A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
I’ve wanted to write this article for some time now, and this seems like the perfect opportunity to do so. For those of you who are aware of Dinofarm Games and our recent release,
Auro for
iOS and
Android , you know that we spent literally years producing carefully handmade, meticulous pixel art. After weeks of work, I just finished the most recent piece. The upcoming PC port of the game needed a new title screen image, as the game will be in landscape view.
A million billion hours, only 45 colors!
I hope it’s clear from this image that I
love pixel art.
Auro was a love letter to the amazing stuff Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, and SNK produced in the 90s. That art was probably the primary reason I got into this field in the first place. It’s a beautiful form, and some of
my favorite pixel artwork is being made today.
That said, the word “renounce” is not just click bait.
Auro is likely to be the last Dinofarm Games title to feature pixel art.
Our team has been debating this for a long time, because we all unanimously love the aesthetic. The debate arose from the occasional anxiety we would get from the “HD this, HD that” fetishism that began in the early 2000s. In a way, our culture’s obsession with higher and higher resolutions made us defiant. It reinforced our stance on pixel art purism.
But in the last year, I’ve come to a very different conclusion. It’s not about what
I like . It never is.
“HD fetishism” has always been around
HD is the current buzz word used to market both hardware and software. The “high” in “high definition” is relative. 25 years ago, “16 bit graphics” was the operative word, but it was ultimately the same concept; 16 bit graphics was just the the HD of its time.
Creators understand that screen size/resolution is just a canvas like any other. A good artist can make anything from a Gameboy screen to a 60 inch LED look good. Problems arise when it comes time to convey to a lay person what constitutes good art. It takes a lot effort to explain how this:
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the original Gameboy
has much better art than this:
Bubsy for SNES
However, it is
easy to explain that the second image has a higher level of technology. To the average person, I’m sure it’s self-evident. Some may even be so taken with the spectacle of added color and resolution that they might mistakenly think
Bubsy has the better artwork.
I could write you an entire book on why that is absolutely
not the case, but that’s the thing – it’s not the audience’s responsibility to read that book. It’s my responsibility deliver them quality in a language they understand.
“The H-est D”
Artists of any era tend to create with the best, most current tools available to them. Technology’s primary function is to make human life as easy and efficient as possible. This is no different in the case of art production technology. Greater production technology means fewer limitations imposed by the medium.
All mediums have their limitations, however. Just as the canvas has its edge, graphics processors have their thresholds. In the earliest days of game art, the extreme technological limitations created serious adversity.
We all get how pixels basically work. A computer divides a display into squares, and each square can be assigned one RGB value at a time. The total squares supported by the hardware is the device’s “resolution.”
This square grid is the smallest possible subdivision of detail available to an artist. It’s very much like tile/
mosaic art – you can only add as much detail as your smallest available tile.
Early game artists had precious few “tiles.”
“NOTHING IS OVER!!”
This constricted medium turned good artists into problem solvers. Good artists looked at the display like a mosaic artist, and not so good artists looked at it like a rock and chisel.
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Mighty Final Fight (pictured on the left above), Guy’s eye is constructed with illusion in mind. By strategically grouping colors and observing their relationships, more complex shapes and forms were implied. The use of flesh tone under the eyelash and on the iris even implies other colors!Mighty Final Fight contain actual information. To illustrate, I drew a higher- resolution extrapolation based on the information coded into these little squares. As you can see, I was able to infer a ton of detail and depth from Guy, but even though both examples use virtually the same amount of pixels, I could barely do anything with Rambo.Mighty Final Fight, we have only retroactively come to call “pixel art techniques.” If the artists of the time had access to better production tools, I’m sure they would have been thrilled. “Pixel art” was never a thing – nobody was thinking “I think we’ll go with pixel art for this game.” Rather, they were simply working in the “H-est D” available to them. Pixel art: a form after the fact dithering .had to dither. Nowadays, it’s used to achieve a look (art by Larwick on Pixeljoint) Modern screens can literally display colors upwards of a billion. these techniques alive (art by Snake on Pixeljoint), but even add to the form with bold expressionist techniques (art by Calv on Pixeljoint).extremely complex work( art by jamon on Pixeljoint) while keeping the color count very low .alpha (semi-transparent pixels), orsoftware-side lighting/shadow/particle effects a form of cheating. “It’s good, but kind of