AuthorTopic: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island  (Read 36660 times)

Offline ndchristie

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #10 on: August 02, 2006, 06:15:40 pm
This game is a testament to the idea that being pixel-perfect is not always necessary to be visually pleasing.  in many cases, the textures are created by simple shapes and even what appears to be pen-tool scribbling.  seasoned pixel-pushers will notice that pixel-art techniques are not present.  they simply arent.  there is no AA, no real dithering except by accident, no shared color ramps (in fact, no real attempt at conservation in any way, these guys used and abused the snes's color abilities).

why then, should we look at this game?  it stands for everything that is widely considered evil among pixellers!  why, we ought to be burning it for heresy rather than evalutaing it!

because this game works.  it cut everything we tend to consider a corner and came out shining like a new dime, especially on the tv.  a few months ago i played this game for the first time and my girlfriend at the time got mad at me because i kept trying to understand why such seemingly novice graphics looked so friggin good (especially on the tv where everything is smoothed together).

the lesson that i would take away from this is simple :
sometimes, simple and sexy like yoshi's island is the way to go. you'll save time and you can still make something that looks great without reworking it for weeks
A mistake is a mistake.
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The same mistake three or more times is a motif.

Offline Helm

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #11 on: August 02, 2006, 07:13:42 pm
Whereas I don't disagree with any of that, I'd like to point out that in this case the game works because the pixelling style is befitting of the art direction. If a similar tech-free approach were to be applied to a realistic dark and gritty spy game or a flight simulator, the results would be... interesting, but not applicable in any case.

It's truly a sorry state that videogames have gotten to be so homogenized in terms of style that the moment my brain considered the frankly disastrous 'crayon painted flight simulator' I went "hmm, at least it'd be novel!" instead of thinking it would suck. We are truly starved for clever styles to support good gameplay.

And that, YI does very much.

Offline ndchristie

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #12 on: August 03, 2006, 01:10:20 am
If a similar tech-free approach were to be applied to a realistic dark and gritty spy game or a flight simulator, the results would be... interesting, but not applicable in any case.

thats a good point.  though actually, FarCry2 : Yoshi's Island might actually sell embarassingly well
A mistake is a mistake.
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The same mistake three or more times is a motif.

Offline crab2selout.png

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #13 on: August 03, 2006, 10:44:36 pm
I think the brush (or marker) strokes style used in drawing the trees, allows for the same degradation to be used for shadow and light.
I really like how they pulled this off. Not obvious in the least, and actual requires some up close inspection and tile flipping to be certain. Shows how important the middle transition tiles can be and how exploiting them is key to effective mirrored tiles.

Some more screens I captured recently










Included some lemons in there. I really don't understand how some of these fugly tiles and BGs were included. They are such a stark contrast to the other levels.

I really like how they did flashlight areas in this game. It stimulates a darkened area very well and doesn't look the least bit cheap as an alpaha mask would. I'd be interested if anyone could explain how this effect is acheived so well. Are the darkened tiles purposefully indexed that way and then re-indexed when Yoshi approaches them with some alpha effects overlayed? Or is the reduction of colours in dark areas simply a well executed use of SNES colour limitations when applying darkening manipulations in real time?

I am so disappointed with those screens for the new YI. I'm going to pretend that there was never a sequel

Offline AlexHW

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #14 on: August 03, 2006, 10:58:35 pm
looks like an alpha mask to me, along with some dithering between alpha values.
I can't help but keep thinking about how much black they used.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #15 on: August 04, 2006, 12:02:19 am
hm, there's 2 things I've always wanted to look at more deeply in YI

the dirt tiles that you cleared with your eggs, I always thought that looked good.

the diamond-ish rocks on cave tiles...already posted a lot of times.

I just remembered, there's a fat shyguy that's very well animated, any of you remember what level he's at so I can give ripping him a stab?

Offline Willows

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #16 on: August 04, 2006, 12:36:59 am
Okay, I'm not careful or confident enough to go in and perform surgery on an actual published game and think my comments have any merit whatsoever, so I'll work with what I know.
There are quite frequently diagonal lines running from top-right to bottom-left. Is there any reason for this?
For example, look at the first screenshot crab2selout recently posted. in the large tiles, there are little lines that run diagonally at a 45 degree angle from top right to bottom left.
In the ice screenshots he posted later, there are predominant gleams that go again diagonally from top-right to bottom left.
The background shading in all three screenshots posted by Xion Knight slope diagonally in the same direction, as do the trees and clouds posted by conceit. Sorry that this isn't technically a pixel art critique, but I'm still curious and if it means something, I'd like to know.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #17 on: August 04, 2006, 02:58:18 am
Kickass Yoshi's Island refference

Artmoney tutorial this is a tutorial for learning how to view every frame of animation in a fighter game, however mostl of the information learnt is applicable to other games YI included.
I think if we had someone knowledgeable on this on board it would be pretty damn awesome for the CCs.

http://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/SuperNES/index.htm#SuperMarioWorld2YoshisIsland YI full level screenshot rips, mostly of the first world

http://www.vgmuseum.com/images/snes01/01/smw2.html YI VgMuseum screens

http://kirby.classicgaming.gamespy.com/games/dreamland3/screens/ Kirby dreamland 3 screens, as a style precursor to YI I thought it'd be a good idea to have some ref.

