Discussion Faux Retro Hate

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Otyugra

Guest
Some circles of the internet have a pretty ill-informed hate for retro indie developers and it really grinds my gears, and I wonder if you all feel the same way I do. Recently, on both Tumblr and Know Your Meme, this post was "trending". On KYM, it currently has 133 more likes than dislikes, and 42 people favorited it:


__Ignoring the literal meaning of this post (which is laughably over-exaggerated), this post is making fun of indie game developers for being out of touch with what players enjoy looking at.
__Let's assume that Charre (the person who made the post) is referring only to indie developers who make games for profit without a publisher (that's who the people in the comments all thought Charre meant), not people using GameMaker for the very first time or something like that. Do you think this is what most retro, purchasable games look like? Can you name one purchasable game off the top of your head that looks like the bottom image even slightly? You probably can, but odds are you can easily name five retro games that look more like the top image of the two; I certainly can: Owlboy, Crimson Ancients, Rain World, Cyber Shadow, Sushido, Stardew Valley, the upcoming unnamed game by Cory Alex Martin, Earth Overclocked, and Homestead. (Rain World may have a publisher, I'm not sure)
__I argue that Charre has an unwarranted hate for all games that are inspired by the retro look, but aren't perfectly retro. Yes, faux-retro games like Pony Island look awful (arguable some art assets in UnderTale are awful too), but a game like Risk or Rain has an art style that isn't purely retro and should not be compared to retro games like some kind of measuring stick.
__how do you all feel about games "inspired by retro art" that do things new and interesting, or take advantage of modern times? This could be as simple as Shovel Knight expanding it's color-per-sprite limit, or an experimental color palette & sprite size, such as the one I used in SnakePit:

__I partook in a 64 by 64 pixel game jam and in order to have more sprites on the screen, I made each sprite 7x7 rather than 8x8 and made the left over bottom and right line of the screen black (9x7 = 63, not 64). Likewise, I wanted to convey a campy Halloween monster-esque atmosphere while also keeping the game "retro" enough to vaguely remind the player of the Gameboy, so I used 3 colors. By Charre's standards, SnakePit is a game made by a moron because it doesn't look like a true gameboy game, and because I'm not using all the colors and pixels I can.
__So is Charre's dislike warranted in your experience: should all "retro" games look like a SNES game rather than experiment with the style?
 
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jackhigh24

Guest
well is that retro as it seems like it from the later versions, i suppose you could call them retro, but thats what gets me about all this so called retro is its not, they often use many more colours than the real retro art did, so to me yes it looks nice but its not retro.
 
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seanm

Guest
People just hate stuff.
"Like wow these guys aren't cool enough to know what real retro pixel art looks like, I'm super cool and other people are stupid."

At the end of the day, most limitations of "retro pixel art" only do a disservice to games.
Not even Shovel Knight stuck to the most basic principle of pixel art, they let everything move around the screen using subpixels. Much smoother, and imo much more enjoyable, gameplay.

Most developers are going to favor gameplay over aesthetic.
Nuclear Throne and Cave Story are both games that abide by "the rules" and they both look like earthquakes are devastating the game world any time you move your character around.


Now if the game looks like garbage, well it looks like garbage, but its not going to look bad just because it didn't follow the rules.
 

Ninety

Member
You probably can, but odds are you can easily name five retro games that look more like the top image of the two; I certainly can: Owlboy, Crimson Ancients, Rain World, Cyber Shadow, Sushido, Stardew Valley, the upcoming unnamed game by Cory Alex Martin, Earth Overclocked, and Homestead.
:oops:
 
No, I'm not angry at the image. I actually agree with it. 90% of the indie "retro" games out there look like trash. The second example isn't too far off what the average pixel "artist" puts out nowadays.
Of course, there are tons of beautiful pixel art games out now, too, including ones that don't stick to the old aesthetics some of us grew up with. Those are fine! The problem is is that the indie scene is full of games with characters like the second image, made by people who can't draw, and try to hide their lack of skill behind "omg, retro graphics lol!" They're not fooling anybody!
 

chance

predictably random
Forum Staff
Moderator
People just hate stuff. (snip)
Sometimes. But often, it's just an expression of personal taste. Getting more "dislikes" than "likes" doesn't necessarily mean people hate you.

I think some young people are victims of excessive "self-esteem" training -- to the point they associate any disagreement with ridicule and hatred. ;)
 
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seanm

Guest
Sometimes. But often, it's just an expression of personal taste. Getting more "dislikes" than "likes" doesn't necessarily mean people hate you.

