Why does indie pixel art always look kind of.. bleh?
>>745988925what geimu, mr. marketer?
because they don't understand proper shading. there's very few shadows in this image
This looks fine, cute even, the problem is the fucking non-pixel font used in the UI. What the fuck is that?
>>745988925They don't actually copy the limitations of real pixel art.
>>745988925I think it's down to two major reasons: Classic games had limited color palettes that made the art more striking and uniqueModern pixel indie games just focus on having "good" looking pixel art and ignore creating a visual identity.Love it or hate it, Undertale's sprites are pretty iconic because of how unique they look. This image has "nice" looking art but nothing about it is recognizable as being from that game/series.
>>745988925The tiles are too clean, just look at te roads and grass, no texture. Earthbound got away with it because of the perspective used and to make it different looking from the fantasy jrpgs of the time.
>>745989590Indiefags never learned art fundamentals. They skipped straight to youtube tutorials. And it shows.
>>745988925Talentlessmaking video games is easier than everIt opened the floodgates to a lot of shitters that have no artistic integrity, no coding knoweledge, dogshit ideas,etc.
>>745988925They imitate instead of innovate.
>>745988925Because you have a mental disorder
>>745989906>>Love it or hate it, Undertale's sprites are pretty iconic because of how unique they look.Circular logic, you only think that because they're fucking everywhere due to the game being popular, if someone showed them to you before the game released you'd barely register them
Do any of these ‘artists’ actually use grid paper like what was used for old sprites?
>>745988925What game?
because you are playing shit games trying to look like 1999 gameswhen 1990 looked like that due to hardware limitations not because devs were shit like retards today
>>745988925It has that tumblr washed out gif aesthetic that I fuckin hate
>>745988925same reason why an amateur artist copying a work of a great master looks bad. the master is looking at real life and trying to capture it.
>>745988925Could you be more descriptive you absolute subhuman?
>>745988925Because it's low budget. All good pixel art people remember from 90s was from AAA games.
>always
>>745990939how is this compared to CrossCode?
>>745990939Yeah that looks bleh Pic related is good pixel art
>>745989141>>745990670Little Witch in the Woods, a highly charged sexventure
>>745988925Everything they do is desaturated pastels.Nothing pops.
>>745990939Oversaturated midtone slop. It's pure graphical junk food. The artist lacked any unifying vision; they had nothing to say. Just "look at how good I copied the Masters!" But I suppose the average consumer won't notice.
>>745988925Very few people are actually trained in sprite work. Even among indie game artists I think most come from a regular art background and adapt.
>>745990939>>745991263This kills the indiefag
>>745988925>why does amateur art look amateur
>>745989590if i start up, say, ALttP, will i see proper shading?
>>745990409circular reasoning, you think success comes in spite of merit, not because of it
>>745991308Ah, the psudo-artists have arrived to discuss subjects they no nothing about, and criticisms are incapable of going into specifics beyond vague buzzword that don't apply.
>>745991506Every modern game
>>745991506it's shocking that modern devs/artists seem to despise harsh values as "amateurish" then proceed to release the most generic shit we've seen since Wanko To Kurasou 2
>>745991727It's not circular reasoning if there are examples of hundreds of games with shitty unique sprites that never succeeded
>>745988925These threads always boil down to people being blinded by nostalgia from a time they were an impressionable child.
>>745991861presuming that others agree with your value judgements is not very persuasive
>>745991927see >>745991506
>>745990249Which game is OP's image imitating?
>>745991960As opposed to >>745989906?
>>745991584wut game on the right
>>745991506This is the real problem with nu-pixel art. Everyone focuses so much on colour they forget about value even though it's miles more important for visual clarity which is critical for vidya art direction.OP's picrel isn't even that bad, it has clearly defined tones and it does a good job of distinguishing the protagonist and landmarks, but it still feels flat and washed out overall and gives the impression of models on a printed out tabletop map.
>>745988925Looks flat. It kinda blends together into a mush.
I kinda like Secrets of Grindea's pixel art. The portraits look atrocious, and the color scheme is just slightly garish, but it feels really warm and bouncy and "alive" in a way.
>>745992261poor foreground:background differentiationsmind you this is very easy to overdue. cf. Portrait or Ruin (and a dozen other gameboy games)
>>745988925this is why
>>745992420*overdo
>>745988925Looks fine. Not every pixel art game needs to look the same.Learn to appreciate different styles, and stop being a philistine.
>>745992040looks like Little Samson
Indie devs cannot help themselves from thinking pastel and pastel-adjacent palettes are pinacle of artistry. It's not just indie pixel art either, almost all of the low poly 3D indie games are pastelslop too.
