More beautiful indie games like Trine and Furi
I'm pretty sure that's 3D.
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The never ending trend of 2D indie games going after the pixel art look is getting tiring
- Thread starter Memento
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I'm pretty sure that's 3D.
I love a good pixel art game. Stop thinking of them as retro throwbacks and just think of them as games.
You are saying Celeste has "32-bit level" colors? Look at the screenshot above. The game's tiles are limited to 3 colors plus black. And pixel art has no "32-bit animation", animation quality for pixel art is all due to a skilled artist putting enough time and effort into it. There were some NES games with amazing 60fps animation.
Also, doubling the detail in hand-drawn art is "easy" and can be done with "very little effort"? You obviously know zero about art. It would take quite a lot more skill and time to draw that detail. Why do you think it took so long in the PC era for 2D games to make the jump from 320x200 to 640x480 to 800x600? It wasn't because of technology, it was because of the insane amount of skill and work involved in creating that much detail.
You are correct in one way, the game's original prototype was programmed for a "Pico-8" game console over four days; the Pico-8 has a screen resolution of 128x128 (compared to NES 256x240) and 16 colors. It is a very limited system, and as such forces you to think in terms of keeping everything simple.
Ignoring difference in team sizes... There are indie games with that level of animation.It's such a backward movement from the amazing pixel art you saw in the last phase of it during PS1 era - especially animation wise:
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User Warned: Unnecessary labeling of thread as a defense force - use the report button if you have an issue with a specific post
Funny how anytime anyone has genuine criticism about indie games the indie defense force shows up. It's like indie games can do no wrong and there are always a bunch of excuses anytime anyone has a complaint. I own a fair amount of indie games, and I agree, the whole pixelated look is getting played out.
I mean, those were produced by people that had developed their craft over many years of working with pixel art as the de-facto industry standard. Dozens of such workers, that did it as their full-time job and were paid reliably by large companies.It's such a backward movement from the amazing pixel art you saw in the last phase of it during PS1 era - especially animation wise:
Why indeed would small teams of amateurs developing games as a side hobby not have the same discipline and professional experience?
Truly a mystery.
For developers, I think it's less an obsession with style and more a decision based on practicality. It's just a lot easier to develop with sprites on a lower budget.
Though I roll my eyes when the blurb on the store page says "inspired by the 8-bit/16-bit era!" too.
Though I roll my eyes when the blurb on the store page says "inspired by the 8-bit/16-bit era!" too.
I don't care if it's pixel art or not. If the game looks good, it's ok for me.
The problem with pixel art maybe is that since it requires a lower entry barrier there are many games made by beginners / students frequently way less skilled than the average dev, resulting in poor art. And since they choose pixel art then you have bad pixel art. But there is also a lot of 3D garbage too.
In my case, pixel art has a special charm when well done. Looks more beautiful, and if i has low resolution there are some elements that aren't clearly shown by the game so the player creates part of this universe in his mind, something similar to the literature. For me it isn't just nostalgia of when I was a child or teenager.
Nowadays it's really difficult to find artists with great 2D pixel art/hand made animation skills, but impossible to find somewhere this level. For big companies who could afford it, for them is cheaper and more popular to make 3D or modern animation. It's a shame.
It's like asking to replicate Leonardo Da Vinci's or Van Gogh's work to make something like a new Mona Lisa. I'd say it's almost impossible.
The problem with pixel art maybe is that since it requires a lower entry barrier there are many games made by beginners / students frequently way less skilled than the average dev, resulting in poor art. And since they choose pixel art then you have bad pixel art. But there is also a lot of 3D garbage too.
In my case, pixel art has a special charm when well done. Looks more beautiful, and if i has low resolution there are some elements that aren't clearly shown by the game so the player creates part of this universe in his mind, something similar to the literature. For me it isn't just nostalgia of when I was a child or teenager.
The problem with these games is that they were too good.
Nowadays it's really difficult to find artists with great 2D pixel art/hand made animation skills, but impossible to find somewhere this level. For big companies who could afford it, for them is cheaper and more popular to make 3D or modern animation. It's a shame.
It's like asking to replicate Leonardo Da Vinci's or Van Gogh's work to make something like a new Mona Lisa. I'd say it's almost impossible.
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What the fuck is this thread
yo im outta here, this shit is stupid
Yeah often times its just something I have to tolerate. With how much more accessible tools have gotten I really would like to see more variety and showcase of skill instead of games just looking good enough.
Outside of the sudden obsession with chiptune music around 2010, it's weird how the indie music scene has avoided the same complaints. Lots of amazing stuff there.
