Sprite work in modern vidya

Aren't most 8bit indie games made by beta males?

so what?

chicken butt

don't you mean bita?

I just want to say, after playing super mario maker, and seeing Super Mario 3. I am in absolute aw of the sprite work for that game. And it was for NES! I also saw Kirby for NES, and it looks incredible.

youtube.com/watch?v=rJXM4EPbPe0

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I personally love spriting and have been spriting since I was a kid simply because i love pixel art as a medium. I'll probably never be KOF or metal slug levels of detail and animation, but thats fine to me because its a passion i really don't want to see die. I love when indies do pixel art ebcause i love to see more of it and the usage of small scale graphics. it can be fun trying to create a detailed idea on such a small scale and see how much detail you can get in the sprite.

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The aesthetics of the NES visuals had an underlying eeriness about it, but when they went into SNES, they pretty phoned in the cuteness up to maximum and pastel colors ever after.

but being shitty is MY unique style!

I dig the style very ghost trick-y

AWESOME
also
>feed me

If the visuals match the feeling of what you're playing then they're doing their job fine. I feel like giving certain moods to players is far more important than looking detailed or proper.

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hey don't doubt yourself. animation is a beast onto itself.

yeah people never cut corners on anything related to their work ever.

It's not exactly pixelart but this is a good example of what I mean. The Goomba's in the LA remake were actually made less on model to help invoke the feeling of the world being a dream by making them feel familiar yet off while also nailing in the look of the gameboy design.

These types of things mixed with really good use of colors, character emotion, and camera work are what make games feel good imo.

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Most people who complain about lazy devs don't actually have any experience drawing anything in their lives. Let alone any pixel art experience. They have no frame of reference for how much effort it take to draw. Also, the amount of experience that is required to get good at it.

Think of the last game you mastered. Now think about how much hours of trials it took you to master that game. It's like that with art as well. You just have to keep hacking at it, and learning and hacking for hours on end, before you have the knowledge to make good art.

Fact is, good pixel artists are good artists in general. They don't NEED to work at low resolution. They choose to, because they enjoy the aesthetic.(Or during early game production, it was out of technical necessity. But I'm not talking about that.)

You can't really tell how lazy someone is. Because even hard working individuals don't have the time to learn all things. Indie devs are already doing so much in terms of game design and programming. Sometimes they do the writing and music as well. And then on top of that, they're expected to be competent artists?

Fact is, good pixel art isn't a reasonable expectation in the first place. You just have to hope that the devs have one of three things:
1. The practiced skills of an artist.
2. The natural talent for artistry.(The ability to quickly grow and adapt)
3. The money to hire an artist.

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Actual pixel art sure, youre absolutely right
The image in my post? Anyone could do that

So? Why should they be expected to do any greater?

Agreed on some points. I think the common misconception for so many people is that pixel art is made large scale, then scaled down. It's not in most cases, its usually made from scratch at smaller resolutions. In my case, I draw small and piece together and add details and embelish as needed as I go. But for this project in specifc, i wanted a flat color style, so i don't add any complex shading save for a few tones here and there.

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op here. i wasn't exactly complaining about indie pixelart style is lazy per say, i create pixel art as well, but i definitely see when pixel art is done in less effort in comparison to other games who use it for effect, for instance Yume nikki i find to be fantastically made visually and even the use of spritework can effect and coincide with the mood of the game, and while i think undertale is a fantastic game, the overworld sprites and locations i think are a little rushed, both in colours and in animtion, and i know it's supposed to be like earthbound, but earthbound usually has some consiceness in it's colours and i dont see it emulated well in undertale, or even in general.

The problem with undertale is its colors are all over the place. Vivids and muted tones in the same level. Toby understood his world building, and his characters are certainly memorable, but the overall tone of the game shifts far too erratically. It honestly should have stayed all monotone imo.

>how can you tell when it's done in laziness
The sprites are internally inconsistent and don't try to emulate 8/16/etc-bit palette limitations.

