Amateur pixelarts

[Katamori]

Some days ago I found a website where I can make pixelish pictures very conveniently.

Since that I've made some pictures, and I'd be happy if you can tell me your opinion. Most of them looks like Atari 2600 or Commodore 64 games. (Edit: according to the replies: NO, DOESN'T.) Also, there are some test picture about sprites to a platformer game I've started planning.

[Maes]

The ridiculous thing about most "8 bit" pixel art in general is that they seldom look like actual 8-bit pixel art that appeared in real games: pixels tend to have unequal sizes and resolution is usually too low for what are supposed to be full-screen pictures.

Only a few Atari 2600 (and much later, B&W Gameking) games actually had pixel resolutions under a hundred in each direction. A type of Zeerust.

[Belial]

From a technological perspective these look like they came from Amiga/DOS games, cropped and with doubled pixels. Maybe an Amstrad could deal with them judging from recent developments.

Atari 2600


Atari 5200


C64

[Scet]

Going with what Maes said, having big giant pixels doesn't make something retro. For most of these systems the real limitation was in how many colors each tile could have, and also a very small palette to work with. For example an NES tile is actually 2-bit, it can only have 4 colours, 3 if it's for a sprite. The palette was only 64 colours that couldn't be changed. The C64 was even more limited in only having 16 colours.

This type of big-pixel art might fool your retro hipster type, but not us crazy tech people that count the number of colours in an 8x8 space.

[Maes]

The C64 and Amstrad CPC did indeed have a "low-res" mode that didn't exceed 160x200 pixels with 16 colors, but even that one would look stellar compared to the above, let alone that most games used multiple resolutions and various tricks to display more colors.

Gameboy Color (or rather, colorized Gameboy) screenshots may look closer to those, in terms of resolution.

[Katamori]

Thanks for the information. I'm not good at old console and computer technology, because I haven't born yet when these stuff was made.

[Kira]

Great pixel-art here if you want inspiration: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

[Katamori]

These are waaaaaaaaaaay better than I'll ever be able to make. However, thank you! It's a wonderful set.

[DoomUK]

I like them. But yeah, not very 8-bit-esque.

[lazygecko]

Pixel art is a pretty thoroughly developed artform, though unfortunately the really impressive craftsmanship hasn't gotten much attention compared to the simple, super low-res blocky stuff which is the mainstream image of the scene. It's too bad that this style is used much more often in 2D indie games rather than hiring some of the insane talent that's out there. This site has some cool showcases of what can be accomplished with pixel art: http://www.pixeljoint.com/

No offense directed at your personal artwork, of course.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Scet said:

The palette was only 64 colours that couldn't be changed.

Not only that, realistically 9 of those colors were blacks, and only one of those could be reliably used, at least on NTSC systems. There were also a number of other nearly identical shades, particularly certain whites/grays and blues.

Edit: The palette could be made grayscale and could be tinted towards red, green, blue or any combination, so a tiny amount of palette manipulation was possible, but these effects applied to the entire palette at once.

Also I'm sure you're aware of it, but there could only be one 00 color, on the first BG palette, which was repeated to the other three background palettes. You really only had a maximum of 13 background colors, versus 16.

[chungy]

GeckoYamori said:

Pixel art is a pretty thoroughly developed artform, though unfortunately the really impressive craftsmanship hasn't gotten much attention compared to the simple, super low-res blocky stuff which is the mainstream image of the scene. It's too bad that this style is used much more often in 2D indie games rather than hiring some of the insane talent that's out there. This site has some cool showcases of what can be accomplished with pixel art: http://www.pixeljoint.com/

No offense directed at your personal artwork, of course.

I think a lot of the whole indie game thing using such crude graphics is that it's actually become stylish to just use programmer art in the final product. It may look shittier than any authentic old school game, but hey all that matters is that it looks Old School™

It's something that bugs me about Minecraft. Just imagine what models and textures would look like if a proper graphics artist were hired. Nope, instead new stuff just gets graphics directly from the creator (Notch/Jeb), and sees very little effort to improve it over time.

[Blastfrog]

Speaking of Minecraft, I've started my own texture pack for it, to attempt to add some actually decent pixel art to the game instead of the awful default art.

Note that these pictures are slightly out of date compared to the current version of my texture pack (cobblestone's been revised, for example.)

[Use]

Also for note, the C64 pixels aren't actually square but rectangular.

[Kira]

chungy said:

I think a lot of the whole indie game thing using such crude graphics is that it's actually become stylish to just use programmer art in the final product. It may look shittier than any authentic old school game, but hey all that matters is that it looks Old School™

Fortunately we have visual gems like Jamestown for our eyes.

[Jodwin]

Katamori said:

Some days ago I found a website where I can make pixelish pictures very conveniently.

And here I was thinking all you needed was MS Paint.

[Katamori]

Jodwin said:

And here I was thinking all you needed was MS Paint.

Yes, but I am extremely lame, so the only place where I can make any useful stuff is http://piq.codeus.net/

[chungy]

I like mtPaint.

[Blastfrog]

Paint.NET is better.

[Fletcher`]

sodaholic: I'm just going to leave this here.



Someday I'll release my pack too. :P

[Dragonsbrethren]

Sodaholic said:

Paint.NET is better.

For pixel art? I don't think Paint.net even lets you manipulate the palette, and assumes you're always editing in true color. I use GraphicsGale.

[Blastfrog]

@rf`

Not bad, I like it. :) I'm going for something closer to how the default textures look (as in not straying too far from the original appearance of things), though. Still, yours looks pretty cool.

[Maes]

ZX Spectrum UDGs are better.