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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

2D might never die but modern 3D can be a compelling workflow for producing this kind of content.

The part that gets really painful with 2D sprites is animation. It can be a lot easier to model, rig and animate a 3D character and then place them into a special scene/camera arrangement for automatic capture into a sprite sheet.

Doing these by entirely by hand is a really difficult proposition in the current games economy.

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You cannot produce "this kind of content" without a lot of manual work. Think a character that has like 3 pixels per eye, and one for each pupil, and that one pixel moves 5 times during the dialogue animation, at exactly the right moment so you know what it expresses. You don't get that by averaging high-res 3D content. Now someone can see this as a challenge and make something that will fool some people, for some time, of course. There is so much pixel art to steal for that purpose, after all. Just like you could do with the masters, who expressed a whole lot with a few scribbles or strokes of a brush... but even trying that means not getting it, at all, and someone who doesn't get it will not produce anything worth looking at, ever. It's like hearing sex exists and figuring out ways to realistically stain your sheets so your friends think you had some. Why even, ever.

> It can be a lot easier to model, rig and animate a 3D

Some do. The talking heads in Fallout were sculptures, for example (I think from paper, but cannot remember well).

But drawing vs rendering from 3D models can be either an aesthetic choice (Braid is an example) or an optimal choice depending on your workflow, expertise, equipment etc.

And in the current times, also Generative NNs I think were proven a possibility to generate animation.

> in the current games economy

Indie vs mainstream have different ways.

> Doing these by entirely by hand is a really difficult proposition in the current games economy.

And yet, it's still very common in the indie space. I just played some Vampire Survivors, for example (although I don't think it's very good in terms of art direction, but that aside).

As for the 3d / 2d one, two games come to mind; one is Factorio (of course, it's very popular with software developers) where most assets are created in 3d then converted to 2d sprites. I want to claim it's great for performance given how much Stuff is on screen at any given time (just like Vampire Survivors), but then Satisfactory came out and showed that giant complex player-built factories can also work and perform well in 3D.

The other one is Hollow Knight where all art is hand drawn (digitally I presume but I don't actually know), but rendered in 3d (from a fixed perspective so it still looks and plays like a 2d game), easy parallax and high flexibility in the "spacing" of the layers and I'm sure there's other reasons too.

Vampire Survivors took its sprites from free asset packs. There was controversy over it, allegations that the sprites were ripped from Castlevania games, but ultimately they denied it all, I think.

Seems to have been smoothed out though. The Ode to Castlevania DLC is arguably the best the game has to offer, and apparently with Konami's blessing. "Beating" the level is truly a joy.

Factorio's sprite approach uses hundreds of MB of PNG files and several GB of VRAM for what could've been less than 10MB of textured triangles.

So then you optimize your workflow, but at what cost?

I find it much more painful to put in any amount of time into something that isn't what I intended. Of all the places to insist on efficiency, this is probably the most unreasonable.

> The part that gets really painful with 2D sprites is animation

bro doesn't know Metal Slug

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTfaTLkt3Y8

Kind of unfair to compare SNK masterpieces with modern labor of love 2D games.

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