Developers on what makes their games ‘hand-drawn’ | Hacker News Reader

Developers on what makes their games ‘hand-drawn’

polygon.com

139 pointshomarp37 comments

If you're looking for a fantastic (adventure-puzzle) game with a very unique graphical style, I recommend Return of the Obra Dinn, by Lucas Pope (of Papers Please).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Obra_Dinn

Truly, truly unique gem that implements detective work really well, and has a mind-bendingly disorienting art style. Spoiler-free trailer with some example gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILolesm8kFY

Lucas Pope is a one man army. He even did the music for that game, which is just as good as the other aspects.

Also check out Helsing's Fire for devices. I don't generally rave about this kind of puzzle games, but like everything Pope does, the attention to details is outstanding.

I meant "for iDevices" but my phone's autocorrect got in the way :(

He kept a very detailed devblog on TIGSource, documenting all the aspects of making the game including sound, modeling and shader programming. https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?action=profile;u=3073...

Also there is an interview from Ars Technica talking about his story from Naughty Dog to Indie and why he like to work as one man team. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/from-uncharted-to-obr...

One of the things that really pops out to me in the interview on arstechnica is his love of writing 'tools' - so do I..

I had a similar issue when I was working on educational CD's back in the dark ages - 660MB just wasn't large enough for all the voice-over we needed to fit the script we were given.

We couldn't go lower than 16-bit/22k/mono without making it painful to listen to, had to come up with another idea..

The key was to work out that the v/o artist we used had 7 phrasings/cadences, and as there were ~7 questions per section she was already phrasing the lesson correctly.

So instead of having to use an entire intro+question+correct/incorrect recording I could instead splice the intro and correct/incorrect responses (mostly) depending on their location in the lesson.

To just substitute based on position in lesson didn't work though, so the 'Audio Matcher' tool was born.

Allowed us to get over 3+ hours of natural sounding questions & answers audio onto a single CD. (..loved writing and using that tool) (..and yes of course we could have simply gone to production with 2 CD's - but that would have cost 2x as much, required installation and not have been anywhere near as cool)

Also for anyone interested in the technical side of the dithering in Return of the Obra Dinn, be sure to check out this forum post by the developer https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...

I can really relate to this commenter on the thread:

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg139857...

Often times, you only see the final product, thinking "that can't be that hard!", only to realize that there is a ton of things that had to be done before. I, personally, like reading devlogs. It helps me staying sane over my personal projects.

Thank you for linking this. What a treasure.

The Witness could stack up too I feel. A handcrafted 3D world with an almost painterly feeling thanks to the modelling and texturing, yet it still feels lifelike because of the correctness of the lighting.

Correctness of lighting has a really important role in making unique 3D art feel real and believable. With how mature lighting pipelines have become, the role of PBR and now the introduction of raytracing I think we actually have a lot more room to make unique 3D art that still feels immersive and "real" as it is the lighting that sells that feeling of correctness. More so than the texture map, art style or the modelling in my opinion

A game like Cyberpunk for one example has some instances where an objects texture is pixelated and blurry yet it still feels entirely part of the world because the lighting correctness sells it's existence in the world so well.

A game like mirrors edge was so compelling even with simple textures because the lighting made the space feel real.

Even Minecraft feels like a world you can live in with Raytracing.

There was an AMAZING game that was released unfinished: The Saboteur, that was in black and white until you liberated sectors of WWII Paris, which would turn that sector back into vibrant color. Unfortunately game content was deeply broken, for example failing a mission might take you back to before a previous mission, among other crazy glitches.

I was so excited for this game, and so painfully let down when I played it... Suffered a lot from the open world curse of "spend ages driving to the mission objective in the country, do one thing, spend ages driving back to the city".

The Saboteur is one of my favourite games, and I think saying it was released unfinished is a bit of a stretch. I've played through the whole campaign several times and never had any game-breaking glitches on either PC or PS3. I would recommend to pick it up from GOG which has added a few quality of life patches: https://www.gog.com/game/saboteur

I would definitely be interested in giving it another try, especially with any available patches. Didn't realize that was out there, thanks!

Another game that I think really belongs in this collection is Gorogoa by Jason Roberts. It's a small game, not particularly difficult, but one I enjoyed.

The game _Before Your Eyes_ sounds particularly interesting. Not because it takes a hand drawn aesthetic, however that is defined, but because it is controlled by blinks, an action that is only partially under our control, like breathing. This probably won't mean much to people who haven't read about the ways we can blur the lines between our conscious and subconscious minds, but this seems like a way to unlock conscious control over things from heart rate to body temperature to the immune system.

I'd buy digital wallpaper drawn in the style of the heading image.

Absolutely! I think it's screenshot further down the article is also fantastic.

The game is Cozy Grove for anyone interested, and it's recent launch has it's subreddit buzzing with the warmth of a growing community. The game can be found on Steam.

Fun fact, the devs have submitted wallpapers that are included in the current (maybe not limited-time-only?) ~$6 LudoNarraCon Supporter Pack, but there aren't previews. (As mentioned here: https://mobile.twitter.com/cozygrove/status/1384546387031855...). I'll be picking it up myself to support the Con, anything with Supergiant's support has my money c:

Most 2D graphical adventures were like that. For example, Broken Sword. Or Super Mario World 2 in the SNES.

