Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese industry
vgdensetsu.tumblr.com
vgdensetsu.tumblr.com
The things they achieved with pallette switching were unbelievable, especially considering the limitations of their tools. It's crazy how he managed to do this stuff just in basic paint programs. Some HNers will be horrified (just write some code!) but I think it's really inspiring.
I'll now gladly pay to have it done properly. :)
Edit: Curses, no parallax! The version of waterfall I made has parallax scrolling, I worked very hard getting that working! (By which I mean I found one strange wallpaper tool from a Korean developer that is the only tool that worked to pull off parallax animated GIF wallpapers). On a 21:9 screen. waterfall is about 3 screens wide...
Think of how hard it is to start writing an essay on "any topic you like" versus a more specific, constrained one e.g., "about the influence of art on science in 16th century".
Something interesting happens when a creative person is constrained by the medium (e.g. limited number of pixels and colours) or by other factors (e.g. limited budget, time, access to instruments, CPU speed, hardware), these circumstances seem to somehow increase creativity.
Many of the great works of art were created in times of intense hardship for their authors.
One of my favorite drawing exercises I have done in a drawing class is speed drawing. You're asked to sketch a model in different poses, but at first you are given 1 minute per pose, and then 30 seconds per pose, then 10 seconds per pose, then 5 seconds per pose. It really forces you to look at the core shapes you see and translate them into as few lines as needed.
I mean, it's a rare artist who was sketching on their computer in the early 80s (the "keyboard and joystick" era of micros.)
The usual workflow was to draw your art on some grid-paper and then plot it onto the screen — either in a paintbrush program, or even more simply, by typing the numbers into a text file to produce a PBM/PGM/PPM image, and then running a tool to convert that to whatever format you need. (In some workflows, the artist themselves could be working entirely on paper, leaving the plotting to a data-entry intern.)
With such a workflow, clumsiness of input method doesn't really matter — it's not impinging on your creative process, since the creative process is already over by the time you sit down at the computer screen.
Why, then, did paintbrush software even exist? Well, it could be helpful for finishing touch-ups to plotted input (especially hand-dithering to suit a given system's palette — effectively the "color grading" of the early digital era.) And, of course, paintbrush software was helpful for quickly banging out "programmer art" mock-ups to use in your game/app, before an artist comes in to replace it with something better.
By the late 80s, 'serious' digital painting software for professional artists to create in came about. But said software either shipped only for systems that had a mouse (e.g. the Mac); or the software package itself shipped with a mouse (as in the case of PC Paint.) So "doing digital painting with a joystick" was never really a thing.
I am in discussions now with a colleague who is setting up a new game design degree in our uni. I showed him this article... we both agreed that the incredible constraints experienced by these early developers could productively inform how the program will be delivered.
This is incorrect, hexadecimal is just a different notation for binary information. It saves space when written down on paper, not in the actual ROM image.
Importantly none of the representations are A. A is a concept and doesn't exist as a real tangible thing in the way paper, bits, or other encodings do.
The map is not the terrain.
data != the representation of that data
Can you suspend pedantry long enough to calculate the area of a circle? What about the approximate area of a circle? Did the addition of the word "approximate" make a difference in how you interpreted the request/statement?
1. The integer 24, as x is the 24th letter of the alphabet.
2. A picture of a handwritten x.
3. The symbol x, as I did above.
4. The integer 120, as in ASCII.
Data representation often has multiple layers. For example that integer 120 from ASCII is then often represented as a single byte containing bits 01111000. The 'symbol x' has some unspecified representation. The picture might be represented using vector art, or an array of pixels, each with a color (which then requires[1] a representation for the colors).
Now suppose I'd want to write a function that gives the next letter after the symbol I'd give in. Choosing the right representation for your data can make this easy or hard.
For the example above, representations 1, 4 are very easy (simply increment the number of the representation by 1), 3 is somewhat easy, and 2 is highly impractical.
