Pixel Art Class - Art Styles for Indie Games

[Music] welcome pals to a new video today i wanted to cover pixel art styles particularly uh the kinds of things you should be thinking about when choosing a style for your game and the challenges that you might come up against as you're trying to realize that style so let's not waste any time and get straight into it all right pixel art styles and how to choose one for your game the first thing i wanted to show you is just a big map of a bunch of games that have pixel art style that i think is is pretty good and i just want to talk about them basically so here are a bunch of games that i think are representative of pixel art mostly these are indie games and they're quite modern uh some of them on the very very far left are retro for the purpose of uh having the conversation now these kinds of aesthetics were originally technical limitations of the hardware that the games were running on and as that hardware improved we were able to represent games with more colors until we basically could just do whatever we wanted so we have names for these 1-bit 8-bit 16-bit for like atari nes maybe snes level of fidelity and modern games that chase these styles usually try to maintain some kind of relation to those limitations whether it's just in the palette or in the resolution as well further down i have more stylistic games and i have two kinds of directions for this stylism so bottom left we have games that are minimal they're specifically chasing a a look and feel that's not based on those technical limitations but has some sort of evocation of them so limited palettes would be a good one and very constrained forms things like silhouettes for characters and just the way those characters are rendered being much much more unique and constrained that's what i would call like a minimal style and on the other side we have basically no restrictions not even restrictions to 2d so games like the last knight an octopath traveler are i would say you know so uh futuristic in the way that they're made that they might not even be pixel art to some people um of course pixel art is still involved but the use of things like post processing uh 3d lighting 3d models those things make a big difference i think the way that i like to break this down really comes down to your objectives as a developer and what you're looking to use pixel art to achieve in your game pixel art has definitely grown in the last 10 years from something that was done to faithfully recreate or extend classic retro style games into a kind of brand of visual i guess language on its own that evokes something that is more handmade and indie so let me show you how i kind of interpret these so we have along the top this idea of like the pixel purity line games along this line are that more traditional style of pixel art where as we move from left to right we're increasing fidelity but we're still treating pixels as pixels as we move down into that modern space we have more non-historic constraints or techniques that are used to enhance the pixel art or push it into a space that's more original so here on the left we've got fewer colors and fewer details by definition just because that's the constraint moving into this limited space here this more stylized space we still have those constraints but we're pushing them in different directions making considerations to things like form not because we have to but because we want to and that usually creates a more strong identity because it's more novel on the right side down the bottom again we're using technology to push pixel art into spaces that's never been seen before by adding and augmenting uh other technologies in with it and on the far right this is just your your core pixel art right more colors more detail but still yeah still keeping in with the uh with the pixel art aesthetic and of course this is not an exhaustive list uh it's not even close to breaking down categorically every kind of thing you can do with pixel art at the end of the day pixels are just things that appear on the screen they're just lights so you can do a lot with this but i think this kind of captures the general thrust of where pixel art is at the moment as a as an art style as a medium as a as a movement so let's now break down these domains give them names and start talking about the challenges associated with them so as we push games into different directions visually there appear challenges that we have to face to kind of maintain uh something that feels cohesive and strong and like it has its own identity depending on the direction we push it in so i've given these names hesitantly they're not really official names they're just names that i've given them for the purposes of my analysis in this conversation the names are retro max bit as opposed to high bit high bit kind of covers all of this but max bit is the idea of yeah pushing it as far as you can go while still being faithful minimalist and post bit which is yeah throwing the kitchen sink at the screen uh including pixel art so given this there are kinds of challenges that appear based on these directions based on these approaches the furthest left retro has creative challenges right because you have less to work with you're put in a position where creating a strong identity for your game and just creating imagery for your game is more difficult characters have less that they can use to stand out and there's less space for subtlety right because you just don't have the granularity to do what you need to do the minimalist space has more of a disciplinary challenge so you're not really bound by the constraints of a small resolution or a completely limited palette but you have to still impose constraints on yourself and maintain them across the use