NES Styled Pixel Art

A place for your artistic side. Discuss techniques and tools for pixel art on the NES, GBC, or similar platforms.

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tepples
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by tepples »

Drag wrote:It's in the same league as having really crazy chiptune-plus-real-drums-and-synths music with sfxr overtop of it.
You mean like Contra or Super Mario Bros. 3 or anything else with sampled drums? Or the silly, gimmicky bat-bass that is Sunsoft's later NES output? Or perhaps the chip metal soundtrack of Kilken, a GBA demo by Calodox (which could totally be done with the Sunsoft technique)?
Stick figures and unrestricted colors = NES and C64. Yes, please shit on all of us, Kotaku.
Allusion to Please pee on us, Will Wright? :P
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Kasumi
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by Kasumi »

OneCrudeDude wrote:Unless my eyes are shot, and unless I'm not looking close enough at my monitor, I don't see any sprite object that has black/light blue/white
The pants:
Image
And I don't see a single sprite where they have brown/orange/yellow,
The hat in the very same image.
Image
Edit: I was originally going to say that maybe having the hat in this picture was cheating. I grabbed this screenshot myself, I happen to have my Player customized that way. But I just checked and Player's default hair would have also been a palette that's not anywhere else on that screen. Black, dark blue, light blue.

I mean, I guess you have no real reason to trust that I double checked the image. But... I really did. (And I even kinda missed one, but it'd be easy enough to do with sprite overlays with the other stuff that's there. Heh.) Admittedly, I could have made the image larger to make things easier to see. The reason I scaled it is so it wouldn't be huge on the forum.

You're right it could be tweaked. Just so you know, my argument isn't "The palettes couldn't work even with some tweaking." My argument is, "That palettes couldn't work as they are." My argument is, "Shovel Knight could be captured with tweaking too. People would rush to find ways to make RCR work, and it doesn't cross anyone's mind to just make enemies in Shovel Knight smaller. Less parallax." I find that interesting. I guess there's like a scale and Shovel Knight is too heavy. But what makes it so heavy people are turned off? Because it's not solely breaking restrictions. I'm not even sure it's that it's farther from the console than RCR. It might be that it's farther from the console as people think they know it. But I guess I'll never quite get that, if it's that.
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tokumaru
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by tokumaru »

Drag wrote:
That page wrote:a super-pixelated style, showing us what the pocket monsters would have looked like if they’d been released on the NES. Or… Commodore 64.
Stick figures and unrestricted colors = NES and C64. Yes, please shit on all of us, Kotaku. :P
We know what the Pokemon would look like on the NES... exactly like they did on the GBC! It's not like they used more than 1 palette for each Pokemon anyway.
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DragonDePlatino
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by DragonDePlatino »

tokumaru wrote:We know what the Pokemon would look like on the NES... exactly like they did on the GBC!
Heh, and we all know what Pokemon would've looked like on the Commodore 64!

Image

DEM DOUBLE-WIDE PIXELS

(I was inspired to draw this a few weeks ago after I read that article, by the way. And yes, I followed C64 restrictions. Guilty as charged!)
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by tepples »

DragonDePlatino wrote:Heh, and we all know what Pokemon would've looked like on the Commodore 64!
Good job.
DEM DOUBLE-WIDE PIXELS
Almost. The C64's pixel clock (CB*16/7 = 8.18 MHz) is faster than that of the S-PPU that the Super Game Boy feeds (CB*3/2 = 5.37 MHz). Square pixels (CB*12/7 = 6.14 MHz) are somewhere in the middle. At 160x200, the effective pixel clock is CB*8/7 = 4.09 MHz, and each C64 double-pixel is as big as 12/7/(8/7) = 1.5 scanline heights or 3/2/(8/7) = 1.3125 NES pixels. A C64 24x21 sprite is as big as 18x21 NES pixels.

(All assuming NTSC; I don't know exact PAL timing.)
tomaitheous
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by tomaitheous »

Double wide pixels are gross!
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tepples
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by tepples »

tomaitheous wrote:Double wide pixels are gross!
Yet most Super NES games used 256-pixel backgrounds despite the hardware supporting 512. The only games I'm aware of using hi-res are RPM Racing, some RPGs' text boxes, and third-party PowerPak firmware.
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mikejmoffitt
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by mikejmoffitt »

tepples wrote:
tomaitheous wrote:Double wide pixels are gross!
Yet most Super NES games used 256-pixel backgrounds despite the hardware supporting 512. The only games I'm aware of using hi-res are RPM Racing, some RPGs' text boxes, and third-party PowerPak firmware.
To call the SNES only using 256-pixel backgrounds "double pixels" is to eschew the point of his post. In the spirit of excessive detail, Kirby's Dreamland 3 uses foregrounds with every other row empty to create psuedo transparency using 512-pixel-wide mode.

