Pixel art games nowadays all look more or less the same. Actual games from the 90s didn't look alike at all. Also most games use pixel art as an excuse for lazy animations with a little amount of frames. I really wonder why everyone likes it so much and I often think maybe something is wrong with my taste :/
I think that the "formal" rules for pixel art have become more well defined with increased access to the internet, and you now see more of a tendency towards Japanese / console style pixel art (compare with Deluxe Paint-style pixel art seen in old PC games). I think that there is also a huge amount of "abuse" in these rules, some of which are definitely universally applicable as applied to pixel art, IMO - namely, using the same pixel size, and perhaps keeping the palette reduced as far as reasonable. There is quite a large amount of "bad" pixel art, probably more so than "good" pixel art, so it is easy to come to dislike the genre nowdays. But pixel art (at least "good" pixel art) is much harder to produce than vector art or unrestricted raster art, especially when it comes to animation (unless you are just rotating limbs, which is a "no-no" in pixel art rules).
Except when you look at the development methodology of the best-of-the-best pixel art games (BlazBlue, King of Fighters), the teams did 3D Animations for all of the characters and then re-traced them into 2D Pixel Art.
Everyone who actually _does_ high-quality pixel art understands. Good Pixel-Art is much MUCH harder to do than good 3D.
It lothes me to say it, but the blogpost is correct. Very few people understand this fact except for the artists who actually do go pixel art.
It's true that superb pixel art is harder to pull off than superb 3D models because of greater self-imposed limitations. However, it's also true that if you just want your art to be passable, it's easier to achieve that via low-res pixel art than via amateur 3D modeling. IOW, pixel art has both a lower barrier to entry and a higher skill cap.
Which is exactly my point: if we're resorting to external assets, there are infinitely more spritesheets available online for the low, low price of free, because making decent sprites is such a comparatively small effort that even artists themselves attach less value to the task.
(Which still isn't to devalue the effort that it takes to make good-looking sprites; I've tried, and damn do I suck at it.)
You need a baseline of art, and then you need to tweak the animations to match your video game. A model may not have a "double-jump" animation but you can easily add one through bone manipulations with any 3d model.
But if a sprite-sheet were missing the double-jump animation? You're either doing it yourself (hard pixel art style) or hiring someone else to do it.
But for me some pixel artists miss (for me) a large part of the artistic value of pixel art: restricting complexity of the scene -- not just portraying things in blocks. The blocks aren't important at all, in fact they're pretty ugly if you're not a great pixel artist (hence the natural wish to find better upscaling algorithms). It's often overlooked the CRTs those art were made for were quite blurry and round, alleviating the blocky look.
That's the right reason to defend using modern screens to their full capability with a certain simplified-art style.
Count the number of colors on Jin Kisaragi. The smooth, defined lines going down "strong", hand-crafted pixel art lines. With massive sprites built for the high-definition era to boot.
The 3D art gets a bit intricate and busy, but the 2D Sprites.
The question that immediately springs to my mind is "what did the 3D reference image look like". Rotoscoping (the animator's term for 'tracing reference footage') is an old, old process, almost as old as animation itself. You can do it well, by using the reference footage as a base to get the hard parts of the 3D motion down then putting that away and pushing the drawings, or you can do it poorly, by just tracing it and not really doing much to it otherwise.
I would bet that if you superimposed that BlazBlue animation over the 3D reference, there would be a huge difference - that looks like it's had a lot of human thought put into it.
(And then go look at Arc's latest game, Guilty Gear Xrd. Which is presented entirely 3D with some models that have had a LOT of love applied to them.)
Yeah. It's like 24fps in film. In 60fps (HD) every flaw is apparent; film props of the wrong weight look fake, and insincere facial microexpressions give it away.
Whereas in 24fps (pixelation), creators can get away with more as your brain fills in the gaps. There's also the bonus that it feels dream-like; larger than life.
There's also the question of pixel-perfect platforming. HD platformers can feel sloppy and untrustworthy if not done right. It's easier to trust a pixelated platformer. (And yet I've never felt cheated by a jump in the polygonal New Super Mario Bros.)
A fundamental difference between Japanese and Western animation is their approach to motion. Western animation emphasized fluid motion, attempting to stick to the maximum framerate (24 FPS) allowed by the film medium as much as possible. This could produce striking results, but tended to limit artists to more simpler, slower, more deliberate stretch and squash movements that would make sense when interpolated across key frames. It was also very expensive to produce, which is part of why western studios have mostly abandoned traditional animation, and why the ones that still do 2D often use Flash to cheaply "tween" between keyframes to get fluid motion for the minimum amount of effort.
