the 2D sprites is clearly much higher than the level of effort for FE:Awakening's animations.
Sigh, the "benefits" of industrialisation and new tech. Fortunately I hope that 2d or 3d pros and cons are known and mastered enough so people can go back to produce artful games.
Similarly to movies, early 2K era movies were speaking too much of CGI, now SFX aren't attractive anymore, you got to give density.
ps: about the level of effort, I think it's not fair, 3d modeling and animating was hard, but more than that it made people focus on low level details rather than 'impressionist' ones. You had to care about all angles and didn't have time nor knowledge on what made a good animation. Same goes for old animations.
"Even in the limitations of the individual voices, in their relative incompleteness, there are advantages.* The necessity for utilizing them within the narrow range of their effectiveness demands characteristic usage and treatment consistent with the material. Thus the pupil learns by this simple example to heed an important principle of handicraft: to make characteristic use of the strengths and shortcomings of the material at hand.
"*I am taking such pains with these things ... to establish explicitly that these principles are not derived from aesthetics but from practical considerations. If what is known as aesthetics does in fact contain much that is merely practical handling of the material, and if what is known as symmetry is perhaps often not much more than an organization of the material that reveals a sensible regard for its properties, yet I consider it worthwhile to set down these observations. For the conditions of practicality can change, if we take a different view of the material and if the purpose changes."
Pixel art games nowadays all look more or less the same. Actual games from the 90s didn't look alike at all. Also most games use pixel art as an excuse for lazy animations with a little amount of frames. I really wonder why everyone likes it so much and I often think maybe something is wrong with my taste :/
I think that the "formal" rules for pixel art have become more well defined with increased access to the internet, and you now see more of a tendency towards Japanese / console style pixel art (compare with Deluxe Paint-style pixel art seen in old PC games). I think that there is also a huge amount of "abuse" in these rules, some of which are definitely universally applicable as applied to pixel art, IMO - namely, using the same pixel size, and perhaps keeping the palette reduced as far as reasonable. There is quite a large amount of "bad" pixel art, probably more so than "good" pixel art, so it is easy to come to dislike the genre nowdays. But pixel art (at least "good" pixel art) is much harder to produce than vector art or unrestricted raster art, especially when it comes to animation (unless you are just rotating limbs, which is a "no-no" in pixel art rules).
Except when you look at the development methodology of the best-of-the-best pixel art games (BlazBlue, King of Fighters), the teams did 3D Animations for all of the characters and then re-traced them into 2D Pixel Art.
Everyone who actually _does_ high-quality pixel art understands. Good Pixel-Art is much MUCH harder to do than good 3D.
It lothes me to say it, but the blogpost is correct. Very few people understand this fact except for the artists who actually do go pixel art.
It's true that superb pixel art is harder to pull off than superb 3D models because of greater self-imposed limitations. However, it's also true that if you just want your art to be passable, it's easier to achieve that via low-res pixel art than via amateur 3D modeling. IOW, pixel art has both a lower barrier to entry and a higher skill cap.
Which is exactly my point: if we're resorting to external assets, there are infinitely more spritesheets available online for the low, low price of free, because making decent sprites is such a comparatively small effort that even artists themselves attach less value to the task.
(Which still isn't to devalue the effort that it takes to make good-looking sprites; I've tried, and damn do I suck at it.)
You need a baseline of art, and then you need to tweak the animations to match your video game. A model may not have a "double-jump" animation but you can easily add one through bone manipulations with any 3d model.
But if a sprite-sheet were missing the double-jump animation? You're either doing it yourself (hard pixel art style) or hiring someone else to do it.
But for me some pixel artists miss (for me) a large part of the artistic value of pixel art: restricting complexity of the scene -- not just portraying things in blocks. The blocks aren't important at all, in fact they're pretty ugly if you're not a great pixel artist (hence the natural wish to find better upscaling algorithms). It's often overlooked the CRTs those art were made for were quite blurry and round, alleviating the blocky look.
That's the right reason to defend using modern screens to their full capability with a certain simplified-art style.
Count the number of colors on Jin Kisaragi. The smooth, defined lines going down "strong", hand-crafted pixel art lines. With massive sprites built for the high-definition era to boot.
