I'm thinking of making a game with retro style pixel art inspired by the PC-98, a Japanese computer famous for games with ridiculously elaborate pixel art. (
Two of the more well-known examples. Be warned, though, searching for anything related to this computer runs a pretty high risk of bringing up NSFW stuff, so be careful if you don't like that kind of thing.) I've practiced in the style a bit now, and would like some feedback from pixel art enthusiasts on the art I've done.
To imitate the style, I'm holding myself pretty close to hardware restrictions—640x400 resolution with a 16 color palette. A lot of the distinctive parts of PC-98 art, like the bright colors and dithering, arise naturally from these limitations. The main thing I'm cheating on are the color values themselves—on the actual system, I think each RGB value had to be a multiple of 16, but I'm not bothering with that restriction in my pictures.
The main unusual part of my workflow is that I usually do initial sketches and rough inking and coloring in
Clip Studio Paint instead of a normal pixel art program. Its drawing tools are very bad at producing pixel perfect lines, but it lets you arbitrarily rotate the canvas while drawing, which is essential for me to get comfortable when sketching and inking characters like this. Then I'll import that picture into a dedicated pixel art program to figure out the palette, clean up the lines, and dither and add details.
This was the first picture in this style that I drew, which wasn't terribly good:
After that, I switched to a program that had more dither patterns, and that made a
huge difference:
Then I decided to lavish a lot of time on one picture, to kind of test my limits in this style:
Then I tried actually making a picture for my game, with a bit more of a subdued look, to see how efficiently I could produce content for it:
It has alternate versions with different expressions.The last picture's the only one I'm still working on, so if you want to choose just one to critique, that'd be a good one. In particular, I may fix up some of the lines (particularly the tops of the doors, which Clip Studio Paint barfed all over). I'm open for feedback on the others, but will likely keep advice in mind for future pictures instead of fixing them up.
Does it look like there's anything big I need to work on? Would you be interested in playing a game with art in this style?
Personally, I guess I'm mainly worried about the line art being too messy, but I'm not sure how much that stands out at this resolution. And I would prefer to stick to aliased lines—it's mainly personal preference, but I think they look a little sharper and more "hand-drawn," particularly with higher res pixel art.
And, I'm not sure what etiquette on edits is, but I would... likely not base any final game graphics off of edits? Coming from normal traditional/digital art, the idea of people giving feedback by actually working on the artwork seems a little odd to me, and I'm not quite sure if they're meant to just be illustrative or not, sorry.
Anyway, thanks for any feedback :p
