AuthorTopic: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story  (Read 40723 times)

Offline Helm

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #20 on: June 15, 2006, 10:16:35 pm
I see how everybody's approaching the graphical shortcomings of cave story with a lot of liniency because pixel made this whole game by himself, and that's fine. There's also the issue that when you do pixel art for fun, and then you shift to doing pixel art for a game, you have to do tighter scheduling and a lot more utilitarian than artistic decisions that make the art look worse, but you can make it faster and more consistent. For example, I rant about color unification in pixel art. Well, in game art? It makes more sense to have mostly separate ramps for remapping or just for neatness. Not everybody works with a universal 256 colours palette, that is premade before art. And so on for colourcount choices and how much time one spends on a single animation... if you take the top hobbyist pixellers from here and make them make a short game each, nobody will make art on the level of their hobby stuff, they'll all deteriorate to 32x32 tileage we've seen before and megaman-clone gameplay, probably.

I don't find the art in cave story amazing or even very good. But it serves it's purpose and the game plays very well. Artistically it's sometimes charming. I can't speak technique for this, as there isn't much of it. It frankly amazes me how some people in this thread have apparently pulled techniques out of thin air to talk about pixel's work, whereas I see fast, non-AA'ed cell-shaded game art.

Offline vierbit

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #21 on: June 16, 2006, 01:08:04 am
hm.. cave story.
played it two times to the end.
I like the sprites(the smaller ones), even im not a big fan of detailess simple shading.

I think that cave story got the most votes more because it has some kind of
strange popularity rather than outstanding pixelart technics.

Tiling looks on some places to obvious.
Here and there is strange aa going on. some sprites and backgrounds have some,
others not or only on parts.
takam already mentioned the one eyed metalblock thing,
thats pure lazyness.

And the ending pictures are more oakaki(or somethink like that)
than real pixel work (imo). 

thats all of from a artistic point of view.
The game its self plays really good and its good balanced.

Offline .TakaM

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #22 on: June 16, 2006, 04:36:28 am
so no one thinks his aa'ing was a style?
it is pretty simple but I think he did it deliberately
both these sections are from the same sprite:

in this section the edges of the sprite are all either mid-tones or the darkest tone, and he aa'd them into the background (another dark background ofcourse)
but on the lightest section of the sprite:

he didnt aa it into the dark background at all, I assume to make the lightsource look harder

opinions?
Life without knowledge is death in disguise

Offline Helm

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #23 on: June 16, 2006, 05:36:29 am
Opinion: bored to do full AA from lightest shade to darkest.

Offline ptoing

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #24 on: June 16, 2006, 06:40:28 am
I think i have to agree with Helm here. The "aa against the background" on the sprite is minimal and might not be even meant as proper aa, could be incidental.

Edit: Just wrote an email to pixel and asked him some questions. Lets see if he responds.
« Last Edit: June 16, 2006, 06:52:51 am by ptoing »
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline AlexHW

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #25 on: June 16, 2006, 06:51:24 am
there's only one way to know.. find other instances where this choice of aa occurs. If this is the only occurence, then it's not a style choice.

Offline ndchristie

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #26 on: June 17, 2006, 11:43:43 am
nothing else in these screens that makes me think that it was a deliberate style choice, though it would have made sense
A mistake is a mistake.
The same mistake twice is a bad habit.
The same mistake three or more times is a motif.

Offline Zolthorg

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #27 on: June 18, 2006, 04:56:14 pm
I feel obligated to post in here.
Everything i would've said has already been said however :l

edit, oh, if i may.


You need to grab yourself a hex editor and append (i believe, open a pmb with the hex editor to check)
"C pixel" to the beginning of the file, then rename it pbm before it can be used in game
« Last Edit: June 18, 2006, 05:00:21 pm by Zolthorg »

Offline Cow

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #28 on: June 18, 2006, 07:30:11 pm
http://www.gsarchives.net/index2.php?category=all&system=computer&game=doukutsu_monogatari&type=backgrounds&level0=non-animatedbackgrounds
Just felt I should throw those out there. Ending pics in GIF format.
Quote
The graphics are not stellar but they have an awesome amount of charme and i think that comes from them being imperfect.
That sums up what I wanted to say. ;)

Offline Stab

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Re: Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

Reply #29 on: July 23, 2006, 04:27:17 am
Curious that he incorporates eyes into a lot of his boxes.