of the game for that style to actually pay off right so there's self-imposed constraints then we have technical so as we push higher and higher fidelity of pixel art the way that you actually pull that off is totally dependent on your technique as an artist so being able to actually render something that looks beautiful and is consistent and to do that in a high volume across the entirety of a game is difficult right it's a technical challenge and then we have technological so it's a subtle difference between technique and technology but effectively the difference is honing you and your hand versus honing your use of a multitude of tools in a way that's harmonious right you've got your chromatic aberration and your lighting and you've got depth of field blur how do you make those feel consistent in an art style so i just want to fanboy a little bit about some games and how they deal with these challenges before we go into my sort of like critical analysis of the of the way that you approach the challenges of course i think shovel knight is an excellent example of a game that manages to find a really strong identity that's still really retro it's it's clearly um taking inspiration from games like ducktales and mega man but it manages to push the forms of the characters and the way color is used in such a way that it just creates its own identity and it's so recognizable and unmistakable in the retro space a common technique here is outlining to actually define these elements you can see in undertale as well heavy use of outlining to actually create a separation between the characters and the scene this is a very common technique and it works well if you use a lot of black in your game but games as we sort of move into a more modern more high fidelity space like momodora try to use more just compositional elements to create that distinction right because we have more colors to work with we can do things like just create a slightly darker background with less contrast in order to create the distinction this is still a challenge of course and it's more down to the artist's ability to compose that image but there's more space here to explore further down as we sort of go into this more minimal look we can see that we're still in a lot of these games trying to adhere to the idea of a palette what tends to happen here is the use of negative space and selective palettes comes into play so we can see in blasphemous the entire environment is basically this like washed out sort of like grayish brown and the two characters on screen are way way brighter much much more saturated it's not that the palette is necessarily limited you know there aren't just like 16 colors in this picture and any different environment you go into you might have lots of different colors such that the overall game has like a quite broad palette but in an individual frame the expression of that palette is very limited and very distinct there's a lot of contrast here between the foreground and the background just with the use of color even jump king which i would say is a pretty messy game visually maintains a really strong sense of uh contrast by doing the same thing right we've got a very kind of like verdant green washed out palette it's green everywhere but through the use of saturation and just selective color we can see exactly who the character is and where they are and we can see where all the platforms are we know with quite a lot of confidence uh what we can stand on and what we can't shape here helps as well square shapes versus organic shapes moving on to something like sword and sorcery uh this is what i think is like mega stylized like it doesn't get much more stylized than this you can see there's lots of pixels here this is like a very dense screen it's probably like 960 by 640 or something like that so there are a lot of pixels but the details are very selective and very repetitive the shapes here that we see there are square shapes there are round shapes and and we have our character shapes which are these very thin stick figures with very very square heads this is something that's not really based on any constraint it's totally just a choice but the commitment to that choice is what is what builds the frame and makes this game look so unique i want to note specifically like the way that these edges here these square components are repeated over here there are challenges with this as well of course like creating frames that are too washed out now we can move over to games like uh dead cells fairs celeste and hyper light drifter and i would probably even lump in uh kingdom and eastwood in this space where these games have a lot of respect and faith to the retro in terms of the resolution but their commitment to creating their own color palette and their own visual style kind of trumps that and at times they dip into more modern tech in order to solve technical challenges and just create more of an identity so in the case of eastwood we can see this kind of like it's almost like a scan effect or like a it's like a shader over the screen that creates a little bit of that chromatic aberration and the palette in general is just kind of washed out it makes the game feel very classic right it feels very like chill because of those effects there are also procedural lighting effects throughout the game as well again a game like kingdom we can see this procedural water and the lighting helps the game get that real feel to it it's got a day night cycle that's procedural as well so the fact that the game you know becomes brighter and darker depending on the time of day it is and the colors change so drastically can only really be done by employing procedural means you couldn't really do this with straight pixel art dead cells famously has a 3d character