A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art (2015)
dinofarmgames.com
dinofarmgames.com
There's another thing I want to mention. I have a broadcast-quality CRT with consoles of ye olde hooked up, and pixels you see on sprites, especially on the edges, aren't there on CRTs. Magical scanline blends them together and looking at the pixel art on CRT is different than on anything else. Almost like they are anti-aliased, but they're not (smudged). I think that's a key component today we are missing from enjoying pixel art. When it was dominant in game industry, you couldn't see actual pixels. Today, they are fetishised.
Exactly! I didn't like the author's dig at rescaling algorithms, but he seems to be forgetting that pixels never looked like that! The pixel art he likes so much was never like what he does today. This article has good screenshots, although I think they're emulated:
http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2982-a-link-to-the-past-ho...
If you like pixel art, go ahead and make pixel art. Some of the artwork in the article is stunning, and I like the aesthetic a lot. However, don't romanticize it and claim that old games looked like that, because they just didn't.
I think better scalers and shaders that can reproduce the look of CRTs are a nice effort, since I want to play old games the way I actually remember them, not with visible pixels that were completely alien the first time I played Zelda on an emulator.
"We all get how pixels basically work. A computer divides a display into squares, and each square can be assigned one RGB value at a time. The total squares supported by the hardware is the device’s “resolution.” This square grid is the smallest possible subdivision of detail available to an artist."
This is the bit that's fundamentally wrong. Pixels are not squares. And never have been. They are "point samples". The fact that "magnified" pixel art displayed here compounds the error by displaying big squares rather than using an appropriate reconstruction filter doesn't help correct the misconception.
Here's a link to a classic paper on the topic: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
But... it's not pixel art anymore, it's square art. And if people want to create neo-pointilist/neo-divisionist artwork based upon a grid of coloured squares that's fine. But it's not pixels.
Here are some high quality CRT examples: http://imgur.com/a/Ad0pe
I have a theory what contributes to that 'blended' effect. Well, at least for the most part. It's the masking in-front of the beam. If you look at the sister comment here I made with portable AGS-101 screen from Gameboy SP, it's the same effect. Most prominent while moving. That (resolution) masking grid (with squares on LCD or oblongs on CRTs) somehow interacts with neighbouring pixels and blends all together. It's not from the composite signal, that's for sure. I know, because I run my consoles with RGB output and I still don't see that sharp look that doesn't look right.
What about the thousands of games for hand-held consoles, which have always used LCDs, and were using pixel art for much longer than their counterparts elsewhere out of sheer necessity?
(Especially when you're a kid and keep your nose mere inches off the screen.)
Your point stands in theory, but in practice it also doesn't look anything like pixel art on modern screens.
edit: to be clear, I'm mostly talking about the edges on the sprites. That's where it's most visible. It's not as clinical or smudged as on modern monitors / upscales.
Curse you, nostalgia. I definitely remember it being… pixel-y-ier. I stand corrected.
I think this is very insightful. I learned about this when setting up a home MAME arcade. The vector-graphic games looked perfect, but Space Harrier and other pixel-based games looked wrong to me, less impressive than I remembered as a kid. The forums told me I could try running a pixel-smudging mask to make the games look right, but it would be graphics-card-intensive. Instead, I went out and found an old used CRT monitor and everything looks great.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/C...
http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png
And if you ask how, the answer is: analog. Every transition was driven by the analog circuits, the phosphor response was analog. Analog all around, but especially to form the pixels one after another: all the transitions, response curves, persitences, dispersions working their own magic.
Great artists that worked in the medium knew how to make art within the restrictions of the medium that didn't look like it had been restricted by the medium; as great artists do in any medium.
Pixel art is a niche but it is still alive and I have been considering to investigate up-scaling methods that are more suitable for it.
For example there is a game OpenTTD (https://www.openttd.org) that is based on the pixel art and while attempts have been made to great higher resolution graphics based on the renders then most of these attempts, with some exceptions, have fallen flat. So people play with mixed graphics and such methods could make it more enjoyable if the up scaling of the lower resolution sprites would work better.
You can check out the forum https://www.tt-forums.net/viewforum.php?f=26 and mostly inactive http://www.simuscape.net/simutalk/index.php for examples of custom graphics made for this game (and older hack, TTDPatch).
But doing it on a rushed schedule is stressful and can suck.
I would love to see some more concrete examples of what you're stating as I an ignorant of that which you speak but super curious....