The 3D art gets a bit intricate and busy, but the 2D Sprites.
The question that immediately springs to my mind is "what did the 3D reference image look like". Rotoscoping (the animator's term for 'tracing reference footage') is an old, old process, almost as old as animation itself. You can do it well, by using the reference footage as a base to get the hard parts of the 3D motion down then putting that away and pushing the drawings, or you can do it poorly, by just tracing it and not really doing much to it otherwise.
I would bet that if you superimposed that BlazBlue animation over the 3D reference, there would be a huge difference - that looks like it's had a lot of human thought put into it.
(And then go look at Arc's latest game, Guilty Gear Xrd. Which is presented entirely 3D with some models that have had a LOT of love applied to them.)
Yeah. It's like 24fps in film. In 60fps (HD) every flaw is apparent; film props of the wrong weight look fake, and insincere facial microexpressions give it away.
Whereas in 24fps (pixelation), creators can get away with more as your brain fills in the gaps. There's also the bonus that it feels dream-like; larger than life.
There's also the question of pixel-perfect platforming. HD platformers can feel sloppy and untrustworthy if not done right. It's easier to trust a pixelated platformer. (And yet I've never felt cheated by a jump in the polygonal New Super Mario Bros.)
A fundamental difference between Japanese and Western animation is their approach to motion. Western animation emphasized fluid motion, attempting to stick to the maximum framerate (24 FPS) allowed by the film medium as much as possible. This could produce striking results, but tended to limit artists to more simpler, slower, more deliberate stretch and squash movements that would make sense when interpolated across key frames. It was also very expensive to produce, which is part of why western studios have mostly abandoned traditional animation, and why the ones that still do 2D often use Flash to cheaply "tween" between keyframes to get fluid motion for the minimum amount of effort.
Japanese animation, on the other hand, plays fast and loose with the rules. Very little is animated at the full 24 FPS, drifting around 12 to 8 to 6 FPS (called animating on twos, threes, or fours) for typical scenes. This allows for the user's attention to be captured by backgrounds and stills in expository scenes, and encourages a different style of exaggerated movement that emphasizes the ''feeling'' of the movement over brute force motion quality. It also allows the budget to be conserved for the most important scenes, sakuga ("moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action.") So called "key animators" work exclusively on these parts of an animation, and here, their skills in creating expressive motions shine when given the time and resources to completely bring a dramatic scene to life.
As the game, comic, and animation artforms grew alongside one another, early games took direct influence from styles of animation native to their creators. The concept of sakuga fit Japanese games well, which would often sparingly animate unimportant "cannon fodder" enemies for the sake of saving budget and development time for elaborate boss monsters. In contrast, I was always struck by the fluidity of motion in Western games produced by groups like The Bitmap Brothers for the platforms like the Amiga, yet unimpressed by the gameplay underneath. It seemed almost as if these groups would spend so much time lavishly animating their characters, that they would forget they were making a game.
Another important consideration is that more frames can work against an action game. Every frame of a sword swing, for instance, is another 16th of a second delay between the player's button press and the intended action occurring. A 1 or 2 frame anime-style sword swish fits perfectly into this mold, allowing for responsive control and an expression of energy. Whereas many Western games I played would lavishly animate the beginning of a jump, or thrust or swing of a sword, compromising the feel of responsiveness for the sake of the artist's ego.
So if you notice the lack of frames in a modern "pixel art" game, then while the artists might have been lazy (the typical "pixelated platformer" drawn at a lower resolution than an Atari, with more colors than a SNES game), perhaps they instead were copying older Japanese artists without understanding the reasoning behind their animation choices. Or perhaps you just don't appreciate this style of animation.
No source for this, but I remember hearing an interesting anecdote some time ago, and I'd love to know whether there's any truth to it:
Back in the 50's or so, when the major American animation studios had a couple decades of experience under their belt but anime was just getting off the ground, some Japanese animators took a trip to Hollywood to learn how the industry worked in the US. They were given a tour of a major animation studio, but through some kind of miscommunication, they came away with the impression that the studio was spending an order of magnitude fewer resources (time, money, manpower) than they actually were.