Japanese animation, on the other hand, plays fast and loose with the rules. Very little is animated at the full 24 FPS, drifting around 12 to 8 to 6 FPS (called animating on twos, threes, or fours) for typical scenes. This allows for the user's attention to be captured by backgrounds and stills in expository scenes, and encourages a different style of exaggerated movement that emphasizes the ''feeling'' of the movement over brute force motion quality. It also allows the budget to be conserved for the most important scenes, sakuga ("moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action.") So called "key animators" work exclusively on these parts of an animation, and here, their skills in creating expressive motions shine when given the time and resources to completely bring a dramatic scene to life.
As the game, comic, and animation artforms grew alongside one another, early games took direct influence from styles of animation native to their creators. The concept of sakuga fit Japanese games well, which would often sparingly animate unimportant "cannon fodder" enemies for the sake of saving budget and development time for elaborate boss monsters. In contrast, I was always struck by the fluidity of motion in Western games produced by groups like The Bitmap Brothers for the platforms like the Amiga, yet unimpressed by the gameplay underneath. It seemed almost as if these groups would spend so much time lavishly animating their characters, that they would forget they were making a game.
Another important consideration is that more frames can work against an action game. Every frame of a sword swing, for instance, is another 16th of a second delay between the player's button press and the intended action occurring. A 1 or 2 frame anime-style sword swish fits perfectly into this mold, allowing for responsive control and an expression of energy. Whereas many Western games I played would lavishly animate the beginning of a jump, or thrust or swing of a sword, compromising the feel of responsiveness for the sake of the artist's ego.
So if you notice the lack of frames in a modern "pixel art" game, then while the artists might have been lazy (the typical "pixelated platformer" drawn at a lower resolution than an Atari, with more colors than a SNES game), perhaps they instead were copying older Japanese artists without understanding the reasoning behind their animation choices. Or perhaps you just don't appreciate this style of animation.
No source for this, but I remember hearing an interesting anecdote some time ago, and I'd love to know whether there's any truth to it:
Back in the 50's or so, when the major American animation studios had a couple decades of experience under their belt but anime was just getting off the ground, some Japanese animators took a trip to Hollywood to learn how the industry worked in the US. They were given a tour of a major animation studio, but through some kind of miscommunication, they came away with the impression that the studio was spending an order of magnitude fewer resources (time, money, manpower) than they actually were.
When they returned to Japan, they budgeted their productions using those lowered expectations, forcing their animators to cut corners and squeeze as much expressiveness into as few frames as possible. Which in turn led to audiences getting used to that style of animation, and created the recognizable Japanese aesthetic that has persisted to this day.
I have no idea, sorry. It would be very interesting if it were true, but it sounds like a bit of an urban legend. Working within the constraints of limited resources seemed to be a constant in all of Japan's pre-bubble successes, from comics, to calculators, so I wouldn't assume there would be any extraordinary reason for early Japanese animators to follow the same principles.
My interpretation was that anime's more limited, stylized animation was due to its direct influence from the prolific manga artist and animator Osamu Tezuka (sometimes called "the Walt Disney of Japan.") All comics, Western or Eastern, must heavily stylize motion in order to have any hope of expressing it in still frames. So having an accomplished dramatic comic artist lead most of the earliest, most influential Japanese animations, most of which were direct adaptations of his comics, working with the low framerate stylized motions that extended naturally from comic book stills, seems to have had a profound effect on the Japanese school.
In contrast, Disney's early animations were inspired by conventional cartooning in subject, and early film and Vaudeville in motion, so given Disney's influence, it should similarly not be surprising that the Western animation school tended towards comedy and fluid motion that attempted to emulate the impression of film.
Most Western animation has historically been done at 12fps ("on twos"); you go to 24fps for very fast motion or stuff you want to be super-smooth. This holds even in big-budget 2D theatrical features[1]. You will also find no small amount of super-stylized motion - dig up "The Dover Boys" (dir. Chuck Jones), commonly cited as the first cartoon to experiment with the smears, multiple images, and other crazy stylizations of motion. Single-frame your way through that someday; it's full of amazing semi-abstract images.
(First in the US, at least; there may have been people in the East playing with this as well, but there was very little cross-pollination at this time.)
The big difference between the Western and Eastern animation traditions, in my mind, comes from different decisions in how to best allocate "pencil mileage". You have a budget of X number of miles of lines drawn by your animators for each project; how do you spend it? Westerners generally pursued "the illusion of life", favoring really fluid and subtle motion over a huge number of drawings. This meant that very few single drawings could be very complicated. Easterners, on the other hand, gravitated towards complicated character designs. You might spend four or five times as much effort drawing a single frame. This meant that very few motions could be fluid.
Fluidity of motion × character design complexity = pencil mileage. Pencil mileage is fixed by your budget. Which one of those do you want to emphasize? You can't have both unless your budget is amazing. (This is also why animated commercials can have both; they can cost more per second than some features.)
To eyes trained in one tradition, the other one looks like crap. Why is this Eastern cartoon barely more than a slide show half the time? Why is this Western cartoon full of such simplified designs? Personally, it took me many years to learn how to appreciate Eastern animation.