Ah, my mistake. Interesting perspective, but it sounds like you've been doing both for a long while now. It doesn't seem like there's a large majority of indie devs (maybe even a good chunk of AAA programmers) who really understand C to the point where it'd make assembly a cinch for them, however. To a lot of those type of programmers, they may be quite good at coding within a modern game dev environment, but if you introduce them to older hardware there's (in their eyes) exotic feature sets to get familiar with, different architectures to learn, new instruction sets to get familiarized with, different (and arguably more severe) sets of limitations to work within, etc. And it'd probably take the average person a decent amount of time and experience to put their head in the space where they can efficiently program for those type of now-obscure and obsolete technologies.
So yeah, I agree that assembly and C are basically doing the same thing with the hardware, just that one streamlines it to make it a lot easier on average and you don't have to talk to the hardware as directly. But it should be fair to say that a large chunk of indie programmers (and even some AAA programmers) likely do not know C at such a high level that they could switch directly over to assembly, and maintain their workload with zero issues.
I completely disagree OP. Pixel art is just an art style and anyone who wants to use it is welcome to. It doesn't make a game outdated or look the same as anything else. It's a stylistic choice and while some styles can be derivative, to make a blanket statement like this about all games containing pixel art doesn't make any sense. There is a huge, broad range of it.
Great point! It reminds me of how Trails in the Sky did a lot with its relatively middling budget compared to, say, a Final Fantasy title. To this day, RPG fans hold Trails in higher regard than big-budget installments like FFXIII.
A more recent, non-game example is Kemono Friends, a CG anime on a shoestring budget that ended up being one of the most acclaimed of the year.
But the N64 generally kind of sucked at 2D tho. Hell, its biggest 2D games (Yoshi's Story, Mischief Makers, Bangai-O) all used prerendered 3D sprites.
Mentioning it now, I would kill for a indie-inspired Mischief Makers spiritual successor. Or just a Mischief Makers port to GOG and Steam. Game deserves more love.
No, 2d elements. Like sprites mixed in to make up for low poly. Like so much of sm64 is 2d stuff blended with 3d. :D
These games are the last bastion of pixel art now that fighting games have ditched it. I hope it never goes away.
It's such a backward movement from the amazing pixel art you saw in the last phase of it during PS1 era - especially animation wise:
Freaking exactly! Can we please move past 8-bit and 16-bit pixel art and get to some NICE 32-bit Sprites going on?
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
Games like Trine also cost millions to make, so no wonder most indie developers can't do art like that.
This has to be one the most ignorant posts in a thread already filled with a lot of arm-chair development comments that have no grounds in reality. There is absolutely nothing little effort in literally having 4 times the more work than what already took years to create. I just can't wrap my head around the fact how anyone could believe the work would be anything easy and very little effort.
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There is definitely too many Pixel Art games that don't actually realize that pixel art was intended to be viewed on shitty CRT's with tons of blur. It's extremely rare that you get a game like Sonic Mania that tries to accurately emulate the way consoles like the Genesis, SNES, Saturn, etc. actually worked.
Actually I think HD screens made pixel art more appealing, not less. Sharp pixels are what distinguish modern pixel art from old games that had no choice but to use pixel art. And that just raised them to a whole new level. Mixing different resolutions is playing with this aesthetic. It's not a limitation anymore, it's a choice.
Celeste in particular has a very distinct style and it also mixes high resolution hand drawn art and a polygonal map screen of the mountain with the different resolution pixel art styles. I feel it is the best looking game, period. The fluid animation of these super low res pixels with a color palette that would be more at home on a 16bit console is just amazing. It doesn't look like any old game. It is completely modern and shows how nuanced pixel art can be.
Finally, someone said it. Yep, as a Switch owner, I'm absolutely sick of it. Not EVERY SINGLE 2D platformer needs to look like a NES/SNES game, but that's exactly what's happening. I'm looking forward to a few games in SPITE of the Pixel art, not because of it. The worst is that there's absolutely nothing special about these games visually in any other aspect, ie. they're not using the power for any crazy animations, effects, etc. It's all stuff that you would expect to see on a SNES.
It's well past being a fad or trend. I'm fine with people trying, there have been plenty of great results. For every retro game on an old console with good pixel/art animation, there 100s that looked like shit. The ones that stand out had a big team and/or a huge budget. Expecting Third Strike quality from indie devs is nuts.
Do you think indie devs magically get the kind of budgets jrpg factories like Konami and Squaresoft did in the 90s?
What's next, why don't the backgrounds in indie games look as pretty as Chrono Cross?