The history is more complicated than that. The artists back then probably wanted their games to look hand-drawn, but were forced to create pixelated designs in acknowledgment of technological limitations. By the time technology caught up around the turn of the millennium, 2D games were being wholesale replaced with 3D games (often to the detriment of the games). At that point 2D games were almost entirely relegated to portable consoles (with some notable exceptions, e.g. Odin Sphere on the PS2), whose hardware was a generation behind, further perpetuating the pixel art aesthetic. Then, once developers finally acknowledged that not all games were better in 3D, pixel art had itself become a vogue retro aesthetic. The fact that we're finally seeing a ton of 2D games that don't use the pixel aesthetic is a sign of maturity in the industry (although a well-done pixel aesthetic can still look great).

This is accurate and well said.

I think the source of the maturation adds another interesting twist to the story.

A lot of 2D games today are built with 3D engines, and use modern GPU-assisted tech like shaders for lighting and effects. The path to better 2D needed to pass through a 3D phase just for the tooling.

Tooling is where I think the games industry stores most of its culture. The studios burn through a generation of devs within a decade, so it's risky to leave it in their heads.

Note that most old pixel art games didn’t look pixelated when you played them, because they’re actually dithered. They were made to be run through a composite cable to a CRT and use the dot crawl/rainbow/scanline effects to generate a smoother picture.

Which doesn’t mean you should keep a CRT around, those things are way too heavy.

There's been some really neat and cool advances in using shaders to recreate those effects, see the following for some info:

http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/NTSC_Filters

http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT-Royale

and http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/File:Composite.p...

The combo of CRT-Royale and the NTSC filters looks great, but it can require 4k to produce the proper image, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvQ1ELB066Q

> The history is more complicated than that.

It's more complicated than that too imo. Before Broken Sword 3 was released, Charles Cecil said they had always wanted the game to be 3D (https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17561). So it's likely that hand drawn 2D (pixelated or not) was often used because of limitations also. It's further possible that developers chose point and click as the medium because of technical limitations (e.g. it's easier to draw/render static scenes than develop a 3d engine). Evidence of this is - further to the death of 2D at this time as you point out - the fact that point and click died also as a genre at this time, as 3d modelling tools and third party 3d engines were becoming more accessible.

I think this same dynamic applies to many old styles in gamedev that are now seen as having an aesthetic quality when really they arose out of necessity (e.g. 8-bit era pixelation, ZX spectrum colour palates, dithered transparency)

So arguably if developers are choosing hand drawn now or P&C, it's perhaps the first time that it's the "harder" option, rather than being a return to "normal"

A lot of game designers focus on the story and experience they want to bring, not on the technology the programmers have to use to bring it to life. There are a lot of 'tricks' you can use in a 2d game to let it show more depth (like parallax scrolling, use of angles, lighting etc), so I'm not sure if '3d' means the same thing to a game designer and a programmer.

3d made more dramatic camera work and lighting possible at the expense of increased production cost. The point and click genre always was some sort of niche popular with the tech crowd in the 90's but couldn't scale up when the computer and video game industry broke into the mainstream. I think that is mainly a demographic difference: point and click games are still being made and sold, but compared to the rest of the videogame market they are a niche.

> I think that is mainly a demographic difference

Possibly so! A shame too, it's my favourite genre and to this day I think 30 year old games are superior to contemporary ones, incl ones that were considered mediocre at the time (Harvester, Phantasmagoria, etc)

Lots of the old point&click games certainly have their charm, but it's not really difficult to see they are lacking in mainstream appeal. Most people don't see solving obscure (sometime maddening) object puzzles as entertainment ;)

Many of the old games have unfair puzzles and are almost unsolvable without a guide.

BS3 was hated a lot back in the day. The 4th a bit less, and the 5th release got pretty good marks on reviews.

Oh I also hated it at the time, but regardless it was apparently the "vision". I don't think any BS since have captured the charm of 1 and 2, and I think the animation and art are big factors there.

Also, 2.5 from fans.

BS3 contained way too many stupid crate puzzles. The 4th a nonsensical story. I found the 5th to be enjoyable, but sometimes a bit 'fan service' oriented.

That reminds me of Borderlands art style. Some of the devs did a GDC talk about it: https://youtu.be/xLi4kfmW_zg?t=47

I'd very much recommend Child of Light. At the time there was talk about how Ubisoft had made a whole new engine for games based on 2D drawings, although I never heard any more about it since.

They made some more games with the UbiArt engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbiArt_Framework

the hand drown styles and specifically the old anime tv shows such as Pokemon always fascinated me. In the last 2 years I have been learning OpenGL and other general Graphics and I hope to do a master in that area after the summer break. In that master i would like to study how a programmers could recreate that style. If anyone has any suggestions or has links to games / resources where they try to recreate that old water color / gouache style than that would be very helpfull.

I quite like the cell shaded style in the Ni no Kuni games, they are designed in collaboration with studio ghibli

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