When they returned to Japan, they budgeted their productions using those lowered expectations, forcing their animators to cut corners and squeeze as much expressiveness into as few frames as possible. Which in turn led to audiences getting used to that style of animation, and created the recognizable Japanese aesthetic that has persisted to this day.
I have no idea, sorry. It would be very interesting if it were true, but it sounds like a bit of an urban legend. Working within the constraints of limited resources seemed to be a constant in all of Japan's pre-bubble successes, from comics, to calculators, so I wouldn't assume there would be any extraordinary reason for early Japanese animators to follow the same principles.
My interpretation was that anime's more limited, stylized animation was due to its direct influence from the prolific manga artist and animator Osamu Tezuka (sometimes called "the Walt Disney of Japan.") All comics, Western or Eastern, must heavily stylize motion in order to have any hope of expressing it in still frames. So having an accomplished dramatic comic artist lead most of the earliest, most influential Japanese animations, most of which were direct adaptations of his comics, working with the low framerate stylized motions that extended naturally from comic book stills, seems to have had a profound effect on the Japanese school.
In contrast, Disney's early animations were inspired by conventional cartooning in subject, and early film and Vaudeville in motion, so given Disney's influence, it should similarly not be surprising that the Western animation school tended towards comedy and fluid motion that attempted to emulate the impression of film.
Most Western animation has historically been done at 12fps ("on twos"); you go to 24fps for very fast motion or stuff you want to be super-smooth. This holds even in big-budget 2D theatrical features[1]. You will also find no small amount of super-stylized motion - dig up "The Dover Boys" (dir. Chuck Jones), commonly cited as the first cartoon to experiment with the smears, multiple images, and other crazy stylizations of motion. Single-frame your way through that someday; it's full of amazing semi-abstract images.
(First in the US, at least; there may have been people in the East playing with this as well, but there was very little cross-pollination at this time.)
The big difference between the Western and Eastern animation traditions, in my mind, comes from different decisions in how to best allocate "pencil mileage". You have a budget of X number of miles of lines drawn by your animators for each project; how do you spend it? Westerners generally pursued "the illusion of life", favoring really fluid and subtle motion over a huge number of drawings. This meant that very few single drawings could be very complicated. Easterners, on the other hand, gravitated towards complicated character designs. You might spend four or five times as much effort drawing a single frame. This meant that very few motions could be fluid.
Fluidity of motion × character design complexity = pencil mileage. Pencil mileage is fixed by your budget. Which one of those do you want to emphasize? You can't have both unless your budget is amazing. (This is also why animated commercials can have both; they can cost more per second than some features.)
To eyes trained in one tradition, the other one looks like crap. Why is this Eastern cartoon barely more than a slide show half the time? Why is this Western cartoon full of such simplified designs? Personally, it took me many years to learn how to appreciate Eastern animation.
(Also it is worth noting that most lovingly-animated Western games quickly converged on quickly popping into a motion as a result of a control input, with exaggerated settling into the new pose - look at Crash Bandicoot, Earthworm Jim, or Aladdin.)
I am rambling. Mostly I just wanted to mention that my experience of the Western tradition (including years of single-stepping cartoons) is largely on twos, with occasional bursts of ones.
[1] except for anything Richard Williams directed because he is kind of a total obsessive who would wander around the studio late at night and inbetween stuff onto ones that maybe should have never been on ones. See 'Raggedy Ann and Andy' for instance. Or if you want to actually see a decent movie hunt up the Recobbled Cut of 'The Thief and the Cobbler' because RA&A is pretty much 80 minutes of pure nightmare fuel.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Pencil mileage is a great way to sum up the difference between the two traditions. Sorry for sounding so down on Western animation; it's true that I'm more used to the look of Eastern animation, having invested much more time invested in it (hence my mistake about Western films animating on ones vs. twos; it's been a while since I watched one of the classic Western animated films, oops), but I don't want to discount the work of Western animators. I have my biases, but there are gems in both traditions, and of course I'm saddened by way Western 2D animation has fallen by the wayside in mainstream Western (or at least American) culture since the dawn of 3D animation.