That said there are a lot of 2D indie games that use this kind of retro aesthetic that look absolutely wonderful. The use of color Hyper Light Drifter is just fantastic to me.
there are less of them for a start, but please don't go down this road
this thread is about idiots vs pixel art
not aaa vs indies
When a movie is in black and white
you don't see people saying how the movies are just trying to prey on silent film nostalgia or just trying to be retro or whatever
So why do so many people seem to instantly assume that if a game uses pixel art, it's because the devs are just trying to prey on nostgalia or invoke an era or trying to have "retro" graphics? You don't see those kinds of comments towards devs doing low-poly graphics or doing 3D platformers or whatnot
Oh yes you do.
And their arguments are just as benial as most of the ones in this thread against pixel art.
pixel artists are not obligated to base their art on an old era of gaming, heck off with this bulllshit. Celeste isn't trying to emulate the hardware specs of NES, Atari, SNES or whatever the fuck else. it's just low-res pixel art and there's nothing wrong with that.
you have no idea how pixel art works, holy shit
You all are lazy bastards defending 3d and 2d games. Honeslty the height of gaming was fmv titles, and everything else looks shit and like no effort was put in comparison.
Just a bunch of low budget amateurs not able to hire actors or use cameras. Pft.
Just a bunch of low budget amateurs not able to hire actors or use cameras. Pft.
Really? I have never recalled seeing comments like that here or on GAF
They're probably much cheaper to make, but I kind of agree. The marketplace is becoming saturated with a ton of games that look the same at a glance (though of course pixel art games can have wildly different art styles, the sheer volume of those games on Steam is overwhelming). I like to see other art styles and am generally more interested in them if I see them in my recommended list (for example Hollow Knight).
But maybe that's Steam's fault for not putting any kind of curation into their marketplace. By allowing a ton of shitty, low quality asset flips and obvious money grab/scam games with low-budget visuals, the hand-crafted and dedicated artists/teams who make pixel art visuals shine are getting lost in the noise.
But maybe that's Steam's fault for not putting any kind of curation into their marketplace. By allowing a ton of shitty, low quality asset flips and obvious money grab/scam games with low-budget visuals, the hand-crafted and dedicated artists/teams who make pixel art visuals shine are getting lost in the noise.
So stuff like the 2D trees in Super Mario 64 or the power-ups in Mario Kart 64 being 2D sprites? I gotcha; that surprisingly doesn't seem as common with the low-poly 3D indie games coming out, I do remember seeing some PS1-looking indie racer doing that type of stuff for its texturing work though.
I have the Redout artbook and it talks about this. True low-poly (as in PS1/N64 polycounts) looks very weird when put into modern detailed lighting systems such as those in, say, Unreal Engine 4, apparently.
This argument is a bit weak considering handhelds always featured sharp pixel art, and pixel art was the norm / very common all the way to the Nintendo DS.
There is definitely too many Pixel Art games that don't actually realize that pixel art was intended to be viewed on shitty CRT's with tons of blur. It's extremely rare that you get a game like Sonic Mania that tries to accurately emulate the way consoles like the Genesis, SNES, Saturn, etc. actually worked.
Art assets aren't cheap to make. There is no conspiracy. Also we've already hit the 32 bit era of sprite work as well. This whole thread has many example. The OP just saw another big indie hit with a pixel art style and generalizes a whole category.
with the amount of heat I'm catching, I assume that the Golf Story dev team posts on these forums or something?
I didn't know that it was only 2 people or that it only took a year or whatever. That's fine. I still think it looks weird. And I can't "just say 'this style doesn't appeal to me whatsoever'" because that's not a valid criticism. I paraphrased that and then I explained why.
but yeah, "ur being mean >:(" is a very good counterpoint and I will rethink my opinion.
The OP is literally chastising indie developers for all chasing the same style. It's the part that sticks out to me most because AAA games are waaaaay more uniform.
Sadly most amiga games don't hold up well today because they used only one button and some genres took different gameplay "routes" than the ones accepted now(for example platformers used to be "collectatons" with big multidirectional levels where you need to explore to find the exit instead of straight left to right "precision" platformers ala super mario).
So i usually don't suggest to try amiga games now for the first time anyway.
Not useless at all, thanks to you i have just learned that Darkmere had a sequel :/
I woild love to have more games with extremely high resolution 2d art but I know that is difficult but I love that style
Im with u op, i have seen indie games being Praised for his graphics and. To be honest i have seen better production value on amiga shareware games and its not Just work force, its a lack of talent on some cases
Nah, even CODs and BFs look visually different and distinct and those are annual franchises.
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