Willows

actually willows, that's a very good point. Dont be afraid to just use your cacumen in these threads, it's not necesary to bulrt out a lot of good
words to make a good point, many times people even get themselves blocked up because of all they know, so much they cant see the simplest things, if you see something interesting post it with no fear =)

I fired up the rom and I noticed that repeating theme a lot, it really makes you wonder about how their art direction went.

one of the main reasons must be simply because in any sort of grid, 45º is the easiest diagonal that can be drawn be it a grid of pixels or a grid of tiles.
If you are going for a natural media look in a game, you'll obviously want to break some of the gridness, but still be working within it.
Yoshi's island wasnt Nintendo's first stab at a game with a natural media look.
http://kirby.webcindario.com/juegos/dreamland3.htm
Kirby's dreamland 3 came first and had a much dirtier look so I figure by the time they went with yoshi's island they understood a lot better they still had to think in grids.

from what I understand Miyamoto was starting to think of using a storybook look for his games when he made this one, so they must have been looking at an effect that evoked childhood memories, was good for adaptation of spriting, marker pictures look like a logical conclusion
http://www.csb-cde.ca.gov/Images/taeler_circles.jpg
everybody has made a messy marker picture like that, they just had to organize the pattern and make it look pretty, because of the sheer ease of drawing 45ª lines they went with that for most shading effects, and because of the rotation effects they knew they'd use they came up with the flat outlined style for the sprites.

I've noticed something in the game, and it is that they vary the sharpness of the shading strokes to make allusions of texture.
  the grass and mud are smooth so they use an pointillist  for the shading, with predominantly round shapes while the rocks have edgy erratic lines.

the ice is smooth but hard and translucent, so it is still pointillist but the spots are a little less round, and some diagonal lines are introduced to represent translucency.

the foreground rocks here have an use of the outline I figure because they're meant to be very hard, (they have some color cycling to represent their reflectivity, we have to make an animation of that color cycling), the background ones are simply done with diagonal strokes that are extra edgy to represent the hardness.

these statements might not hold true for every texture of the game, but I'm just trying to make the point that they effectively convey diferent textures whitout using any detail specifically related to it, the diferent spreading patterns and shapes they use are enough for you to process that it's suppose to be a diferent texture.

I think their rendering was mostly done by alternating a pointillism with strokes, and every now and then use a few details or an outline crossing the tile to make the texture.

also, I've noticed the more unique a tile is, the less it is likely to have 45º lines
because these trees are so big they wont repeat a lot of times troughout the level, so their lines are scattered to create a better sense of spontaniety and all the things related with natural media and chilhood.

it's hard to imagine how it became such a recurring teme troughout the game to use the 45º lines even for things that arent strokes, it might have been decided in pre or in emerged spontaneously in production, but in the end I belive it happened because with all the natural media inspired textures on the game it'd be a strong repeating visual theme, so it just fits the picture to keep other effects in a 45º line aswell.
« Last Edit: August 04, 2006, 05:16:26 am by Conceit »

Offline ndchristie

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #18 on: August 04, 2006, 04:50:28 am
45 degree hatching is a common practice in drawing for linear shading, and tends to look better than most other methods.  cross-contour shading really doesnt look good in videogames and though personally i think multidirectional hatching looks best on paper it too doesnt lend itself to pixels as the angles are almost never on fo the 'perfects'
A mistake is a mistake.
The same mistake twice is a bad habit.
The same mistake three or more times is a motif.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Commercial Critique August: Yoshi's Island

Reply #19 on: August 04, 2006, 05:19:42 am
hatching, I guess that's the laymen's term for it...rememberr english isnt my first languge....and bad Adrias, I had a "please dont respond still editing" sing up c.c

anyways, yeah...that's exactly why 45º hatching made sense as their griddy yet natural media-ish shading style.

the hatching tends to become multidirectional in YI backgrounds when it's used on an object that wont repeat a lot, although because it's done with lines of atleast 3 pixel width it still translates pretty well.