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Baldbeard posted:Have any of you guys had success using GameMaker? I'm installing it now and thinking about using it for game mockups, since I only have just a little Flash/Actionscript experience and it's still a lot of raw coding to get something going in flash. It's totally viable for professional projects - the original Spelunky was made in Game Maker, as was Gunpoint and Hotline Miami.
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May 13, 2014 01:33
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Scut posted:D'aaaawwwwwwwwwww It's making use of subpixels for horizontal space. Most displays still fundamentally use little rgb lights to display single pixels - it's less noticeable than it used to be because resolutions are so high, but if you get close enough to a TV you can still see it. So essentially, your display looks something like this:  Where you can imagine a 3x3 section to be one pixel. Since the brightness of each light corresponds to the colour being displayed, you can use colours that have values like 255,0,255 (magenta) to make a pixel that has the R and B subpixel set to full brightness while the G channel is set to black. Here's the same image with letters created by only removing entire colour sections from each 3x3 block:  Since this is using real pixels rather than subpixels, it will still work when zooming in, but a real subpixel image won't because it will just stretch the individual pixel colour over multiple spaces, rather than preserve the shape created by the subpixel lights. Windows has an option to add coloured pixels around the edges of supported fonts to give them a very smooth look by using the subpixels to create even finer resolution than the pixels themselves provide.
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Aug 8, 2014 05:48
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FraudulentEconomics posted:Okay I know about futile for 2d is that what you're using with it? Also, worth it to learn unity from zero c# knowledge? You can do regular 2D animation with the built in Unity animation system - it works exactly the same as animating in 3D except for your keyframes instead of moving parts of the model around, you just change the sprite image. Also C# is pretty easy to pick up, especially if you're at all familiar with java or C++ or other C-syntax based languages. Scripting isn't really a big barrier to entry for learning Unity.
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Oct 22, 2014 15:11
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SupSuper posted:Following from a discussion on #SAGameDev, I was wondering what is everyone's experience with making 2D isometric art? (ala classic PC RPG/strategy games) It's not a coincidence that 3/4 of the examples you linked are 3D images rendered to sprites - full isometric animation with 8 directional movement is an absolute ton of work per character if you try to do it all by hand. If you compare it to something like Final Fantasy Tactics, which is both hand-sprited and has an absolute shitload of characters and unique animations, you'll see that A) they only drew standing frames from 5 directions (NE/NW, E/W, and SE/SW are just mirrored), movement is only animated in 2 directions, since diagonal movement is impossible (and again, mirrored NE/NW and SE/SW) in the game, and the actual walk animations themselves are only 5 frames. It's all doable by an indie team, but when even huge productions like FFT cut that many corners, you have to be aware of the limitations you're going to run into if you try to do it all by hand. The Fallout/JA2 method of just making a 3D model and rendering to sprites is a lot more feasible, but will look different than hand drawn art and out of place if your backgrounds are done by hand unless you really spend a lot of time tweaking the rendering process. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Nov 28, 2014 |
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Nov 28, 2014 15:28
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Are you having Gamemaker rotate/skew the sprites at all? Any sort of transformation on pixel art usually leads to that kind of jagginess. If you want stuff to spin around, you might be better off animating it by hand and just having it loop the animation. Resizing also causes it, unless you're scaling up by a multiple of 100%.
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Jan 31, 2015 03:20
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A sitting down/standing up animation I did today which turned out nicer than I thought it would. Admittedly the dynamic lighting does a lot for it.
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Feb 6, 2015 06:42
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Fellatio del Toro posted:So I've decided I need to stop staring at code all the time and actually make something tangible. This is kind of my first serious attempt at pixel art and I'm really happy with how it's coming along: These are looking pretty good for a first attempt! As far as I can tell the shading is consistent which is a fairly common pitfall for a lot of people (although I'm guessing you've got experience in other media so that probably helps). One thing I do notice is something that a lot of people do is the presence of "jaggies" - extra pixels on a line that make it look a bit rougher. Derek Yu's excellent pixel art tutorial talks about them in parts 2 and 4 and gives some pretty good examples of how to fix them up to get really crips lines. Differentiating between front and back legs can also be as simple as just shading the back leg slightly darker, although honestly I don't think you need to here. Faces are tricky at that scale too, but there are some stylistic choices you can make that help alleviate it - if you look at old adventure game art like this you can see that the only detail in the faces at all are just a couple of dots for the eyes and mouth. Pixel art, in general is about making the most of the limited space you have to suggest more detail than is actually there. Sometimes just adding shading in certain places can be more effective than actually drawing in the detail itself.
