I love this old Genesis game 'Rings of Power'. You can learn more about it over at mobygames. It looks like this:


What I've wanted to do for a while is make a pixel-perfect full world map of the game (it has a seamless world) but doing that by hand would be extremely painstaking as the game is huge and you only see 10x10 tiles on the screen at any one time. So I was wondering, do any of you have leet genesis hacking/mapdumping skills? If not, do you know on which internet community I might ask where they do?

that's a shot of the in-game overworld map stitched together:



Look at a section of the in-game map up close



Obviously the game feeds from this overworld 8x8 piixel tile map to recreate the terrain on the fly in the game's engine. The data it checks for each tile probably just is something like 'face, elevation, tile type'.



Of course feel free to discuss the game and its graphics, for all its shortcomings, it actually succeeds in many places. I might make someone like that one day.

This is an idea repository thread for a tutorial I'm planning to do that deals with fundamental aspects of pixel art. At first it will seem like an incoherent mess. I will post here when I have ideas I want to come back to and put in order. Feel free to discuss them with me or offer counters and examples. Eventually the text will be pruned and images will be made to explain the vaguest points and something useful might eventually occur.

Please keep in mind that these are thoughts constantly under consideration, not my religion. It is possible I might discard some or most of the fundamental ideas behind this before I'm done with a final text. This is why it's titled 'brainstorm'.

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Pixel art is like a Go game. Every pixel placed contributes towards a struggle between intentions that will eventually end in an state of variable equilibrium between the opposing forces. Anyone that has played Go knows of the feeling of immense mental strain when they place one piece down on the board and they ponder on the eventual ramifications of that single move towards all the clusters of pieces across the board. A piece feeds on the vital space around it, you see. Not all pixel clusters can live, some will have to die for the purposes of other, more important - towards the whole of the game - clusters. Go is a holistic game, a game about sacrifice and a game about grace. Likewise, drawing with pixels results to similar concerns of balance between clusters of pixels and their optimal positions are again about sacrifice and grace.

Let's consider what a cluster of pixel is as opposed to a single pixel.

This is a single pixel: .
This is a cluster of pixels: _ or that: ,

The cluster of pixels is made from single pixels. However, a single pixel is most of the time near-useless and meaningless if not touching pixels of the same color. 
The pixel artist is concerned with the shapes that occur when pixels of similar color touch each other and convey an opaque, flat, shape.
Most of the defeats and possible triumphs of pixel art occur in that exact moment where the artist makes a cluster of pixels.

What are the defining characteristics of a cluster of pixels on the morphological level? Besides those obvious and common with other types of art (like the information inherent to the color in terms of value/brightness, chroma/saturation or hue/tint that the cluster possesses) we are interested in the particular characteristics of that body of color as pixels. The characteristics of the shape are defined by its outline. It could be made out of straight lines, 'perfect' angled lines (will return to perfect lines later), implied curves or irregular (or jaggy) lines. A cluster has often many of these attributes around its outline. The prime job of the pixel artist is to find the ideal shape for every cluster while considering how they all come together to represent the item they are rendering. It is my belief that there are almost ideal shapes for clusters of pixels and they are those that achieve a twofold, yet holistic goal: how to optimize the resolution of the image. "What's this?" I hear you say "but isn't the resolution set anyway?" The real resolution of the image certainly is. But the fake, that is, the perceived resolution of an image is in the hands of the capable pixel artist, higher than the real one.

There it becomes important to realize what the available fineness of resolution exists for the piece of art the artist is trying to render. The less colors the artist has to convey his image, the more the available resolution tends towards 1 pixel = 1 pixel. The more colors the artist has, the more they can approximate, fake essentially, higher resolutions by proper buffering. Look at this image:



The 256 color gradient makes it impossible to even notice a pixel. The effective resolution here is considerably larger than if the artist had 4 indexes to convey the range between black and white.