>>745991668They will now tell you LttP looks bad.
>>745988925bucket tool instead of noise texture like >>745990939or>>745991263
>>745988925Most indie devs are soulless leftists shitheads and because soulless leftists shitheads are allergic to beauty, it manifests in their art as the most desaturated garbage you can imagine. Pic related, it's a soulless leftists shithead's reaction to actual color anywhere other than their faggot rainbow flag.
Not a problem with my indie games.
>>745988925It's preferable to Unreal slop
>>745993227That's not pixel art.
>>745989590>"Hmm, OP's image doesn't have proper shading, so they *all* must lack proper shading!"/v/ continues to generalize based on what's right in front of them.
>>745988925Looks fine. If you cropped and resized that screen and told me it's a GBA game I wouldn't question it. There are some miserably ugly pixel indie games, I'm reminded of that vaporware JRPG some anon kept posting one screen from because he was probably the dev.
>>745993478>>they all lack proper shading... until they don'tplease learn context
>>745993386it very obviously is
>>745992635they seem to lack the fortitude to claim the point they are very obviously implying. shameful but not unexpected.
>>745993227enemy reminds me of a Lion series unit from SRW OG
>>745992613It's funny how in one thread you'll get people hating on desaturated colors and then go into a rune factory thread where you'll see a yearning to go back to when the series used desaturated colors
>>745989590Having actually played the game, that's not an issue at all.
>>745994175Both represent the worst of each style
>>745988925I don't think it looks that bad. Certainly nowhere near peak pixel art from decades ago, but it's also done by fewer people with less time and knowledge. What can you do?
>>745994175the only thing in RF that has ever failed to look like complete ass is the portraits tbqh
I'm not defending indieslop but Seiken Densetsu is genuinely one of the ugliest series around, the SNES games in particular
>>745994370Secret of Mana looks great
>>745988925indies think pixel art has to be chibi or cutesy stylized. The idea of pixeling a character with realistic proportions is unthinkable to them. if they ever saw amiga games they would lose their fuckin minds
>>745988925A lot of artists have this problem where they inadvertently make everything round and doughy. This doesn't affect just pixel art, either. It shows up in all kinds of mid to low tier art.
>>745994175I fucking hate grass that are colored like nuclear waste
>>745991781Mikan's game got a sequel?
They aren't making art out of pixels, they are making "pixel art". They go out of their way to conceptualize it as pixel art instead of the pixelization being a means to an end.
>>745994758I hate suburbs too.
>>745994419it really fucking doesn't
>>745988925You're not playing the correct pixel art indies
>>745988925its were the soul vs soulless meme came from
>>745994484You say that as if the big games everyone loves from back in the day (zelda, chrono trigger, final fantasy, etc) don't also have stylised chibi sprites because portraying the characters with a recognizable face is important for games like that while the only top-down pixel games that have realistic proportions are more serious games like Metal Gear (but in return lack any sort of facial features). Like gee, I wonder why the wacky indie game inspired by Zelda and Harvey Moon would have nice to look at readable chibi sprites...
>>745996373if you're making a JRPG sure, but they do it with all genres
Because indies have the faggot retard mindset of adhering to “the rules” (redditors love following rules). Whereas actual good games just did whatever looked cool.
>>745988925>Random nobody can’t match the Japanese masters of the pastWaow…
>rando japanese salarymen are "le masters"you niggers are so fucking embarrassing
>>745995217t. blind retarded faggot (pyw)
Not everyone can be snake
>>745988925they aren't working with limitations to tell a story. they are using pixels for cool boy points.
>>745988925Pixel artists would be an order of magnitude better if they did the pixel art on a CRT first I did this experiment years ago with an artist friend who enjoyed making pixel art
Play Doloc Town!
>>745994175Neither of those are pastel.
I think good-looking pixel art games would look much better if they didn't use pixel art. Am I wrong?>>745999006The Mina the Hollower devs did this and purposely gimped their color palette to emulate the Game Boy Color aesthetic.
>>745991506>>745992450meanwhile...
>>745999548desaturated colors are pastel-adjacent, THOUGHthe original post also said pastel-adjacent, aka desaturated
>>745999548Fair enough.In spite of those two kind of overdoing it in opposite directions, they still both have soul though.
>>745989906Undertale has max 4 colors in sprites. Undertale's textboxes and NPCs are primarily monochrome.The witch has 16 colors
>>745991506>>745992150Did you guys make it *proper* grayscale or did you just use the default setting?