As for games, I wanted to add a comment to my post about how I was mostly thinking about mid 80s-early 90s games, but Hacker News seems to have some restrictions keeping new users and throwaways from editing posts. Many European games from this time stood out to me as compromising gameplay at the expense of their animation. In contrast, many of the 90s and early 2000s Western mascot platformer games, as you mentioned, did great jobs of working charismatic, fluid animation into the medium. Crash Bandicoot in particular is notable for being one of the few games to use per-vertex animation; for each key frame of animation, the vertices that made up Crash were placed manually, giving the artists an unprecedented degree of control.
Since then, sadly, most Western AAA devs have tended overwhelmingly towards more "realistic" art styles that make heavy use of inverse kinematics-driven procedural animation for gameplay, and motion capture for cutscenes, leaving the animators much less room for expression.
Regardless, my intent was not to comment on Western animation as a whole, but (bringing it all back to the original commenter's remark about mobile games being sparsely animated) simply state that sparse animation doesn't have to be a bad thing, and in fact, there's an entire school of animation built around it.
Anyway, thanks again for replying, and I'll be sure to check your suggestions out.
* WARNING *
"Raggedy Ann & Andy", IMHO, is NOT A GOOD MOVIE. It is a fascinating trainwreck of obsession. It is a weird damn thing you see when you are five, then halfway remember when you are twenty and wonder if you dreamed it.
The idea of "pencil mileage" works both ways; really thinking about that helped me be able to finally actually enjoy some Japanese stuff.
There is also a strong tradition of Western limited animation; it actually started as the artistic cutting edge with the work of UPA (Gerald McBoing Boing, Rooty Toot Toot). Even Disney played win that domain with stuff like Pigs Is Pigs or Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom.
But then in the 60s, TV came along, and Joe Hanna and William Barbera's sweet gig doing beautifully animated Tom & Jerry shorts was gone; they started doing super-simplified cartoons that were carried largely by the voice talent. This got worse in the 70s and 80s, with tons of terrible toy-based cartoons done on the smallest budget possible (He-Man! GI Joe!). "Limited animation" is a dirty word to an entire generation of American animators.
Or at least it was until John K's "Ren & Stimpy" hit the cable networks, and inspired a new generation of animators. Who're busy making a lot of the TV stuff of today.
(But honestly I think that deep in the heart of every Western animator, there is a grey-toned Fleischer character bopping up and down in time to their heartbeat. Their hallucinatory version of Snow White - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNG8GYrh1mg - is a good example.)
Crash and Spyro are great examples of what can be done when a 2D animator's mindset is applied to 3D games! It carries on nicely from all the gorgeous 2D work on games like Aladdin or Earthworm Jim. I would love to see people come back to that mindset in video games. Guilty Gear Xrd is the first ray of light in the clunkily-puppeted darkness in a long time.
What great 2D animation is left? Ghibli stopped producing features (or put it on hold) and Disney, and everybody else in the US moved to 3D
I was thoroughly impressed Knights of Sidionia on Netflix, and though it can match some feature animation, it is still far from Ghibli/Disney. And it isn't even 2D!
The other day someone posted a gallery from Ghost in the Shell on Reddit and I thought "When was the last time we saw art like this on the big screen?"
Many pixel games today take it further by adding shaders, lighting, semi-transparency, HDR, particle effects, etc. so a lot of them share this hybrid old-new look. It's charming if a) done tastefully and b) the animation/art is solid e.g. Towerfall Ascension.
There are a few games that really nail the pixel art, but they are the exception among the flood of poorly done graphics. Those titles usually look different than most other pixel art games and don't fall into the lookalike pattern I mentioned before. I tend to generalize negatively in regards of pixel art because of the vast majority of the bad titles.
I think pixel art by itself is rad and has an audience that appreciates it. For games though, even beyond the problem of the audience not getting the point, in the age of retina displays there are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want.
If one was so inclined to stick with blocky pixel art, one could always render the bitmaps' pixels as filled vector rectangles and the target display would autoscale those rectangles without blurring them (unless they became subpixel-sized.)