pixelated…” Reviewer of the SNK fighter King of Fighters XIII over at IGN had this to say about the sprite work:“While they look a bit pixelated, the character models look quite good”-IGN review of KOF XIII ever made in a video game. However good it is, it’s good in spite of it being “pixelated” according to many.Street Fighter IV Street Fighter IV is a garish, sloppy eyesore with sub-par animation. Let’s see if IGN agrees.SFIV received a higher art score than one of the best looking games to date, and I believe it’s all due to a pixel tax. To demonstrate what I’m driving at, let’s put SFIV’s animation under the microscope.Street Fighter III: Third Strike ?SFIII’s animation is orders of magnitude better than SFIV’s . It’s not even close, but perhaps it’s still not totally evident at a glance.SFIII works like a whip cracking. When every frame is a new drawing, it allows for things like flowing drapery, muscles flexing and unflexing, the natural sort of warp the body takes when it moves in extreme ways, etc. The effect is nothing short of magical.SFIV , the animation is just kind of dead and sloppily done. There is no urgency, and many of her limbs and facial movements seem bizarre and out of place. Because of this, SFIV Chun-li looks like she’s posing for a photo shoot, whereas SFIII Chun-li looks full of adrenaline and intensity… almost as though she were in a fight!*EDIT* It appears there has been a bit of confusion over this. SFIV’s bad animation has nothing to do with it being 3D. I’m not saying SFIII is superior because it’s 2D. I’m saying it’s superior because it’s better art/animation. Pixar, for example, produces some of the most genius animation I’ve ever seen. Conversely, tons of American TV has terrible 2D animation. But look how long it took me to explain that. Now watch this:Street Fighter IV is in 1080pStreet Fighter IV runs at 60 FPSStreet Fighter III , on the other hand, is pixelated. SFIII or KOFXIII , they don’t see the unbelievable craft that went into it, or if they do, they have to first reconcile what they see first, which is the magnified image above. They have to pay the pixel tax. Auro wasn’t supposed to be “retro.” To me, the “retro game” aesthetic isn’t just pixel art, but an appeal to the specific sounds, feedback, and look and feel of a specific set of old school games. While it’s true that Auro was an homage to my favorite game art, I never intended for it to be “retro.” I just wanted to make great pixel art, yet it inexorably gets lumped in with the retro aesthetic.t’s not their fault. The Artist’s Responsibility Auro to be a “retro-style” game, what I intended doesn’t matter at all, and it’s 100% my fault for failing to communicate in a language people understand. . Nobody owes us their time or attention. As such, when someone gives us their time, an implicit agreement is made and we are now in debt to that person. We owe it to them to deliver value for their time, and to deliver it efficiently.meaningful intent as close to instantaneously as possible. By meaningful intent, I simply mean that the audience has to internalize the concept, motion, emotion, perspective, etc. of a pieceright away. The second the audience asks “how can he bend that way without breaking his spine,” or “Why is he shooting where he’s not looking,” we have failed them. They don’t owe us the time to look at our work in the first place. They certainly don’t owe us the time to squint their eyes and try to make sense of our work.Meaningful intent applies to medium as well. In choosing to make our game with pixel art, we have accidentally taken on a war on two fronts. My job was to make Auro’s art polished, inviting, and clear to the audience, not to also educate the audience that pixel art is a deliberate style .Embracing The Medium advanced, ingenious pixel art yet (art by Fool on Pixeljoint).cohesive piece (art by Thu on Pixeljoint). This principle, along with many others, applies to all visual art, pixel or otherwise.Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for GBADiablo for PC. Or as I like to call it, Anti-Aliased Antfarm: Muddy Colors Edition! with a low polygon model by using simple, symbol-like textures…Grim Fandango for PCagainst it by stretching a compressed photograph across a polygon slab.Goldeneye for N6450! sense for an artist to hand-place each and every one. Nowadays, it’s no wonder people think something is wrong when they see games like ours on an iPhone 6 screen.Auro! Pitfalls of Post-Pixel Pixel Art Auro . Some devices stretch it. Some devices letterbox it. No matter how hard I worked to make the art in Auro as good as I could, there’s no way a given person should be expected to see past all those roadblocks. Making Auro with higher-resolution art would have made it more resistant to constantly-changing sizes and aspect ratios of various devices.The Escapists by Mouldy Toof Studios for Steamalgorithm .they are splintering on this issue, I think it’s time to face the chiptunes.Dinofarm’s Art Moving Forward Auro with expansion material, ports and other new content. Since we’re at the point of no return with Auro , all future art for it will still be pixel art. Like I said, I love pixel art, so on a personal note, I’m happy to be able to scratch that itch for a while.careful, hand-done touch of an artist . There are no shortcuts, and there are no algorithms. There is no cheap way to make it good , only relatively good ways to make it cheap .
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