Do you doubt Toby's work ethic though?
He went over the game's estimated release date, delivering the game late. He was an amateur dev, burdened with more work than he realized he had in the beginning. And you guys want to give him shit because some of the art is rushed?

Was he supposed to delay the game for months longer, while he and Temmie go back over the game's art?

Just for the sake of avoiding the stigma, what's a good alternative to pixel art for a one man dev with no budget and mediocre art skills?

Oh I'm not giving him shit user, I still admire his work but the colors really could have been better. in some cases it can give a mystifying feeling sure, but in others, certain characters stand out on the dull backgrounds with their neon colors

hey this is old as hell but, i learned so much shit on this sprite i made. (was more an animation lesson.) just doing a walk cycle. the red dot was just an indicator for down step.

i stopped working on sprites and shit because IRL stuff. But I'm going to boot strap some money, buy a car and a laptop, and just find a quiet place to work. get back into it.

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What program should I use to edit sprites? I tried Gimp but it is shit.

not shitting on him at all, but that doesn't mean that i can't criticize the game's visuals.

Unironically Mspaint. I do all my sprites from scratch on its grid function. and I prefer it because theres no tools to make the job easier. just good old pixel by pixel drawing.

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You can criticize the visuals. But calling it "lazy" isn't right. Even if it was rushed. Even if they did cut corners. There was good reason.

do you have access to cgpeers?

yo their registrations are open, go register and DL aseprite or photoshop. cgpeers.to

You can tell that a number of indie games simply don't have the artistic talent employed to pull off good sprites or animations.
Laziness is rare, it's often lack of resources and talent.
They also often lack writing and programing talent, but they're trying.
... Unless we're talking about artsy games that try very hard to be "meaningful", which for some reason are what people immediately think of when they say "indie games".

Paint.net works too

>Paint.net
Ehh, it does. I used to use it for my drawing, but I hate drawing with alpha. and the hardness of the brushes isn't all that great. I just do my sprites on hard copy first, then take them to photoshop if i need alpha/transparency, etc. But i try not to use any tools or lighting, i'
d rather just recreate it in the art itself.

>Lack of resource or talent
in most cases no, its lack of time. Most bosses don't want you to spend more than a week on a spritesheet of animaitons for a game. they want it done, finalized and you move on to the next assets. It's annoying too because there s so many times i want to do more/dont like the final result, but its not my call to fix them.

Time is a resource and with enough talent you could get them done faster. Project managers who don't properly scope the project to the size and potential productivity of the team are also a lacking talent.

Mspaint would be ideal but I kinda miss layers and built in transparency support.

>Layers
While useful, not necessary. I copy my work, set a copy aside on the canvas, and work on it. and go back to the original and copy it again if the idea doesnt work to my favor, or set aside the top "layer" and integrate it afterwards.

When character models have segments that animate independently. or when a character animation appears to rotate in a 3D manner conveyed by only the pixel work

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THIS GIF DOESN'T PROPERLY LOOP FFS AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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I'm glad they fixed the generic mario enemies, when I first saw the LA trailer that bugged me a lot

Shame about the obviously placeholder cutscenes.

Celeste.
No hard feelings, but I can tell story > graphics in that game. It's a case of "sprites so minimalist I can just shift pixels around for "movement" while I make my 14 year old fanfiction about my dark side issues"

It's just the way it is. I noticed the less importance the story is in a game, the better the animation gets 100% of the time. Just think of Yoshi's Island, the SNES masterpiece, was less gameplay and more story telling?

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I wish more people, devs included, realized that sprites don't necessarily have to be so low res that you can see the pixels

Look at this screenshot. It's TTYD with HD textures. It's clean as hell and looks like it could have come out today, and I'm really surprised more games haven't tried a similar approach with sprite-based characters and 3d backgrounds

It's not like it's even hard to do, TTYD's sprites aren't even hand-animated

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>Why should they be expected to do any greater?
Because participation trophies don’t exist outside of high school. Put the effort in and bleed for your craft, lazy shits that make crappy art should be bashed until they do better.