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Feb 8, 2015 10:21
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Scut posted:Pyxel Edit has some decent animation tools. I tend to use Gimp for animating. Maybe either of those would be an easier alternative to Photoshop for you? I use Graphics Gale for most pixel art related stuff, and I highly recommend it. It's a great combination of being easy to use while also giving you the kinds of tools you want for pixel art. It's not as powerful as something like Photoshop or Gimp, but the tradeoffs are MORE than worth it just for the ability to very quickly and easily animate a small sprite then export it to a sheet. The free version won't allow you to save in most of the formats you'd probably want to use (png, gif, etc.) but it's otherwise feature-complete so it's great for deciding if you want to use it, and the full version is only like $15 so it's great value for what you're getting.
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Apr 28, 2015 02:49
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a hole-y ghost posted:That sounds interesting but I couldn't find any examples of what it looks like. In fact, when I tried to google it I just came up with your art If you look at pictures way back from old Atari systems you'll see they had WIDE pixels (2x1), tall pixels would basically be the same idea but with the orientation reversed. The main point is to save on processing power while still filling the screen, since you need half as many draw operations to fill the space than you would with square pixels. This is an example of wide pixels. It's not actually an authentic image from an Atari system, obviously, but you get the idea.
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May 5, 2015 00:41
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Do you have pictures of this "tall pixels" thing?
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SMP posted:Working on a thing for the gamejam right now and could use some input on perspective. I'm doing a house from a zelda-y top down perspective and the walls closer to the camera are tripping me up. When I laid down the walls beforehand it looked alright, but I quickly found the problem when it came to doing the couch. As suggested cutaway walls for stuff in your current room is probably the best way to maintain your current look while also making things visible. I think your primary issue though is that the perspective you're using actually isn't exactly the same as the warped perspective you usually get in Zelda games or SNES RPGs. If you look at a screenshot from Link To the Past for example:  You can see that both the far AND near walls are actually angled away from the camera, as if it was directly above the dungeon, despite the character and chest sprites suggesting a 3/4 perspective. It's an incredibly warped perspective which becomes immediately obvious when you change the camera angle, as in this example shot from A Link Between Worlds:  Something like Final Fantasy 6 on the other hand uses a more internally consistent perspective, but also have very rigid size constraints for everything - a wall is the same size as a character which is the same size as a floor tile. So if you had that kind of tiling on your image, the couch would still not be touching the wall, but would only have to be one tile out from it to be fully visible (and if you wanted you could actually shift it down a half tile, so it's partially obscured but still easy to identify). The main issue you're having is that you're going with much more realistic scaling with your graphics but keeping the FF6 style low angle perspective, so you end up with near walls that cover half the room. Anyway, tl;dr I think Sims style cutaway walls would probably look best and not require any significant changes to your existing art, but if you want to explore some alternatives those are some examples.
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Jul 7, 2015 23:51
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Since it's come up recently and is a big part of pixel art in general, I just saw this article about colour use that I think people will find very interesting: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HermanTulleken/20150729/249761/Color_in_Games.php It's not about pixel art specifically (although it does talk about some pixel art techniques like palette cycling to create the sense of flowing water), but it's all stuff that's useful to understand in any kind of visual art design, and I think it's especially relevant to pixel art just because palettes tend to be very limited, so good colour choice is vital.
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Jul 30, 2015 22:53
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Baldbeard posted:I spent like an hour making the UI icon for the player's inventory. It's all just practice. I'm really slow at making art too, but I'm not a full time artist. Getting more practice just lets you get a better sense of what you need to do to get the look you want right off the bat, rather than having to play around with it for a while until it looks right.
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Aug 20, 2015 07:42
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MikeJF posted:Does anyone know of a simple tool I can use to automatically attempt to convert an image into a provided pallete? In what sense? Like an index based palette swap, or taking a full color image and doing a closest-match to a given palette? I believe that Graphics Gale can do both of those.
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May 2, 2016 17:23
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I haven't done pixel art in a little while but I've just started getting back into it recently and decided to do some character animations that I think turned out really well 
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Nov 28, 2022 08:37
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I just use Aseprite, each one took me about a day-ish although it was all in my free time so I'm not sure exactly how many hours it was. I also did a lot of tweaking after the core of the animations were done to clean up various stray pixels that didn't look right or add little details like the hair movement.
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Dec 4, 2022 22:22
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Pixel art hands are tricky and you usually have to go more for the "idea" of a hand than a really detailed one. Especially with outlines since that's taking away a good chunk of your real estate. Something that can help is to only have the outline around the whole shape of the hand rather than each individual finger (kind of a mitten look), and then using shading to imply the internal details.
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Mar 23, 2023 21:53
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:29 |
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I think the issue with doing a really accurate CRT shader is it needs a crazy high resolution to really look authentic, so most shaders go more for the "feel" of a CRT display rather than aiming for a 1:1 recreation.
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Jul 8, 2023 19:03
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