that's being sampled down into something that looks more like pixel art this is kind of like a time saving measure in order to keep the pixel art aesthetic but reduce the amount of time committed to animation fez a massive massive example here of like a game that is totally uh pixel art until it's not it's a completely 3d game that rotates around its axis i like the way that this game manages to create for the most part a really flat style like the the there's almost i would imagine purposefully a commitment against trying to create depth in the pixel art because the depth comes through in the camera movement i think that's a real stroke of genius and i don't know if it gets enough credit really celeste would be another example so this item here being the item that we definitely want to pick up it's more noticeable because it's brighter right lighting is being used to draw our attention and i think you know using uh procedural effects in this way that a lot of these games do it's very tasteful and uh totally acceptable in in 2021 maybe some pixel art purists may have had an issue with it in in years gone by but definitely not anymore we're in a spot now where there are so many games that having them be good games and look visually unique is something that we want i want to quickly dip up to this line of games here before we go to the bottom right this is fragato and friends iconoclasts chasm and owlboy i think of these games as really core pixel art games they rarely if ever use any procedural effects they have very detailed very beautiful pixel art they're artisanal in the way they've been created because you can just see the amount of painstaking effort that's gone into creating these frames these games are very difficult to make they have a lot of it's kind of like very high risk high reward in terms of like the amount of investment of time but also the fact that you know games like this can struggle uh in the sense that like i would say here in in owl boy's case because there's no constraints on the colors on the forms on the amount of detail there are frames that can get quite noisy right some of these details conflict with each other and that's a challenge that comes with taking on such like a massive palette and a massive scope and then finally in the bottom right we've got the full full on caution to the wind post bit games so this is i think songs of conquest you can see it's actually a 3d scene with billboarded pixel art the lighting and the bloom is is super gorgeous on this and i love it the resolution on the pixel art is not it's not that high like most of this is quite low res um but the frame itself is obviously really nice and high res you can see procedural shadows there's tons of of procedural stuff in here and the challenge with games like this is again managing all of that and creating a style that still feels clean and deliberate so octopath here's another one a massive vignette over the screen very dark on the edges and a really really powerful depth of field blur to make this feel like a tilt shift scene i personally would love to explore making a game that looks kind of like this in the future this is kind of like low poly 3d with pixel art textures the last knight is a giant game as far as its impact on the pixel art scene i think especially for games you can see like this is clearly a pixel art game like the assets are all pixel art but the scene itself has so much 3d tech in it in my opinion like this is a beautiful example of a game that balances these things well but you can see very easily how you know we're almost at the point where we're asking the question like does this need to be pixel art at this point like is the thing that makes this worth looking at does that have anything to do with the pixels because you know this lighting is so masterfully created you know the actual frame the way we we have our eye drawn around it and just the tech in general like there's like so many things going on we've got the depth of field we've got uh good shafts of light that look like volumetric uh we've got bloom coming off of these lights lots and lots of reflections on the water what is this like subsurface scattering i don't know it's pretty pretty nuts uh really really interesting so that's kind of like what the scene looks like these days i want to talk about how to deal with some of the challenges that games across this spectrum here come up against so let's check that out so the way i like to think about these challenges is in something that's called well i just made this up uh creative boxes so it's kind of like when we talk about thinking outside the box versus inside the box in this little section i want to talk about defining the boxes in the first place and how these different kinds of games the retro minimal max bit and post bit games how they actually define the boxes differently and the challenges that come up out of those so we have the little boxes and the big boxes and those are based on constraints the little boxes are more constrained big boxes are less constrained so in the retro space we have breaking out okay if you have a game that has a bunch of constraints from the beginning limited resolution limited palette maybe you're not even trying to break the technical limitations so as far as like the amount of things on screen and how things appear on screen as shovel knight would then all of your efforts are going to come down to breaking out of those constraints right giving your game an identity that's clear and distinct and that works while pushing against those limitations those boxes on the minimalist side rather than actually setting a bunch of constraints based on historic hardware limitations you actually start with no constraints and you're trying to create them yourself