Sprites take more work to animate than 3D models.

if artistic style is specifically chosen to pander laziness or lack of talent - it's still laziness or lack of talent

like an ironically bad game - ironic or not, it's still a bad game with poor gameplay.

No

If each frame is redrawn completely than yes, but TTYD's method has each body part as a separate layer, so, say, walking is as simple as making Mario's 2 shoe layers swing around

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I know nothing about sprite art but this sounds incorrect.

You fags always point to Celeste. But I call bullshit. The game makes excellent use of color. The palette are all vibrant and well balanced. There is a deliberate art style to everything. How they distribute detail, how "broad" objects are drawn", it's distinct.

Celeste also has smooth animation that helps accentuate the motion of the character. Just look at how many frames they use, and how the character's hair flows.
God, I don't even like the game. Never played a single second of it. But I watched it, and thought the story was emotional hipster garbage. STILL, it pisses me off that you guys try to act like you know A FUCKING THING about pixel art, while using Celeste as an example. All you've done is expose your immense ignorance.

It's why so few games use them in the modern day. This is of course when talking about high quality sprites vs high quality 3D models. Would you rather.....
>redraw a character with minor differences 200+ times
or
>Make one model
>Properly set up its skeleton
>Animate through moving the skeleton around in a program

And you think the guy who came in 4th place didn't work his ass off to get there?

only mind-blowingly good stories deserve bad graphics excuse and i'm gonna put a safe bet on celeste not being one

Sprites require more time and effort to animate unless you're going for that shitty 2000s era Flash tween shit look.

4th place is the third loser, so no.

We already have HD puppet animated shite. Everyone agrees that it looks cheap as hell.

Paper Mario's gimmick is only good under the concept of Mario being made out of paper. But using shitty puppet animation for most games looks awful.

>It's why so few games use them in the modern day.
Are you simply just ignoring 85% of indie games to support your argument?

>Sprites require more time and effort to animate
In your opinion

Are you perhaps ignoring a key part of the post to support your argument?
>This is of course when talking about high quality sprites vs high quality 3D models

Well it sounds like you've never worked hard to achieve anything in your life.

that's why 3d games take less time to make

It's ALWAYS dont out of laziness
If devs cared they'd make every game look like Red Dead 2
Everything else is just gauging people for money

>No actual counter to the argument

For Void Bastards, we considered it an obvious fit for the style once the cartoony, comic book aesthetic was locked down (at first, the game was going to be far more gritty and System Shock-y). Obviously this meant we had to compromise on things like verticality in level design (the two options being have the sprites pitch forward and backwards which looks silly, or to keep them at a fixed pitch which broke immersion really quickly), but the inability to create a 3d-readable minimap function invalidated that anyway.

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the character sprites in celeste are fucking ass but I don't think the environments look too bad. that being said it's not like Maddy doesn't have a shitton of work put into her animations just so the gameplay (you know, the most important part) feels smooth and precise.

High quality sprites user. Wanna-be retro where the 8 bit sprites are like 14x14 aren't what's being discussed. Stuff like Ragnarok Online or Dungeon Fighter Online. In RO each class' sprite is over 200 frames.

Do you think you can just use some magic transform tool to create a good looking walk cycle? Every single change in each frame has to be done by hand. Whereas in 3D work once the model is t-posed, it's done. You don't need to recreate it or retexture it, you just animate off of the skeleton. It's a signficiantly stream-lined process.

nobody played that game. They only watched the Angry Nerd video of it

Have you not been paying attention to Gamefraeak at all.

it looks nice but it could look like cheap flash animation if not done properly. There are a few that can pull it off, but when it fucks up it’s really noticeable.

What argument? All you're doing is doubting people's work ethic. I can't cure your blind incredulity.

actually ppl who have achieved first place in anything they love to do would encourage audience to never give a shit about ''how hard it was behing the curtains''
Only the end result matters - we're adults and don't need a collective hugbox to cope w/ our failures.
Learn to take a hit and try harder, like said, you twitter dwelling solyent slurpers (also, shave!)

