a quick Comparison between a lot of different artstyles and how difficult and easy they are. This is largely a comparison between pixel art and the type of hand drawn or HD 2D art that I usually make.
I realize in hindsight that mentioning dead cells was probably a poor choice since they used a 3D workflow for the animations (although as far as I've understood it the environment is 2D and the animations are exported into sprites). But I didn't really think about it at the time and just looked at games in my library that look fairly complex and blasphemous and dead cells were the ones I had :) Another thing that has been commented on and that I really regret talking about is how much easier it is to animate in pixel art. This is so true, an animation that took me 5-15 hours could essentially be finished in like 1 hour because of how easy it is to reuse frames. And frame by frame animation in hand drawn is really quite tricky, With that said, this is why rigging is so commonly used in HD art and while it probably still is worse than pixel art, it would make things easier. But ye, I probably should have talked more about it cause it is worth considering depending on the game you are making.
So far I've found them similarly difficult to animate, just because Drawing takes a lot more animation frames to look right whereas a small sprite only needs 1 or 2 frames for the same action
I whole heartedly agree that pixel art is a medium rather than a style as many people refer to it, but I do find animating with pixel art to be simpler since you're sculpting the frames rather than drawing them. This means that you can build off of the previous frame rather than draw a completely new and unique one.
Yes, this is absolutely true, I should have noted this, good of you to point it out. animating handdrawn is a horrible experience whereas animating in pixel art is actually kind of fun :)
There's also the option of doing rigged animation. That's the route I've taken. It has its own challenges, especially if you want to avoid the "paper doll effect" but it has practical advantages, too, like being able to reskin characters. 2D rigged animation has actually become my favorite part of the entire game dev process, which has been a huge surprise to me.
@@Nonsensical2D I've starting practicing pixel art recently, bought cheap a good course of it in Udemy, paused a bit at the start to just experiment with the initial stuff and see what could I make with my current limitations and already made 2 simple animations, more gifs than anything, nothing fancy but I did enjoyed the proccess quite a loot, while my previous attempt and hand drawn bassics where just frustrating.
As a profesional pixel artist i have to thats not exacttly right if You look Games like shovel knight sure. Yet if You look for more hi bit Games like berzeke boy or blasphemust the bigger the Sprite the harder and more time Will take to do animations i work with sprites. Bigger than 100*100 for animations and i found My selft like doing frame by frame and drawing from scrash many frames
As a pixel artist, I appreciate this. It's frustrating that people seem to think something that requires a lot of skill especially to make look good is easy. It isn't, the reason so many indie games end up looking worse for wear is when they use pixel art to try and make their game look better without understanding it. They would of been better off just doing hand drawn art!
Agree i like to do pixel art but when is bigger si like man how can i make u undersstand that if You ask for good qualitty art and fast ? They are not exacttly going toguetter
As someone who isn't an artist and thinks making art for a game seems like an almost insurmountable obstacle I agree with this. It seems like there are a lot of pixel art games out there that seem like they had the same problem I have and decided to pick pixel art because they thought it would be easier and that just seems crazy too me. I've tried making some pixel art and it looks significantly worse than when I try to do hand drawn art. As was stated in the video pixel art is extremely punishing and at least for me is is very hard to identify exactly where the problematic element of an image is when using pixel art.
I agree, I don't like how the video seems to claim that hand drawn is easier though. I feel like this video swung all the way in the other direction claiming that simpler hand drawn styles are easy and don't need much effort to look good.
Pixel art doesn't require the same degree of mark making skills (hand coordination) as digital painting, so it is easier in that regard. However, it takes simplification of shapes to an extreme because of the size of the pixels relative to the scale of whatever you are painting (I guess limiting yourself to a very large brush in relation to your canvas would force you to simplify shapes at a similar level). And then all the same art fundamentals still apply regardless of your medium of choice: form/construction, proportions/anatomy, light and shadow, color, rendering textures, composition, and--depending on the projection you use in your artwork--perspective.
I agree, so the logical conclusion is that pixel art is EASIER than handrawing. By far. I've done both. This video is ridiculous. It's smelling their own farts. Yeah it limites the colors, shapes, lineart and many things but that also make it easier as your range of choice is... limited! I repeat, I've done both. No fucking way pixel art is easier. i'm sorry. This is echo-chamber thinking. This is gamedev subreddit in 2012-2014 when lots of morons used to post titles like "gamedev is the most difficult thing in the world" "john carmack had to quit gamedev fulltime to spend time crafting rocket... so rocket science is easier than game development!" Stupid, stupid way of thinking. There's a reason pixel art is the first choice of indie devs. Because hand drawing requires thousands of hours to practice to start being decent unless your're naturealy gifted. I was naturally gifted but I still had to practice. The excuse the dude on this video gave is "you have to apply the same principles, fundamentals in pixel art as in traditional art" yeah, but it still implies you have to apply those fundamentals in traditional art, per the same argument. Whatever you have to use in pixel art, you have to do so too in a piece of paper/tablet free drawing with your hand, but the latter is way harder.