(Also it is worth noting that most lovingly-animated Western games quickly converged on quickly popping into a motion as a result of a control input, with exaggerated settling into the new pose - look at Crash Bandicoot, Earthworm Jim, or Aladdin.)
I am rambling. Mostly I just wanted to mention that my experience of the Western tradition (including years of single-stepping cartoons) is largely on twos, with occasional bursts of ones.
[1] except for anything Richard Williams directed because he is kind of a total obsessive who would wander around the studio late at night and inbetween stuff onto ones that maybe should have never been on ones. See 'Raggedy Ann and Andy' for instance. Or if you want to actually see a decent movie hunt up the Recobbled Cut of 'The Thief and the Cobbler' because RA&A is pretty much 80 minutes of pure nightmare fuel.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Pencil mileage is a great way to sum up the difference between the two traditions. Sorry for sounding so down on Western animation; it's true that I'm more used to the look of Eastern animation, having invested much more time invested in it (hence my mistake about Western films animating on ones vs. twos; it's been a while since I watched one of the classic Western animated films, oops), but I don't want to discount the work of Western animators. I have my biases, but there are gems in both traditions, and of course I'm saddened by way Western 2D animation has fallen by the wayside in mainstream Western (or at least American) culture since the dawn of 3D animation.
As for games, I wanted to add a comment to my post about how I was mostly thinking about mid 80s-early 90s games, but Hacker News seems to have some restrictions keeping new users and throwaways from editing posts. Many European games from this time stood out to me as compromising gameplay at the expense of their animation. In contrast, many of the 90s and early 2000s Western mascot platformer games, as you mentioned, did great jobs of working charismatic, fluid animation into the medium. Crash Bandicoot in particular is notable for being one of the few games to use per-vertex animation; for each key frame of animation, the vertices that made up Crash were placed manually, giving the artists an unprecedented degree of control.
Since then, sadly, most Western AAA devs have tended overwhelmingly towards more "realistic" art styles that make heavy use of inverse kinematics-driven procedural animation for gameplay, and motion capture for cutscenes, leaving the animators much less room for expression.
Regardless, my intent was not to comment on Western animation as a whole, but (bringing it all back to the original commenter's remark about mobile games being sparsely animated) simply state that sparse animation doesn't have to be a bad thing, and in fact, there's an entire school of animation built around it.
Anyway, thanks again for replying, and I'll be sure to check your suggestions out.
* WARNING *
"Raggedy Ann & Andy", IMHO, is NOT A GOOD MOVIE. It is a fascinating trainwreck of obsession. It is a weird damn thing you see when you are five, then halfway remember when you are twenty and wonder if you dreamed it.
The idea of "pencil mileage" works both ways; really thinking about that helped me be able to finally actually enjoy some Japanese stuff.
There is also a strong tradition of Western limited animation; it actually started as the artistic cutting edge with the work of UPA (Gerald McBoing Boing, Rooty Toot Toot). Even Disney played win that domain with stuff like Pigs Is Pigs or Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom.
But then in the 60s, TV came along, and Joe Hanna and William Barbera's sweet gig doing beautifully animated Tom & Jerry shorts was gone; they started doing super-simplified cartoons that were carried largely by the voice talent. This got worse in the 70s and 80s, with tons of terrible toy-based cartoons done on the smallest budget possible (He-Man! GI Joe!). "Limited animation" is a dirty word to an entire generation of American animators.
Or at least it was until John K's "Ren & Stimpy" hit the cable networks, and inspired a new generation of animators. Who're busy making a lot of the TV stuff of today.
(But honestly I think that deep in the heart of every Western animator, there is a grey-toned Fleischer character bopping up and down in time to their heartbeat. Their hallucinatory version of Snow White - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNG8GYrh1mg - is a good example.)
Crash and Spyro are great examples of what can be done when a 2D animator's mindset is applied to 3D games! It carries on nicely from all the gorgeous 2D work on games like Aladdin or Earthworm Jim. I would love to see people come back to that mindset in video games. Guilty Gear Xrd is the first ray of light in the clunkily-puppeted darkness in a long time.
What great 2D animation is left? Ghibli stopped producing features (or put it on hold) and Disney, and everybody else in the US moved to 3D
I was thoroughly impressed Knights of Sidionia on Netflix, and though it can match some feature animation, it is still far from Ghibli/Disney. And it isn't even 2D!
The other day someone posted a gallery from Ghost in the Shell on Reddit and I thought "When was the last time we saw art like this on the big screen?"
Many pixel games today take it further by adding shaders, lighting, semi-transparency, HDR, particle effects, etc. so a lot of them share this hybrid old-new look. It's charming if a) done tastefully and b) the animation/art is solid e.g. Towerfall Ascension.
There are a few games that really nail the pixel art, but they are the exception among the flood of poorly done graphics. Those titles usually look different than most other pixel art games and don't fall into the lookalike pattern I mentioned before. I tend to generalize negatively in regards of pixel art because of the vast majority of the bad titles.
