I’ve wanted to write this article for some time now, and this seems like the perfect opportunity to do so. For those of you who are aware of Dinofarm Games and our recent release, Auro for iOS and Android, you know that we spent literally years producing carefully handmade, meticulous pixel art. After weeks of work, I just finished the most recent piece. The upcoming PC port of the game needed a new title screen image, as the game will be in landscape view.
I hope it’s clear from this image that I love pixel art. Auro was a love letter to the amazing stuff Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, and SNK produced in the 90s. That art was probably the primary reason I got into this field in the first place. It’s a beautiful form, and some of my favorite pixel artwork is being made today.
That said, the word “renounce” is not just click bait. Auro is likely to be the last Dinofarm Games title to feature pixel art.
Our team has been debating this for a long time, because we all unanimously love the aesthetic. The debate arose from the occasional anxiety we would get from the “HD this, HD that” fetishism that began in the early 2000s. In a way, our culture’s obsession with higher and higher resolutions made us defiant. It reinforced our stance on pixel art purism.
But in the last year, I’ve come to a very different conclusion. It’s not about what I like. It never is.
“HD fetishism” has always been around
Basically, it's an article talking about glorious pixel-art and how that kind of art-style, in his mind (and ours! ) more often than not trumps "HD" artstyle.. but how he's coming to the realisation that pixel-art is less viable for "most" people on today's ever-increasing hardware and screen resolution.
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When every pixel was visible to the naked eye, it made sense for an artist to hand-place each and every one. Nowadays, it’s no wonder people think something is wrong when they see games like ours on an iPhone 6 screen.
Pitfalls of Post-Pixel Pixel Art
Not only did my purism give my audience the chore of deciphering a language they don’t understand, but by not embracing the medium, we ran into all kinds of practical problems.
Some devices blur Auro. Some devices stretch it. Some devices letterbox it. No matter how hard I worked to make the art in Auro as good as I could, there’s no way a given person should be expected to see past all those roadblocks. Making Auro with higher-resolution art would have made it more resistant to constantly-changing sizes and aspect ratios of various devices.
And he talks about how even retro gamers try their best to get rid of the square pixels;
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Evidently, even some retro game enthusiasts want to get rid of pixels so badly that they would rather have a computer smear the art like runny makeup than appreciate the pixel art for what it is. A few years back, the Hebrew University and Microsoft set out to “depixelize” pixel art through a new anti-aliasing(pixel-smoothing) algorithm.
The hand-placement of the squares is precisely what makes this kind of art valuable. If anyone besides artists should appreciate that, it’s retro game enthusiasts. When even they are splintering on this issue, I think it’s time to face the chiptunes.
*shudder* That kind of HQ2x/SuperSAI resampling is nothing less than ghastly and it utterly ruins everything that makes the classic pixel-art titles look so terrible.
Finally closing with a heavy-hearted statement of how they're going to be "maturing" (I really don't like that, as if you have to "grow up" to move with the times, but egh, personal opinion and all that) and their subsequent games will be drawn with a HD art-style. I have no problem with that whatsoever, you have games like the frankly superb Ori and the Blind Forest or even two of my all-time favourite games; Dust: An Elysian Tale and Odin's Sphere but it is a shame to see someone who has, if you read between the lines, pretty much had their hand tipped in this regard. They love pixel-art, but it seems to be very much a niche art style and one often ruined by the very hardware it runs on. You only have to look at the blurry horrible headache-inducing mess of Chrono Trigger on iOS/Android to see that. It's a sad article but it does have some really good points and shows some truly great examples of what makes pixel-art so endearing.
Also sounds off with something we were discussing the other day, and what I think we both agree on
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Same goes for another term highlighted above: “retro.” Auro wasn’t supposed to be “retro.” To me, the “retro game” aesthetic isn’t just pixel art, but an appeal to the specific sounds, feedback, and look and feel of a specific set of old school games. While it’s true that Auro was an homage to my favorite game art, I never intended for it to be “retro.” I just wanted to make great pixel art, yet it inexorably gets lumped in with the retro aesthetic.
It's interesting but I think the real reason for people moving on from pixel-art games, is because indie devs have (ab)used the style for the past 5 years, leading to hundreds of very average looking "pixel art" games and you know how I feel about calling those pixelated messes pixel art .
Having said that, I think pixel art as a style appealing to the masses has indeed sailed. It made a come back and now, due to over-exposure, is dying again, just like it did in the mid 90's when even adventure games were not allowed to be 2D anymore.
It's interesting but I think the real reason for people moving on from pixel-art games, is because indie devs have (ab)used the style for the past 5 years, leading to hundreds of very average looking "pixel art" games and you know how I feel about calling those pixelated messes pixel art .
Aye, I think you've definitely got a point there
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Having said that, I think pixel art as a style appealing to the masses has indeed sailed. It made a come back and now, due to over-exposure, is dying again, just like it did in the mid 90's when even adventure games were not allowed to be 2D anymore.
Which is such a shame as I still find it one of the most visually appealing styles, it evokes a great deal of feeling and happiness for me, so it's a shame to see that the public reception is cooling so quickly due to over-exposure or, perhaps, not fully understanding the style and just assuming "ugly and cheap because the artist sucks and cannot into polygons!"
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) more often than not trumps "HD" artstyle.. but how he's coming to the realisation that pixel-art is less viable for "most" people on today's ever-increasing hardware and screen resolution.