@@Afreshio. Pixels are easier to make thats why many indies make pixel games and guess what they look shitty as fuck but pixel art is fucking difficult to master. There is not many pixel artist that can make owl boy level of pixel art. it takes forever... In handrawing art you have shit tons of space to work. You can do a lot of great cluster with just brushes alone. In High quality pixel art its you that need to create the texture via pixels. You make the cluster not the brush... Imagine how hard to do high quality pixel art.
With pixel art, however, it's much easier to make good animations. You can make many more in-between frames much more easily because you only have to move individual pixels rather than drawing out entire shapes. You can make smears much more easily because the shapes are simpler. And particle effects look much much better in pixel art with minimal effort.
I definitely should have mentioned animations, because as you say it is signicantly easier to do animations. But I think that is also why a lot of people do rigged animations in 2D instead of frame by frame, its an interesting topic which would have been nice talking about :) I personally really don't like making particle effects in pixel art compared to hand drawn (but it is probably just personal bias there)
Depends how complex the hand drawn sprite is. If it is the same complexity as a pixel sprite, I would say it takes about the same amount of time to animate. There is skeletal puppet animation if needed. Also, think about skill level and how that effects the speed of how long it takes you to animate or draw a sprite.
Hey I have a question if you don’t mind, I have no artistic skill whatsoever but I’m trying to make a pixel art game. Not because I think it’s easier but just because, to me, it’ll express the game better. Also, pixel art games have been one of my favorites since forever ago and that really motivated me to make one. I have a full story ready. I have boss ideas ready. My coding skills are… nonexistent really haha… but it’s been super super fun learning coding. I’m trying to make a 2d pixel art game, and so I’m here to ask, should I continue with pixel art? I have some people who are willing to help draw things and make it easier. Coding will be a pain. Everything will be a pain since I’m really a freshman to all this almost. Is pixel art the way to do it? I’m keen on doing this, and I honestly believe that I have a semi-enjoyable story. I’ll work on it, make it better of course, and have people review it, but I do think I have some good “lore.”
@@EEEEEE-wx6wp I understand that you want to make a Pixel Art game because you feel that's the correct aesthetic for your game, but with your limited confidence in your artistic skill, it's definitely better to hand-draw your assets. You will get a lot more mileage out of your creativity if you just hand draw cute little characters, and backgrounds, and etc. Pixel art requires a lot more precision and skill than people understand. Anyone can hand draw assets that look passable, but bad pixel art is glaringly obvious. I truly believe that the only advantage that pixel art gives you is that it's incredibly easy to make very fluid, dynamic, and seamless animations with it compared to hand-drawn. If you have limited artistic skill, don't care as much about seamless animations, and have truly no experience with pixel art, then I would recommend just doodling out your characters. You might even find that you like it more. If you're still sold on Pixel Art for your game then the other option would be to either 1. Hire artists, 2. Buy assets online, or 3. Find free assets online, and then take those assets and learn to animate them yourself. Because the hard part of Pixel Art is creating it. After it has been created it is very easy to animate it. Give it a shot, watch some animation tutorials. I'm sure you can pull it off. The animations don't even need to be that complicated.
@@Vesdus Thank you for replying. Pixel art seems like the way to go for me. I’ll definitely check the other styles there are, as in hand drawing things, to see what I like best. Animating will be fun to learn, I’ve seen some interesting things and I’m excited to learn that. I see the characters vividly and clearly in my head, I just need to… well.. express it artistically. It’s like having story but no words to write a book with. I just need to learn “words,” metaphorically speaking. Thank you, this has helped me a lot.
A few years ago i only played AAA 3D games, playing sidescrollers seemed ridiculous to me, playing pixelated ones even more so. Then i saw Ori and couldn't resist, the magical designs, gorgeous visuals and brilliant music pulled me in. I beat both games 100% in about 4 days and fell in love with sidescrollers, and metroidvania's in particular. Looking for more of them i quickly discovered that many are in fact pixel art. The likes of blasphemous, carrion, moonscars, death's gambit, mo:astray, haiku and tarnishing of juxtia quickly changed my mind on pixel art. I still love the hand drawn aesthetic most but i've grown very fond of pixel art too. Especially when combined with particle, fog and lighting effects to make it look more cinematic. Games are art, not just entertainment . Ori made me realize that, and many games i played afterwards, mostly indies, have solidified that point. Pixel art is no lesser than the other forms. Only thing is how well it's done. And both pixel art and handdrawn can look great or bad, depending on the artist
Definitely agree, I think Ori was the first modern metroidvania that I played as well. I think it is probably still my favorite (blind forest that is, I weirdly enough kind of preferred it to will o' the wisp). and I agree, there are lots of pixel art games and styles that I am really fond of, but I really don't want people to be afraid to pick up hand drawn :)
I do on a few occasions use some terminology a bit loosely, (such as referring to 1080p art as hand drawn and accidentally calling downwell 1-bit, but hopefully it's clear nonetheless). I'm afraid that the video perhaps got a bit too fast paced at times, I'm going to try and test a new approach with the next video, but hopefully this didn't get too tiresome to listen to.
