Why such a gorgeous pixel style so hard to copy?Most indie games look like fucking shit.
>>12556018I agree but not with your pic, that looks awkward as fuck and indie games look low effort and fake as fuck.Nobody's ever gonna compete with SNK because too much effort and talent no one has now
>>12556018There are good looking indie games. If you cherrypick the best from previous generations then it'll seem lopsided but there are plenty of bad ugly retro games too. A lot of indie games are also made by one person vs retro games having someone dedicated to just doing pixel art.
>>12556018they hired a professional painter to make that art. easy thing for a corp but a different thing for some jack of all trades trying to make a game in their spare time.
>>12556018>New game looks like shit! but old games? there were never any old games that looked like shit!
>>12556018>Most indie games look like fucking shit.Why can't you make a thread appreciating old pixel art instead of begging for non retro discussion? Shitting on modern games goes on >>>/v/
>>12556018Something to do with the tools.Sega games were made with a huge customized digitized light pen setup.Nintendo games could start on paper or they could use a track ball attached to a custom system.Some early PC games from the 80's could look like they were made with ms paint.Some ega games were good but VGA is when they got pretty good with stuff like Dune.>>12556019SNK used CG to help with their fighting games later on.
>>12556019yeah snk were in a league of their own
>>12556018Faggotass artists won't work for a percentage of profit. they want to get paid in advance, which amounts to thousands.Market is worse than in the 80s - AAA titles go on sale for $5 + you compete with the whole history of gaming, like Doom, Myst, Final Fantasy, etc. - nothing goes away anymore with the new console generationsSo no indie dev can afford those artists.
>>12556018>gorgeous pixel style so hard to copy?real artists made more money making pron.... play for nippon eroges.if you meant modern indies copying the "retro" pixels. well modern devs are lazy basterdz and have shit taste.
>>12556128>play MORE nippon eroges.
>>12556093>Faggotass artists won't work for a percentage of profit. they want to get paid in advance, which amounts to thousands.And they will stick to this idea doggedly, no matter how many times they see programmers cashing million dollar cheques.
Most pixel games of old were made on aaa budgets back then.Indies today don't have the budget to pay good pixel artists.
The artist for picrel still works on games today and they stand out from the trash 'retro style' games that are all over the place. One problem is that some indy devs seem to think its easy. It's just pixels, right? Anyone could do that. And of course their game looks like shit and they have to go to the old 'Oh, its stylized' well, pretending they made specific artistic choices when churning out their dross.
My biggest pet peeve with modern indies is how bouncy they make all sprites
>>12556018Pixel artists used to try to imitate real life and newer pixel artists try to imitate old pixel art. Tbh sometimes it works since they're basically shortcutting their way to the same ends the older pixel artists had to work to get to, but as a consequence a lot of modern pixel art ends up looking very samey since they all mimic a lot of the same source material.The pic in OP is a mixed bag of good and bad. The grass looks fantastic but the castle and bridge look a bit ugly. The mix gives it a garish look but it's kind of unique because of it. I would be surprised if AI could produce those kinds of stylized imperfections without extensive prompting, and most modern pixel artists seem set on either sticking to some super basic blocky style or something more uniform throughout, so there's very little room there for style to emerge.
>>12556194Tiffany, everything looks like shit compared to classical and Renaissance art.
>>12556518*tbf
>>12556018It's not just indies, there's an epidemic of fake art in modern games, makes you wonder why it is so easy to tell real comfy apart from fake comfy in games. Perhaps because the designers have lived in the world
>>12556542>cel shaded or minimal textures>throw a filter on itI hate this shit. Those games always run like ass too despite the basic look.
>>12556018Modern indie games are inspired by JRPGs to a huge extent, with superdeformed cutesy graphics. JRPGs took their design cues from anime and manga. So today's "indie" devs, raises on Nintendo pap, copy what they saw as children.Oldern western games had a wide variety of graphical styles, many inspired by cartoons or comics, but others not based on an existing art style. Jordan Mechner's games, for instance, had a (for the time) focus on realism and fluid motion, as most people over 18 know he filmed his brother doing various martial arts moves, and painstakingly overlaid tracing paper on the videos in order to "capture" the realistic motion.But nope, today's games are all basically little squat kawaii SD knockoffs.
>>12556018There's been a shit ton of indie games that have some of the greatest pixel art ever made. The fez era of hipster garbage pretty much ended a decade ago.Instead of complaining about Fez 15 years later, you fucking faggots should play some good games like Huntdown.Also your game looks like the average MS DOS game
>>12556019Ever heard of skullgirls?
>>12556165shut up and play Blasphemous
>>12556194Shut up and play katana zero
>>12556093>Faggotass artists won't work for a percentage of profit.The vast majority of these games make negative profit so this is them just being smart.
