Do you like pixel art?

[racofer]

 

[supervoid]

It is not too different in detail level from the screenshots I posted, which do count as pixel art btw. You can clearly see the single pixels that make up the "painting".

No, those screenshots are low-resolution digital paintings (Gemini rue seems to be painted in low-resolution, other painted in higher resolution and resized). Pixel art is not defined by visible pixels (if somebody has enough free time he can make 10000x10000 photorealistic pixel art). It's defined by technique- art is made by placing single pixels, without blending and transparence (for that reason it often uses dithering for smooth shadows). Digital painting emulates (to some extend) real life painting by blending modes, brushstrokes etc.
Also I think that backgrounds in Gabriel King game that made likuaq butthurt aren't pixel art either, it's small palette and resolution what makes it looks pixelated (or maybe artist placed all artifacts by hand, I dunno)

JarlFrank's screenshots are scanned paintings with paint-over. The paint-over, and sprites, still count as pixel art. So it's at the very least part pixel art, part digital art. Good art, but now what I would put out front as representative of pixel art.

Eh, why scanned? Most people paints digital from scratch (or scann only rough sketch, overpainting is pain in the ass). Technobabylon has some 3D renders in backgrounds in addition to paintings. Sprites are pixel art, but none of those background are (at last it looks to me painted). Also pixel art, digital painting, 3d art are part of digital art, you can say that those games are part digital painting, part pixel art.

Example of great pixelart:

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

If you want good pixel art, go play some games from the 80-s/90-s . Some of them look nice even today, especially if you compare them to the modern, deliberately pixellized crap (some games look pretty good, though).

However, I can tolerate pixel art if the developer is not an artist (or unable to get one for whatever reason), but compensates it with other parts of the game (gameplay, soundtrack, etc).

 

[Zed]

It is not too different in detail level from the screenshots I posted, which do count as pixel art btw. You can clearly see the single pixels that make up the "painting".

No, those screenshots are low-resolution digital paintings (Gemini rue seems to be painted in low-resolution, other painted in higher resolution and resized). Pixel art is not defined by visible pixels (if somebody has enough free time he can make 10000x10000 photorealistic pixel art). It's defined by technique- art is made by placing single pixels, without blending and transparence (for that reason it often uses dithering for smooth shadows). Digital painting emulates (to some extend) real life painting by blending modes, brushstrokes etc.
Also I think that backgrounds in Gabriel King game that made likuaq butthurt aren't pixel art either, it's small palette and resolution what makes it looks pixelated (or maybe artist placed all artifacts by hand, I dunno)

JarlFrank's screenshots are scanned paintings with paint-over. The paint-over, and sprites, still count as pixel art. So it's at the very least part pixel art, part digital art. Good art, but now what I would put out front as representative of pixel art.

Eh, why scanned? Most people paints digital from scratch (or scann only rough sketch, overpainting is pain in the ass). Technobabylon has some 3D renders in backgrounds in addition to paintings. Sprites are pixel art, but none of those background are (at last it looks to me painted). Also pixel art, digital painting, 3d art are part of digital art, you can say that those games are part digital painting, part pixel art.

Example of great pixelart:

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

scanned, line-traced, 3d render... doesn't matter, wasn't the point of what I wrote.

 

[DwarvenFood]

I love the pixel-art when working with a limited palette of colours, thus resulting in techniques like gradient. Mandatory thread: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/2d-art-appreciation-thread.90271/

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Define pixel art. Because the examples today are pretty shitty.

 

[Cadmus]

Spoiler

this is shit, nothing about it can be called an art

 

[Lord Romulus]

It's ironic how only the games with the shittiest pixel art gets regarded as "art games" by critics.

Also FYI, this was suppose to be a woman.

 

[Zed]

wide-crotch stick-legs is the worst offender

one exception and that's Eitr. that's nice "modern" pixel art

 

[pippin]

That creature has big titties though. I bet the artists did lots of porn of her.
Pixel art is good when it tries to be art. People don't realize games were made with the intent of moving the media forward, trying new technologies, approaching new models of presentation, etc. They wanted to make something new, something worth buying. Not low-effort timewasters for youtubers.
I'd like more games with art in the style of The Banner Saga though.

 

[Dexter]

It's ironic how only the games with the shittiest pixel art gets regarded as "art games" by critics.

Also FYI, this was suppose to be a woman.

Stumbled upon this the other day, pixel art or "pixel art"? http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=601618195

 

[Rabbid]

As supervoid said, not all 2D shit and sprites are pixel art. You have to place and edit pixels manually in order to make an image, not just have visible pixels after the image is done and a gazillion of automatic filters have been placed over it.

I agree that older titles (while trying to perfect the visual outcome by using pixel art as a tool) look better than most games which mostly use pixel art as an end purpose. Still, as a design choice, it can bypass some development and cost obstacles. For example, Terraria has great pixel art that gets the job done (ex. the NPC sprites). Another good a example is Kingdom (though not as a good game as Terraria). Looking forward to Eitr as well.

 

[Mozg]

My standards for it to look good are probably still low enough that it is cheaper than paying people to do regular art. It's wearing off, though - particularly like Zed said the stick leg/arm thing that doesn't even look nostalgic.

 

[Naraya]

Ready for a huge nostalgia overload?

http://amiga.lychesis.net/game.html

Dear god, I love good 2D graphics. You can really tell the creator put his heart in it.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Do I like pixel art? Well, I just ordered this book:

http://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/products/commodore-amiga-a-visual-commpendium

Over the course of some 420 pages, Commodore Amiga: A Visual Commpendium showcases more than 140 of the biggest titles, bringing them vividly to life with a double-page screen grab or loading page. This is accompanied by quotes and commentary from renowned Amiga artists, developers and publishers, including R J Mical, David Braben, Sid Meier, Ron Gilbert, Julian Eggbrecht, Tobias Richter, Dave Gibbons and many more.