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In a time where 3D tools are freely available, sprites have diminishing returns. Fighting games have been the hallmark of spritework, where tons of hours could be saved by rigging 3D models, but for something like a puzzle/platformer it is much quicker to make 2D art.

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top kek at 8-bit john rambo

still a meme game so who cares

>Only the end result matters
People are just better at things than other people. You know what is onions slupers do? They say "anyone can make it", "we're all equal", they deny genetic reality.
And the fact of the matter is, if you took two basketball players, and made them practice by running the same miles, jumping the same jumps, shooting the same amount of hoops, one man will be a better basketball player in the end. Because genetic diversity.

The idea that the losing players didn't work as hard or harder than the winners, is utter nonsense.

Pretty sure this thread is all about how to determine if some games have lazy pixel art or not.

Before switching over to Gimp, I used Paint Shop Pro 7 for quite a long time. It got the job done very well. Though if you're into animating things you might want to look at more modern, pixel art specific programs.

Making animations without layers or some other tool is a pain and a half. Also if you're an insecure faggot like me you'll want to make multiple versions of every sprite, stack them on each other, and spend hours disabling/enabling layers to figure out which version looks least bad.

the spark of artistic talent is hidden in genepool raffle ticket, but only practice can unleash it and improve result.
Everyone has their own ceiling, but only a few have tried to reach it.

Your metaphors are a jumble. If artistic talent is a raffle, then wouldn't that mean some people won't win it?
So you're admitting that some people won't have the talent?

>You don't need to recreate it or retexture it
One big exception - Arcsys going with manual faked light/shadow effects, created with changing textures, instead of using celshading like everyone else going for a cartoonish look with 3d models. Takes a shitload of work, and only works with fixed light sources and camera angles.

Yes and no. It's really time consuming to make a model twist and bend properly and not look like a broken mess. People really think "add bone to model, gg no re" and pop, good animation, but no, there's a real big reason riggers are really rare in the game dev community, it's hard. Like, there's a reason why Sakurai refuses to make quadruped characters besides 2 of them over the 70+ human esque characters.

When you get past the technical part of rigging for animation, it CAN be easier to animate in 3D than 2D, but 2D is far easier to access for beginner animation because it can sometimes take a lower ceiling to make good animation even with a rough art style. While a bad looking 3D model, a poorly rigged 3D model, or just plain animating a 3D model in 3D space, can be really fucking hard to git gud at if you're not skilled for it.

tl;dr: Sprites doesn't take more work than 3D from an entry level. But on a skill level it takes a lot of time to make 2D sprites look clean and fluid while once you got the right rigging done for a model and the practice of animation in 3D space, it's far easier to do 3D work than 2D work.

t.3D modeler/rigging novice.

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>don't try to emulate 8/16/etc-bit palette limitations.
There's no need for palette limitations anymore. That was done out of a necessity due to limitations. This doesn't however excuse poor color palette choices however. That should still be an absolute strong focus when dealing with pixel art because the smallest pixel makes a big difference.
Everyone raves Shovel Knight for being "accurate" to NES palette limitations to a point, but honestly that game is pretty fucking ugly with some of its color choices and some of its tile work is just downright fucking lazy.

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ITT: Lazy pixelshit devs defending their derivative unoriginal games no one wants to play. Name me literally 1(one) pixelshit game with truly interesting mechanics. You can't

Who cares? What matters is if the end product looks good to you, not what the artist's intent was or how much effort was put into it.

I also don't think going for a "lazy" approach to art is necessarily a bad choice for a solo game developer. Creating all the art assets needed for a game is often hugely time-consuming, even if you're going with extremely low-res pixel art. Going with a "low effort" art style means that more time can be spent polishing the gameplay or adding actual content.