I process information pretty quickly in general, i watch most videos at speeds of 1,25 to sometimes even 1,75. I've never had any problems following your explanations, even though i'm pretty unfamiliar with gamedev lingo. Your explanation, pronunciation and pacing is really solid. You do make a lot of points in quick succesion but by coming back to the main point often it becomes clear imo. All of this to say that for me the videos are great. For people with less proficient English it might be different though.
@@Nonsensical2D I agree, if it would be past, people can stop it or slow it down. I personally learned Blender from Lazy Tutorials of Ian Hubert, which are 1 minute videos shrinking several hours of content, and without them I am sure I'd have never learned blender. So fast pacing is never bad :D
This channel + Thomas Brush have become my favorites for artwork/game design, always keep me motivated to push forward when I’m frustrated. 🙏 Thank you.
Hi, pixel artist here. It really pisses me off when people think pixel art is 'primitive' and 'takes no skill'. Absolutely NOT. Standard 2D art is way easier! At this point it's clear pixel art is its own separate medium and takes time to learn, same as any other medium would. This stuff is not as easy as people like to think, not even close
from my experience, i can say that what makes something look pixel arty is definitely the shapes, when you do very readable and very geometric shapes such as squares, circles etc. it sells the idea more of the pixel art. also something that help me a lot, is doing color ramps before doing any piece, when you make color palettes (using hue shifting), I always try to connect or cover more colors from the colors that I already have put on the palette, that way it gets easier to actually shade stuff, and it will overall make the scene more clean in a way.
I actually love the high res pixel art style! It’s the awkward child mix of hand drawn and pixel art, which makes it all jagged and odd yet surprisingly freeing. I think it’d be funny to try a high res art style with Shovel Knight’s 5 color limit per sprite kinda like the old days.
There is a small timeskip at 1:35, but I still get your point. Like another commentator already mentioned, the biggest advantage of going the Pixel Art route is animations. These can be a huge time sink depending on the game you're making. I once tried drawing a very simplified version of Rivals of Aether (a fighting game) for a single character and doing it hand-drawn style was so time intensive, even with all the technological shortcuts of Krita. But doing some sprite work with mostly copy and pasting shapes in Aseprite was considerably more doable. Still a lot of work, though. Good video, as always!
Thanks for informing, I checked it vs the original and it is a small audio bug I say "the same environment" but 'same' got cut out when exporting I think. Ye, I think handanimating is generally not advisable in terms of speed xD. But rigging is generally quite a decent approach in terms of speed if doing HD. But I should definitely have mentioned it in the video.
@@Nonsensical2D The Cut-Out/Rigging/Skeletal Animation could be an interesting topic to explore. Have you done a video on that or is that something you are less interested in? Thank you!
I found handdrawn art so impossibly harder then pixel art, until I finally looked into some digital art brushes, and my god does it change the playing field.
I appreciate this. I've been trying to consider the art style for a game I'm working on, and while I'm not sure if pixel art is quite right for it, I was shying away from hand-drawn because of how much more complex it is. This video helped me realize that perhaps I should dig more into the hand drawn route before I dismiss it.
If you do pixel art, your game will most likely be ignored by 99% of people, unless you become godly good at it which takes like 5-10 years. Whereas, hand drawn people will flock to your game even if your hand drawn isn't super good, but just passable.
I have been looking for this type of content for years. I am an illustrator and I started digital like 8 years ago. I have been studying illustration hard over the last few years. I have always wanted to make a videogame for various purposes (Including increasing my portfolio and dev knowledge). I am gonna binge all your videos!
I like this video a lot - It showcases the effort put into pixel art and also makes handrawn more 'aproachable' to those who might want to give it a try. As a pixel artist (hobbiest) , here's my humble opinion on the subject: Pixel art is a medium born of restriction, which is either a blessing or a curse, depending on the artist. I personally love it - it freed me from the choice paralysis I had with hand drawn and gave me a basic framework to start and build upon. Pixel art is accessible with high skill celling; it's the art of telling more with less, and I find it very creatively engaging and just... fun. (also, mind blowing at times. I have no idea how the devs made SHOVEL KNIGHT look so visually rich in such low resultion, but they are a huggeee inspriation) I think this is why I liked your video, because it showcases the idea that there isn't "hard" and "easy" art, just art befitting the artist. I kind of want to recreate the scene at 4:40 from zero in pixel art (with your premission, of course!) I don't really think as a digital handrawn artist (I sketch with penciles sometimes but I mostly work w pixel art) and I wonder how the differnt mindset and approach effect the results. Also, I just want to say I love your channel!!! I find your tips very helpful even if we work in differnt mediums, and if not that then the video is always interesting and so well produced I feel inspired by the end anyway. Keep up the excellent work!