But, I personally think a high resolution pixel art style in games is just going to confuse the consumer. Box shots no longer sell a game, trailer videos do. Are you going for high detail but low color count and 24fps animation? That does seem like a strange choice when I write it like that.
Low resolution pixel art (320 pixels wide or tall) makes a statement, and I think the consumers get the "retro" style the developer is going for there. But then why would an artist with a pencil and a budget ever want to restrict themselves like that?
I don't know what Ubisoft did in recent Rayman titles, but it looks like 3D or 2D vector art. The animations are super fluid, scale very nicely, and are super fun to watch! I suppose as the author suggests at the end, hand-placed curves could be a good substitute for hand-placed blocks.
The new Rayman games are absolutely a joy to behold. The majority of the visuals in the game are 2D, though the engine also supports 3D models, and I'm not certain if the 2D assets are sprites or vector illustrations. There's a pretty neat demonstration of the engine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoLpPw864eA
> There are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want.
Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place. The pixels in Atari/NES games were made to go through the various distortions in the video pipeline (composite crossover, scanlines, flickering, misaligned electron guns and all that) that left them with all the hard edges blurred off.
The aesthetic is totally based on people running emulators showing you the framebuffer in a way it was never meant to be seen.
> Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place
Some did. For instance, I played games like LucasArts adventure games and WarCraft 1 on a Mac with a Trinitron display, which faithfully showed the blocks in all their glory. I imagine the experience was similar for other PC games. Not all pixel art was made for NTSC TVs.
Except that Game Boy games didn't look like that screenshot either. The point being that programmers and artists took advantage of the screens (be it a handheld LCD or CRT television) to compliment their artwork and achieve effects they couldn't pull off by their pixels alone.
One can see a Cg shader here that attempts to recreate the look of an actual Game Boy screen, complete with several characteristics including motion blur and contrast settings:
'Many developers who try to achieve the retro aesthetic overlook how much magnification is going on, resulting in not one, but several different resolutions at once. Not only can this be unsightly, but it’s “showing its strings,”which defeats the purpose of limiting your resolution in the first place.'
Pixel art may have come from the limitations and formats of the past, but it'll continue to evolve and change like other art styles. It's simple to get into and complex to master.
There are some good points in the article, but pixel art in games (or art heavily influenced by pixel art) is a style that many people enjoy, especially when it is done well. It's very puzzle-like and you have to think economically when creating larger pieces. Pixel art and low poly art are fundamental art styles of gaming, I think partially because they are so overtly digital.
I think my favourite pixel artists show how the medium is always changing and getter better, e.g., Paul Robertson, Pixels Huh, Yuriy Gusev (Fool), Barney Cumming, and Mrmo Tarius.
PS. I'm a game developer and also run a pixel art on community on Twitter called @Pixel_Dailies. Come check us out sometime. :)
It was interesting to see that the game Aero uses very nice looking (high resolution?) pixel art. I'm familiar with it in old games and in newer ones that choose to adopt a retro look, but I'd never seen someone attempt what they did. I probably would have been one of the people complaining about the game's 'pixellated' art, as a result.
That said, I quite enjoyed the article, and some of those modern pixel art pieces linked were very impressive. I think overall his decision to make the switch is a good one though, if I can consider myself any kind of sample of his audience.
This article has several very important points that any creator should keep in mind 1) The medium is the message. In other words the medium determines the art. In his case, the higher-resolution of phone screens determines that his message must change to take advantage of the screen's capabilities. For example, when TV started it used radio and play formats for presentation. It wasn't until years later, that people began to explore the visual storytelling aspects of the media. It takes a while for people to discover how each medium should be used most effectively. 2) The meaning of a communication is the response you get [1]. When your audience is saying that your game is retro and old-fashioned, they are not lying -- that's what it means to them. You can try an educate them, but you are going against their understanding of point 1, or you can work to their expectations. Good luck to the guy, he really gets it.
This is great! It reminds me of some of the stuff I did once upon a time. Here's a small collection of what I saved/salvaged over time[1].
We were a small group of friends who wanted to make a Harry Potter MMO (post-trio era, if anyone cares). Well, we did make it, but we were young, didn't know how shit about marketing and that stuff, and it never launched properly. So, the first M of MMO was never achieved, sadly[1]. I still know shit about marketing and that stuff, now that I think about it.