I think he's saying talent only decides your skill cap with something. And talent alone doesn't automatically make you good. So anyone can practice anything and make progress, but on higher levels some folks just stop progressing while the talented ones keep going.

artistic talent is directly related to level of intelligence (particularly, at being able to connect the elements of reality, similar to each other in one way or another, and the more subtle that similarity is - the more talented is the artist)
Like w/ intelligence, there's no ''yes or no'' with the talent - only ''more or less'' of it.

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>Muh talent muh genetics
Excuses. Anything and everything on this Earth can be learned. I may not be a natural at art, design, or music, but I can absolutely mold my brain to be good at those things. I can create those pathways and learn to think like other artists, designers and musicians do. Don't overrate genetic dispositions and resort to thinking of the body, especially the brain, as a solid state. It's not.

Nice try robbit tourist, now for funfacts:
If you are game dev inexperienced in one way you either start learning or paying for someone who is competent. Competent =/= confident. This might ensure one part of your game is actually going to be good, and you can focus on other things. Many times the solo projects end up being in the trashcan before they even begin, because guess what, there is a fuckton of "Idea guys" who have this vision and think their ideas are better than others, and they also lack the skill.
If you choose this artform you do so because its a fuckton easier to build from scratch with it, lets be real here. Also there is a big chance you are a bad at actual pencil+paper too . Now comes the harshest part: You are inexperienced, and even if you DO possess the skill, you simply fail because you have below zero idea what makes a game good. You know back then devs always complained about not having good enough technology. Now whats your fucking excuse? The triple A industry is full of zoomer shits making games while they look incredibly good, they simply suck because the game itself is trash, due to the man who knows what makes a game good is nowhere to be found, then there is just a fuck in a suit in his late 40's thinking about the newest Audi he'll buy while observes the actual developers working for breadcrumbs. If these underpaid shits can make something look really cool, albeit hollow, then my man its time to get your head out of your ass.

Yea Forums will argue about the color of a man's shirt for fuck's sake, trying to have any form of an intellectual debate is like talking to a pack of rabid foxes and hoping that they understand you

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also, this

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you guys don't know shit about sprite animation

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So is this the next HIRETHISMAN meme? All things considered his animations have good timing and flow. Why is everyone getting uppity about this?

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Tweened animations and/or 3d models flattened into sprites are sure signs of lazy art. Using effects that have a significantly higher resolution (smaller pixels) than your other sprites is usually a bad sign too. They're not the only ways art can be lazy, but they're the easy to define ones.

Lazy art is lazy art, even when chosen for good reasons. Also lazy art doesn't automatically mean the game's bad. I like it when games are pretty, but that's not a requirement for them to be engaging and entertaining.

Sure you can. And the dude who has talent can do the same thing a million times faster. He just gets it, while you have to change yourself to progress.

It shows a critical lack of understanding of animation with limitations and the use of key frames.

Such as-

Because his head and hat move in an unrealistic and unnecessary fashion. It looks like he just added movement to them just to show off, rather than create an actually appealing and functional animation.

The hat looks more like a fish flopping on his head.

mario looks alright (jumping cap won't work when sprinting / quickly changing direction and will generally get old fast), but megaman looked just like a shitty frame interpolation, turning the charachter into boneless jelly.

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>Because his head and hat move in an unrealistic and unnecessary fashion.
The hotdog hat didn't give that away?

I don't want to write several paragraphs of explanation so here's a video for you to automatically dismiss as eceleb video essay shit

youtube.com/watch?v=fJosaT1sCfs

no need, I fell for the dunkey cuck video bait earlier today and it made me sick, so I'm no better anyhow. also

Pure laziness.

That said, I'd never bother animating a full game with late-era pixel art fucking ever. 2D animation in general is a fucking slog. So is 3D. Generally everything is a slog. I sympathise, but that doesn't mean that most games don't look like shit regardless.

Just do 2D sprites and a 3D overworld then.

Why is he wearing a fish out of water on his head?

I'm doing a full 3D ps2 era sorta game. If you have to put a shitload of work in to make anything decent, you may as well cut to the chase and do what you really want to.

Or maybe don't work in a visual medium if you suck at art?