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PIXELS: THE NEW CLICHE - BY MR BIFFO

19/1/2016

28 Comments

 
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Here's something that will make you laugh/think I'm an idiot; back when I reviewed the 3DO version of EA's Road Rash, at the start of 1994, I actually thought we'd reached "peak graphics".

I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing: I sincerely thought they were the best graphics ever, and there was no way possible that games could get any better looking. 


It took less than a year - until the release of the original PlayStation - for me to feel like one of those Victorians who fled the cinema when they first saw moving pictures, fearing they were about to be run over by a steam train.

The point of revealing my gross and humiliating stupidity is to underline that game graphics progress. They improve. At least, they should improve, but for some reason, a lot of game graphics seem to be stuck in the past right now. Which of these things might that be: good thing or bad thing?

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LOVELY CHAPS
​Lovely Ste Pickford - who, along with his equally lovely brother John, has worked on more games than you've had brown dinners - talked about pixel art in his introduction to the ZX Spectrum visual compendium, published by Bitmap Books. 

He said something along the lines of this: classic pixel art was pixel art, because that was the only choice open to designers back in the day. More or less. I'm paraphrasing, you see, because I'm writing this from bed, and my copy of the book is in the living room, and if I go and get it I'll need to have a wee, and... well... might as well get up then, and it's too cold for that. 

But the thrust of Ste's argument was that pixel art wasn't pixel art: it was just art. Which begs the question: if games no longer need to look like that... why do so many new games look like they were released 20 or more years ago? ​I get that we all love a bit of nostalgia - nothing in the world is as good as it used to be - but aren't we at risk of becoming an industry that eats its own tail?

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CURIOUS TO SEE
I'm mostly talking about indie games here: you couldn't quite imagine a Far Cry game, which was done entirely in pixel art (though I would be very curious to see them try...). 

Blockbuster games will, no doubt, keep on finding ways to make sunsets and rivers look even more compelling... 
​

But the fact that so many indie developers are obsessed with recreating the past is perhaps the biggest shame. As the indie scene is showing us time and again, that's where the real creativity is in gaming right now, where the real ideas are burning bright - and it seems a wasted opportunity not to bring some of that creativity to the visuals.

​Punch Club is but the latest in a long line of indie games, which are evoking the games of yore, and the point at which my patience with pixel art sort of broke in two. In the case of Punch Club, it reminded me of the old Police Quest games, with its 80s homages and urban grit... but there was no real context to why it looked the way it did.

The novelty of a new game looking like an old game has worn off, and with Punch Club I didn't understand why I was playing a game which looked like that. I didn't get what it was trying to say with its visuals... and, consequently, concluded that it wasn't trying to say anything.

At first I enjoyed these homages to the past, but as more and more games have come to adopt that retro-new look, the more I've found myself questioning why.

​The turning point for me set in around the time of Downwell - a vertical, gravity-assisted shoot 'em up, which reminded me of the old Spectrum game Underwurlde. It's a decent game - but I started wondering whether pixel art is becoming a crutch; a substitute for actual creativity. In essence, is it nothing more than graphical cosplay?

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OLD IS NEW AGAIN
​For a while now we've been lapping up all the retro-looking indie games.

Shovel Knight is one of the more notable examples, taking its cue from the NES, even if I may not be as in love with it as most people seem to be. Weird fencing sim Nidhogg goes even further back, looking like an Atari 2600 game, sort of.

Smear your eyes across Steam, or the PlayStation Store, or Xbox Live, and it feels like every other title is some sort of retro homage; Toast Time, Undertale, Nuclear Throne... all good games, but not a one of them has an art style it can call its own. 


When pixel art works - step forward Hotline Miami, Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP, Fez, Pony Island - it's using the past to create something new... or to use the old to say something.  Or to reinterpret pixel art through the lens of modern technology.

I get that indie games don't have big budgets... but that's all the more reason why pixel art for the sake of pixel art is a bad idea. Games looked like that because the designers were working within tight budgets, and with limited resources. So are you. Now use that to your advantage to create things we've never seen before.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
2015: THE YEAR I REALISED by Mr Biffo 
VIRTUAL REALITY: I'M STILL NOT CONVINCED by Mr Biffo 
GAMES OF MY YEARS: ASTRO WARS by Mr Biffo 
28 Comments
badgerpog
19/1/2016 10:59:27 am

I couldn't agree more - and if I could, I wouldn't know how to put it into words (I agree more?)