I think some young people are victims of excessive "self-esteem" training -- to the point they associate any disagreement with ridicule and hatred. ;)
As a musician, I can assure you that there is an immense amount of disdain felt towards anyone who doesn't "follow the rules".

But it was just in general, people like to hate on stuff. I don't give two 💩💩💩💩s about some people who disliked a meme on imgur.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I have to say I agree with the image. There's a lot of good pixelart out there, but the vast majority of people that claims their stuff is retro are just using a buzzword to drum up hype. I've seen some horrible examples with things that literally look like MS paint placeholder doodles being marketed as 'retro graphics' on the old GMC.
 

Ninety

Member
You guys realise the latter style is by far in the minority, right? I mean sure, if you browse the GMC or GameJolt or something you're not going to see the greatest graphics but the vast majority of games that go to market, and especially those that have some measure of success, have significantly better. Let's not pull statistics like "90%" out of nowhere and pretend the sky is falling.

on the old GMC.
There's your problem. The GMC is a terrible measure of what's actually going on in the indie dev scene.

Edit: Also, if people really are so sick of games that look like that, maybe they should stop buying them, so they won't be profitable :^)
 
You guys realise the latter style is by far in the minority, right? I mean sure, if you browse the GMC or GameJolt or something you're not going to see the greatest graphics but the vast majority of games that go to market, and especially those that have some measure of success, have significantly better. Let's not pull statistics like "90%" out of nowhere and pretend the sky is falling.
I said 90% of indie games, not 90% of indie games that go to market. If you pick a random indie game from anywhere off the internet, do you really think you'll find much more than 10% that don't look like complete crap? Have you gone over to pixelation yet? Half the newbies there are drawing garbage like the second image. Go check it out. Even in professional games, that look has become popular enough to spawn this meme-y image. :p

The other major thing I hate about new "retro" art is how every artist out there now thinks they have to have their characters bouncing around like they're having a seizure during their idle animations and stuff. You know what I'm talking about. It seems like literally every pixel art game does it now. They bounce their whole body up and down like they're constantly hyper-ventilating. So bad looking. Cut that 💩💩💩💩 out and learn some subtlety, guys. : \

Cheap sub-pixel animation made by mindlessly stretching drawings and crap sucks, too. Even good sub-pixel work looks mushy and gross to me when it's overused. A lot of artists I see use it without even knowing what they're doing though, and it looks even worse.

Basically, I hate everything. But the three main sins of the modern pixel "artist" are:
1.) Lack of basic drawing ability hidden by "style."
2.) Spazzy flailing idle animations.
3.) 💩💩💩💩ty sub-pixel animation.
4.) Oh yeah. Also, giant MOTION SMEARS EVERYWHERE, because people can't animate for crap, and think adding ridiculous smearing effects will hide the fact.

grumble grumble...
 
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Ninety

Member
<appends new people to Ignore List>
If I just got Yal to block me it'll be the greatest thing to happen to me all week.

4.) Oh yeah. Also, giant MOTION SMEARS EVERYWHERE, because people can't animate for crap, and think adding ridiculous smearing effects will hide the fact.

"muh motion blur"

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not saying there isn't bad pixel art out there. There's frankly more bad pixel art than good pixel art. And I agree with most of the points RHC says. I just don't think all this outrage over strawmen is necessary.
 
"muh motion blur"
Whoa, awesome animation, dude! I can tell he's moving because of that sick motion blur you added! It looks so smooth! O:
To clarify, there's nothing wrong with motion blur or smears in animation. They're actually great techniques if used well. The problem with most indie game artists is that they can't even handle basic drawing or animation, let alone more exotic stuff like severe smearing, lol.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not saying there isn't bad pixel art out there. There's frankly more bad pixel art than good pixel art. And I agree with most of the points RHC says. I just don't think all this outrage over strawmen is necessary.
To be fair, I don't think anyone is really outraged at 💩💩💩💩ty pixel art masquerading as "retro" artwork. We just don't like 💩💩💩💩ty art, and enjoy making fun of it. X'D
 
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I wouldn't label the aforementioned style as "faux retro" since closely similar styles were prominent with retro gaming consoles such as Atari and Commodore 64. To me it is a minimalist approach and should it provide function to the overall design of the game, I do not perceive it as problematic.

