Creating Pixel Art (2010)

I feel like I need to shout out aseprite here: https://www.aseprite.org/

It's a really good pixel art tool, but I think their licensing strategy is particularly interesting to the hn audience. The tool is open source, but they don't distribute binaries for free. So if you just want to use it, you can buy a copy like normal software, but if you've got the technical ability to do so, you could just build a binary yourself from source. Always struck me as such a good compromise.

I love Pixel Art - yet I often don‘t like how a lot of games try to approach it in a „modern“ way so I started to create my own dream pixel art game (working ob it >5 years now):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/541310/Tiny_Thor/

This has made me super nostalgic, thanks for sharing this!

I definitely look fondly back on the days of the old phpBB forums. So much knowledge shared freely and without any motive other than sharing knowledge and wisdom with their community.

Of course I’m a biased since those were my teenage years and the world in your teenage years is always the best lol.

I love pixel art and I wish I had this artistic talent!

Folks that like this post might be interested in this web-based tool I made for making pixel art as ASCII art:

https://memalign.github.io/m/pceimage/index.html

I don't know how many times I have read this set of forum posts on pixel art throughout the years. It is always one of my go to resources when I get that urge to build a 2d pixel game. Well, I haven't finished a game and I can't do pixel art, but it still is a great resource to go back to, at least for the memories.

Thanks for sharing!

The Pixel Art subreddit is a great source of inspiration:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelart

A tip to ease anyone interested in making pixel art: instead of starting from scratch (very hard), for beginners it's much easier to take a high res image and down sampling it as a template. The down sampling algorithm will create many issues as mentioned in this guide, but you can then edit on a single pixel level following the principles of the guide.

Wow - pixel joint still exists.

I spent several years in that community ca. 2004-2008.

If this type of art is something that you would like to do, I would highly recommend hanging around there. They do challenges and share tricks about how they do what they do. They also have very strict policies, which makes it a game of it’s own.

There's been recent innovation in the pixel field...

Astortion brings skeletal animation and texture mapping to the world of pixel art, in a way that is very convincing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsOKwUwL1bE

I finished my game development graduation now in May. My graduation project was a pixel art based beat-em up as we used to have in the 80s and 90s (like double dragon and crime). I loved to work with pixel art and I feel that I can draw (and animate) pretty much everthing that I want/need.

However I would like to pursue any kind of graduation in that area, online for sure, but not certifications like udemy, coursera and etc, mainly because I like the loop: learn, homework, feedback, improve work, feedback and so on. I would like to learn "Art" but with Pixel art as main topic. There is such thing?

I love pixel art, when I was a teen I drew a number of famous football (soccer) players in pixel art style: https://www.deviantart.com/iglobear/art/International-soccer....

They ended up in the gaame Sensational Soccer as unlockables. (Score three goals in a match and you get Zlatan). I was honoured.

In the mid 2000s there was a whole community of pixel art for signatures in forums about Runescape. I don't know if this community still exists today (the game certainly does), but it was quite something. Random examples:

https://i.imgur.com/eEZtmJd.png

https://i.imgur.com/P8HfrIv.png

On the note of pixel art, anyone have any interesting techniques for 3D -> 2D Pixel Art?

Of course the difficulty here is producing good quality pixel art from three dimensions. Often it simply ends up worse. Nonetheless i've been researching this and toying with it for a while. Notably for producing art in different isometric projections which would be very difficult to do by hand.

I've had to wing it in a number of situations where I'd needed to draw a small sprite or touch up a picture by placing individual pixels. I now see that I've fallen into the pit of hugging banding quite often, which explains why my edits were sufficient, but always lacked something undefinable. Thanks for sharing!

One interesting thing about neural net generation of images is that up until recently, pixel art didn't work at all. Attempts at using GANs to learn Pokemon pixel art etc always failed miserably. The release of CLIP turned out to enable pretty good pixel art generation, and it's only gotten better - DALL-E 2 also can just do pixel art.

eg https://github.com/pixray/pixray (see https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532197896090681344 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532129051434958851 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1531478055344082944 )

https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uswf2r/pixel_art_of... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/upf93v/a_raccoon_le... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ulh07q/spaceships_2... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uh8sep/pixel_art_of... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uav52t/tileset_of_f... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uc4jnv/spritesheet_... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ufb564/cherry_bloss... https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1531545772420132865