.

[Nifft Batuff]

^ I think that LucasArt's Days of the Tentacle, The Dig and Fullthrottle were legit pixel-art (i.e. hand-pixeled and not scanned drawings like in Sierra games).

 

[Falksi]

I'm having a funny morning. First some cunt on Facebook is hating on turn based games, so I've had to spend a bit of time winding him up into a ban, and secondly this pile of 3-D rendered shite keeps getting repetitively promoted in a retro group I mod......

What a fucking eyesore. I mean, which thick cunts decide to remake the style of games & artwork which actually helped kill that golden era?

Regardless I've still allowed them to post in the group as I'd sooner see indie devs get support rather than AAA's, but I did warn them that the group is not there for pure advertisement, and to pull back on the amount of advertisement posts. So the reply I get was this.....

So I granted his wish and banned the dirty scrote.

But I had to laugh. I mean, what a soppy twat. That group's got 40k members that he's just cut off from promoting his game to. Not only is he making a game with a style & artwork which next to no retro fan gives a fuck about, but he's also cutting off promotion avenues. Don't think his Brazilian shanty hut is getting widows anytime soon.

Thankfully the lads in the group see it for the piece of shit it is......

Hopefully the next dev who comes along will be making good pixel art games, and be more savvy too.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

When was the last AAA pixel-art game?

Well, it depends on what you consider AAA and what you consider pixel art. My bet would be for a fighting game, I think Capcom was still doing pixel art until the early PS2 generation. King of Fighters XII might also count, but I think that's pixel art drawn over 3d models.

 

[Jutsun]

Would something like Octopath Traveler count as tripel A with pixel art?

 

[Rincewind]

Foreword of Sam Dyer's Sinclair ZX Spectrum: a visual compendium

 

[Catacombs]

Foreword of Sam Dyer's Sinclair ZX Spectrum: a visual compendium

Looks dope. Do you have the PDF?

 

[Rincewind]

Foreword of Sam Dyer's Sinclair ZX Spectrum: a visual compendium

Looks dope. Do you have the PDF?

https://disk.yandex.ru/d/otPA_DPipMudA

 

[Rincewind]

Just found lots of ultracool ZX Spectrum pixelart here.

Spoiler

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Would something like Octopath Traveler count as tripel A with pixel art?

I've heard it described as AA and HD2D.

Square Enix is certainly a AAA developer and publisher, but Octopath Traveler is not a AAA game. It's AA. It was built with a tiny fraction of FFXV's budget on much lower-spec target hardware.

I think HD2D makes sense too. High-definition two-dimensional characters aren't the high-definition characters we see in many of today's UE5 games, but they're also not the 2D sprites we saw back in the Mario days and earlier.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Foreword of Sam Dyer's Sinclair ZX Spectrum: a visual compendium

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Would something like Octopath Traveler count as tripel A with pixel art?

Morel likely "voxel-art".

 

[Rincewind]

Amazing stuff. I'd say ZX Spectrum is one of the most challenging machines to create colour graphics for, if not the most challenging.

First of all, the 15-colour Spectrum palette only contains the 8 "pure" colour combinations you get with 1-bit RGB components (on or off), plus their slightly darker variants (dark black is still black, hence not 16 colours). The second problem, attribute clash was extremely severe on the Spectrum. It basically only stored a 1-bit bitmap in the framebuffer (pixels could be either on or off), and then you could set the foreground and background colours per 8x8 character area at a separate memory location. That's it! You can clearly see abrupt colour changes at 8x8 character boundaries in some Speccy artwork; how well this could be mitigated or entirely hidden depended on the skill of the artist.

This is arguably a lot worse than the default EGA palette (which is identical to the CGA palette for backwards compatibility, 99% of the games used just the default), where the colours were far more usable. With the "red", " bright red", "brown/yellow" and "bright yellow" colours you could actually create some passable skin tones (e.g. check out the old Larry games; there's lots of skin in those ), plus because EGA had no attribute clash limitations whatsoever, one could mix colours with dithering techniques (e.g. all EGA Sierra games, or Mark Ferrari's art in Loom, Monkey Island 1 and Indy3).

In comparison, the C64 palette makes it possible to create all sorts of interesting colour ramps and blendings, allowing the artist to use advanced hue shifting techniques (ramps of colours that increase/decrease in terms of luminosity, but the hues are constantly shifting). The attribute clash was generally much less severe as well; in multicolour mode (160x200) one could use 4 different colours per 8x8 region, while in hires mode (320x200) the same attribute clash limitation as on the Speccy applied (only 2 colours per 8x8 region). Of course, later some ingenious demoscene hackers found ways how to bypass these limitations and create new graphics modes the hardware was never designed to do. They even implemented interlaced modes on the good old C64!