There are still profoundly effective variations of minimalism in indie games such as Fez. For this game, minimalism serves the scope of the overall design; not distracting, distasteful, or lazy. The developer still invested substantial time and effort into his design and effectively created a beautiful world of his own. Are there bad minimalist works? Yes, but I find that irrelevant since the same comparison is applicable to any style. Would I make a minimalist game? Eh, probably not mainly because I do not envision my future projects designed as minimalist works. However, I cannot say that I do not appreciate it. In fact, I firmly believe the style has the potential to work for the developers who know how to make it work.
 
did someone say garbage sub pixel idle animation?
This isn't the sort of bad sub-pixel animation I was talking about though. What you're doing here is something I don't really see often, and doesn't really look too bad to me. This isn't the obnoxious type of idle I was talking about, either. If you sped it up maybe 2x or 3x, added some wavy bull💩💩💩💩 going on with his hair, and had him dip another pixel, this sprite would really grate on my nerves. As it is now, I don't really have a problem with it, lol.
 
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Otyugra

Guest
I think some young people are victims of excessive "self-esteem" training -- to the point they associate any disagreement with ridicule and hatred. ;)
__This doesn't even dignify a response, but here's one anyway. Social media posts like this one, ones that become popular on seemingly many sites, project a harmful image on every indie dev that uses pixel graphics to the passers by who look at the image and don't think about it too hard or long. It's by definition propaganda and it will stick in hundreds of people's subconscious' for a long time. This doesn't effect just me or my "excessive self-esteem," it hurts you, me, and all of us equally, if only in a tiny way. Maybe a few people will decide not to check out the indie game scene for a few months after looking at the image.
__For Charre, this was an attempt at justifying his or her dislike to pixel art indie games because many of them aren't to his or her liking, but for the image viewer, this transcends that meaning and becomes a symbol for how bad looking indie games (as a generalized whole) are. This image isn't hurting the games that look like the bottom image because if someone agreed with the post, they wouldn't have played the bad game in the first place. It hurts all other purchasable game sales when "heavy dislike" is spouted about indie games as a whole. Do you see why this stuck a cord with me? At least it lead to a sweet discussion on the forum.

__This is where we as a community ought to warn newbies about how the player is going to respond to their game art (music, etc) to hopefully shrink this dislike in the future. If you see a game that has subjectively bad art, by what would be popular opinion, the kind thing to do would be to give them advice on how they can make it better, or encourage them to work harder on that area.
 
__This doesn't even dignify a response, but here's one anyway. Social media posts like this one, ones that become popular on seemingly many sites, project a harmful image on every indie dev that uses pixel graphics to the passers by who look at the image and don't think about it too hard or long. It's by definition propaganda and it will stick in hundreds of people's subconscious' for a long time. This doesn't effect just me or my "excessive self-esteem," it hurts you, me, and all of us equally, if only in a tiny way. Maybe a few people will decide not to check out the indie game scene for a few months after looking at the image.
__For Charre, this was an attempt at justifying his or her dislike to pixel art indie games because many of them aren't to his or her liking, but for the image viewer, this transcends that meaning and becomes a symbol for how bad looking indie games (as a generalized whole) are. This image isn't hurting the games that look like the bottom image because if someone agreed with the post, they wouldn't have played the bad game in the first place. It hurts all other purchasable game sales when "heavy dislike" is spouted about indie games as a whole. Do you see why this stuck a cord with me? At least it lead to a sweet discussion on the forum.

__This is where we as a community ought to warn newbies about how the player is going to respond to their game art (music, etc) to hopefully shrink this dislike in the future. If you see a game that has subjectively bad art, by what would be popular opinion, the kind thing to do would be to give them advice on how they can make it better, or encourage them to work harder on that area.
I don't think it hurts all of us. I'm happy it's getting passed around, and agree with the general message. :p
You'll notice that the image isn't even calling out all indie devs. Just "retro inspired," ones, using sarcastic air quotes. I'm sure the person who created the image is perfectly happy to see indie games using good pixel art, and I'm sure the people liking the image feel the same way. It's a picture poking fun at indie developers who can't draw, nothing more or less. If anything, I feel like this sort of thing is good for indie developers who can actually draw. It's saying "hey, everyone, don't accept garbage art in your games!" which is something I actually appreciate.
 
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Alessio

Guest
Guys, aren't you actually glad that most indie developers can't make interesting stuff? This gives much more field to talented ones!
Now let's make something very good that doesn't look like "fake retro". I'm doing it right now.
 

