Commercial Critique June 06: Cave Story

[Turbo]

What i found more interesting about the graphics was more the character design - blot-y, minimalistic cartoon, how i'd describe it - than the pixelling techniques in themselves, which aren't too elaborate. Also, interesting mix of mostly semi-desaturated colors with ocasional high saturated ones.

[toastie]

Re: Thread Hijacking et al.:

Just keep in mind that the whole game was made by one person, including all the code, graphics and music. So go easy on poor Pixel here

[Crazy Asian Gamer]

Re: Thread Hijacking et al.:

Just keep in mind that the whole game was made by one person, including all the code, graphics and music. So go easy on poor Pixel here

....
That's not sane! 

[Billeh]

Only one person??? Thats freaking incredible...to me atleast XD.

[bumman]

Hey guys. I've been lurking around on here for a while, but I couldn't resist when I saw a Cave Story critique.

Putting aside all the great things about Cave Story, I will say that the pixel art in it is sort of a mixed bag. Everything works pretty effectively, although it's pretty evident Pixel just wanted to get the thing done after a while. I think like someone mentioned earlier though, his art did get better as the game goes on. For example, I find this one really awesome...



Even though it is just an edit of the regular core, I really like the mouth and eyes that pop out heh. Also, some of the ending pictures are a little so-so, but I thought these looked pretty cool...

(is that a stray white pixel on the top right? lol)



They definitely could be spruced-up with a little more AA, but at least they're better than some of the others...

(GET 'R DONE)
or
(Good grief edit)

So yeah... the art is mostly good. It'd be nice to post some screenshots too since most of the sprites don't look half as good on a lighter background. Still, It'd defnitely be interesting to some more edits like Ayavaron made.

Critiques aside though, I gotta give the man credit for doing EVERYTHING in the game (although, I think I heard somewhere that he had a little help with the music). The pixel art isn't perfect, but it definitely works and has a cool style of its own. I'm actually glad to see a game with "ungodlike" pixel art as it gives more room for critiques

edit: lol, trolling...

[.TakaM]

for example, the lightsource is from the top-right, so he didnt make the top right edges aa into the background and in the few places where the lightest and second darkest I think it is hit theres no use of the middle tone to ease the transition, sometimes he even goes out of his way to make the darker and lightest tone touch jaggedly.. logic behind this?

I personally think this is because of colour count restrictions. For the lightest to second lightest colour, this is no available colour to use to AA unless he added a colour, so he was limited in what he could actually AA and ended up recycling colours to AA instead of having dedicated AA colours.

well, if you look where the lightsource is directly hitting the object, pixel rarely antialiased that area into the background. In areas where mid-tones and the darker tones, he still AA'd them into the background because cavestory almost always had a dark BG, its strange he took advantage of that for all areas except where the lighsource hit objects

[ptoing]

I love the everything about this game. The graphics are not stellar but they have an awesome amount of charme and i think that comes from them being imperfect.

while the endgame pics are not supersmooth they have good composition and convey what they need to perfectly.

[.TakaM]

took some screens of my cavestory file, I tried to get screens of some interesting stuff:
































yeah I killed all the bats with the duckie gun and only lost one health 

[Tinygiant]

Although, as has been pointed out, some of the sprites are not technically all that amazing but stylistically they are wicked, just shows that no amount of technical, colour choosing, anti aliasing knowledge can make up for pure unadutarated talent.

[AlexHW]

I think what lends well to this game is it's consistency and it's simplisticy. As a complete package, everything balances out pretty well. There's nothing in the graphics which outshines the rest of the graphics, so when you play, you don't feel like the graphics are lacking anywhere, but rather you feel it is just how they are suppose to be. It's more a style choice which fits and makes sense.