In pixel art we do not deal with 256 color gradients, however and therefore the effect isn't anything bigger than perhaps 1 real pixel = 0.75 fake pixels, but it is still a very important thing to consider and makes or breaks great pieces. When looking at a piece of pixel art, the artist should be able to evaluate how many colors can be used to blend clusters of pixels better so as to optimize towards a finer resolution. This is not a point of stylistics, this is what pixels long to be, that is their ideal form. Any style can benefit from this process.

A beginning pixel artist should always start with very constrained palettes, where hue and saturation do not matter, just value. Gameboy 4 colors is excellent. Small sizes, small palette. 1 pixel = 1 pixel there and they can worry more about dealing with how clusters of pixels long for their perfect shapes together rather than care about anti-alias or dithering and other advanced resolution-upping techniques. If you can't render your item with 4 colors in a gameboy screen, you will not be able to do any better at 800x600 with 256 colors or more.

What is the perfect shape of a cluster? It has to do with its outline. The juggling act here is to think of what you're trying to represent with your pixels and then try to retain its essence while at the same time making the clusters you're using to draw it become as close as they can to 'perfect' lines. Perfect lines are the 90 and 45 degree ones. Curves can be assembled from smaller segments of perfect angles also. Avoid single pixel noise. Using perfect lines, before the artist even starts to anti-alias manually, the contours of his clusters should be as close as they can be to 1 pixel = 1 pixel resolution.



A is a freehand doodle line of pixels. This is an implied cluster too, even if it's a line. B is the same line, cleaned manually until it's made of the safest couplings of pixels possible while still retaining the intended curvature.

On the detail of A we see that the jaggies hurt the resolution of the image by conveying larger pixels than our computer monitors are capable of displaying. This is effectively, the bane of pixel art. Banding does this. Bad AA does this. Bad dithering does this. Pillow shading does this.

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to be continued. Let's discuss while I think.

That's a pun on Magic : The Gathering, or Changeling: The Dreaming or what have you. A metaphorical card game that Souly actually wants to make. Details here. Personally I'm not interested in an actual, playable game at all, just interested in pretty cards and silly/cool flavor texts. In fact I think collectible card games are a blight on the tabletop gaming industry. This doesn't stop me from admiring some mechanics and such in some of the top games, but the impulse to buy buy new expansion pack or fall fall fall behind is a bit unethical for me. I realize that this version wouldn't actually cost anything even if it's made but still it's too close to a business model I actively dislike, for comfort. So I was reading Souly's thread and felt inspired to do my own card regardless of the actuality of the game being made. I've gotten this so far:


(if you open it inside your animation program instead of in-browser, it animates much faster)

I will make a border and some silly flavor text further on (suggestions are welcome! I have some ideas about power effects but actually me writing my own flavor text would best be avoided, hah). As always feedback is appreciated, though keep in mind that I'm pretty happy with it and might not alter it significantly.

16 colors double palette... uh... what else to say. Extremely saturated palette on purpose, wanted to capture a pretty harsh digital aesthetic thing. Mostly perfect angles so there isn't really much need for laboured aa in most places... As you can see I completely skipped dithering as it would hurt the angularity of this one. No reference (besides standing up a few times against the mirror) as likeness isn't really a big deal for something like this.

Hello. I started making a new piece as of late. It's tallpixelled! Crazy!

current wip:



steps one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Here's the drawing it's based on.



The changes of the facial characteristics are intended as you can't really do those sharp lines as well in tallpixels.

I will be working on this pretty hardcore until it's done, so crit away while it's still at an early stage!

I am aiming at an end of 32 colors.

Let's create a pixel art day so we can celebrate it each year with live sacrifice and the like! First stage is to find out which month is the predominant month of birth of pixel artists. When we're done with that we shall set a specific day. I will let this poll run either for a full month, or until we have 200 votes or so. Do we even have 200 active users? We'll see! Participate, these things matter!