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sgtcrispy

Doom sprite Challenge over at Pixel Joint

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Hmm, is it a single sprite? I might actually try this, since i can sometimes kinda hackify pixel-y things.

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Pretty interesting! I've always been a frankenspriter but this might be my chance to prove myself at doing something from scratch.

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Hmm, it might be worth clarifying what exactly they mean. I'm probably overcomplicating it, but from a Doomer's perspective, I gotta know: are we doing a full sprite sheet, including animations and rotations and things like death frames, etc.? Do we get bonus points for putting it in game? Silly things like that... :P

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"could possibly exist in Doom"

The way I read it, it's just one sprite. Especially as this is a pixel artist community, it's unlikely they care about usability, just the art.

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Why 1024x1024 map units? That seems really arbitrary and has no basis in Doom's engine.

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i suppose that's just part of the challenge. create a Doom-y sprite with this limited palette. it's not like Doomers already impose challenges on themselves when doing something ridiculous in e.g. vanilla which could have been easily replicated in a more advanced engine.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

Yeah, but that's to emulate various console limitations and has no relevance to Doom.

Pixel art also has little to no relevance to Doom.

I dunno, I've never seriously attempted to make pixel art, but I think that big palettes with lots of tones are simply ineffective when you're working with the colors directly. Correct me if I'm wrong.

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Phml said:

"could possibly exist in Doom"

The way I read it, it's just one sprite. Especially as this is a pixel artist community, it's unlikely they care about usability, just the art.


Yeah, in a spriter's language -if such thing exist- just the xxxxA1 sprite will do.

In all fairness, the Imp probably doesn't even have 20 colors in total, counting the blood

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Da Werecat said:

Pixel art also has little to no relevance to Doom.

Nonsense. Even ignoring the touch-up on the monsters, nearly everything in Doom is pixel art.

Gez said:

Why 1024x1024 map units? That seems really arbitrary and has no basis in Doom's engine.

Fair enough. Still feels like imposing a limit on a medium out of tradition rather than the actual limits of the platform being targeted to me.

Having to merge two shades of red to bring the color count under 25 does nothing to improve the quality of the artwork.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

Having to merge two shades of red to bring the color count under 25 does nothing to improve the quality of the artwork.

That's not true, reducing colours can sometimes improve a piece quite a lot. Besides, imposing restrictions is what the guys at pixeljoint do. 25 is a surprisingly high amount of colours they are allowed to use compared to their normal challenges.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

Even ignoring the touch-up on the monsters, nearly everything in Doom is pixel art.

Please describe pixel art then.

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IMX said:

In all fairness, the Imp probably doesn't even have 20 colors in total, counting the blood

I've just counted the number of colours in imp's front sprite (TROOA1). They are actually 37.

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no dragosbrethen, doom art isnt pixel art, in pixel art the placement of the pixels is exact, pixel artists know why each pixel of their piece is where it is. but the way that the doom sprites where created, digitizing, means the artist had limited control over the final image, wich can be seen in some minor artifacts in both sprites and textures. the approach (painting with a wacom and then palletizing) that is used by some of us including me doesnt qualify for the same reason (theres a degree of randomness in our images). but that doesnt mean that a sprite that qualifies both as doom sprite and pixel art cant be done, iirc scubas steve work is a good example of being both pixel art and fitting for doom

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Pretty much all of the non-monster sprites are obviously hand drawn and not digitized. The lost soul. Plenty of the patches. The HUD fonts and menu graphics...do I really need to go on? That's even discounting monsters like the imp where so little of the base is left, it might as well be considered hand drawn, or all the touch up it took to get those digitized images actually looking good in game.

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It doesn't matter if an image is hand-drawn. Making a true color image and then quantizing it to a palette won't produce pixel art.

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scifista42 said:

I've just counted the number of colours in imp's front sprite (TROOA1). They are actually 37.


Dang. Well then.

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Da Werecat said:

It doesn't matter if an image is hand-drawn. Making a true color image and then quantizing it to a palette won't produce pixel art.

So you're saying things like the pickup sprites aren't pixel art. Ok then. I guess I need to use dumb terminology like "hand pixeled", since that's what I meant. Drawn in an art program, pixel by pixel. If you actually look at the artwork, it's clear that's what was done. We have the alphas, you can see this stuff being touched up across versions.

What's your definition of pixel art?

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Dragonsbrethren said:

Drawn in an art program, pixel by pixel.

I wouldn't describe it this way. Try to imagine drawing this texture pixel by pixel (when it would be infinitely faster and easier to just overlay a bunch of stripes and gradients):



This one is also nice:



Pay attention to pink, blue and magenta color garbage.

What's your definition of pixel art?

It's when you work with the colors directly, not just on the pixel level. Think pensil tool with 100% opacity.

Technician said:

He's just being contrarian to the point of looking stupid, mate.

I don't think it's the right place to accuse me of that. In this particular thread it's actually relevant what pixel art is and what it isn't. Besides, I'm not the one who's trying to get his point across by accusing the opponent in writing nonsense.

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I said most, not all. Now our definitions vary a bit because I still think it's pixel art if you draw details over a noisy background image, which is how a lot of the patch and flat detailing was done.

But even ruling those out, you have every pick up sprite, the majority of detail sprites, every projectile, an entire monster's sprite set, a handful of patches...

Totally relevant to Doom, even by your own definition.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

Now our definitions vary a bit because I still think it's pixel art if you draw details over a noisy background image, which is how a lot of the patch and flat detailing was done.

It really depends on how you draw them. Sure, you can take a noisy photo and draw pixel art over it. But most of the Doom's art assets simply don't look like they were made this way.



This neat pickup sprite has an out-of-place grey spot. It's a pretty clear indication that it was drawn with more colors, then palettized.



I clicked on a few random sprites after that. Green armor doesn't have any obvious quantization artifacts, so it's actually possible that it was made as pixel art. But I don't see a point in arranging all these tones one by one.



I wouldn't want to juggle these yellow and brown pixels either.



It's hard to imagine that someone would add these random green and brown dots consciously. Although I guess one can always rationalize that they were added to give the sprite more color depth or something.

Anyway, there are much more efficient ways of creating "photorealistic" art assets with big palettes than pixel art.

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Man, those submissions are looking really good so far. The Caco is definitely my favorite but they all look good.

Hard to believe theyre only using 25 colors. Talk about taking less and making it more.

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