Ye, this is pretty much my stance as well. Weirdly enough I kind of get choice paralysis when doing pixel art, I think some of it is just practice :) Yes I'd be totally fine with you recreating it :) , I do want to note one of the important aspects though which is time, the scene is still quite far below what I would consider 'the best I could do', but I really don't like the idea of releasing stuff that is so worked on that you couldn't possibly make a game out of it. I think having a mentality of quick but decent enough is quite important as a 'solo game artist'.
i used vector art for my most recent games, so maybe you should discuss vector art. (by the way: great vector art - like Material design icons - uses a grid so that straight lines are perfectly pixel-aligned when shown in the intended size or an integer multiple of that size)
The points in the video almost convinced me, i mean it convinced that the skill floor of these mediums are way closer than what i used to imagine, but i still think it's easier to use pixel art for 2 factors: . 1st is that it needs way less actual drawing to convey the same information. In a medium canvas size pixel art, independent of what size it will appear in the screen, is quite easy too make a rough think and make it look good with a few twiks. But argue if is something like 8x8 with 4 colors is a hell to draw somethings, and a giant multi color sprite (like blasphemous) it becomes harder than hand drawed sprites. Because of the amount of shape nuance. Too much is hard to notice what you got wrong, too few most things will feel wrong. And it is discrete, like how with binary prime factorizing and sqare root are as simple as multiplying. But the numbers end up being giant monstrosities and you don't have a lot options with regular sized numbers. . 2nd is fluidity and balance, a pixel art is like a sculpture. So you can make something good that looks like it has a good movement even without much training because you have less shape nuance than a traditional drawing and for animation just a pixel is as perceived huge movement, but it has few actual movement. You don't need to go do gesture drawing or copy a few seconds of lot of movie to train good movement. Most pixel art animation you can just learn the 12 principles then follow your guts.
Personally when I make art I use a lot of math, not like I'm crunching numbers or anything but I'm using geometry and ratios to make my art look cohesive. This process of creating art by geometry is what is easiest for me as a programmer, since it makes the art more logical rather than subjective. It gives art a "right" answer as to how to do it. Which is why I gravitate towards pixel art. In pixel art if I want to make a circle with a diameter of 10 pixels, there is a correct way to do that to make the circle look the most circle like. With hand drawn art though I feel like throwing in perfect shapes like that never looks good, its easy to just go use a circle tool in any drawing software but it's so easy to tell and it looks weird. I think I like pixel art more because while one wrong pixel can make something look wrong, I know that it is wrong and that it needs to be fixed. With hand drawn art though I feel like one person may think that it looks wrong while another thinks it looks fine. That's my take on it but I'm no artist and my comment has already gotten quite long. Hopefully someone gets what I mean though by saying that I like to have my "right" answer in my art lol
Wrong. There are principles like perspective and fundamentals in anatomy, and something like shape design to help you get the proportions and perspective right. You can play with that if you're experience enough, but that's another thing. Cartoonist do this everyday. But it's noticeable when there's a mistake in perspective and anatomy that makes it look off if you account first for the art style of the artist in question. If you have your eyes training is glaringly obvious. I'm seeing this shit take on AI "artists" outputting crap and saying is the best shit ever, not even noticing the glaring mistakes. But that's on them for not studying some fundamentals first and thinking writing some prompts makes them an artist. BTW I know what you mean by using more geometry and perfect shapes in pixel art. But you can do so in traditional art. You just lack the know-how and knowledge in art history for example, but there's definitely a plethora of artist that use them. There are tools to draw them, in digital and traditionals arts (like rulers!). But I also get it that many people start with hand drawing and traditional art (especially is using color, which is another dimension by itself) and can feel the world is too fuzzy, there are not many guidelines (which is a given in pixel art: the super small damn grid), and it can look intimidating. It just takes practice and knowledge of fundamentals. Then you'll know how to draw your own guidelines, grids (if you want), special tools, etc.
Just gotta point out that Dead Cells isn't pixel art, it's actually 3D rendered to look as if it's pixel art. Still agree with your points though. Also good luck with your game!
You make really good points. I don't draw, but I am thinking of learning pixel art (game boy style) for my next game. I think if I stick to a simple pixel art it's still easier to pull off then regular art. And players are more forgiving as well.
As a player I'm personally not very forgiving of "bad" pixel art (or any kind of art style I don't like). I'll get over it if the rest of the game is engaging enough, but I won't say "oh it's pixel art so I don't care". However, making something look decent doesn't have to be that difficult. Here's what I want you to keep in mind constantly: - readability, both from a gameplay standpoint of things not blending together, having contrast or any way of telling things apart at a glance, and from a recognizability standpoint, someone who isn't you needs to be able to understand what you're representing and you need to know what the object would look like realistically in your head. - consistency, assets need to have a consistent resolution, there needs to be a logic to how you draw things and what things you draw in what style. Understanding the rules of how you drew something (outline, shading, texturing) and them applying them consistently so things look harmonious.