right so the style is defined as the way that you've shrunk those uh sides of the box down into a smaller space and this is the swords and sorcery approach on the big boxes side we have a big box that you're trying to fill this would be something like owl boy right where we have very few constraints we have as many colors as we want we have as high of a resolution as we want but our task is to try to fill that into something that feels cohesive that's not overly detailed or not overburdened and you know doesn't get lost in all of that size it also takes a lot longer to do because it's more painstaking and difficult to just produce that much pixel art on the post bit side it's very easy to fill a frame it's very easy to to throw stuff at the screen and to populate it with color and light but then the challenge becomes containing within the box so let's take those four examples i just gave we take shovel knight owl boy swords and sorcery and the last knight and we'll talk about how they actually approach those challenges and where they come up against them so shovel knight is in that breakout zone where we start with a lot of constraints and we're trying to create an image from that the challenges here are in creating readable and diverse forms to maximize the palette use artfully rather than just arbitrarily and to maintain a sense of scene shovel knight does that really well here we can see the the character standing out against the background we can see the context that the background is in like we know where we are and what this place is we can make out the other characters as distinct from king night here and overall the the image is fairly well composed even though there's a very limited palette and very few pixels now we can see that's achieved uh with the character design yeah primarily so king knight here you know is a lot of contrast in the colors being used as far as like the black shape in the helmet and the outline versus the very bright gold colors the same can be said for shovel knight and even these characters despite having a lot of similarities are very distinct these blues and the horns on the helmet very clearly from a silhouette even if you were to make these characters completely black you could still tell the difference between them this is done with uh exaggeration for the most part right these characters are not anatomically correct they are stylized in a way that maximizes the things that we use to differentiate them so in this case the heads are really important because the helmets are really important those are the distinct elements and so those are what are more caricatured and you can see the game does a pretty good job with those outlines and with those strong silhouettes of still managing to create scenes that are very colorful without breaking the readability in the minimal space with games like sword and sorcery the struggle comes from establishing a unique limited visual language so that's up to the developer to do that committing to solutions within those constraints right not breaking them and then doing that in a way that doesn't wash out the frame so let's look at the constraints here that sword and sorcery puts itself under one is the fact that unlike shovel knight almost all of the characters look essentially the same from a silhouette perspective they all have very thin long legs all of their heads are simple squares they have very little that they can use to differentiate between the characters by design that's a constraint that helps make the game look unique but it's also a challenge we can see that bearing out here with some of these scenes it's really hard to pick out the different characters where they are relative to the scene and who is who it's almost hard to even notice the characters especially this character in the scene they're almost completely hidden if you didn't know what to look for sword and sorcery manages some of its ux constraints by breaking pixel art a little bit so we can see these like uh just like drawn lines on the screen and there are other areas where there's like a bubble over the character i can understand why trying to solve these with pixel art would have made it quite difficult and so yeah that's definitely the challenge it does a good job in some areas where sword and sorcery manages to separate the character from the background so in this case you know the black legs and the head really nicely create more contrast between that washed out height behind and definitely visually separate from the forest in the background so when building your levels trying to actually establish some sort of visual separation and composition in the frame that allows the character to stand out is really important especially in games that are very minimal and stylized this way right you can see how easy it is in a game like shovel knight to do that much much harder if all the colors are as flat as they are in sword and sorcery i mean look at this it's like the whole palette like the entire screen fits inside of like five percent of the color spectrum now let's take a look at the max bit example this is uh owl boy so we're trying to fill the box here creatively the challenges here are to achieve high consistent quality to meet resulting high scope and to avoid visual noise and maintain focus so the first is to just like have a lot of art talent and that's something that the artist on owlboy clearly has the second is to meet resulting high scopes so what tends to happen with these games is high reliance on tile sets and reusing images now the challenge is then with that repetition and with a high amount of detail avoiding cluttering the scene so there are some scenes where things are a little harder to differentiate having very clear layering and very clear hierarchy