pixel art articles project

[matt0]

Hey,

I?m planning on writing a series of blog articles about pixel art, focusing specifically on games and I?m just canvassing around for peoples opinions.

I?m not sure how long the series will run for or how I?m going to structure it yet but as a starting point I was considering breaking down pixel art into smaller categories and covering those. I?m also considering interviews with artists, some WIP series? of pieces that I?m going to attempt myself in various different styles and theory articles.

It?s a very big project and I doubt all of these ideas will make it in.

The (sometimes very loose) categories I?ve decided on are:

8 bit pixel art (worldwide) - this will probably be the most general article - This will include home computers (Spectrum, C64, CPC, Apple II etc.) as well as consoles and maybe arcade games too.

Western (weighted towards European) 16 bit pixel art - centred around the ST/Amiga/DOS and hopefully including demo-scene related stuff.

Japanese 16 bit pixel art - centred around the SNES/Genesis and arcades

SNKs late Neo Geo output - I?m thinking Metal Slug up to the SNK/Playmore merger (I think they do deserve a whole article to themselves considering games like Metal Slug, Garou, Last Blade etc. contain some of the most respected pixel art ever created).

Modern Japanese portable consoles - centred mainly around GBA/DS - inspired by almost too many games to list, Advance Wars, FF-Tactics Advance, Boktai, Fire Emblem etc. are some of my personal favourites. I also need to separate it from the next category which is another huge one:

Modern pixel art in general (worldwide) - Cave Story seems like an obvious game to look at as well as Joachim Sandberg?s games (Noitu Love 1+2 etc), Paul Robertson (Baby Pirate whatever-it-was-called, Scott Pilgrim etc.)

So anyway, I?m cross-posting this here and on the Pixel Joint and rllmuk retro forums as well to try and gauge peoples opinions on those categories, whether there?s major areas you think are left out (or even whether they?re valid categories in the first place?).

Once I've got the categories sorted I'll probably pick 3 games for each to focus on in greater detail.

Thanks for reading!

- Matt

[Mathias]

Interesting. I suggest using many pics sprinkled throughout the articles.

May I ask what prompted you to want to do this/what is the motive here? Because yes, the composite idea here is quite grandiose.

[Kasumi]

I'd suggest dividing the "8-bit" categories by bits per pixel.

Older Atari consoles have 8 bit CPUs.

NES has an 8 bit CPU. But there is a very clear difference between the types of graphics they can generate. Old Atari games tended to be 1 bit per pixel, which means 1 color and transparent, or two colors.

NES is 2 bits per pixel which means 3 colors and transparent, or 4 colors. The whole "8 bit"/"16 bit" thing only really describes the largest number a CPU register can hold, or how much data the program counter can address at once time. That really means nothing to the end user/artists. And it's not like NES and Atari couldn't deal with 16 or 24 or even 32 bit numbers, it just took multiple steps for the programmer. "X bit" became a marketing term, but it's really useless description for someone who's not a developer.

[matt0]

@ Mathias:

Yeah, there'll be a lot of pictures - pretty much everything I've chosen to cover can be easily emulated and I'm sure there'll be a way to grab screens of the newer PC stuff.

I've got a bunch of different reasons for doing this. I'm hoping a large study project like this will help improve my own art. I've been wanting to do some writing about art in general for a long time now and this is just part of that. Finally I thought people might be interested.

@ Kasumi:

I'd argue the 8-bit / 16-bit distinction means more to a casual reader (at least here in Britain) than dividing things by bits per pixels, like you said. I know they're not exact catagories in a lot of ways but they're two distinct eras for most gamers. I thought about using years (say before 1990, after 1990) but then there's issues with overlap with some of the games I want to cover.

[EyeCraft]

I am altogether very unfamiliar on the subject, so I can offer little assistance. But I would love to read it when its finished; I've always wanted a discussion on the different pixel art styles, systems and eras.

My own personal experience has largely been with DOS VGA, NeoGeo at the arcade (before all arcades vanished )... actually pretty much everything listed except for most of the 8-bit catagory you list. I always found the DOS games had a very weird air-brushy approach that was kind of blurry.

