Funny you should say thata friends got me doing graphics for a proposed iDevice game and he wants a 'Like old-skool C-64/Amiga graphics kinda style' to it and I've been working on getting something I like that looks very similar without having to adhere to pissy exact rules about the amount of colours, size of tiles and style of dot shading I'd have to stick to to appease internet 8-Bit nazis and all that.
I'm guessing it's bleeding over into my b3ta stuff...
(I'm guessing it's bleeding over into my b3ta stuff...
..wil,
Fri 3 Jun 2011, 15:10,
archived)
It's rather good fun actuallyhere's some examples:
essentially imitating the style of 8-bit without actually re-creating it, which would just do my head in if I had to do that, chrissakes I was there doing graphics for games at the time and having to work around such a narrow colour pallete was awful, NOW we can do literally millions of colours, so fuggit, I'm gonna use 'em!
*edit* just read the Newsletter, that was a bit thin wasn't it? Can't get the staff these days, pshaw...
(essentially imitating the style of 8-bit without actually re-creating it, which would just do my head in if I had to do that, chrissakes I was there doing graphics for games at the time and having to work around such a narrow colour pallete was awful, NOW we can do literally millions of colours, so fuggit, I'm gonna use 'em!
*edit* just read the Newsletter, that was a bit thin wasn't it? Can't get the staff these days, pshaw...
..wil,
Fri 3 Jun 2011, 15:31,
archived)
It's really hard to do good hand-drawn pixel art with 24-bit colours and super hi-res available to you.I find it's far easier to concentrate if you lower the resolution and palette range.
Personally, I like the shrub, but I'm not convinced by that random colour noise on those flagstones. Maybe do some noise in grey scale, enlarge it to get a random but smoother texture, reduce its number of colours to 4 or 16 greys, then use it as a layer to alter the brightness of some plain-coloured stones..?
(Personally, I like the shrub, but I'm not convinced by that random colour noise on those flagstones. Maybe do some noise in grey scale, enlarge it to get a random but smoother texture, reduce its number of colours to 4 or 16 greys, then use it as a layer to alter the brightness of some plain-coloured stones..?
joefish It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks,
Fri 3 Jun 2011, 16:48,
archived)
I was in two minds about that one too, it breaks a lot of rules, maybe too many,but as I say I'm not trying to do pixel art, I'm trying to do something that harks back to the cute plasticy style that developed back then but obviously isn't, the difficulty is knowing where to draw the line, but I'm starting to get a design language I like, essentially, top-down, slightly caricatured appearance, hard pixels, plastic shading lit from top left, strong highlights, but shadowed pretty much directly underneath, fairly heavy line borders without being too full-on, and try and keep each coloured object as a pure-colour rather than mixing them (which I broke for the flags as I just thought it looked more stoney) and being REALLY full on with the whole attitude of obvious square tiles.
If you're a purist you'll also hate that we plan to do smooth rotation and scaling of 'sprites' by doubling up on the apparent pixel count, and the occasional cheat of actual 3D textured to look like flat pixels, which might not work but we'll see, but the basic concept is 'what would it look like if you took game makers from back then and gave them a modern computer to work on'?
We're still working on it, if it doesn't work I'll just start over with something else, but our first try is a game so simple it's barely a game at all, given away free, just 'cos we wanna test the waters and see what's swimming in it...
(If you're a purist you'll also hate that we plan to do smooth rotation and scaling of 'sprites' by doubling up on the apparent pixel count, and the occasional cheat of actual 3D textured to look like flat pixels, which might not work but we'll see, but the basic concept is 'what would it look like if you took game makers from back then and gave them a modern computer to work on'?
We're still working on it, if it doesn't work I'll just start over with something else, but our first try is a game so simple it's barely a game at all, given away free, just 'cos we wanna test the waters and see what's swimming in it...
..wil,
Fri 3 Jun 2011, 18:08,
archived)