In the end there was a big (personal) argument and people divided into two groups and we parted ways on not-so-good-terms.
[1]: http://nino.miletich.me/public/pixel_art/
Note: not all of it is my work, in fact most probably isn't. I don't even remember what is what isn't; we colaborated on a lot of stuff. I was mostly the programmer/developer and not the artist for the project.
[2]: Maybe not so much sadly, since WB is apprantly very aggressive towards fan-made products that get a bit of attention.
Yes! Thank you. I love the old pixel aesthetic, but today's art should fit today's constraints. Those classic games will always be around, awaiting your next nostalgia rush. Screw stagnation.
Likewise, I like old Victorians and Art Deco, but I wouldn't be excited about one built today. No one would respect a 2015 medieval-style castle quite like one from 1515.
Agreed. It's like the tacky buildings in Las Vegas that mimic other buildings, or Disney World, or those faux-European cities built for tourists in China.
I sure would love to see some new cathedrals built using the methods of centuries past, though.
Some of the greatest film movies ever created are black and white, ironical because most of them were recorded in two colors but the color was lost(as the only copy that not degraded over time were the black and white television copies).
But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it.
Even Chaplin got nearly bankrupt trying to stay with silent pictures.
Most people can't understand that making a movie without sound is actually harder than with it, as a movie without sound feels weird and you have to apply lots of work in order to fight this limitation.
So it just does not make economical sense when 99% of the people do not understand the work behind and you have to make something 99 times more expensive to those that do in order to live of your work.
>But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it.
For any given object, over a large enough population, most people won't be exposed to it; those that are won't understand it. Hit TV shows might reach 10M viewers in the US - out of 350M.
FWIW I think the OPs move is slightly premature: there's a movie coming out soon called Pixels that will certainly raise the profile of this style: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2120120/
While I understood the obsession with pixel art, I never really emotionally "got it". For me, it is more about what to do with the technology available to do, and then making the best out of that. And that does not mean going photorealistic if you can, but just create a look that fits the product. XIII, Borderlands, World of Warcraft come to mind - competing products of the same time had a much more "real" look, but these titles actually stood out and aged well. The author mentions Grim Fandango, which is in the same vein. None of these is retro or pixel art, just done with an overarching style that is not at the maximum of what was possible at the games creation.
And I'm going to keep making games with pixel art. Why? Not because I want to evoke retro nostalgia. Simply because the asset pipeline is easier to manage. I avail myself of high resolutions and millions of colors, but even with those you can create great pixel art even in a simple paint program and from there it is easy to load into a game and draw on the screen. Plus, well done pixel art reads incredibly clearly -- compare pixelated Mario with the 3D-rendered, mushy Mario used in Mario vs. Donkey Kong.
For 2D gaming pixel art gets the job done and requires minimal tooling and middleware. That's why I love it.
This is a great article and I feel one of the most important points are being drowned in discussing the merits of pixel art or what art is here in the comment section.
The most important thing is the part about speaking the language of the users. And especially "the users don't owe you their time"
These are principles that are extremely important if you want to build a product that reaches people and change their lives. Be it in the marketing department, engineering, UX or as this article, art work.
Another great point is that we can produce great art/products/UX while speaking the users language.
Author/artist here! Thank you so much for bringing it back around. And it's important to point out that I am in no way proposing that we "dumb down" or "pander." I think we should always be pushing as hard as we can and producing ambitious, excellent work as much as we can. We should sacrifice money and time to see it through and really add something of value and enrichment to the world! I just think we should do that in a language people already speak. That's a lower level than all these finer points, fun as they are to discuss ;). Thanks for reading!
Limitations often breed art. Compare what George Lucas did when he was on a shoe-string budget to what he did when money was no object... frequently directly to what he made when he was on a budget. Pixel art is appreciated by people because they can see the limitation and appreciate how the artist worked around it. However, restricting yourself to pixel art does mean adopting a limitation voluntarily when you probably also have a lot of other ones to deal with too. Sometimes one more limitation is one limitation too many.