The pixel aspect ratio of a 256-pixel wide image on the SNES is fairly close to 1:1, though of course it is wider than that (8:7 or so?). It is still very far from the 2:1 PAR shown in the above C64 mockup sprites, which means the resulting image doesn't have the "gross" appearance of the double-wide pixel sprites. I will agree with tomaitheous that the double wide pixels are unappealing.
lidnariq
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by lidnariq »

C64 aspect ratio is, IIRC, exactly half as wide as VIC20 aspect ratio. So for NTSC, that becomes 3:2 and 3:4, and for PAL, 5:3 and 5:6.
tomaitheous
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by tomaitheous »

Off topic: Tepples shows that the PAR for 5.369mhz mode is ~1.14. TVs were never calibrated to spec, and that always seemed too wide to me. I set my emulators and TVs (when given the option), to 1.12 or 1.11 PAR. That looks much closer to how I remember seeing these old games systems on multiple TVs BITD. I swear that I found that PAR was changed in sometime in the mid 90's with the clarification of how digital video should be created and how PAR should be corrected or handled. 13.5mhz, IIRC, seems to be dot clock for 720x480 (with 704x480 being 'clipped' of that. Technically 484 lines, but those 4 really don't change anything). But I could have sworn that I saw older documents (pre-90's digital dilemma), stating something like ~14mhz (to what the plastic overlay would equate to when you adjust the screen underneath for the test screen - BITD).

But yeah, double wide pixels as in the pixels appears almost double wide compared to vertical resolution (7800, c64, CoCo 3 low res, etc). Sooo gross :p
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ShaneLite
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by ShaneLite »

Hi guys! Thanks again for the feedback so far. I'm glad that this built up quite the discussion on palettes (to the point where I see the thread got split). I think for now my friend Naoshi and I are sticking to the palette table we currently have set up since it works best with the artwork we've created so far.
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I did the art for this stage earlier in the year (it's on page 1) but I felt it looked too much like the Metroid tile set so I'm redoing it. Still a WIP.
Image
And with a filter.

Image
The characters were also tested with a minor palette tweak.

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This is how the main characters look when taken out of the 8-bit graphics.
tepples
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by tepples »

If that's what they're supposed to look like out of pixels, what would they look like in pixels with the light (skin) color for his shirt and her blouse, and the medium (red) color for her skirt?
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DragonDePlatino
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by DragonDePlatino »

Whoa! Those are some really professional character designs! It's rare to see such artistic talent on indie projects like this. :D

And yet...I think the pixel art designs could be a lot closer to the concept art. They're a little too serious. Maybe something like this, if it's not too late in development to change the designs?

Image

Oh, and the WIP cave tileset is also coming along nicely...I like the texture of the door and the Western effect you achieved by banding the rocks like that. The background is just starving for some detail, though...why not fill it up with some single-colored rocks?
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Alp
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by Alp »

DragonDePlatino wrote:And yet...I think the pixel art designs could be a lot closer to the concept art. They're a little too serious. Maybe something like this, if it's not too late in development to change the designs?
While those sprites of yours *are* quite nice, I wouldn't change the originals.
They have a rather interesting contrast from the NES-era standard.

NES-Era:
Gritty Box Art > Cutesy/Chibi Sprites

This Art:
Cutesy/Chibi Art > Gritty Sprites
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OneCrudeDude
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Re: NES Styled Pixel Art

Post by OneCrudeDude »

DragonDePlatino wrote:Whoa! Those are some really professional character designs! It's rare to see such artistic talent on indie projects like this. :D
It's still much more common than it will ever be for modern NES game projects. You have people creating interesting characters, nice graphics, and catchy music for various Mega Man fan games made for a modern engine, but when it comes to ROM hacks... just make Bomb Man blue, make him shoot his bombs in all 8 cardinal directions, and set it to some NES-ified Kirby music. That seems to be the trend of Japanese MM hacks, anyway.
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