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dab88
19/1/2016 03:28:25 pm

I couldn't agree more, than you agree more. But if I could agree more, the agreement would be, even more than before

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Damien link
19/1/2016 12:04:53 pm

I wonder which games of today will look ghastly a few years down the line...

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mikeyc
19/1/2016 12:47:06 pm

Aaaah like an idiot I wrote my reply in the wrong box.. it was a really good reply; something about money and time and stuff. it

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Alex link
19/1/2016 01:10:54 pm

I love a game of BroForce but can't really comment on the rest as I've not played Shovel Knight or Punch Club, or any of the others you mention. What strikes me though is the faux retroism that these games have. I can play BroForce for more than 8 seconds without unfairly losing all my lives or getting stuck in the scenery, and that's not realistic in the slightest.

This, and other pixel art games give us the sort of graphical and gameplay experience we like to think we had 20 to 30 odd years ago but never actually did. Life bars? HA! Decent levels of scrolling AND animation? HA!

Not that I'm complaining, BroForce is the most fun I've had in years.

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lilock3
19/1/2016 01:21:50 pm

Well I thought graphics had reached their peak when I saw pinball game High Speed running on the NES round a friend's house back in the early nineties. I truly though it was 100% photo-realistic (quite literally, I think my reaction was something like “Wow! You’re playing a photo!”) and couldn’t imagine how games could ever get better looking. So now who looks like the most real big idiot, eh? Beat that!

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Mr Biffo
19/1/2016 01:23:58 pm

Hee-haw!

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Chris
19/1/2016 01:52:04 pm

There's no reason why "pixel art" games can't look as good non-pixel-art ones. What you see on screen is in 2 dimensions, and some beautifully drawn games have happened in the past. I think it's just that 3D is "cool", and probably the APIs for getting stuff done makes it easier. I don't necessarily think it looks better than 2D (pixel as the textures are all pixelised, but the wrapping and warping distorts them in ways the artists may not have intended.

I have no real clue what I'm talking about, and also the new design means I can't actually see what I've typed, so it may just be a load of gibberish.

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colincidence link
19/1/2016 03:09:37 pm

In a couple of years, will there be a wave of indie games with Playstation Launch Title rudimentary 3D?

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badgerpog
19/1/2016 03:24:31 pm

Let's go further back instead - black and white vectors? Or a floating letter 'c' firing fullstops at z's and dropping commas on b's.

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colincidence link
21/1/2016 10:12:31 am

Your head, quite frankly, asplode.

WM
19/1/2016 04:08:02 pm

Pixel art is a perfectly valid medium even when there's no technical need for big, low-colour pixels, I think. It's no less valid than choosing watercolours to paint a picture with.

Pixel art has unique properties that make it interesting. Every single pixel is deliberate and meaningful; the entire picture means something because every single element has been placed there. Good pixel art conveys a thought process and intention as well as an image.

In a gaming context it can convey even more due to how deliberate it is. Sharp edges clearly delineate features like platforms, and it really lends itself to tile-based gameplay by being so perfectly constrained by 32x32 (or whatever) blocks.

I would always want to play the old versions of Monkey Island 1 & 2 over the new versions, due to how perfect the pixel art was. Sure, it was based on actual drawings, but look how they cleaned it up, made every edge and light and expression matter (look at Guybrush's pixelly eyeballs!) and made it look like somebody cares about every single pixel on the screen.

http://www.videogameszone.de/screenshots/original/2010/03/monkey_island_2_special_edition_4.jpg

The new version looks like it's 20% generated by a gradient brush tool filling in the gaps. No love.

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Kelvin Green link
19/1/2016 06:39:02 pm

Yes, this is all correct!

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colincidence link
21/1/2016 10:20:00 am

http://www.dinofarmgames.com/a-pixel-artist-renounces-pixel-art/

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Jay Griffin
19/1/2016 05:24:11 pm

"Games looked like that because the designers were working within tight budgets, and with limited resources. So are you."

A very, very big part of the reason so many indie games use pixel art is exactly this. It's a relatively cost-effective way to make things look decent. Simple, chunky pixel graphics can be done in a fraction of the time and (and this is a big one) look better with it. Look at "HD" remakes like Superfrog or Speedball compared to the originals. They come off like free flash games, something about them just feels cheap where the originals still look great.