Well, I hope you will appreciate the pixel art of these classic 8-bit home computers more by being aware of the difficulties the artists had to face on a constant basis.


C64 vs ZX Spectrum palette

Default EGA palette (CGA palette)

Colour ramps/hue shifting on the C64

EGA skin tones

And some ninja level C64 pixel art from elite demoscene artists (aka "Hue-shifting masterclass")

Spoiler

 

[Rincewind]

Dark Castle & Beyond Dark Castle, Macintosh

 

[Rincewind]

Amiga Graphics Archive -- an excellent collection of outstanding pixel-art from the Amiga.
http://amiga.lychesis.net/

I've just realised that I really prefer limited palette Amiga graphics (16 or 32 colours out of 4096) to VGA (256 out of 262,144).

Another example of technical limitations stimulating creativity in interesting ways.

 

[Fedora Master]

That's all very nice art (totally not run through a program, of course) but the reality of indie games is vastly different.

 

[Rincewind]

That's all very nice art (totally not run through a program, of course) but the reality of indie games is vastly different.

Personally, I don't care about indie games with shitty blocky art when there's a vast catalogue of good old games to play.

 

[Marchand]

Making my way through this thread, I have seen a lot of Amiga related pixel art, that I like a lot myself. Between 2021 and 2022 I made a pixel artwork were I transferred a Red Dragon from the game "Champions of Krynn" to the "real world" by using colored squares of felt, replacing each pixel.

You can see him in this thread:
Red Dragon from Champions of Krynn

I would love to go on with this project, using 10 mm x 10 mm pixels instead the 15 mm x 15 mm from my Red Dragon.
I did not make any other of these artworks yet, but I have a gallery where you can find generated images that show how they might look like, if ever created.
Maybe someone is interested in at least having a look:

https://www.pixelartbilder.com/gallery/

Here are a few samples:

Last image shows the generated version, where I change a few colors, compared to the one I made.

 

[Morenatsu.]

The phrase ‘I made... pixel artwork’ gave me PS:TD flashbacks to a certain donut-maker.

 

[Marchand]

The phrase ‘I made... pixel artwork’ gave me PS:TD flashbacks to a certain donut-maker.

Well, I simply said I made a pixel artwork, not that I made pixelart. Therfore it's an artwork with a new medium, trying to conserve as much from the original pixelart which it tries to resemble.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

The phrase ‘I made... pixel artwork’ gave me PS:TD flashbacks to a certain donut-maker.

Planescape what?

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

If it's done well, has a unique style, and genuinely tries to be artistic:

10/10, awesome. Looks good.

If it's hipster indie cash grab garbage from the asset store

0/10 do better.

 

[schru]

The phrase ‘I made... pixel artwork’ gave me PS:TD flashbacks to a certain donut-maker.

Planescape what?

Postscape Torment Disorder.

 

[SlamDunk]

I don't care what kind of an art style a game uses. If it looks good, it looks good.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I used to think for many years, the sharper/higher resolution the game art, the better, and pixelation of any kind was a bad thing. But then I discovered the concept of "pixel art" which, like ascii art, is its own highly intended thing. However, I feel it's being very overused and overemphasized in modern gaming asthetics with the whole retro art thing. It's almost annoying but there are far more annoying aspects to modern gaming of course so you won't see me complaining too much about it.

 

[Rincewind]

I used to think for many years, the sharper/higher resolution the game art, the better, and pixelation of any kind was a bad thing. But then I discovered the concept of "pixel art" which, like ascii art, is its own highly intended thing. However, I feel it's being very overused and overemphasized in modern gaming asthetics with the whole retro art thing. It's almost annoying but there are far more annoying aspects to modern gaming of course so you won't see me complaining too much about it.

Yes, and let's not forget about the extra "enhancements" added to pixel art by CRT displays, which can include slightly rounded pixels, varying pixel sizes depending on light intensity, scanlines, patterns added to solidly filled areas by the RGB phosphor/aperture grid structure, bloom, halation, glow, composite/PAL/NTSC/RF artifacts, etc. (depending on the particular display technology).

Without these, 100% sharp pixels displayed on modern LCDs look very... sterile, and quite unappealing.

Performing linear interpolation at the GPU and/or monitor level then turns the whole thing into a blurry mess... That doesn't have anything to do with how CRTs displayed low-resolution images.

My point is: pixel art created in the 80s/early 90s is intended to be viewed on CRTs (or through really good CRT emulating shaders).

Addendum: and the blocky hipster/indie style that uses huge sharp rectangles as "pixels" is *not* retro at all. That's some new invention that has very very little to do with proper old-school pixel-art. Personally, I detest it.