I might perhaps use short snippets of it in general videos. But I am becoming more wary of doing art analysis of single games, They generally require the most amount of work of any videos and people usually don't want to watch them. It's definitely an interesting game though so I'm considering buying it.
Good thoughts, I've been trying to decide the variety of art for my game, and I've mostly been making pixel art for that sort of project, but come to think of it, it takes as long or longer to make decent looking 16 bit textures compared to HD textures in procreate. With pixel art you can meticulously tweak every detail... but you also kind of have to, and it's surprisingly time consuming.
There's something about the personality of paint that is great to listen to. Subscribed. Love this video very much. All the work you put into converting your art to the different styles is fantastic and crazy helpful
To add some extra data for people considering the different art styles, coming from regular digital art, I decided to make my indie game pixel art. I started learning pixel art and using aseprite at the same time, so my steam aseprite "play time" is a pretty okay representation of how long it takes to make pixel art, if you're considering swapping to it from regular art. So far it's taken me just shy of 700 hours to draw the trees, tilemap, ui, and plants for my 360x180 game. I'm proud of how it looks though :)
I was starting out in learning game Dev. I researched Game Dev. Art for a very long time, those is what I get: 1. How to draw your BG for your game 2. 3D Art such as Blender 3. Pixel art 4. Little about Vector art directly from illustrator Nothing about hand drawn art which is what I am good at and nobody discussed about it. I thought you know what Ill create it myself. Some 2D good art not pixelated. As a beginner in the game dev. world I panicked that nobody saw this as art for a game. Here Iam seeing your channel talking about it. So thank you. Salam!!
Ye, I agree there aren't that many that do hand drawn, you have Nic the Thick (who does more devlog style), Andrew & Giacomo Pinnical (who do a mix), and then Trent Kainuga, but I agree, there are a bit too few both games and game developers that seem to want to do hand drawn :)
Great video, im quite a fan of the technique where you use 3d models and flat colors for everything then use post processing or shaders to lower the resolution down to pixel art, I know dead cells does this a little bit, but i want to know your opinion on the technique as a whole?
from what I've read the upfront costs are a bit high. and that kind of makes sense, 3D in general tend to have moderately high up front costs, but the benefits generally come with scale. So for games like dead cells it makes total sense, they need to make an insane amount of animations, lots of different weapons and types of attacks, lots of different enemies and making those animation by hand would be insane just due to the sheer volume. But if you have very simple enemies with attack animation consisting of only three frames, then I think that doing them by hand would be significantly faster. So i would approach it from a "expected time" to develop. If we assume the 3d model and system takes 200 hours to develop and if for my entire game I only needed to make about 120 animation frames, then I would probably do it by hand in aseprite, since I could make 120 frames in less than 100 hours. but If I needed to make something like a 1000 frames, then that upfront cost of 200 would eventually pay off, plus it will be significantly more flexible once you have it.
You mentioned it in the video, but I want to harp on it more, I think the reason why pixel art feels "easier" for me is that when you make a mistake, its instantly recognizable as a mistake. In pixel art you HAVE to be good at color theory, shapes ect to make something decent. A lot of art for me feels like problem-solving, why does this look good? Why is this recognizable and this not? I have tried making character designs for my game and I had more success with pixel art because of the restrictions, it just made the character silhouette pop out way more, and when reinterpreting the character in a bigger canvas, the character still looked way better than first attempts in full resolution.
Ye, I think this is a huge aspect of it feeling easier. For me personally I have worked on those things so much when doing hand drawn that when I do pixel art I just get annoyed because what I think "should work" (according to my hand drawn intuition) simply doesn't work that well in pixel art, my intuition is sort of thrown off.
@@Nonsensical2D Speaking of characters, can you make a dedicated video on character design in HD? There's very few tutorials about how to draw a good full HD style character because everything the light touches is pixel art haha. Just some tips and some technical details such as the size of the character etc would be great, thanks so much for all of the cool content.
I do have two videos on how I designed both the demon and the mushroom character. But I didn't really go into technical details. I might touch on it again in the future, but I have quite a few videos I am working on already that I have to finish :)
As someone who's combining both pixel art and hand-drawn visuals in my game, I can personally testify that pixel art is REALLY HARD.😬 Not to mention there are a lot of rules to follow in pixel art while staying true to the color palette limitations compared to hand-drawn art.
@@sabsyoutube241 Well, that's a good point. But the same thing can actually be applied for hand-drawn animation. The neat trick when I animate my assets is I sketch the key pose first, duplicate the frames and use the selection tool to adjust parts of the sprite's body to match the animation of my choice. The only time the process gets long is when I start outlining and coloring the animation.