Can you please explain in pics what youre talking about?
With that said, I think the example art the article provides for their game is not very good. Specifically I think there's far too much dithering going on, making it look like it was originally drawn in 32-bit color but then had the number of colors reduced by the pixel editing software (as opposed to the beauty of manually placed pixels). This is especially glaring in the UI elements, and is not the only fault in my opinion.
I realize different people have different preferences, and I realize that pixel art is experiencing a surge in unpopularity, but I can't help but think they'd have better luck if their pixel art was better...
They complain about the shape of someone's arms in Street Fighter? Who cares about realism, these characters can shoot fireballs from their hands. Look at Link in Link’s Awakening! His head must weigh 3x more than his body. If you find a screenshot with his sword, it's even weirder. The sword is simultaneously smaller than his head, and yet larger than the entire rest of his body. And have you ever seen a tree or wall that looks like that? But it looks freaking fantastic at that resolution.
I don't care if the author's art was entirely hand-made, it looks like a high quality image was pixelated by a computer. The art in King of Fighters' may have been done entirely by hand, but if the end results looks indistinguishable from a 3d render at low resolution with terrible aliasing, who cares what means was used to get the crappy look? The author restating things about "embracing the medium", but I don't believe they did.
The irony is the particular King of Fighters they reference had character models/animations that were originally produced as 3D renders [1] and then used as the basis for the artists to draw over/fine tune in order to save time during production (since the previous games took so long to finish the animations). So in the context of the article it's an interesting though overlooked detail that could have been a decent bridge into the point about transitioning to 3D.
> They complain about the shape of someone's arms in Street Fighter? Who cares about realism, these characters can shoot fireballs from their hands
Animations and design are still important even when what's being representing isn't based in reality. It's the same reason CG was for a long time critiqued, and continues to be, for instances where there are 'floaty' characters or the animation/physics seem 'off'. 2D can often take more artistic liberties and isn't so stringently expected to be 'realistic' compared to CG. And while that comparison in the article was a bit out of place, considering the real difference is animator talent and visual style, it showed how mature the 2D animation scene was at the time, and it has to be said the animations of Street Fighter III Third Strike are among the best 2D animations in any commercial game.
[1] http://kofaniv.snkplaymore.co.jp/english/info/15th_anniv/2d_...
Well, the whole point is to make them shoot fireballs out of their hands in a convincing fashion. So having the non-fantastic elements of the animation be convincing is especially important.
Hayoa Miyazaki's writings in this book https://www.amazon.com/Starting-Point-1979-1996-Hayao-Miyaza... explain the need for realism in animation far better than I can.
Interestingly the author actually ends up supporting that point too. All the examples they use of Pixel art are in support of an aesthetic that, while it was forced upon them at the time, is of a certain forced low-resolution style.
Their game however is pixel art for... well no obvious reason other than they like pixel art. There is no reason in the aesthetic of the game to be pixel art. It doesn't look like it's supposed to be pixel art.
So generally I'm not surprised they're moving away from pixel art - they had no reason to use it in the first place!
If you're not going for a low resolution aesthetic then why on earth would you use pixel art which is exactly for that style?
But when you dig in with this excruciatingly detailed expressive pixel art style, you lose that charm. You're expressing what HD images already can express, and it feels like you've just made a pixelated HD image.
Look at Hyper Light Drifter. Every one who's seen that game agrees that it looks amazing, among the best looking games of the year (a year which includes technical powerhouses like Doom, Uncharted 4 and Overwatch).
In previous years, games like Fez, Superbrothers and Hotline Miami have gotten similar accolades. Even a game which is adheres to super-strict arbitrary pixel art restrictions like Shovel Knight was highly praised.
If people didn't particularly appreciate the art on the author's game, I'm going to say that it has very little to do with the fact that it used pixel art. The "pixel tax" is fictional.
Some years later, I realized that I'd logged as many hours in UT99 as I had in emulated playthoughs of Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger, not because the graphics of UT99 were amazeballs (which they were for their time), but because like Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger, UT99 was actually _fun to play_. But when I attempted convey that idea -- that perhaps graphics were not the sole driver of fun factor -- to a game dev who had moments before been bitching about the hacks his team had to do make 3d performant on the Playstation 2, he responded that nope, a game _has_ to be 3d, or it isn't any good.
Is that a silly attitude? Sure. But it still exists. And to dismiss the possibility of such an attitude I think misses the author's point that it is more important to focus on making the best game art one can in the medium to hand, than to focus on an art style that arose from past limitations over everything else.
