292 A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art. I’ve wanted to write this article for some time now, and this seems like the perfect opportunity to do so.

A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art . For those of you who are aware of Dinofarm Games and our recent release, Auro for i. OS and  Android, you know that we spent literally years producing carefully handmade, meticulous pixel art. After weeks of work, I just finished the most recent piece.

The upcoming PC port of the game needed a new title screen image, as the game will be in landscape view. A million billion hours, only 4. I hope it’s clear from this image that I love pixel art. Auro was a love letter to the amazing stuff Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, and SNK produced in the 9. That art was probably the primary reason I got into this field in the first place. It’s a beautiful form, and some of my favorite pixel artwork is being made today.

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That said, the word “renounce” is not just click bait. Auro is likely to be the last Dinofarm Games title to feature pixel art. Our team has been debating this for a long time, because we all unanimously love the aesthetic. The debate arose from the occasional anxiety we would get from the “HD this, HD that” fetishism that began in the early 2. In a way, our culture’s obsession with higher and higher resolutions made us defiant. It reinforced our stance on pixel art purism.

But in the last year, I’ve come to a very different conclusion. It’s not about what I like. It never is.“HD fetishism” has always been around. HD is the current buzz word used to market both hardware and software. The “high” in “high definition” is relative.

HD of its time. But as you all now, everything is on HD now, from games to movies or even gaming channels on youtube, here is a list of the the top YT channels. Creators understand that screen size/resolution is just a canvas like any other. A good artist can make anything from a Gameboy screen to a 6. LED look good. Problems arise when it comes time to convey to a non- artist what constitutes quality art. It takes a lot effort to explain how this: The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the original Gameboyhas much better art than this: Bubsy for SNESHowever, it is easy to explain that the second image has a higher level of technology. To the average person, I’m sure it’s self- evident. Cymbeline (2015) The Movie High Quality more.

Some may  even be so taken with the spectacle of added color and resolution that they might think Bubsy has the better artwork! I could write you an entire book on why that is absolutely not the case, but that’s the thing – it’s not the audience’s responsibility to read that book. It’s my responsibility deliver them quality in a language they understand. Is like when I’m playing with my Raptor Spinners, people sometimes don’t understand what they’re for, and is just for fun.“The H- est D”Artists of any era tend to create with the best, most current tools available to them. Technology’s primary function is to make human life as easy and efficient as possible. This is no different in the case of art production technology. Greater production technology means fewer limitations imposed by the medium.

All mediums have their limitations, however. Just as the canvas has its edge, graphics processors have their thresholds. In the earliest days of game art, the extreme technological limitations created serious adversity. We all get how pixels basically work. A computer divides a display into squares, and each square can be assigned one RGB value at a time.

The total squares supported by the hardware is the device’s “resolution.”This square grid is the smallest possible subdivision of detail available to an artist. It’s very much like tile/mosaic art – you can only add as much detail as your smallest available tile. Early game artists had precious few “tiles.”“NOTHING IS OVER!!”This constricted medium turned good artists into problem solvers. Good artists looked at the display like a mosaic artist, and not so good artists looked at it like a rock and chisel.“Your worst nightmare.”In Mighty Final Fight (pictured on the left above), Guy’s eye is constructed with illusion in mind.

By strategically grouping colors and observing their relationships, more complex shapes and forms were implied. The use of flesh tone under the eyelash and on the iris even implies other colors! The pixels in Mighty Final Fight contain actual information. To illustrate, I drew a higher- resolution extrapolation based on the information coded into these little squares. As you can see, I was able to infer a ton of detail and depth from Guy, but even though both examples use virtually the same amount of pixels, I could barely do anything with Rambo.

Techniques like those used in Mighty Final Fight, we have only retroactively come to call “pixel art techniques.” If the artists of the time had access to better production tools, I’m sure they would have been thrilled. In the early 8. 0s, IBM PCs could only display 4 colors for a full screen illustration(black, white, cyan and magenta). Blending colors was impossible, so artists would “checker board” two colors together.

At a glance, this looks like a color exactly halfway between the two. This technique is called dithering. Back then, they had to dither. Nowadays, it’s used to achieve a look(art by Larwick on Pixeljoint) Modern screens can literally display colors upwards of a billion. I think it’s safe to say that the tricks of the trade employed to make primitive games look good are no longer required.

Yet there is a small, but vibrant community of enthusiasts who not only keep these techniques alive (art by Snake on Pixeljoint), but even add to the form with bold expressionist techniques(art by Calv on Pixeljoint). This community takes pride in doing extremely complex work(art by jamon on Pixeljoint) while keeping the color count very low. The biggest sticklers and purists consider the use of alpha(semi- transparent pixels), or software- side lighting/shadow/particle effects a form of cheating.

All these aspects of the community culminate into a sort of sport- like atmosphere, similar to the remnants of the Jazz music scene. While these communities are full of dexterous, blistering performers and highly talented craftsmen, they are also very small and very insular.“It’s good, but kind of pixelated. Either way, anyone who uses the word clearly doesn’t grasp the concept that pixel art is a deliberate, predetermined art style. And it’s not just with us. The Reviewer of the SNK fighter King of Fighters XIII over at IGN had this to say about the sprite work: “While they look a bit pixelated, the character models look quite good”- IGN review of KOF XIII“quite good.”This sprite is not “quite good.” It’s among the best 2.

D animation ever made in a video game. However good it is, it’s good in spite of it being “pixelated” according to many. Out of curiosity, I wondered what kind of treatment a game I consider to have pretty ghastly art got. Street Fighter IVYes.

I think Street Fighter IV is a garish, sloppy eyesore with sub- par animation. Let’s see if IGN agrees.*spit take*The shoddy SFIV received a higher art score than one of the best looking games to date, and I believe it’s all due to a pixel tax. To demonstrate what I’m driving at, let’s put SFIV’s animation under the microscope. At first glance, it looks serviceable. I think animators and artists can spot the issues right away, but to the average gamer, it’s perfectly clear and fine looking. Anyone remember Street Fighter III: Third Strike? God I miss those days.

SFIII’s animation is orders of magnitude better than SFIV’s. It’s not even close, but perhaps it’s still not totally evident at a glance. Chun- li’s body in SFIII works like a whip cracking. When every frame is a new drawing, it allows for things like flowing drapery, muscles flexing and unflexing, the natural sort of warp the body takes when it moves in extreme ways, etc. The effect is nothing short of magical.

While I’ve seen far worse than Chun- li in SFIV, the animation is just kind of dead and sloppily done. There is no urgency, and many of her limbs and facial movements seem bizarre and out of place.