>>12556953shut up and play blazing chrome
>>12557002>>12557005>>12557013I'm not saying those are bad at all, because they're not really, but there's something about the way modern pixel art is designed for high resolution screens that makes them look less detailed at a glance. Pixel art designed for CRTs made heavier use of blurring techniques and honestly tend to look worse on high-res screens, but they still maintain the impression of detail since there are less flat areas of single colors. This is especially pronounced in the second of those three screenshots, where there's barely any, if any at all, dithering between the different colors, which makes it look very flat.
>>12557038You can play these on a crt. Plug in your steam deck. Everyone who's done it says it's incredible, especially if you have a widescreen hd crt.So you're really just bitching that "It's different". Which is brainless boomer-tier opinion. Especially "muh dithering". These are basically meant to be what-if games, that's what the people who outnumbered you want. "What if we kept making 2D games instead of 3D? What would that look like? What if Nintendo made the super duper Nintendo HD and sega made the 96X add-on for the Sega Mega DVD?" And these games succeed at that.
>>12556513> Pixel artists used to try to imitate real life and newer pixel artists try to imitate old pixel artYou nailed the problem. What was an abstraction or stylization is now elaborate forgery.OP choosing HoMM was clearly not the best choice. While nature looks great (so much that HoMM 2 reused a lot of terrain and forest map tiles from the first game) units and the castle with dat gradient look gaudy.
>>12556018I like good pixel art, but for some reason I've never been a fan of how HoMM2 looksI think I unironically prefer how HoMM3 looks even with it's shitty pre-rendered 3DCG
>>12557073>So you're really just bitching that "It's different".No, I'm just saying it looks less detailed. Nothing you said there even denies that. I made a point about a defining characteristic of older pixel art flat out not being present in your examples and your response was basically to say to just deal with it. I didn't even say it was bad. I'm just pointing out the fact that it's not the same thing and the difference is visible at a glance, which you seem to agree with.
>>12556987Also, Fez looks good to begin with and OP's image looks kinda bad. That purple troll person especially looks like an absolute retard. I would take even something like FTL that has janky graphics and clearly isn't designed to be very beautiful-looking over this, graphics-wise.
>>12557110Less detailed? Makes no fucking sense. Show me the 16/32 bit game that's more detailed. That boss is more detailed than legion in SotN.You're just retarded. Dithering doesn't make it more "detailed". You could argue "more textured" bit I'd still disagree.
>>12557038>there's something about the way modern pixel art is designed for high resolution screens that makes them look less detailed at a glanceThat is the issue right there. Pixel art was about making the momost of a lower resolution and finite color palllet. Each pixel was placed carefully to enhance detail. Modern pixel art is just normal 4k art with exagerated squares added on the edges and line separations. They are now adding big random pixels to erase detail rather than add detail. It looks nothing at all like real pixel art from the past, its just weird demake of modern art.It would be like a modern indie film maker trying to do an "old tyme style film reel" and doing nothing but smearing vasoline on the lens of his 4k camera and saying "there! done!" There are some rare cases when they get it right, I dont mind the pixel work of Kay Yu (he did the holcure game) but he is a legit animator in the anime industry who has worked on a lot of high profile shows.
>>12557151You can back port these games to old consoles and some of them have. Pretty much all the port master games. Look at sonic mania on dreamcast. You're wrong faggot. Plug a fucking steam deck into a crt and the you go. Absolute fucking retard.
>>12557107I'm the opposite, I adore how HOMM1 and HOMM2 look and wish HOMM3 would have kept a more cartoony artstyle instead of going for a realistic 3D one. I absolutely love it.
>>12557236No one said anything about CRTs. What the fuck are you even on about? It was a 240p and low color limit of hardware that made realnpixel art a reality, not what display it was on.
>>12556018As someone who has worked with indies at least on a surface level: there's two aspects to good art. The first is the technical aspect. Is the perspective correct. Did you do the shading right. How high is the resolution? This are quantifiable, objective things.The second is style: is what it's depicting pleasing? Are the colors balanced? What mood does it invoke? What's the subject? It doesnt matter if it's high resolution if the idea is bad.This is inherently a subjective statement since it involves the second point but I think indies rarely do both. If you want someone who is good at the technical aspect of art you need to either already be trained or hire someone. You can't just 'learn it'. They either can't handle working with teams or wont hire someone, they wont hire someone because of some weird reason, or they can't.The second is just that most people who decide the art direction in indie games live in their basement. So the direction is always bad: usually ugly or drearie. Sometimes they don't even have strong artistic sensabilities so they dont even see the art as ugly or drearie. If you aren't already an art director you need to hire one. And it's humbling hiring someone to tell you what direction to take things. If they even have the money and are willing to part with it.
>>12556018>gorgeous pixel style>posts some truly ugly shit
>>12557249no, all the complaints about how "it just looks different maaaaaan" can be solved by just plugging it into a crt.
>>12557423nah.
