HD and pixel art?

[Incubator]

Hi guys.

I'm working on an XNA tech demo, and I'm getting to the point where I'll need to settle on the look and hire an artist. It'll definitely be a 2D game, but I'm a bit uncertain about the details.

At full resolution, XBox 360 games run at 1280x720. Now most of the entities in my game are (roughly) 36x36 pixels, with relatively few animations. In addition, these animations consist of somewhat subtle changes between the individual frames, making them quite suitable for pixel art. Larger entities also exist, ranging from 128x128 to 310x310. These sizes might be pushing it a bit, but they don't have as many animations and would probably still be doable in the same pixel fashion.

Now the backgrounds is where I'm a bit conflicted. I expect the backgrounds to be relatively empty and purely aesthetic, with little to no scrolling (meaning that each background would be 1280x720, with perhaps one or two exceptions). Since they do not need to scroll, they would most likely not be tile-based. Some decorative pieces would be nice to randomly scatter around the edges of the field, but that's about it. Still, these are very large sizes that might be outside the realm of pixel art.

What concerns me is having a consistent look, so I wouldn't necessarily want the backgrounds to be hand-painted as it might create an awkward contrast between them and the animating entities. I suppose I could try to go the hand-painted route the whole way much like David Hellman did with Braid (http://www.davidhellman.net/blog/the-art-of-braid-index/), but Braid had very little animations, and none of them were squeezed into 36x36 sprites.

Do you guys think such a game would be doable entirely in pixel art? Or would hand-painted backgrounds still look OK with pixel entities? Do any of you have experience creating higher-res pixel art?

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Gil]

Hand-painted + sprites looks perfectly fine if done right

[Incubator]

I've worked on some games that did this approach, although the backgrounds were still relatively low-res. Are there any examples anyone could point me to where the backgrounds were painted while the moving entities were done in pixel-art?

[Gil]

http://neorice.com/aptgg_160

An example from Neorice's comic. What you see here is doubled up pixels over a drawn background and it still looks good, because of control over palette among others.

I'll try to find a decent example of what I mean.

Have a look at Chris Hildenbrandt's portfolio too, there's some semi-good examples there. For example: http://spriteattack.cator.de/pf_flash.php?dir_name=battleplans

There's tons of better examples, but I need to think about where and when...

[Incubator]

Thanks for the links.

The first example is kind of what I'd like to avoid, but the second one had some promising shots, such as http://spriteattack.cator.de/flash/battleplans/show_jungle.png. In this image, the contrast between the background and the sprites isn't too great, and the shading on the paiting doesn't clash with the sprites. This http://spriteattack.cator.de/flash/battleplans/show_tanks.png, on the other hand, does.

Still, those are good examples of combining the two styles, and if you think of any more please let me know.

Thanks again.

[Ryumaru]

I think in that second example they clash because the sprites have no shadows to ground them to the grass and in the first one, elements were used in the foreground to incorporate the sprites in the scene better.