Even if you're not a great artist, you can probably at least manage some passable pixel art. The recent vogue for it has become a bit of a leveller in that respect. If you think indies would be better avoiding chunky pixel art styles entirely, go back to the commercial end of the early indie/shareware scene in the late '90s to early '00s and see where that leaves you. If nothing else, it's all but killed off the kind of "programmer art" that stank up more than a few great games in the past.

Time is a huge factor, too. If I'm making a block tile for a platformer I can make something pretty decent on a 16x16 grid by eyeballing it, but move to higher definition and anything that isn't working from a solid reference is probably going to look like arse. It's the difference between spending a couple of hours on something vs spending days. I re-iterate and dump stuff a lot too, so that could be days going straight in the bin. For many indies that's just not viable.

Short version: at the moment it's one of the only viable solutions to making things look decent for an amount of time and effort that isn't going to kill your tiny studio dead. There's a reason so much of the bedroom coder scene died the moment things started moving past that first time around.

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Damon link
19/1/2016 06:28:33 pm

1) I like pixel art but it often comes across looking lazy. If you look at actual games that HAD to use pixel they pushed the limit of it. I read something called "The H-est-D" that compared it to black-and-white film. It remains a stylistic choice for people who might want to use it - but if used in appropriately it feels... misplaced or just plain stupid.

2) Let's say a developer, for technical reasons wants to use 2D assets? How SHOULD they look? While there's a trove of non-pixel sprite art. Someone who grew up playing console games is probably familiar with sprite art and then the very anime styles from Japan.

3) Many indie studios without huge budgets have no in-house art team. You can't phone up the art debarment and say "we're making a shooter, we'll need a few character designs for players and bad guys and a lot of space ship designs. What can you come up with?" It's up to people with programming backgrounds to come up with the art direction and it is much easier to copy the art style of a better game.

4) The western world is creatively stagnant and has been for a while. This was expressed at a panel lead by commercial songwriter Anne Bryant. She feels that too much focus on math and science has left us culturally unable to innovate. No one learns any foundation of art or music anymore.

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Kelvin Green link
19/1/2016 06:35:59 pm

Well yeah. If you're doing pixel art because of nostalgia then that is going to get boring after the first few times.

But there's nothing inherently "better" about photorealistic three-dee models, so if the best way to create memorable and effective visuals for your game is through blocky sprites, then that's what I want to see.

(By the way, Biffster, it seems that there's something wonky with the new site; I can't see any of the text I've entered in this box because it's black on black.)

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Mr Biffo
19/1/2016 06:57:59 pm

Weird. I'm working on it. Cheers, Kelvin.

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WM
19/1/2016 06:59:42 pm

Line 718 of common-v2.css is the culprit. color: #000; should be color: #fff;

Mr Biffo
19/1/2016 07:40:39 pm

WM - I can't find that section of code on the site. Are you sure??

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Mr Biffo
19/1/2016 07:50:26 pm

Not an ideal solution, but Weebly's technical support said we can't change the colour of the comment text - so the best solution is to make the background a dark grey, rather than a black.

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WM
19/1/2016 07:56:32 pm

Wow, they are rubbish.

I'd give pasting this code:

#commentPostDiv .field input[type=text],
#commentPostDiv .field textarea {color: #fff !important;}

into this editor a shot: http://themedocs.weebly.com/css.html

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Mr Biffo
19/1/2016 08:01:51 pm

You'll have to bear with me - where should I shove that exactly (as the actress said to the bishop)?

WM
19/1/2016 08:02:30 pm

Right at the beginning or right at the end... just as long as it's not in the middle of something.

Mr Biffo
19/1/2016 08:17:03 pm

All sorted - thanks for your help, WM!

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Hamptonoid
19/1/2016 09:46:05 pm

Think I've flagged this before, but this is a good time to give it another shout - pixel artist renounces pixel art. ..
http://www.dinofarmgames.com/a-pixel-artist-renounces-pixel-art/

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colincidence link
21/1/2016 10:25:44 am

Oops - linked this in an above reply before scrolling here.

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GunFlame
20/1/2016 02:13:57 am

It's partially a case of developers being driving by nostalgia, and to create what they experienced.

In 5 or more years time, this won't be the case. And I'd expect that as new developers enter into developer, younger guys who were born after 2000, then we'll see less fondness for that pixel style.

Reply



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