Carnivius

Member
Yeah the lower image is terrible but the actual Capcom SNES Mega Man 7 sprite there is pretty lousy in it's own way too. I thought that at the time the game came out too. After the lovely spritework in the Mega Man X games I thought this one was a step backwards. Not saying I'd prefer the lower image, just that they could have used a far better example for the top one.
 

pixeltroid

Member
Some circles of the internet have a pretty ill-informed hate for retro indie developers and it really grinds my gears, and I wonder if you all feel the same way I do. Recently, on both Tumblr and Know Your Meme, this post was "trending". On KYM, it currently has 133 more likes than dislikes, and 42 people favorited it:
I have to agree with this picture. Sorry, but lazy, ultra-minimalistic pixel do NOT equal retro
 
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Alessio

Guest
Reminds me of Spelunky.
Exactely what i meant. Not that i dislike Spelunky, it's a very nice game, but i dislike indie game devs copying art styles from other devs like they were the supreme way to make indie games.
It's not really a matter of lack of skills (not everyone can draw or paint) but more like a lack of originality. Look Vlambeer, for example, they keep getting ripped off!
 

Carnivius

Member
Shortly after Cave Story came out there were a LOT of people copying it and it's graphic style. I'm no fan of the sprite style of Cave Story to begin with but it was crazy seeing so many bad imitations about at that time.
 

woodsmoke

Member
I'm also not a fan of lazy boring looking art, but it depends on what is retro. Atari 2600 is even more retro and looks like "that".

 

Carnivius

Member
Nah, the Atari stuff there at least has consistency in pixel size and colours forced upon it by the machine specs...and to be fair, the sprites in that Atari shot still look more like (knobbly kneed) people that the overly-simplified 'style' the lower Mega Man image do.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Nah, the Atari stuff there at least has consistency in pixel size
Not really...


Probably mostly because the prevalence of rectangles, but the hoop looks like it's made with a 3x pixel size of the line or the character, not to mention the fonts. (And this is why one should avoid big mono-colored rectangles in pixel art...)
 

Carnivius

Member
That's not really a pixel size thing but more about the construction of the basketball net object. I mean look at the player sprites. They are all the same pixels within themselves and you can tell how large each one is... now look at the lower Mega Man image... what the hell is the pixel size supposed to be there? I see that a lot with that style and it bugs me.
 
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Alessio

Guest
Atary didn't age well of sure. I love a world where i don't have to be a programmer to make digital art!
 
People too often confuse "retro" with "I don't know how to draw".

Retro is an easy way out because there are less pixels so less room for error.

Real retro artists should learn exactly what the palette of their system is and what are their limits (for instance, people who make NES sprites using more than 3 colors + transparency don't know what "retro" means)

Making a retro game is harder than it looks, I tried:
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Making a retro game is harder than it looks, I tried:
Not too bad, actually. The terrain/platforming bits are better than the characters, and the trolls are better than the player characters... you should ensure that you make your playable character the most detailed, and try to spread out your 3 colors so they're all used somewhere to not make them wasted... big chunks of a single color doesn't use your limited potential fully.

Also, the lack of a HUD irks me, I'd say that's pretty important for retro games (and it's typically one of the earliest things I add to my games)
 

Changgi

Member
On the subject of retro, it seems that most people just think of the NES with graphics. Very few people go for Atari style.

I tried it with my game Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie Hunt which I posted several days ago on here. I tried to make it authentic, with flickering when more than 1 instance of the same object exists, and having only 8 by 8 "pixels" per sprite. Along with the flashing and mono-colour-per-sprite.

(seizure warning at boss defeat)
 
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Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
On the subject of retro, it seems that most people just think of the NES with graphics. Very few people go for Atari style.
IMO it's because the NES actually had graphics you could interpret without a cheat sheet :p'

Atari graphics are too limited to be immersive, IMO... a single color, very small sprite size, and almost every game using them seem to use as many featureless rectangles as possible instead of actual shapes. Not sure if that's a hardware limitation or just people not having access to drawing tools to make sprites properly with. The NES has a limited palette, sure, but you could use 3 colors per sprite and 24 simultaneous colors via the palette system to do some really stunning stuff. It still had the drawback of colorfulness and detail being exclusive, which is why I prefer SNES graphics, but it's definitely the hallmark of 8-bit graphics.
 

Changgi

Member
IMO it's because the NES actually had graphics you could interpret without a cheat sheet :p'

Atari graphics are too limited to be immersive, IMO... a single color, very small sprite size, and almost every game using them seem to use as many featureless rectangles as possible instead of actual shapes. Not sure if that's a hardware limitation or just people not having access to drawing tools to make sprites properly with. The NES has a limited palette, sure, but you could use 3 colors per sprite and 24 simultaneous colors via the palette system to do some really stunning stuff. It still had the drawback of colorfulness and detail being exclusive, which is why I prefer SNES graphics, but it's definitely the hallmark of 8-bit graphics.
I see... I didn't know about the NES' limitations.

