Pixel Art Wiki

[Carnivac]

I'm also extremely insulted that you think pixelation is stuck in the c64 era or whatever,

Heh.  This caught my eye straight away in that post.  The word 'stuck'.  I often (most recently this morning in fact) get accused of being stuck in the past, stuck in the 8-bit era, stuck doing NES or CPC style graphics... I'm not stuck doing any era or style, nobody here is.  It's a choice and not one anyone has to be stuck with.  I bet I'll still get those annoying emails that say I oughta 'learn' how do draw HD graphics and such cos low res/color is apparently crappy and out of date.

[Ymedron]

Ah yes, sorry Carnivac. I guess I think of "stuck" in the same way as being stuck in traditional art vs digital... Blindly hating the newer inventions because they make it too easy or whatever.
Anyway, an informed choice to do a certain style is an admirable and fine thing to do. c:

[ptoing]

And speaking specifically about pixelart, working with restrictions actually can make you learn a lot. In other art too, but especially in pixelart, I think.

[Ai]

Restrictions make it easier in a pretty real sense IME, just by reducing the amount of variables you need to deal with. Enabling much greater conceptual clarity by removing a lot of peripheral concerns.

@Ymedron, Carnivac:
There's also 'modern retro art' in the good sense as distinct from 'contemporary retro art'; for example Fres Fighter which is artistically well beyond 98% of the CPC games that were available when CPCs were popular, enabled by the use of tools (paint programs, emulators) that are just plain better. The standards of CPC, C64, NES art are still improving.

@tcaud: I agree with Ymedron and others that I don't want to see this subjective-content-written-in-a-style-suggesting-objectivity representing pixel art or pixel artists on the web, and a private wiki is more appropriate. Or more specifically, a personal wiki -- I can recommend Zim from personal experience. Personal wikis avoid the maintainability, cost, and security issues incurred by server-hosted wikis, while also generally having a nicer UI, more robustness, and more flexibility.

[tcaud]

I use the same site for several things, including my game maker (I couldn't find stable hosting for it anywhere else).

Honestly I think the site is coming into its own as a starting point for learning. Now honestly PixelJoint would probably be a better home for this kind of project. I notice that the materials there are very good, and I'm linking to several of them from the wiki. But I hope people understand that neatly organized information has value. Search is good for getting the latest information about something you have basic familiarity with, but the world's internet forums are no match for Wikipedia when it comes to gaining intellectual foothold.

If I see something like this happen at PixelJoint, I will probably take the wiki down. I am also open to handing the wiki's backup over to PixelJoint proper, if they want to host it. At the very least, I think WikiPixels is a good name and that its logo should be preserved, because it was very gracious of its author to make it.

I am adamant that extensive, well organized reference material is key to the usefulness of a wiki such as this. Putting all the palettes you can find on one page, or even giving them separate articles, is not a bad thing. But one thing the wiki should not be subject to is immature trolls. I've seen them in action on other wikis for other topics, and they literally strangle their evolution. It's controversial to ban them but I think it's for the best.

In some ways the wiki is treated like my personal resource but it's simply not my nature to stockpile private information. If I'm going to exert my mental activity in novel directions, then I want it to be of use to others. I understand their needs may differ and I'm willing to negotiate to the extent that the resource in question continues to serve my own intellectual need. Although I can be gracious I am no altruist.

I do want people to participate, so long as they respect my contributions. In general I think contributed information represents well-intentioned mental effort which should be respected.

[Carnivac]

@Ymedron, Carnivac:
There's also 'modern retro art' in the good sense as distinct from 'contemporary retro art'; for example Fres Fighter which is artistically well beyond 98% of the CPC games that were available when CPCs were popular, enabled by the use of tools (paint programs, emulators) that are just plain better. The standards of CPC, C64, NES art are still improving.

If you say so...

[ptoing]

To what is that "If you say so..." referring? To Fres Fighter (which looks like arse imo both gameplay and art wise), or to that the standard is still improving (which is actually correct, or at least what now is doable because of way more powerful crossdev.)

[Ai]

^ some of the art style is a bit silly (anime faces, anime-ish bodies) but it's unquestionably better animated and presented then -- well, the only CPC game I can think of that it doesn't clearly beat in its area (mode 1) is Stryker and the Crypts of Trogan.  The graphics are more detailed and more readable, the animation two to three times as smooth, and the performance is also excellent (important in a system that doesn't have any hardware sprites). I guess what I'm saying is there are more stylish CPC games (Fairlight is a nice example), but very few CPC games that are better -presented-.

If there are actually any other better-presented mode1 games I would definitely like to know them.

[Carnivac]

I downloaded the game a few years ago (to run on emulator as it doesn't run on my real CPC 464 likely needing more memory for the intro and animations and such) and didn't enjoy it much.  Found the gameplay very slow and clunky and didn't care for the graphics at all, finding the style extremely bland and it's use of colour pretty poor.  Too much of the flat Spectrum-style of shading and not enough of the kind that made better use of the 4 color mode for a bit of extra shape and volume.   Scaling up the character portraits (which I didn't think were well drawn anyways so scaling them just made them look even worse) doesn't make much sense either (what's the point of using that resolution if you're going to just make bits of it super blocky?).    Character designs weren't very appealing either.  Come to think of it the little animated bits of the intro were my fave bits of the game.   

Regarding beat 'em ups on 8-bit hardware it kinda amused me that a lot of CPC owners were waiting for Street Fighter II which never actually made it onto the CPC (there was all that waiting in hope for it by Amstrad Action back in the day, even being on the cover of one issue) and that despite loving my CPC and loving SFII I didn't want the game on that computer.  I bought a SNES to play that game which was more suited to it and I loved playing all sorts of other games on my CPC that weren't available on a SNES (I actually prefer western and european graphic styles over japanese for the most part... which is a bit strange cos one of my all time fave 8-bit games is SwitchBlade which was one of the early western games to have a clearly anime-influenced hero but still quite a dark atmosphere rather than all cutesy and over the top dynamic despite the SD-like player sprite) and even the Amiga version of SFII failed to play anywhere near as good as the SNES version (and despite some decent attempts there never really was an Amiga beat 'em up that matched SFII's gameplay and graphics). 

Street Fighter Alpha on Gameboy Color however played very well despite having extremely downscaled graphics (and thankfully didn't resort to the cutesy SD style of the Neo Geo Pocket fighting games).  It had the feel of Street Fighter even if the graphics looked quite scrappy and primitive though easily recognisable as to what was what and who was who.

I really gotta cut down on my use of brackets...

Also this has gone very off the original topic... Sorry.

[Helm]

http://youtu.be/Xgm2biUQO2Y this game looks pretty awesome, really!