#why did i alliter8 like that. i did it earlier today and i did it here. why am i like that.

[doomsdaydicecascader]

:fire: pixel art in indie video games

there are so many angles to approach this one from. like okay this is a homestuck blog and i’m making a webcomic where i do art on a canvas meant to be viewed without any magnific8ion or up-scaling but for like. 3 years before this i was a full-time indie dev, and one of the things i took the most pride in was my pixel art - i still love doing pixel art but it’s hard to find places to put good pixel art into a homestuck comic. 

last year i put together a game for a game jam where i spent most of the time in the week i was working on environment art (@janederscore killed it on character animations) and the final score was, in terms of graphics, #5 out of 114 entries.

check out witch machine if you have the time, sound of the summer.

i’m personally really proud of this shot of the curtains in the dining room. 

all this to say, i feel like i’ve got a non-zero amount of skin in the game, with this ask. and the skin in the game is, i feel like pixel art is an EXTREMELY devalued medium, especially in the context of indie games, like. i can think of exactly one holistic pixel artist, where like, their work exists as its own thing and not as an extension of a game’s aesthetic, and that’s fucking paul robertson. 

you may know him as the guy who did all the pixel-pushing work in gravity falls - both giffany and the street fighter parody were his art. and that dude bites. that dude made graphic fan art of custer’s revenge, you know - the game that exists to be pointed at in gdc talks where the late-20s, early-30s dsa member says “we have to do better than this”. and they’re right, that game sucks. 

and even then, his work is only really holistic because the scott pilgrim game got fucking. unpersoned, and if it was still around he’d be the scott pilgrim game guy. even homestuck has homages to that dude’s work in it - eridan and sollux’s fight is in that exact style. 

thats a tangent but heres my feeling: the prevalence of pixel art in games is like a thing that has to be done in every other artistic medium, that is - you have to make a fucking choice, about what your game is, about what your narrative is. 

i wrote a whole blog post last year about what i was doing with the game i was working on at the time, box game, since i spent ages doing a pass on all the art in-game, redrawing things and reshaping them to be more visually coherent, less bad, and why i made those choices, and i stick by those to this day but here’s a less masturbatory example:

one of my favorite pixel art games, visually speaking, is space funeral. space funeral is a game about MOON, an artist who saw the CITY OF FORMS, a perfect city based on the platonic theory of forms and after being driven mad, destroyed it. over the course of the game, your goal is to defeat moon and restore the city of forms. 

at the beginning, phillip walks in weird ways, like the animator just drew some frames without really knowing how they fit together, the tiles are all given this black outline that’d be horrifying to ship, since there’s this pixel art concept known as “jaggies” - when drawing lines, there’s certain kinds of curves that you follow to create the illusion of curves and almost always, it’s on diagonals. 

the difference between these two lines is palpable, no? it effortlessly creates the illusion of amateur pixel art. also it is amateur pixel art, for as heady and interesting as thecatamites games can be i wouldnt put “pixel art quality” at the top of their merits. its still gr8 but you know. 

anyway, it starts out with this really comparatively desaturated look, using lots of neutral versions of colors. but........

as you approach the city of forms, it grows garish. the only colors that arent blown out are the yellow of leg horse and philip’s skin. as you approach moon, and restore the city of forms, restoring this “perfect model city” and restoring the world as it was known, the whole game’s aesthetic shifts again. 

to the RPG maker default tileset, something so thoroughly soulless that the only place you would ever see it in 2020 is in this context, a melancholy ending as the unique world you just spent the whole game exploring, is stamped out for a world that conforms to the very assets its packaged with by default. 

(youll also find them in hentai games on steam, where they bring out big bucks for busts of their buxom babes but barely break a babys bank over things like tilesets, though trying to talk truthfully about that seems thoroughly tedious) 

all this to say, i feel like you cant just have a take like “:fire: pixel art in indie games” because its like. “whats your opinion on art in comics”. “whats your opinion on acting in films”. its just a medium and there are good and bad examples of that medium and i think its kind of unfair to judge a medium by its terrarias when its also got games like deltarune, gato roboto, and hyper light drifter 

and again this is just in games, pixel art is a medium unto itself which is a whole other topic but i dunno how much i can get into that, just bc i dont have the experience