Both is hard, but only one looks incredibly good looking and smooth while the other looks like garbage in my opinion. I am talking about pixel art, it looks like garbage and any game made with it I avoid playing lol.
@@Mk2kRaven Nah, there are a lot of pixel art games that look a lot better than some hand-drawn games out there. This one might be subjective, but a game like Iconoclasts has beautiful pixel art that fits the theme of the game. 🙂
This is exactly the narrative in my head trying to figure out how to draw my game art. I want to do a non pixel game but the freedom is crushing. I can’t yet visualize things well without pixel space for some reason. The restrictions help me be more flexible with shape and color. Hopefully this will resolve itself as i practice more.
Dead cell if I am correct was actually made not as usual pixel art, but it was made with 3d animations, that were than transformed to pixel art with a filter.
After doing pixel art for years, I recently switched to low poly 3D. I always thought any kind of 3D would be harder, but to me low poly is actually easier and more fun to create. And I prefer the look to hand drawn, but that's a matter of taste 😊
Dead Cells is not drawn by hand, just so you know. It's all 3D models that get pixelated. Otherwise it would've been way too hard to add all of the weapons.
recently i was practicing some perspective / form drawing and was amazed by tips from kim jung gi and how he basically focuses mainly on perspective and proportions - and drawings are amazing when there is conscious form and dimensionality. i was wondering about how to approach drawing for side scrollers, i know there is no possiblity for the perspective to be congruent. but i wanted to establish horizon line (eye level) and draw some things with respect to it. i was wondering what's your view on that. i will try to use eye level of playable character and draw assets in 1point / 2 point perspective. but the most important thing is that - everything below the eye level of the character will have TOP of it visible and everything above main character will have visible bottom. for example trees, buildings will have more bottom visible, chests or bushes will have more of its top visible. i will analyze sidescroller gameplays from now on more consciously looking for horizon line and perspective - but i have a feeling that its rather random
I have been thinking about making a video on it. I think the topic overall is quite complex. You can see quite a few interesting examples on horizon lines, wonderboy is an example that looks awesome. But the problem is often that horizonlines start to look weird as soon as you have to deal with any verticality. And platformers almost always have a lot of verticality
@@Nonsensical2D exactly, its a difficult task to handle. however without perspective things look flat and shitty so i think at least some major assets have to deal with it in some way. but many times i see things on the floor have perspective and also architecture - especially doors, windows and openings are drawn from below (we can see the bottom of window frames etc) - i see it even in hollow knight now. and its super confusing from the artist standpoint - camera will always scroll so it defies many classical rules
i think the main decision you owuld have to do when chosing either pixelart or hand draw, is hoqw much time you wanna spend animating, because while pixelart can be easier to understand at a basic level, when we get to animation its a whole other world, while i would argue that hand draw and 3d have a much easier time translating their images to movement.
I think one of the draws of pixel art is that it's really easy to go back and edit things, as you're locked to a grid, so you can always make things line up nicely with hand-drawn art, it can be hard for beginners, because without stroke consistency, it'll be hard to get it to look right because of that depending on the style you're going for stabilizers and straightening tools do work, but I've found they often either take away control, or make it look less organic and natural, without actually solving the core issues
How can we learn hand-drawn art for games? I am learning drawing from 0 but any of the resources that I follow has noting about game art. Usually focuses on comics or portrait drawings etc.
Hmm, I think what I generally believe in is to just try and draw/make a game and apply what you know, and then as you encounter problems you iterate and iterate until you slowly improve. This way you will largely look up how to solve problems that you are actually having, and so most of your improvements directly impact what you are making. There is a risk that when you just casually 'learn' game dev by passively looking and practicing, that you learn a lot of skills that are cool, but don't really benefit you in the game you are making. With that said, there are a few decent resources and youtube and stuff and I actually recommend watching pixel artists talk about art but then apply what they teach to handdrawn. So some examples are: AdamCYounis, Saultoons, Reece Geofroy, Pixel Overload.
This was also a huge issue for me as well a long time ago. But at the end of the day, some rules used for pixel art assets came in handy for hand-drawn assets, by setting up a tilemap for hand-drawn assets.
I tend to start with 7-10 for the base of the scene. It tends to be enough to get the vibe kind of where I want it. On occasion you might need a few more to add some details or unique assets, but at that point you know what you need and why. Starting small tends to make it easier to ensure that you reuse assets as much as possible and it also helps keep the scene unified.
The thing about deadcells, is they actually started with 3d models, rendered the animations from them and then drew pixel art over the renders. Not that it changes anything, just a little tidbit for anyone that's interested.
