Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvillano | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, pixel art today is the affordable default for indie games.

I think it is, again, a way to work around limitations. Economic limitations in this case rather than technical.

Compared to modern HD graphics, pixel art is more affordable because you can hide a lot of details you would normally have to work on behind these fat pixels.

And the most interesting trick, to me, is that pixel art looks sharp! The non-CRT-like square pixels is a feature.

Blurry usually doesn't look good, it is as if your eyes can't focus, or that you are looking through a dirty window, it naturally registers as a problem. Real life has details and you are missing them. With sharp pixel boundaries, you are telling the brain "there is no problem with your eyes, everything is fine".

It is not the only way of introducing artificial details to make low detail pictures look fine: scanline effect, screen door effect, ostensible dithering, etc... But pixel art is a good compromise, in addition to being a recognizable somewhat nostalgic art style.

That's my theory at least.

Note that classical pixel art was not necessary particularly fat/blocky. Since SVGA become common, games like SimCity 2000 or Transport Tycoon Deluxe run in 640x480 on 14" CRT, which is ~60 DPI. Later (in second half of 1990s), higher resolution became common, but also higher screen sizes, so DPI was in 70-80 range. That is not really that different from full HD on 24" LCD (~92 DPI), which dominated later era.

Now I’m wondering what were some of the last generation of games to dominantly use fully hand-drawn pixel art. After 1995 or so, games using isometric art such as Red Alert (1996) and Fallout (1997) were more and more switching to sprites and environments rasterized from 3D models and hand-tweaked at most, as desktop 3D modeling became more affordable and SVGA resolutions meant less need to hand-fix aliasing artifacts.

c&c Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 used Boxes instead of sprites. But yes, PC pixel art was easy to see in the late 90s, specially in RTS games .

No, I mean that eg. Red Alert clearly used 3D modeled and rasterized sprites, not hand-drawn.

Good pixel art is quite difficult to make. This default pixel art usually isn't; it's just not that great.

Maybe not for long. It seems to be the art style most difficult to get right for diffusion models.

Yeah it seems very clear that the cheapest artstyle of the future will be whatever AI can output with minimal human editing or involvement. And some studios will go that route.

Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon, and definitely not by the indie crowd.

I've also been thinking about this for animation. I foresee cheap limited animation (sliding layers, only mouth moving, etc) being replaced by incoherent un-/barely edited AI output instead.

> And some studios will go that route.

All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.

> Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon

It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing. Same in professional film and TV productions. It doesn’t look AI generated because they don’t just run Stable Diffusion and call it a day, but the reductions in labor costs are still immense even with the post-processing that’s currently still required to match AAA quality.

> All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.

This is not correct. Your profit doesn't have to be relative to what another company makes. It would only be affected if games passed the savings on to the customers. You make more profit if you do use it potentially but it doesn't mean you don't make profit if you choose to go the traditional route.

> Nobody can afford not to use it

The games market has a massive oversupply. It's not enough to just "make a game", you have to make a good one. That is to say, better than all the other things your audience could be playing. Cheaping out is literally not an option. You can cheap out in one area to spend more effort in another area, but you can't just say "this is cheaper therefore it will be the default" because the default isn't good enough. Most games fail

I don't agree that the cheaper option is less good. I can admit that ai often (but not always) writes code with more attention to detail than I do, and much faster. Diffusion by itself does not produce human tier graphics (usually), but in combination with llms and heuristics it can do some things better than humans. When wielded by a graphic artist who could do it by hand with mixed media much less digitally, the amount of top tier art that can be produced is increased. Less expensive art doesn't have to mean worse art, it can mean equally good art, just note of it, art everywhere.

> All of them will. [...] It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing.

Doesn't your lot ever get tired of the intellectually lazy, rubbish absolutisms you peddle? Same goes for the projections; just because you slop it, doesn't mean everyone will.

It seems like a good pixel art model should be trained from scratch to emit high-quality low-resolution outputs, rather than trying to jerry-rig a generalist high-resolution model to unnaturally output tiny images (or even worse, a regular grid of exactly NxN color blocks).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com