Out There Somewhere

I love the mountain of indie platformers, personally -- I mean, it's the only way the genre gets any love nowadays outside of new Mario games, more or less. But hey, I'm a platformer junkie.

it's easier, it has nothing to do with nostalgia, it's also easier to make something look realistic. braid for all its qualities looks like crap to me. the art is nicely "rendered" but looks terrible. everything looks stuck to the screen surface and has a generally "ugh that doesn't look right" feel, HD 2d stuff hits an artistic uncanny valley somehow. pixel art leaves a lot to the imagination, and a bunch of pixels can represent something very complex that our mind fills in, two dots are eyes rather than realistic eyes being eyes, and if they're drawn wrong being the eyes of a drunkard. It really doesn't change much to have pixel vs real. another world did a great job feeling real with relatively simple gfx, small changes= big differences. it's the same reason we see a lot of animated movies or cartoons or anime simplifying the way characters and forms look. sure it could be realistic looking, but then it would be way harder to make everything look right, and it would also be harder to relate the characters to someone familiar or ourselves rather than to what they physically look like.

btw this looks great, somehow reminds me of lyle in cube sector even though the games look completely different and have different gameplay.

I've discussed this something similar with guys on the development for Natural Selection 2, which is a lot more detailed then it's predecessors (a mod on goldSRC, the 1998 HL engine)

The old maps seem to feel more alive and awe inspiring somehow, even though they have a LOT less detail. It just feels like there is more to them, mainly because of this subconscious thing we humans do by filling in the blanks. Makes it feel more alive I guess.

The new maps are highly polished and detailed maps, perhaps it results into too much visual clutter to get this "filling in of the blanks" thing we seem to do. Which does trigger that epic feeling you get when walking trough older maps. We humans are weird

Designing something with a minimalistic approach seems to be a good basis for a maximum end result.

what quazi said

also, I can assure its not because its easier either-- in my opinion pixel art is harder than normal drawing any day!

honestly, you'd have more trouble making the graphics in the first image?

cuz personally, I could probably do all the graphics on the first better than it looks there with my crappy art skills before the guy who did the bottom one finished painting the house in the background, which I couldn't get right period with any amount of time

<img src="http://www.deviantart.com/download/119699181/3D_Super_Mario___Warp_Zone_by_NES__still_the_best.png">

<img src="http://ve3dmedia.ign.com/images/05/15/51514_orig.jpg">

edit: oh yeah!! and looks awesome as I said in the screenshot thread....are you guys selling these awesomes somewhere?

Don't know either why lot of people make a game with 8bit graphics, if its just for hobby I can understand it, or for learning purpose. My experience with gamedesign as a indie is the grapics, its hard and it take so much time to master. But I think that as a indie you need to master it, and it is not easy to push youre self to keep trying.

As someone who does both Hd 2D and pixelart I can say that I don't think either is easier.

They both have completely different challenges.

And I'm not sure that comparison image really gets the point across, if you were to recreate the hi-res image in pixelart it would be a LOT more difficult than just drawing it straight. Recreating the blocks in full res wouldn't be that difficult I can't imagine.

If you can draw full res 2D then I've found that the challenges of pixelart are kind of refreshing. When you draw something straight you just draw it, thats really the only challenge, being good enough to get it right. With pixels the restrictions of space become an all new challenge, one that I really enjoy tackling.

I'm sure other artists are the same. And there absolutely is the nostalgia aspect as well, I love the idea of making games like the ones I grew up playing.

Oh and Out There Somewhere looks awesome! Can't wait to play it!

honestly, you'd have more trouble making the graphics in the first image?

I could make the tiles in the first image pretty easily, but those are really simple tiles even by pixel art standards.

Something like this though:

No way in hell. The level of skill it takes to do pixel art like that is crazy high compared to if you were painting hi-res images of the same subject in a more traditional style. So if we're doing NES, I could do pixels. PSX era 2D pixel art though (which is about what Owlboy is) is too far out of my league, and painting something like in your second example would be a lot easier for me.

Not that I've ever painted something that detailed, but I suppose I could if I had enough time and a reason to do it (it probably wouldn't be nearly that pretty though ).

because smaller sprite need less work ... and programmer are not usually 2d artist

Well I can't answer why is everyone doing it, but I can say why am I doing it.

Well, first of all, nostalgia, I grew up playing games that looked like this, I like to see it again.

Second, the low resolution let the imagination flow. I mean, i'm very sure that if you play my game you will start to see much more information than there's on the screen, probably you will imagine a totally different astronaut than the one I imagined, with his own personality and face. This is possible thanks to the large chunky pixels that are not very clear in showing everything.

Third, it's easier. Or maybe not easier, but somehow faster. Honestly, for me it is incredibly more difficult to draw a pixel-art image than a realistic/stylized one, but the pixel-art is much easier to animate and implement in the game.

Well, let's get on with some updates! I did some background animations, like that alien power core (used as example up there), one of the objectives in the game and a fountain.

<img src="http://i323.photobucket.com/albums/nn453/amorabettany/Teste.gif"><img src="http://i323.photobucket.com/albums/nn453/amorabettany/Fountain.gif">

I also did one cut-scene image that will appear in the game introduction:

<img src="http://i323.photobucket.com/albums/nn453/amorabettany/Opening-1.png">

There's already a bunch of new tilesets too but I'll post them later with some screenshots.

Ooh and most important of all, I'm kinda broke, so I decided to try an 8 Bit Funding project to get some money to finish this game. The final game will be free, but I believe that I'll only will be able to finish it if I get enough donations. Well, you can check the page here:

http://bit.ly/gmVhoq

Thanks again for all the compliments and support!

You sure are skilled with pixel art .

well done sir...

Looking absolutely beautiful. Keep it up.

Truly outstanding!!