1. http://andreaspapathanasis.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-tech-arm...
Also, why did the dev have to pull crazy hacks to make 3d performant on the PS2? I mean, if he was trying for something particularly impressive, or xbox-level graphics, sure, but the PS2 was built for manipulating polygons. It was, in a very real sense, the last console that was so aggressively optimized for one use case.
A lot of the PS2's speed came from vector processing; not sure how great the tools were for taking advantage of vector math. Didn't code on one myself. Also possible they were just using too many polygons; it's easy to kill your performance when you push your polygon numbers too high, or if you have too much overdraw and you blow past the pixel fill rate. (The design of the game had various animations happening in the background, which no player could ever see because of course you're paying attention to the Tetris board in the middle...not my idea; I just implemented what they asked for.)
I didn't have performance problems on the Game Boy Advance because even though my CPU was slower, I was in 2d-land. It was funny to me that they eschewed the C++ engine and rewrote their in C because "performance!", while they ended up with performance problems and I didn't, but what can you do...
Or something.
Neat story, anyways.
As for the game dev, I don't know, I didn't ask. I might be mis-remembering and he might have been bitching about the PS1 instead of the PS2. shrug
While we're discussing how high tech isn't required in a game, I feel the need to say that they aren't mutually exculsive, either.
That's fair. I think part of the whole pixel art thing is a backlash against modern graphics tech, born of one-too-many experiences with a game that, while using the latest and greatest tech to achieve visually-stunning results, was no fun to play. Taken to the extreme, it can easily become a reverse-pixel-tax attitude: A game using modern graphics tech wont be fun, or at least, not as fun as it could have been.
Such an attitude is as equally silly as a pixel-tax attitude, and I think part of what drove the the author to write the original article is realizing such.
Meanwhile, the latest Call of Duty makes a hojillion dollars, still running on a heavily modified Quake 3 engine, with relatively unimpressive graphics for its time. Meanwhile meanwhile, Valve makes another smash hit, still running off of a heavily modified Quake 1 engine.
Don't see how you're disagreeing with the parent comment with these examples.
"I think this critique is just plain wrong on its face" is a critique of the article.
The Diablo vs. FFTA example in the article demonstrates it well: Despite Diablo coming out earlier, while 2D art was very much a well-cultivated thing, the artists just didn't know how to get it right (too low contrasts, too much dithering, …). FFTA, meanwhile, just looks beautiful.
I also agree with his criticism of Goldeneye vs Grim Fandango. However, which of those games was more successful?
Sometimes good art doesn't sell as well as flashy effects that may look antiquated in 5-10 years.
It may be problematic if one has to do things that are not really compatible with the medium, such as trying to put high poly models on a low-poly screen, but a lot of games cannot really achieve the right feel by working with the medium. One of the issues I have with a lot of retro-style games is that they're almost automatically limited into certain genres and feels.
Diablo using properly pixelated art just wouldn't be Diablo anymore, and for all the muddy, I love how it looks to this day. I always liked the 2.5D style, really. But for me, this is subjective either way.
Diablo on a CRT looks better and feels better than Diablo 2 on any monitor imho, and is on par with Diablo 3's visuals (and still has a better feeling of physicality, unlike D3 where bodies are clipping left and right).
Isn't that what he's saying?
Just like, people like me genuinely like how Diablo looks and he things it's a muddy aliased mess.
When we only had 16 colours, it was harder to make great-looking art, but that difficulty didn't make the art look better. The essence of pixel art is that (it seems that) every pixel is placed with care. An image which uses 45 colours but looks like a dithered version of a full-colour image does not look like every pixel is placed with care. Quite the opposite: it looks like the image you're looking at isn't even the image the artist wanted you to see.
Hyper Light Drifter has great "pixel art", but couldn't have been achieved on a 16-bit display (without either noticeable banding or dithering). But, the way it uses colour is clearly inspired by great 4-bit artistry. Although there are many more than 16 colors, neighbouring hues are contrasting, blending is used to indicate glows or shadows, and blurring is used to indicate depth.
I think it is very sad to hear any artist saying this. I think he's being noble and he certainly has rationalized the situation very convincingly ("embracing the medium").
