This is the "Victory" sprite that appears when you win a match. Not sure why I decided to make my life difficult with lots of perspective text for our game, but alas, here we are!



Only worked on this for one session and trying to decided what it needs/what to do next. I also need to make one for "Defeat" (angled down instead of up) and wanted to make sure I have an overall style that works before moving forward. Any comments appreciated!

edit: also wasn't sure about having the "plaque" behind it or just the text floating on it's own, any thoughts?

The way we've been talking about pixel art here is almost as if it's some kind of dying language struggling to adapt to a modern age haha, but it's actually not a far off comparison. We are already at the point where its necessity is diminished, and the only people keeping it alive are hobbyists and indie game developers using the style to evoke nostalgia in a particular demographic (I should know, that's been my team's strategy as well). It's also an attractive art form to those solo devs who might not have developed art skills, they're thinking (maybe naively), "how hard could it be? It's just squares."

Then we have to ask, are there enough devs and hobbyists producing games and pixel art to keep it alive and well forever? Or will we reach a falling off where the upcoming younger generation fails to see the appeal of pixel art (having no nostalgic hook as many of us here do) and it gradually fades away? Personally, I don't believe it would happen to that extreme, at least not for awhile. There are still indie games hitting main-stream appeal (like recently, Stardew Valley) that will keep the pixel art torch burning bright. Or maybe I'm just idealistic and blinded by my own nostalgia. Time will tell!

Yeah the story beats definitely had a strong impact this time around, congrats on the finale! (really liked the little Gameboy bit)

Interesting perspective! I haven't heard anyone contextualize pixel art alongside the other art mediums in this way. I guess you could even extend the conversation to the 3D art forms, say, sculpture compared to... minecraft creations? But maybe that's a whole other topic.

Pixel art's strength is its ability to capitalize on small space and size (both physically small and data-wise small) so it can be a very real-life functional medium in that sense. Technically anyone editing graphics on a computer is working with "pixel art" but we don't call those people pixel artists. They're working at such a high resolution they don't need to use any abstraction or trickery to make something round, for instance. It takes a true pixel artist to make a line seem rounded at a low resolution, and with limited shading values.

Designing recognizable fonts, icons, or UI elements for old devices (like calculators) back in the day took the hand of someone with some form of pixel art sense. Nowadays, though, I'd argue the necessity for that sort of practically applied pixel art is definitely lessened (higher resolutions displays, more storage space, stronger GPUs/CPUs, etc). So here we are today where pixel art is celebrated and practiced not because we need it for practical reasons, but because we derive enjoyment from creating and marveling at it. Not so different from any other art form.

While you make an interesting point about where pixel art sits in the "art heirarchy", I wonder, can an artform based on limitations and reduction really be the "next step up" from drawing/painting, which offers so many more options for expression? (included in those options would be pixel art itself, by the way. I believe they just called it "pointillism" back then.) So is it just the grid, then, that pixel art has to offer? But can you not create a grid on paper and limit yourself in a similar way with drawing? I think what pixel art has done primarily is force people to obsess over and push the limits of that grid. Artists hundreds of years ago would have had no reason or motivation to discover the nuances of micro grid-based art to the capacity we understand it today. So the question is, looking back with our new found pixel-art knowledge, is there anything significantly useful pixel art can offer to traditional art forms that they didn't already have? I'm not sure I can think of a satisfying answer.

I'm reminded of my sister as she was first learning pixel art (coming from a drawing background) expressing her frustration at our limited character sizes, exclaiming, "This isn't even art! It's a puzzle!" I almost took offense, but after some consideration, she's not exactly wrong. There is an element of technical challenge to pixel art. In a small enough space, there are only so many combinations of pixels that will translate as an eye, or a mouth, or a leg, etc. Color and shading often ends up being the defining personal touch to pixel art, where there's a higher variety potential. Translating an idea, or a larger design, to the restriction of the grid often does feel like a problem to solve more than an artistic process. I think that's part of what attracts me to pixel art, actually. The challenge. The self-imposed restriction.

Lastly, to get really abstract and go back to the 3D thing, the concept of reduction does have a certain anchor in reality, considering that the "pixels" that make up our real world are essentially individual atoms fitting together and interacting with light to create everything visible in the universe. I personally wonder what it would be like to be working with "atom art", creating tiny abstracts of real objects in micro form. But for now, pixel art will do.

Insane! Crazy high-quality work in here, honestly. Do you guys have previous experience in the industry? (cartoon animation or games or anything?) And are you guys working on this full time? I can't imagine anything else considering you seem to make them so fast (unless you've been working on all the parts simultaneously!)