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[1] I said something requires a representation. But this is only true when creating a concrete implementation. But while designing algorithms or systems it can often simplify things to simply think of the data, and not its representation.
I don't think storing bitmap graphics in ROM as BCD was ever really a thing. If you had reserved space for 4 BPP, would you really say "nah I don't need 16 colours, 10 is enough for me".
The way they solved this was by having CLUTs (color lookup tables), so for the Super Nintendo (if my memory serves me) you had 16 different CLUTs that you could assign to a graphical object, each able to contain 16 unique colors.
This is what made something like the Super Nintendo graphics look so much better than say the Amiga 500, both used bitmap graphics, but the Amiga did not have a CLUT solution, so you were stuck with 32 colors except for more advanced graphic modes which weren't really usable for games.
It still amazes me how users of kanji/hànzì are able to pick up ideograms from images that contain too little information for OCR to do its job.
Aftr a11, yu are proba81y ble 2 raed htis sntecne, but a cpmuter wd strgggle.
The other learning, in the oposite direction, is about "A Pixel Is Not A Little Square" (http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf). Abstractions are really useful, but they fail in some cases. Pixels are more complex that the abstractions we use.
And, of course, the article has some beautiful graphics.
This is especially an interesting problem with the Super Nintendo, this video explains it all nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssluTgfkdlg
A pixel is a little circle.
(just kidding — skimmed your link though and it was my 30-second takeaway)
In the early 1980s, I would stop at an arcade, almost every day, and waste a couple of dollars playing it.
That's a great article. We've come a long way. I particularly liked how it showed that the original characters were designed to integrate aliasing and blurring from CRT analog artifacts, so they actually look crappy, on today's nice monitors.
As a young child, I had an Atari, and the first shooter I ever played was Galaga. Played for hours. To this day one of my favorites.
One day I got the Xevious cartridge. I was in awe. A scrolling background that looked like a map, instead of a starfield? Objects in the game that you couldn't kill? Shooting bullets AND dropping bombs? Wow.
This was all capped off when you reach a mothership. Wow, a giant enemy that takes up what seemed like 1/4 of the screen! I was genuinely terrified when I first saw that thing.
That game caused me a double-take. It seemed like a very alien world we were on.
https://vgdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/179039509353/la-création-...
Just got this one with an image search:
https://i.stack.imgur.com/5FX88.png
The version where you see "stripes" of blue, is the raw pixels, when you play on emulator you see that, for many years since I could only play on emulators, I thought the game art was weird and an a bizarre stylistic choice (the cartoon also had bizarre art so that was easy to believe).
The first time I saw photos of people playing on CRT I was amazed, on how skilled the artists were, figuring out you could make a transparent waterfall by using vertical stripes if the user had a certain TV + Cable combo (I think the classic coaxial cable was the one most likely to produce this effect if I remember it correctly, seemly that cable worked in a way that it inherently always mixed two columns next to each other).
Also many "retro" games make me sad, with them abusing "pixel art" without realizing that it was never about the pixels, some even go ahead and scale up their game to force pixels to be visible even on CRTs (stardewvalley for example scales the game up forcefully 4x, I did some modding of that game and tested what happen with the scaling disabled, the game could be much more beautiful).
Also lots of people forgetting pixels weren't necessarily square, and just copy-pasting old games art and then not understanding why shields now are oval...
EDIT: lots of hostility to my post it seems.
1. I never said "all" retro games makes me sad, not even "most" of them, I said "many". I am a gamedev myself and understand the appeal of pixel art, including cheaper costs (it is much cheaper to draw pixel art than hightly detailed art).
2. There are pixel-retro games that have really, really good art, even with no blurring or dithering, I never said there weren't.
3. I didn't said all pixels were not square, I said pixels werent "necessarily" square, some of them were rectangular, some were triangular even! And some weren't even pixels at all (Vectrex for example).