Anyway, enough blabbering.

Godspeed!  

[ptoing]

SNKs late Neo Geo output - I?m thinking Metal Slug up to the SNK/Playmore merger (I think they do deserve a whole article to themselves considering games like Metal Slug, Garou, Last Blade etc. contain some of the most respected pixel art ever created).

Is it? I agree that those games look nice. But IMO none of them are very good examples of good pixelart. If you look at the stuff in Metal Slug for example there is bad practise everywhere, hardly any aa, banding all over the joint, and so on. Metal Slus as well as those other games look good because the people who made the art were good artists and good animators (as in able to really draw and paint), but not good pixel artists.

[matt0]

Is it? I agree that those games look nice. But IMO none of them are very good examples of good pixelart. If you look at the stuff in Metal Slug for example there is bad practise everywhere, hardly any aa, banding all over the joint, and so on. Metal Slus as well as those other games look good because the people who made the art were good artists and good animators (as in able to really draw and paint), but not good pixel artists.

Lack of AA is something I've always seen as a choice an artist makes, I wouldn't necessarily hold it against a piece of work if it didn't have any - although I'm not sure it's a conscious choice with SNKs games. Also those games were all late 90s as far as I remember (Garou maybe a bit later?) good pixel art practice as we have it today wasn't as widespread.

Metal Slug as a series can look a bit messy but the backgrounds alone I think are worth looking at, there's some stunning pixelled cloudscapes and stone work in there and textures in general, things like sand, wood grain, rust that are very hard to capture are done perfectly at a pixel level. And the animation is something I'll be looking at too - that big explosion from Metal Slug 1 is incredible. Looking at Last Blade and Garou shots just now and you're right - it's a very basic technique, lots of blocks of clean pixels but that's interesting to me in and of itself.

[Mathias]

An idea I had for this would to be to get into display restrictions associated with older pixel art. ptoing could certainly advise on that, he's clinically obsessed with restrictions and pixels like the C64 just came out yesterday. hehuurp. If you're serious about including restrictions info I'm sure he'd be obliged. eh, sven?

Why include restrictions stuff? Because it's interesting. Because it's relevant. Visuals output by the ancient displays were governed by hardware restrictions that "virtually" dictated everything about how pixel art looked when when sent to CRT screens by said hardware. I think it matters. You don't have to expound on full detailed specs or anything.

[EyeCraft]

An idea I had for this would to be to get into display restrictions associated with older pixel art. ptoing could certainly advise on that, he's clinically obsessed with restrictions and pixels like the C64 just came out yesterday. hehuurp. If you're serious about including restrictions info I'm sure he'd be obliged. eh, sven?

Why include restrictions stuff? Because it's interesting. Because it's relevant. Visuals output by the ancient displays were governed by hardware restrictions that "virtually" dictated everything about how pixel art looked when when sent to CRT screens by said hardware. I think it matters. You don't have to expound on full detailed specs or anything.

Oh absolutely. I assumed that would be in the article by default since pixel art and restrictions go hand in hand. 

SNKs late Neo Geo output - I?m thinking Metal Slug up to the SNK/Playmore merger (I think they do deserve a whole article to themselves considering games like Metal Slug, Garou, Last Blade etc. contain some of the most respected pixel art ever created).

Is it? I agree that those games look nice. But IMO none of them are very good examples of good pixelart. If you look at the stuff in Metal Slug for example there is bad practise everywhere, hardly any aa, banding all over the joint, and so on. Metal Slus as well as those other games look good because the people who made the art were good artists and good animators (as in able to really draw and paint), but not good pixel artists.

Yes this is true. While there are many excellent art techniques and decisions in MS, there's also some garish pixel art missteps, made especially obvious by our 21st century LCD viewing devices. Zoom... enhance... zoom... ENHANCE.

That's not to say MS should be omitted from the articles, that would be... horrible. 

[ptoing]

No it should not be omitted, but it should not be put on a golden pedestal of untouchableness either. That would just be wrong. Let's not mystify things, please.

As far as restrictions goes I have written quite a bit about that in the non-exhaustive restrictions thread, which I am too lazy to search now, just search for "exhaustive" and you should find it.