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Hello. I know you are all probably getting tired of seeing threads appear from me and here I am again. lol

The past few days I have been playing around with dropping down to an ultra low resolution for my next game project (whatever that may be).

I decided on 128 x 90 resolution which scales up 10:8 to a full-screen 1280 x 720 resolution.

note: the border I just added to combat the light background on the page here.


And here it is scaled up to 640x360 ... the proportions change because width is scaled up 5X and height is scaled up 4X (that 10:8 scale ratio for fullscreen I mentioned above)


I keep telling myself "simplify... simplify". So I have made a few iterations to remove detail and try out different character sizes, etc. The above is what I am leaning toward at the moment.

Of course, I am still looking at colors including some intermediate colors used just to smooth transitions such as the mountains, sky and top of tree.

Anyway, I wondered what you folks do for ultra low res? Have you ever made a game in a ultra low resolution? By that I mean less than 256 x 144.

If so, what did you come up with?

I have played many PICO-8 games and some of those devs do some awesome work in the 128x128 resolution with a palette of only 16 colors.
I really like all of the little touches of polish they add to PICO-8 games. Just super simple stuff like solid color circle explosions and circle smoke and so forth but it just works probably because of the low resolution.

PICO-8 128x128 Fixed 16-Color Palette Games





And I also played many #lowrezjam games. Again there is some great stuff... (found some better GIFs for 64 FISTS)

#lowrezjam Games using 64x64 resolution



Anyway... I really like the idea of going what I call Ultra Low Res (ULR). For someone who doesn't want to spend weeks, months and years on graphics alone... yet still create a visually interesting game... I think ULR is the answer. Obviously, some attention, design and other effort is needed to produce something cool but this is different than iterating on a single character for days and weeks.

For me a game can have high resolution graphics even great art (as in looking at an image / single frame of animation in isolation) and still not be visually interesting. Yet other games can have lower resolution/simpler graphics etc and be much more visually interesting. So I place more importance on creating visual interest over raw art quality or tech stats.

What are your thoughts on it?

For a one man indi team so is it probably the sane way to go
Drawing grafix takes alot of time but still will not appeal to everyone..

I'm not sure pixelart really save that much of a workload. I tried redrawing your tree. It didn't take much time, since you had already done the heavy lifting in your pixelart, research, shape, color selection and such. I had the same experience when redrawing some pixelart textures. Pretty easy, since the actual work was done already!

To me, pixel art is just too much work with no appreciation in return!

Yes. Pixel art is raw art. You're relying solely on the artwork beeing "visually interesting", where hi-res artwork can get away with being mediocre.

Me, I'm aiming hard at the latter. "visually interesting" take effort, and in the end, people just think pixelart is super easy. "Oh, another indie pixilated shovelware". They forget that with lower resolution, each pixel gets much more significant.

But, I must admit that pixelart does save you from getting lost in the artwork. I think there's a reason pixelart is still in fashion in indie games.

Ever played "They Bleed Pixels"? Pretty great pixelart in that one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X42GIOfuYo

You did a painterly art style of tree not pixel art. But it still looks interesting.

For sure there are people who don't like pixel art but there are also a huge number of people that not only don't mind games using simple pixel art but even love pixel art. People who complain are just always the ones talking the loudest. But every year games are released with lowres pixel art that do very well.

A lot of the complaining about pixel art comes from game devs or wannabe game devs more than anyone else. There are a lot of these folks who view pixel art as "cheap" "lazy" and they brag about how they spent weeks (or even months!) creating one 3D character for their game (that almost always is never completed or even seen outside of screenshots!) but they also often dislike 2D games in general. Doesn't matter if HD art or whatever to them they think all Indies should be shooting for making AAA style games. Most live in a fantasy land where they think they are actually going to make a game like the latest AAA. Lol

Truth is Steam is filled with games with very well done (non pixel) art that have sold very poorly. People just can't easily point at them and say why they failed. So if they see a game uses pixel art they say "no wonder it sold so bad it uses pixel art" or if they see it is a 2D game they say "well it doesn't surprise me it sold so bad it is 2D people only want to play 3D games now"... and neither are true.

And a lot of this belief comes again from game developers making a not so great game that uses pixel art. The game doesn't sell as well as they hoped so they write articles and answer in interviews that nobody likes pixel art. Someone made a lot of noise about that talking about how they labored so long and gamers didn't appreciate their effort. Then a few months or so later Stardew Valley came out using Pixel Art and sold millions. So again a lot of the toxicity on Steam and Internet in general comes from game devs. They cannot accept they made a bad game or failed to market their game.

For me the choice of using ultra lowres pixel art is because I like it and second because it means I can better animate things and most importantly it means I can spend more time on the game itself. Adding more and hopefully better gameplay. Basically instead of spending 2 hours drawing one tree it makes more sense to me to spend 15 minutes drawing one tree and the other 1 hour 45 minutes creating more content and/or working on gameplay. Both of these directly benefit the player. More content more gameplay experience.

Pixel art can be a great choice for a small team or lone wolf.
You just have to differentiate yourself from all those people using "retro" as excuse for "I am not putting the effort in". (lots of those flooding the market currently)
In the end, it will come down to the quality of your artwork, even much more than in other styles, because you can't rely on the tech to pull you through. (totally agree to basicFanatic's post)

Great pixel art will be noticed, there are a lot of fans of the style around, me included.
Also agree to what GarBenjamin said about not listening too much to loud complainers. You are you, not them. Market research is good, listening to every complainer on the net is not.
You can succeed with any art style if it fits the game, you execute it well and your gameplay also holds up.
Looking forward to your results.

Great point @GaborD about the "I am not putting the effort in" approach. I probably should have clarified when I put "minimize workload while still creating visual interest" I don't mean making a super tiny game with hardly anything to it and then making graphics as quickly as possible calling it done and throwing it out on the market.

I mean reducing workload in the context of making good games takes a lot of effort and/or skill. While all team sizes need to manage the workload this is especially true for a solo developer and even more true for a solo developer that wants to go Indie instead of doing it solely as a hobby.

Basically it is like this... if I make a game completely as a hobby it really doesn't matter if I spend even 10 years working on it. It is a hobby. It doesn't need to bring in any money to cover the expense of all of that development time. If I spend 100 hours drawing and animating the player character it doesn't matter. If I spend 10 hours making a single tree again it does not matter.

In contrast... if I am doing it as a business (a solo Indie developer) it absolutely matters to a huge degree. If the money coming in doesn't at least cover the time I spent on development and marketing then I cannot even break even and stay afloat. So it becomes a question of where to spend the time. If I spend 10 hours on the player character and 1 hour on a tree that has either freed up 99 hours that can be spent on creating additional content or programming gameplay or audio or design etc OR it has reduced the cost of development to only 10% meaning the game only needs to bring in 1/10 the amount of money that it needed to generate in the other case. And of course more likely (and much preferred IMO) is to balance it out... perhaps reducing development cost to 1/3 to 1/5 and also producing a better game.

This is very different from just throwing together any ole thing as quickly as possible and then tossing it out on the market. I am talking about conscious deliberate decisions of if I put X time on this piece I either need to reduce time spent on other areas or the game must produce more money to warrant the cost of spending X hours on this one piece.

So it is a challenge of how to get the "most bang for the buck". Maximizing the value obtained from a given amount of time spent with the ultimate goal being to produce a good game at a reasonable development cost (so a person can afford to keep making games).

Again for hobby only none of this matters.