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Comment by Beltalowda | Hacker News Reader

Why are any of these things "bad"? Back in the day pixel art was constrained by technical limitations, but now you can use the same style but with less technical constraints, and include these sort of things. It's not "true" pixel art from 1990, but that doesn't make it "bad".

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For the same reason people like the hiss and pops of a record, film grain, or even VHS tracking artifacts. Yesterday's technical limitations become today's aesthetic.

But the real answer is they aren't inherently bad. People don't actually need it to conform to the past limitations. More that they want it to feel authentic to the nostalgic memory they have in their head.

For example, games like Shovel Knight go for an 8bit style, but they're not limited to an 8 bit color space, NES sprite limitations, etc.

Shovel Knight used the 54-color NES palette, with 4 additional "cheater" colors:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/breaking-the-nes-for-sh...

I get all that; I really enjoy the sound of some "imperfections" of old blues and jazz records, but I also don't consider any modern records which doesn't replicate those "imperfections" to be bad.

I'm not sure about Shovel Knight because I've never played it, but Mina the Hollower (also by Yacht Club) actually does conform to the those limitations. It's based on the art style of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and does so quite accurately.

https://www.yachtclubgames.com/games/mina-the-hollower

Check out La Mulana.. the original version of the game conforms to the limitations of the MSX, but remakes do not. There’s plenty of room to do things either way!

A post from the author about the remade art: https://la-mulana.com/en/blog/graphic_full_remake.html

Compared to the art from the screenshots on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La-Mulana

It's been a while since I played Shovel Knight, but I don't remember it having any of the issues OP talks about.

It doesn't. I was using it as an example of it being done right, without actually following the limitations of the NES. But you can see from the article linked by one of the other replies the dev team put in a lot of effort to make it as close to authentic as possible.

Some people on twitter take offense when opinions such as parent's are said, but I believe he has a point. I'm talking specifically about the amount of colors and also the use of tiles instead of a discrete art.

There's something to limited color space that those people do not seem to understand, be it the ones saying such critique, or the ones getting mad at it. We see color quantization in any realistic painting after the renaissance. Limiting the color space actually makes the pixel art look more realistic, because then every shade or shadow fits the overall drawings. Once you go Stardew Valley, sure it's pixel art, but just like a Picasso is great, it's not a Caravaggio, it's not "realistic" when it comes to how lighting reflects off surfaces.

Then there's the use of tiles/repeating background parts or having a full canvas where every pixel is unique. Although it's nice to look at, there's just too much information for the brain to process. That kind of art is nice, but in a game it's distracting. I personally call that kind of art pixel paintings and separate it from classic pixel art with tiles and limited colors.

It might be all just rose tinted glasses of nostalgia, but I firmly believe there's some science to what I just described. Look at any Caravaggio painting but especially portraits to see how limited the color space really is, how sometimes he uses shades of a color to give the impression of a very distant (color-space-wise) second color. It's really about that.

The techniques he mentioned don't serve the higher principle.

Adding lights from a lighting engine over the top of sprites with baked shading, might make a pretty image but it is not pushing pixel art forwards. Scaling and rotating can produce poor quality sprites.

P.s. Ashford is the best.

Who’s Ashford?

Reference to the username "Beltalowda", a character in "The Expanse" book and TV series.

The article explicitly says it’s okay to disagree. Agreement or disagreement on art style isn’t really the point. If you see pixel art differently and can decide for yourself which effects you want to use then you’ve learned something.

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