What bothers me is just many people could do better, but they just blunder ahead without understanding what they are trying to replicate, it doesn't make me "angry", just sad, because I see lots of great artists wasting their potential.
Some mediums allow a lot of interesting things, for example when Donkey Kong came out, Nintendo loved the pre-rendered 3D look, and demanded their next game be that way, Myamoto (that was orignally hired by Nintendo as artist, NOT as game designer), then made Yoshi Island to be the extreme opposite: art that is obviously 2D, with a painted look. I just want to see more people pulling that sort of stuff, instead of replicating something they don't understand, when they clearly have skills to do better.
Hell, the NES box art emphasized the blocky, pixelated look. To act like square pixels are a new plague is dishonest.
Please folks, the holidays are here and 2020 is almost over. Let's all be a bit more forgiving and generous to our fellow human beings. Maybe something like, "You may have forgotten that square pixels were contemporary" instead?
/s
However, there is a big trade-off in the form of the entire game being blurry. That's why many enthusiasts back in the day (and today) preferred RGB output, even though the higher quality would ruin the blending of the dithered pattern. The Genesis/Mega Drive therefore supported RGB (Sega released an official adapter in Japan, and there was a SCART output in Europe).
And, of course, if you were playing a game on a PC with a CRT monitor, dithering remained visible since PC monitors coupled with VGA signals were of much higher quality than composite signals on consumer TVs.
It's definitely not the case that pixels could not be seen on a CRT - it just depends on the signal and the CRT type.
These kinds of arguments always seem a little solipsistic to me. I think it's a mischaracterization to say most indie developers are blundering foolishly after something they don't understand vs just developing their own style or working within their constraints (there are constraints that aren't technical in making a game, after all).
I can understand the intention of developers in the 80s optimizing for blurry screen all day, but that doesn't change the fact that I just prefer the grid-look for a lot of game contexts and usually don't like art styles with heavy antialiasing or a lot of smooth curves. To say that if only I understood the reality of the technical implementations of 40 years ago my aesthetic preferences would shift is pretty frustrating. I'd imagine it's much more frustrating for actual artists who have devoted time and energy to getting good at making games in the style and probably know their history pretty well.
>Some mediums allow a lot of interesting things, for example when Donkey Kong came out, Nintendo loved the pre-rendered 3D look, and demanded their next game be that way, Myamoto (that was orignally hired by Nintendo as artist, NOT as game designer), then made Yoshi Island to be the extreme opposite: art that is obviously 2D, with a painted look. I just want to see more people pulling that sort of stuff, instead of replicating something they don't understand, when they clearly have skills to do better.
I think you're comparing two different intentions here. When those games were made, the goal was to push the graphics of the snes as hard as they could. Most retro games are made with the intention of, well, looking retro.
If you look at a game like say Hollow Knight, that's where I feel like art styles like Yoshi's island evolved to. There's still people going for that painted look, you just don't notice them or compare them to retro games because, they don't look retro.
A good thing too. Secondhand CRTs are getting scarcer and demand is increasing. It’s a very schizophrenic microeconomic case study.
ETA: Wait, I used the CRT monitor on my desktop server sometime about 5 years ago after a power outage and I needed to restart the server.
My favourite monitor is a CRT, currently plugged into a R9 380X, that is the most recent GPU + RAMDAC combo... newer video cards do not have RAMDAC anymore :(
Also I do have the CRT main problem too... I own a Television that I intend to use to play old consoles, and that TV is from a very sought after model, but it is stuck on my parents house because it is so big and heavy that there is no physical space inside my apartment to put it :/ It will wait until I move into a ground-level house to use it... (I still regularly turn it on and use for other things, it works great)
And I miss old school tumblrs for inspiration. Sites like MLKSHK & FFFFound would provide a steady random stream of highly curated visual juxtapositions. Seriously needs to be revived...
Also how Japanese games almost always have some animation in their UIs.