With Atari, it's actually the first 2, along with NES, video game consoles that I ever got in touch with, which also happened to be the first video games I knew about, so I always considered Atari and NES to be equals in terms of modern popularity, back then anyway.

As far as I know, the Atari could have 8 pixels across (and I think as many columns as the screen provides), and you could scale the sprite to 2 times or 4 times the size. That's why many Atari sprites are so blocky: Their pixels aren't big, but because of the 8-pixel limitation, the sprite would look quite small, so it's generally scaled to 2 times the size to make the size good.

I've played lots of Atari games without "excessive rectangles" though :eek: Beamrider, one of my favourite games, is an example:


One interesting limitation of the Atari 2600 is that it was actually first designed with Pong and Combat in mind. It was made when Pong was all the fuss, so I think in simpler terms, the Atari is able to handle:
2 player objects (these could be cloned to up to 2 times, making a total of 3, on the same horizontal scanline)
2 missiles
1 ball
And a stationary background

This is the reason why a number of Atari 2600 games look like they have many rectangles, I guess, cause it wasn't made to handle so many things, so what came out of it is really amazing IMO. My favourite Atari 2600 game, Millipede, still impresses me with how they managed to fit everything in (the player character is a block because I think the ball object was used to represent you, since the others are already taken). They have the Millipede, up to 8 spiders, the player, a beetle, bombs and mushrooms on the screen all at the same time, considering the system's constraints! There are other bugs like dragonflies, mosquitoes, etc., but they don't appear at the same time.

 
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Galladhan

Guest
The NES has a limited palette, sure, but you could use 3 colors per sprite and 24 simultaneous colors via the palette system to do some really stunning stuff. It still had the drawback of colorfulness and detail being exclusive, which is why I prefer SNES graphics, but it's definitely the hallmark of 8-bit graphics.
Even if i adore old Atari games, i agree with you on this. I would say that the hallmark of 8-bit graphics is represented by PC Engine/TG16, but i would be cheating cause it wasn't actually a 8-bit machine.
Graphics-wise, there were good things also on 8-bit home computers though (Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and MSX).
The problem with NES palette is yellow: it was pretty horrible :D

Told this, Pitfall II still looks good to me:

pitfall2.png
pitfall2b.png
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I'm having a hard time taking the 10-seconds-to-replicate-in-MS-Paint background in Pitfall 2 seriously compared to the delicious background tiles in some of the later NES games. :p


I guess what made the NES so special compared to its contemporary rivals was the dedicated GPU... the NES backgrounds are limited to a plane of tiles that is one tile larger that what fits on the screen (so you need to scroll in tiles one column at a time; the hardware only supports horizontal scrolling natively but by using some clever memory tricks you can scroll vertically too), but since tiles are represented with a tilemap instead of a big rasterized image, they're very memory-efficient... and as a result can be made large and detailed. (Looking closer at the Pitfall 2 background, I can see that the image is stretched more horizontally than vertically). Especially with bank switching and stuff letting you use multiple individual tilesets one at a time rather than having the game's whole set of graphics loaded in memory at all times, you can do some really cool stuff. Just look at the difference between the first Super Mario Bros, a launch title with a 64KB cartridge, and games like Shatterhand, Ninja Gaiden and Batman using 256KB cartridges.

Sure, tilemaps means the background will have repeats in it... but it's not impossible to work around that, especially since 2x2 tile chunks can be assigned palettes individually rather than being locked to a single palette (like in GM).
 

Changgi

Member
Pitfall and Cosmic Ark used some clever tricks to get their visuals. Frankenstein's Monster's Gradient effects and some others also look quite nice.





And slightly irrelevant to Atari, but relevant to faux-retro. When it comes to retro styles, the thing that I see which is really common is rotating pixels, which kinda bothers me. Also many people think Atari is just blocks so they just make something pixelly and call it Atari, without regards to the sprite sizes, which obviously isn't the case.

In fact, there are even parodies of some Atari 2600 games on Uncyclopedia:



(The second one is supposed to be Asteroids)
 
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Galladhan

Guest
@Yal : hey, i said i agree with you lol :p

Awesome post, by the way: i'm always eager to learn that kind of stuff =)
 
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