AuthorTopic: Modern day pixel art?  (Read 12743 times)

Offline surt

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #10 on: September 02, 2014, 07:02:23 am
It is kind of funny that pixel art is linked with an inherent nod to games past, yet this style never existed until well past the 2000's
The no outline, flat shading and smooth animation is suggestive (ignoring quality and stupidly blown up pixels) of DSI's vector stuff in Anotherworld and Flashback though so really this kind of thing should sensibly be vector rather than pixel.

Offline Cyangmou

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #11 on: September 02, 2014, 08:05:10 am
Could it get more old school than Shovel Knight?

IMO it's pretty well done and captures the aesthetics it wanted to have beautifully.
Cluster wise it could be polished a bit, but hey it looks like a NES game (color restriction and size wise) while taking advantage of modern hardware (frame size restrictions, amount of tiles etc)

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Offline rikfuzz

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #12 on: September 02, 2014, 08:40:47 am
The more styles, the better!  I'm just glad everything doesn't look like Habbo Hotel anymore. 

Offline Indigo

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #13 on: September 02, 2014, 09:01:12 am
The more styles, the better!  I'm just glad everything doesn't look like Habbo Hotel anymore.

oh god

Offline Pix3M

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #14 on: September 02, 2014, 09:47:08 am
Lol Habbo Hotel

I would agree with more styles being the better. I find that being an artist with multiple styles, while some of the more gimmicky "pixellated" styles might get some attention, it will also bring more attention to other things in your gallery that might not have the same mass appeal as your other stuff.

Though, maybe this may happen on a larger scale too and not just the individual. When I was starting out with pixel art, I once found PixelJoint but my tastes in art back 4 years ago when I was 18, and I was heavily interested in anime. I think most of us know PixelJoint, and I found almost nothing in the hall of fame that interested me. In a way, expanded my horizons that there's a world of art that I haven't appreciated yet.

Sure, I would not be surprised if most forum-goers here knock off these styles for the reasons we have, but they will indirectly bring more attention to the best of what pixel art can be.
« Last Edit: September 02, 2014, 09:56:10 am by Pix3M »

Offline Cyangmou

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #15 on: September 02, 2014, 11:29:26 am
Actually I don't think that Pixeljoint's Hall of Fame shows off the latest developments in terms of pixel art styles and there is a lot pretty bad stuff around because of the cycling mechanic.
This got already discussed multiple times, and I got tired of that topic. Pixel Joints galleries except the new ones which get cleaned every week/month aren't up do date. Fact.

On the other hand the observations and developments we make here at Pixelation are not really open to everyone.
Lots of good and informative material gets buried constantly.
If you haven't spent a long time here at Pixelation it's also pretty hard to find the few information jewels.
Next to this Pixelation is kinda small and don't has a huge impact outside the hardcore comm of this forum.

Compared to old classic games the newer modern approach of pixel art isn't that much different except... a lot of the noise got removed.
Cluster control for CRT screens it wasn't that important and if we look at graphics of not so well known games they look pretty noisy and hard readable on modern screens.
 
We also can't compare small indie games to triple A titles of their time which already had budgets of multiple million dollars.

On Owlboy and Chasm are people working who are well known in the PJ/Pixelation community.
They share a lot of our established ideas how pixelart has to look.
For the other games ... I haven't really heard of those artists being around in those communities.

Means on the one hand they might not have even heard of stuff we were discussing over the course of the last years.
On the other hand they might dislike the more detailled approach, it's to expensive or they aren't capable of getting that level of quality for a complete game.
 
And on top of that I don't remember any really successfully released indie games so far which were made just by experienced pj/pixeljoint artists (although I don't know every indie game).
"Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man."

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Offline NaCl

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #16 on: September 03, 2014, 10:54:15 pm
I personally really like the style. While I think it has roots in "retro" video game graphics, I do not think it works simply because of nostalgia. If anything, our childhood experience with pixel graphics predisposed us to "getting" the aesthetic, so that we can now build it out as its own thing.

I also think it is a good style for an interactive medium like video games (where movement is the essential aspect of that interaction), because it lends itself well to being animated. Not just because it is simple and relatively easy to produce, but because there is something inherent in it that allows the artist to capture exaggerated movements that are entertaining. The same is true for the "cartoon" style. These abstracted forms with very little rendering are extremely effective at capturing interesting movements. In other words, a single frame of this style is not designed to stand up on its own. It's designed to stand up in the moving interactive environment of the video game.

I see a sort of backlash of people saying it's a gimmick, overdone, trying too hard to appeal to nostalgia, etc... But if it's a gimmick it is an undeniably effective and productive one.

Offline Seiseki

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #17 on: September 06, 2014, 10:12:21 pm
What do you guys think of Irkalla?








I'm loving this style!
It's rough, no outlines, blocky shapes and flat shading. It also relies heavily on lots of animations.
Sorta similar to Sword and Sworcery and focuses on huge environments with tiny and slim characters.

You also have to take into account how easy a style is to manage. I think a style like this allows for more rapid development of assets, which will naturally appeal to indie devs.
It does what it's supposed to really well, it conveys the atmosphere with rough shapes and animations and the lack of fine detail let players themselves fill in the blanks.

Especially the animations give way more life to the game than a well designed static image that might be more detailed and of higher quality.
So it does make sense to focus more on animation than detail.
« Last Edit: September 06, 2014, 10:22:27 pm by Seiseki »

Offline Mr. Fahrenheit

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #18 on: September 07, 2014, 02:18:50 pm
Yeah I agree Seiseki. For me personally I almost always like the rough sketch someone draws when working on something more than the finished drawing because it loses some of the sketches magic. This style seems to retain some of the sketchy style that lets the viewer fill in the details as you said.

Also, animations will tell you much more about a characters personality than a perfectly pixelled character, that follows the same animation template that every other sprite follows, could ever.

Offline AlcopopStar

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Re: Modern day pixel art?

Reply #19 on: September 13, 2014, 02:45:57 am
I adore the style. It's much more focused on aesthetics, colour balancing, silhouettes and design over any fine rendering. It's also super economical to make, as someone working freelance on a roguelike that has decided to go for a more rendered path, it's painful to watch how painstaking every part is to do. I look at something like Buch's latest work:

http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/88639.htm

And gosh. it's fast, simple, bold, readable and you can add new assets at a goddamn lightspeed. And since it has so few moving parts it can be very simply and fluidly animated.

It's also using pixel art as an aesthetic within itself rather then just a medium. The edges are clear and defined, it's not using sub-pixel techniques to hide what it is. This is why some people misconstrue it as retro. It reminds me of the way that low poly art has come into it's own by focusing on form, lighting and colour.

So yeah, big fan.
« Last Edit: September 13, 2014, 02:55:13 am by AlcopopStar »