Pixel art is very trendy right now, but it probably won't remain so forever. Shooting film in black and white used to be all that was possible. Then it became what was cheap. Today, we still see some B&W films for aesthetic reasons, but it's very uncommon. Pixel art will probably become very similar to B&W film eventually. Seldom used, but used for a specific effect when it is used.
There's room for plenty of aesthetics besides pixel art and "HD" though. With modern displays, there's no reason that games can't borrow aesthetics from other mediums. Watercolors, comic book print, you name it. Heck, even though it's similar to pixels, I'd kill to see a good game created to look like a Byzantine mosaic! Adopting these limitations when appropriate offers artists a chance to take on problems nobody has seen handled before, and it's therefore more interesting than just working with the same artificial limitation everyone else is currently working with.
I'd just like to expand on the idea of a mosaic aesthetic a little bit more. It may seem like mosaics are just irregularly shaped pixels, but it's actually much more than that. Mosaics were made out of a variety of materials that scattered and reflected light in very different ways. Some tiles were matte, some colored glass, and others backed in gold leaf to amp up their reflectivity. Mosaic tiles were also angled to reflect light very strategically, allowing the artist to make some features grab your eye. A mosaic-based game would require a virtual mosaic toolset that would give artists the ability to simulate different tile materials and angles and a lighting engine to render the results. The resulting image would have complexity on a much smaller scale than a single tile.
The 'depixelize' reference [1] is an MS page with samples. I mostly find the hq4x (upto 8x) then EPX most pleasing. The 'Ours' (presumably meaning MS/Xbox) makes everything look like Inuit art completely losing any original sense.
The thing that bothers me about pixel-art is that too many young artists are obsessed with the past, and not exploring the possibilities of the new technologies, tools and modes of thinking that are available to them.
It's as if every musician under twenty was content to play in the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
Don't get me wrong, I love pixel art — Paul Robertson and the Sword & Sworcery guys are doing some of my favorite work — but if the artists of yesterday were stuck in their own pasts… you know?
As technology moves forward, more and more tools are at our disposal. The trick then, is choosing the right tool for to communicate the look and feel you want, in support of the story and world you are creating.
I feel like the author is so close to the issue that they lost the forest for the trees: there will always be some games that benefit from the pixel art, it just takes a full and proper understanding of what they style instantly communicates to your audience.
There are some great-looking pixel art phone games out there. Pixel Dungeon, Game Dev Story (and other Mobage games by the same developer). I haven't seen anyone claiming that the graphics are shit in those. This guy's game doesn't look all that great to be honest. However the points he's making about the public misunderstanding the craft that goes into pixel art are valid.
I have to agree deeply. Purism just for the sake of it is not dealing with the end users demands. A pixel artist does pixel art because he deeply cares about the pixels. But the user doesn't necessarily about the pixels. Most of them care more about that the game's story and interactions are as convincing as possible. Finding the right tools to achieve that is the right way to go.
I think today it's much, much more effort to make a decent pixel art game than to make a generic Unity 3D game (which look all the same to me; I hate them).
I found it interesting that the author denigrated a fighter from Street Fighter IV with 'arms don't work that way', then immediately turns around and says that the pixel art for the next fighter is far better because 'she looks like a whip cracking', despite spines not working that way. It feels like the author is applying different standards at times.
Artist/author here! To be clear, when I said her body is like a whip cracking, it's because a kung fu artist doing that kind of movement in real life would look like a whip cracking. When I said arms don't work that way, I mean that his anatomy is literally deformed to the point of not even looking human.
I am not using a double standard. Though, even if both figures were deformed beyond what is absolutely realistic, there could still be well-executed and poorly-executed iterations.
I couldn't name 10 Animes. I'm not weeaboo by any metric. I will say that I think Japanese art tends to be finer, but not always. I think our culture grapples with being macho, or gritty or realistic. I think it rubs against "the rule of good."
Anyway, whether or not something is old is immaterial. Pixar is making some of my favorite animation period, and they keep getting better. AND they're American.
By all means, dismantle my argument. I would be happy to discuss. I don't think ad hominem is the best place to start.
--Brian Eno