of detail in a scene is really important this screen i think struggles a little bit just because of the way that the assets are layered other scenes don't have that problem okay so this screen is totally bespoke you can see it's one big sprite and as such there's much more consideration into the composition but this is very expensive to do time wise it's really hard to spend like what a week on every background in the game and so the middle ground is uh yeah where you use more negative space so just not trying to take on so much detail in every frame helps this game really look a lot clearer and and it really just helps the detail that's there stand out more howlboy has some phenomenal sprites uh and some phenomenal tiles and i think it does its best when those two are working in harmony and not stepping on each other's toes i want to also say just before we move on from owlboy that from a technique perspective it tends to be the case that relying on really blanket techniques like outlining is something that artists in this space tend to try to avoid you can see here there is some outlining on these characters but it's what we would call sell out it's a selective outlining where the colors that make up the character are interspersed along that outline to try to soften it and break it up we're really trying to chase with a lot of these games something that feels more painterly and so achieving a sense of contrast without using obvious techniques that's oftentimes the goal even if the contrast is still an issue there's an objective there to make something that's still beautiful in every screenshot and so it can be difficult and then finally with the post bit games we have the struggle to contain within the frame okay so we're trying to balance here retro and modern techniques we're trying to do that to build clear frames and we want to do it in a way that feels purposeful so i think the last night struggles in some cases the game's not out yet i should say but as far as the screenshots go it struggles in some cases to actually justify the pixel art and to build a frame that allows us to appreciate all of the time and energy that's been put into it here i think the the spotlight is you know it's quite strong there's a lot of that uh smoke and lighting there's a lot of rain there's a lot going on here and it's hard to to appreciate what's happening the last night is a gorgeous game and it's not really my argument here that that uh the culmination of all these techniques lead up to something that doesn't look good but i think uh the value of it being pixel art is something that uh i don't know i i wonder like if if this was just high-res 2d imagery that was just uh you know drawn by hand or vector art with all of these lighting effects would we appreciate the fact that that these were pixels or would that really change the way we experience the game i don't know but i guarantee you there are hundreds of games out there that have all of these effects and don't look even close to the way that last night looks this is uh such a masterful combination of effects even this like bokeh in the background for the the lights i mean it's very difficult to capture all of that in a tasteful way and you've essentially got to make a 3d game that looks really good as a 3d game and then incorporate the pixel art okay so that's my interpretation of those four domains the challenges they come up against and how they can actually try to mitigate those challenges to create beautiful images let's uh let's do a little bit of wrapping up so across the board here we can see that the aims of any artist looking to establish an art style for their game using pixel art will always be looking to primarily create a strong image right all of these challenges we've been talking about and the solutions to those challenges hinge on the idea that we're working towards something that reads clearly that the players can understand and that has a distinct look if you're trying to approach one of these art styles or some combination your goals should always be to work within your means as an artist what i mean by that is if you're looking to chase the visual aesthetic of something like owlboy you have to have a background in art right you have to know how to render an image and you have to have the experience and the workflow with pixel art to be able to bear that out over the course of an entire game's worth of art likewise if you're working on something that's going to be mixing in 3d or using post-processing it's worth appreciating how those interact with the pixel art and working with them in a way that's harmonious rather than just throwing them in it's really difficult to create something that's very stylized it's something that most artists approach as they become more experienced because it's hard to find something that's valuable that hasn't been done before and hopefully having watched this video you'll be able to have the confidence to work towards a style in a way that doesn't massively increase the time and reaches something that actually adds value to your project thank you for watching and i will catch you in the next one hey pal thanks for watching and thanks most especially to the patrons and twitch subs who support this channel and my gamedev project insignia to find out more click the links in the description below and if you like this video tell youtube by clicking the like button and then youtube will tell me and then i'll make more videos that's nice thanks again and until next time [Music]

Channel: AdamCYounis

Views: 72,861

Keywords: game development, pixel art, game dev, game, video game, indie games, stream, tutorial, lecture, art style

Id: LfTiws-0Vss

Length: 32min 5sec (1925 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021