Ye, I've only seen it refer to the character itself, so I believe the environment is drawn, but from what I've read on the 3D process it is definitely much more complex than a sprite sheet, its just more flexible once finished :) From what I recall they even started out with a sprite sheet before they made the 3D version
I think the artstyle overall is really nice, but I think it would do better in 1080p or 4k resolution. Being able to see individual does make it a bit more unclean and childlike (the character outlines look really unsmooth since they are only a pixel thick), which can be a benefit to a style like this, but it also drags down the aesthetics (in my opinion) and I overall think the game would probably do better as HD.
@@Nonsensical2D yeah, I see why Pizza tower could look better in HD, mostly with how pizza tower's art style is mostly inspired by ren and Stimpy. But personally I think the pixel art and hand drawn combined style helps it stand out from games like Cuphead, and the art style makes the game more modding friendly, because you would not need to get high priced animation software to make custom sprites for modding the game.
Cuphead is a bit of an outlier in a sense but kind of also make my point. Pixel art often adds a lot of restrictions that can be hard to follow, and the ability to skip those restrictions when doing hand drawn can often make hand drawn easier. But the creators of cuphead went kind of insane and added a lot of restrictions to hand drawn instead, and literally do traditional paper animations, I actually kind of can't believe they managed to put it all together as well as they did xD
I still on a quest to find someone to show the whole process from the beginning of the whole process form map layout to everything and how they did it and i mean everything not to us it as cheat but as a guide for i suffer from Memorie lost and have to have a lot of note to do anything but want to make a full game and want a real guide to one point to another as a good reference without any lost information to go for help. Please could you do this with the game process you are making that would be awesome.
Not trying to nitpick, and maybe you knew this, but (to my understanding) Dead Cells uses 3D models and renders it as pixel art. Maybe you meant that the process of converting to pixel art is difficult, or that if it did not use this process then achieving this effect would be very difficult, but I just thought to mention this.
Can you do a top down hand drawn video? Your videos are helpful when it comes to plat former, and convinced me I don't need to do pixel art. I'd like to see you explain making and setting assets for a top down game in your style.
Almost by definition, pixel art works at a detail level of a single pixel. A 32x32 square texture is 1024 of them. A thousand such textures is more than 1 million things you need to think about.
Pixel art is harder because you are very limited in resolution. It's like trying to paint Mona Lisa on an A4 sheet of paper with a wall-painting brush.
I know the character is made using a 3D workflow, but from the article I read about it by "gamedeveloper" the model gets light adjustments which are then precomputed and exported into sprites, and I think the background itself is fully 2D with a 2d workflow (but I haven't seen any articles on it).
Hi, could I get the name of the app you used to make pixel art ( Pixel-Perfect it's called I think ), I've been doing my search to find it and maybe this is because Pixel-Perfect is not the name of the app you use
the only problem i have its principally the looping of the art. how do you do it with handdrawn art? i can imagine myself drawing all scenes completely by hand with each individual asset. But i cant also use it like copy paste of sprites because then it just would look repeptitive but not transitioning. how do you solve this problem? and how do you transition between scenes?
Hmm, games like hollow knight, tails of iron, or what I'm doing don't actually loop art using any parallax script. As you say it would look terrible. Instead you stage the scene by hand, carefully placing assets where it looks good. The asset itself might repeat somewhere else, but its position in the scene won't be repeated, but will have to be placed by hand. If you do this for your entire game you don't actually have to transition between scenes, but it could generally good to do so for the sake of performance anyway. (I have a video on how I do this pseudo-3D look in Godot, but in unity you would actually set up your scene in 3D space)
@@maotrax1163 Yes, for sure. but if you want to transition scenes you can just do it with a "teleport function" of sorts. but I don't think the problem of repetitiveness occurs if you hand place each asset.
Pixel art is easy. Good pixel art is actually quite hard. Even trying to recreate some of the oldschool NES style is something few devs manage to do right beyond just the superficial look. Also, many indie devs have great individual art pieces, but put together it looks like a mess or the levels FEEL like a tilemapped level.
great video so far, but just for the record, dead cells is not technically pixel art. some of the much simpler animations Are hand drawn and animated, but the majority of the game is 3D models with a pixel filter applied to it
Ye, I realize in hindsight that perhaps I should have talked about it, but I didn't think about it at the time. As far as I've understood the article, the background is still hand drawn , and the animations are 3D models exported into sprites (it reads that way at least). but regardless, the workflow for the animations would be entirely different so its not that good of an example.
Are there any good tutorials on developing a simple hand drawn style? One advantage of pixel art is that there are so many resources available to learn
In pixel art, choosing the right colors is much more important than pixel placement. The readability issue can be solved by drawing the background with low contrast and desaturated colors. That's usually the reason for the limited color palette in pixel art. Colors are chosen because they work together. In my opinion, drawn art can benefit from a limited color palette as well.
So a lot of people start with pixel art IME for 2 reasons. 1. They can't draw characters and old games like Mario and Zelda have basically squares with eyes and hats which have 2 frames of animation. If you're worried your character art will come out poorly, it's easy to hide behind the blocky aesthetic as "retro" when actual retro games did that. 2. Tiles are an easy way to handle... everything, really, in a game, and pixel art and tilesets go hand-in-hand.