It's a very delicate balance. On the one hand, yes you do not deserve an audience. All too often contempt for the audience is merely the sign of a lazy artist. On the other hand sometimes you must bite the hand that feeds - and keep biting. The best I know have that mixture: they desire glory and at the same time they have a tyrannical disregard for what others think.
Ultimately, he's courting the high opinion of people whose opinions he doesn't respect, because they are influential.
Further, if the viewer's display is _close_ to the art's native resolution, but not at least one integer multiple higher, the art is going to be smeared as no scaling technique will deal with such a small scaling transition well.
With that in mind, Auro looks like it'd have trouble looking good on any of the devices it was intended for, and indeed looking more like aliasing ("pixellation") to the average user. The author acknowledges this in the article: "Some devices blur Auro. 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."
--Orson Welles
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.hexage.rad...
https://lh5.ggpht.com/EyOXQmFzhQ8ie9AnQcq7mcYOaY_uiWY6M8Zis2...
Yeah, he looks like a pixel art figure, but look at how he's canted. Look at the bloom on everything. Which may reinforce the author's point -- that there's tradeoffs to doing perfect pixel-by-pixel placement on modern devices, where everyone uses screens of different size and aspect-ratio, and that different techniques are needed to give people the best experience, even if you want to have a retro aesthetic.
Wrote a tool to take a single font sheet bitmap and parse out each letter. Each letter had 4 shades of grey. So, would create 4 fonts that would render in 4 passes.
To make a master bitmap, we'd scan a font sheet into a PCX file hand it over to an artist with the instructions: "make it smooth". Hours upon hours of: zoom-in-click-click-click-zoom-out-review-repeat. Poor artist.
I wonder what kind of lament a vector artist will have, decades from now. And what will take its place.
[edit] vector
I don't think anything is going to take the place of vector tools, especially as screen DPI continues to increase. I keep flirting with Affinity Designer[2], which does some very interesting things with integrating raster effects to create a very scalable but very painterly look. But I've got a decade and a half of sunk cost into Illustrator that keeps pulling me back.
1: http://egypt.urnash.com 2: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/
... Shitty dither. That didn't take long. Even in Bubsy, the things that weren't dithered weren't nearly as bad as the ones that were.
It has other problems, too, but they would become more apparent if the artist had refused to dither. Then they'd be a lot easier to talk about, such as the horrible shapes for everything except bubsy himself.
The problem with that background in bubsy wasn't the "pixel art", it was the art. I'm betting that artist couldn't draw well in any medium.
They have explicitly said that they're not going for an adventure game in the truly old style, but for something that feels like it is.
I think one issue is that most people don't appreciate or understand the limits. This comes up in the demoscene. The demoscene makes realtime demos. The fact that they are realtime (or 4k or 1k or 256b) makes them interesting to people who understand the limits. But to most people outside the scene they're just mediocre effects because they aren't aware of the limits and instead are used to Star Wars: the Force Awakens effects or Pixar or whatever.
The same is true for pixel art. Many people like pixel art because of nostalgia. Others like it for the creativity within limits. But, probably most people, aren't aware of the limits so to them it's just not latest AAA game level of art.
It kinda sucks but there's lots of things the masses don't like/don't get. Fortunately there seem to be enough who do like these types of things.
The whole 'But customers want HD!' era has long since ended, with many of the most popular hits on PC games being pixel-based. The issue was never fully the artwork, but the cutthroat nature of the mobile market.
That said, the artwork of Auro reeks of faux-retroism and unlike Shovel Knight which embraced it, it seems like they were only really willing to go half-way.
Looks like it stuck this time; http://www.dinofarmgames.com/forum/index.php?threads/battle-... is a thread on Dino Farms' forums with some bits from a game they're working on. Personally I'm not sure the comic booky ink outline style is working for him yet but hey, he's learning an entire new way of working, possibly an entirely new art toolchain, and that takes time.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned though …
The sad truth is 3D games are now cheaper to produce and work at arbitrary resolution, so the big studios will just keep popping them out because it's just so easy.
So some people likes pixels and call it “art” and use such word combinations like “HD fetishism”.
But I would say “Pixels fetishism” and “HD Art”. Of course badly made HD content can be bad too.
P.S.: This is my purely subjective and personal taste. Other will disagree with this because they have other taste.
In the immortal words of Jeffrey Lebowski:
"That's just, like, your opinion, man".
(Which you admit too, but I think can't be emphasized enough).
Umm... You can find massive amounts of shockingly ugly non-pixel art too. Perhaps you are confusing bad art for pixel art.