But remember:

 

[Average Manatee]

I like good 2D art.

The term 'pixel art' disgusts me along with anyone who uses it and anything described by it.

 

[Excidium II]

I like good 2D art.

The term 'pixel art' disgusts me along with anyone who uses it and anything described by it.

Is there a better name for art that is drawn at the pixel level that doesn't offend your sensibilities? Digital cross stiching?

 

[MRY]

I like pixel art, but I think that's mostly because I cannot think of any other medium of game art where the quality is so consistently high. Obviously there are a lot of these ultra lo-fi games or games with joke programmer art. But, I dunno, I think there is broad and deep pixel art talent, and it tends to show in games.

It has an enduring quality, too. It's funny -- I was about to say that you can distinguish pixel art from art that tries to be "cutting edge" and that the latter will always turn out to be crappy in the long run because the cutting edge is always moving forward. But the weird thing is, there was a time when pixel art was cutting edge. The things that were done with parallax and sprite size and color hacks and stuff like that. And that kind of art has aged well. I can't think of any other medium for which that's true other than possibly small sized prerendered 3D sprites and prerendered 3D backgrounds. But even then, there are very few examples of such graphics that have aged gracefully, too, and lots of crap. A big part of it is that pixel art is consciously stylized -- stylized 3D art (as in Twinsen's Oddysey, for example, or Super Mario RPG) ages well too. Also, being lower resolution, it can get by with fewer frames of animation and still look good.

The thing is, there definitely was a learning curve for pixel art -- you can tell by looking at early NES to late NES games. It's not just the technology that improved. The art form improved a ton as well. You can see it too with Amiga games, how they moved away from "pillow-shading" to actually having light sources and sensible shading. And what's neat is, I kind of remember when this was happening among indie game artists too in the mid-to-late 90s. There was a board called Tsugumo's Lair, which later became Pixelation, and artists spent hours analyzing and reverse engineering the Japanese pixel techniques, coining terms like "selout" (selective outlining, IIRC) for concepts that they hadn't understood until then. Beats me if that was actually some epicenter of the pixel art movement, but at least in my internal narrative it is! Back when I was a whipper snapper dreaming of making a jRPG, it was basically impossible to find an indie pixel artist, but you could go into #3dsmax or #lighwave on IRC and recruit a dozen 3D modelers. Nowadays pixel artists are everywhere!

Plus, whether because of improvements in the art or in tech, it seems like pixel art is actually now easier to do well. I mean, it's telling to me that it's hard to get graphics as good as the RPGs I liked in the 90s, even from big studios, but WEG games have graphics that -- if not quite as good as Westwood or Lucas or Sierra -- are at least colorably close. With one artist per game! Maybe it's just that pixel art is ahead of 3D art in terms of development, or that the best 3D artists are siphoned off to film.

[EDIT: Here's a tutorial the guy put together near the end of his site's life. He and I "met" I guess in '96 or so when we were both making QuickBasic RPGs and I taught him coding and he taught me some art. It's a shame all my old files/emails were lost, would be fun to see them now.]

 

[Alienman]

Might be a stupid question, but would it be possible to fake 2d pixel art in a 3D engine? Just to get the aesthetics? I mean, like how you do cell-shading and stuff.

Like this one, but in a fully 3d world:

Spoiler

 

[Average Manatee]

Is there a better name for art that is drawn at the pixel level that doesn't offend your sensibilities? Digital cross stiching?

Just call it art. Unless its horrible indie crap. The shit you see nowadays is atonishingly ugly.

 

[Excidium II]

Is there a better name for art that is drawn at the pixel level that doesn't offend your sensibilities? Digital cross stiching?

Just call it art. Unless its horrible indie crap. The shit you see nowadays is atonishingly ugly.

Could you possibly get a more broad term?

 

[MRY]

Might be a stupid question, but would it be possible to fake 2d pixel art in a 3D engine? Just to get the aesthetics? I mean, like how you do cell-shading and stuff.

Like this one, but in a fully 3d world:

Spoiler

Return of the Obra Din.

 

[eric__s]

Might be a stupid question, but would it be possible to fake 2d pixel art in a 3D engine? Just to get the aesthetics? I mean, like how you do cell-shading and stuff.

Like this one, but in a fully 3d world:

Spoiler

Yeah, I think it would be. What gives it the feeling it has is the detail, shading and resolution. Check out the dungeon crawling part of Star Cruiser for the PC88 (starts around 4:00) -



The game is from the 80s (it's a first person shooter/RPG hybrid by the way...) so the hardware didn't have the processing power to render the same kind of detail that this picture has, but it uses a lot of the same color and dithering techniques for shading and has the perfect resolution for it. I think if you were to remake this game using the same art techniques but modern hardware, you could get it looking a lot like this. But it's pretty amazing how pretty much any individual frame of this could be taken as pixel art, especially the frames that blend both 3D and pixel art.

Edit: changed the vid to an even better one. Original is also pretty awesome but not as good.

 

[Rabbid]

Is there a better name for art that is drawn at the pixel level that doesn't offend your sensibilities? Digital cross stiching?

Just call it art. Unless its horrible indie crap. The shit you see nowadays is atonishingly ugly.

Could you possibly get a more broad term?

He could call it an rpg.

 

[Akratus]

Might be a stupid question, but would it be possible to fake 2d pixel art in a 3D engine? Just to get the aesthetics? I mean, like how you do cell-shading and stuff.

Low Res 3d environments with 2d sprites already has that 'feel' for me, although maybe not for everyone.

Spoiler