Disclaimer : I am an art noob You said that pixel art turns out to be simple because you cannot add too much detail, and therefore hand-drawn with less detail is equally easy. But, for high res art, doesn't player expect more detail ? I mean, will the hand-drawn art look bland without the details ? I always thought that we expect more detail as resolution rises..
I think there will be some people who will be turned off by "too little detail" but that is very much the same as with people being turned off by pixel art. There are plenty of games like hollow knight, adventure pals and wonder boy that have fairly clean aesthetics and appeal to audiences that like those types of graphics. I'm personally that type of person who is drawn to slightly more simple and clean art compared to anything rough and gritty. most animations in movies or for kids' shows, tend to be simple, but it isn't really bland and it is extremely popular. So it is more about understanding who you are targeting and I wouldn't say that people universally expect the results to be a specific way. hollow knight and cup head has more popular art than games like Aeterna Noctis or ghost song, even though the latter two are significantly more detailed and the resolution of all games target 1080p.
@@blitzkreig4887 I mean it is definitely more detailed than my art, but not significantly more detailed. A lot of the richness and vibrancy is colour/particle effects and grain filter. But you have a considerable amount of bushes or rocks that are very simple with the details not being done using more than one or two thick brush strokes.
I think that there are quite a few channels that do talk about pixel art, Reece Geofroy, Saultoons, Pixel Overload and AdamCYounis are a few that I am familiar with. But the pixel art I made for this video was the second time I touched pixel art, I am not a pixel artist xD
Great video, I think there are for sure contexts and caveats that would make pixel art or non pixel art easier than the other, but in general pixel art is more difficult. There are cases where pixel art is actually easier, but it is usually a matter of the limitations/style/compromises that are chosen to go along with it, rather than the choice to pixel art. For instance, if I, as a game dev with not particularly great art skills, choose to make a very low resolution pixely game, like say a pico-8 game with 8x8 tiles and an 8x8 player character. I'm also (most likely) choosing to forgo almost all the details and just go for simple, and or abstract designs. Because pixel art is an established idea, it can be less noticeable how simple the designs are, or in some sense the person looking at it is more forgiving, or finds the extremely limited space of 8x8 tiles and 128x128 to be charming. All of that is to say that pixel art has areas where it can allow you to more easily create something that you are satisfied with, especially if you are jumping into art for the first time. It is a trap to consider pixel art to be the easy because of that though, the difficulty in creating pixel art scales much faster the more your details, variety, and quality standard for your own work increases. Just as you noted, pixel art is a medium(?) that does not lend itself well to nice easy shortcuts, essentially the coherence of it is very fragile. Working to fix some of the issue that come with resolution and such is a technical matter, which I don't find very difficult but I am much more technically minded. Perhaps it comes down to the true nature of pixel art. If I personify the medium a little, it has a slight perfectionist attitude. The beauty that comes from fighting against some fairly heavy limitations has outlived almost all of the reasons those limitations were originally imposed. Pixel art that doesn't make much of an apparent effort to emphasize the beauty in its limitations, or seems to give up on the limitations half-way, tends to feel pointless. like instead of interesting limitations it just looks like you've never heard of anti-aliasing before. It can be very punishing in that way, but that's also something I truly love about it I guess. I love pixel art enough to let it go, and encourage people to not try to use it as the easy way 😆 For myself, I make a lot of very small projects, weekend jam or little experiments. I've noticed I tend to shy away from using pixel art in small, short things lately ironically because it's the way I have the most experience with, I actually have higher standards for myself and know I will spend much more time and effort on it if I choose to go with pixel art. There are many ways to make simple and easy assets while still creating an appealing style, sometimes it takes a bit of experimentation to discover them though.
I think now more than ever there are a lot of tools that help bridge the gap between your most comfortable, productive creation medium and your desired stylistic outcome. The comparison to Dead Cells is actually good example of this. The creators didn't start with pixel art, they pixelized simple 3D animations. They made/used tools to streamline that pipeline, and have made some of those tools available to the public.
i've been drawing pixel art and building in minecraft for years, i know how to manipulate individual pixels to get organic shapes, but i don't even know where to begin to make hand drawn art.
I think generally you don't want to build your art step by step with building blocks which you might do with pixel art and Minecraft buildings (though I don't recommend this for pixel art either). I think generally you want to try and just throw something onto the screen, avoid having a blank canvas, and then you step by step fix it by redrawing or drawing on top of what you have already done. What I'm essentially saying is just start with a sketch, don't worry about it being ugly, it's kind of supposed to be. It's easier to fix something when you have something to fix.
Not only sprite were made that wway with dithering to try and make shoaes but because old screens really did mixed those pixels, doing an illusion of these sprites being more smooth, that's why in old tvs and screens, old games looks better, and why they look terrible with new schreens withouth this effect
