Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

My main gripe is with sloppy technique. A lot - not all, but a lot - of modern pixel art is purposely made to look overly blocky. Dithering and anti-aliasing just isn't utilized, which makes it look even chunkier than actual old game art does on a modern screen. It seems to me as if the artists are worried that classic pixel art techniques would make things look too good, though I personally believe the opposite applies.

I think a lot of this is due to where the nostalgia is being aimed. The number of pixelly games trying to look like a c64 or Amiga is vanishingly small compared to the number trying to look like an NES, SNES, or Genesis. (Or a PSX or N64.) And they’re mostly trying to make things like early first-party hits, not later third-party games that do crazy techniques. How many 8-bit-looking games sound like a Tim Follin soundtrack?

And of course given that those machines are from a generation that stopped being the new hotness about 30y ago, we have pro pixel artists who have never seen a game through a shitty connection to a TV unless they deliberately sought one out or had obsessively retro gaming parents; they just like making these square mosaics look like things.

My family had a real SNES hooked up to a real (and real shitty) CRT TV, and I played games on it. But I also had a desktop PC and then eventually a laptop computer where I played a lot more games than we actually owned via ZSNES. We also had a NES at one point that I think we got from our older cousin, but it broke. So I only ever played Final Fantasy 1 or Chrystalis emulated.

If I was today going to make a pixel art game grounded in nostalgia for these games, what style of screen should I be aiming for? Do I even want to do that, as opposed to making a pixel art game that looks good on a modern screen?

If you want to look at a company that does pixel art right for the modern era, Yacht Club Games is probably the gold standard with games like Shovel Knight and Mina the Hollower.

https://www.yachtclubgames.com/blog/the-art-of-the-game

These are all aesthetic decisions. What feelings does a smeary CRT SNES screen evoke? What does a crisper 1993 DOS screen feel like to you? Which one better matches the mood of the game you want to make?

Probably you should screengrab some games from the first couple years of the SNES’ life and doodle things for your game that look like those screens. Possibly some later games that more directly inspired the game you’re making, too. Possibly you should read up on the precise technical limitations of its graphics and be precise about how many colors and moving objects you allow yourself. Possibly you might decide to break those limitations for the sake of making the game more fun, but it’s probably better to break them knowingly.

Then look at DOS games from that era. Same decisions and rabbit holes as above. Does it feel like there’s a harmony between them? Does one feel much better for the game you want to make? Play with shitty TV filters on the SNES and DOS shots.

Then doodle some things with fewer limitations. How do they feel? Does the lack of limitations make it easier or harder to animate an entire new game entity? And which one is more fun? Experiment, sketch, play, explore. It’s art. It’s also business. Maybe. Maybe you have a skazillion bucks to pay your bills and pay artists and musicians and whatnot while you develop it with no care for it selling even a single copy. Limited funds can stretch further with limited scope.

There is no single right answer to these questions. You need to find them yourself.

Indeed! My question was (mostly) rhetorical - I happen to be of the right age to have organically played some real 8 and 16-bit console video games on real CRT ; and also organically played a lot more 8 and 16-bit console video games emulated on a laptop LCD display, in an era where emulators were (mostly) playable but by no means autistically perfect. And I simply don't care whether modern pixel art games look like their pixels might've been smeared in a way characteristic of a real CRT or not. It honestly wasn't something I noticed very much at the time. It's not an artistic decision that I think should have much weight, compared to every other artistic decision someone making a modern pixel-art game needs to make.

Personally, my favorite 2D video game aesthetic was the vibrant look of high-quality late-SNES games, particularly Chrono Trigger (which obviously had a whole lot of things going right for it besides the art design). I've played a number of modern pixel-art games made by people who were clearly inspired by Chrono Trigger and eager to make graphics that look like it but without any of the SNES's technological limitations, and I'm all for it - Crosscode and (especially) Chained Echoes are salient examples, and I think both those games look great.

Really I think that deliberately courting persnickity people dissecting how Wrong it is that your pixel-art game has art displayed in three different pixel sizes that have aggressively non-integer relationships to each other might be a great way to get some free marketing. :)

SNES 1chip using RGB/SCART is worthy of imitation. Don't bother recreating a crummy Composite signal.

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