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[Cobralad]

yeah, shovel knight is not the best pixelart at times. For example some background bricks have 5 colors for no reason and some graphics looks like it belongs on pc engine.

[battlerager]

I guess I'm in the minority when I say I think shovel knight looks fugly.

*cough* King Knight stage *cough*

[zilluss]

Shovel Knight's graphics didn't bother me, because I don't like "Pixel Art" in general. I criticize the animations (or lack thereof). However, the gameplay was really good. They took the things that already worked in the best NES games and distilled it to a great game. They create nostalgia with their tight controls and unforgiving platforming sequences. The first comment in the linked article is spot-on:
> what i missed from Retro gaming is the Challenging games without the insulting handholding.

[starsrift]

There's a difference between good pixel art and bad.

Speaking as someone who's been consciously gaming since 1984, you people and your 'retro' fashion is crazy, for multiple reasons. Honestly, for the most part, I'm with CA. That said, if someone came up with a straight internet-co-op version of Swords of Twilight (affectionately known as Swords of Toilet), I'd buy it in an instant.

[MeshGearFox]

Justin Retreau

[beetleking22]

The point of retro is to mimic an aesthetic, shovel knight gets it the best and most indies imitate it to certain degrees of success, intentionally or not. Also, nostalgia and references.

Pixel art is one of my long time hobby and If I make game.. People might think that Im trying to make it for sake of retroness.. Even thought I would make it because Im poor & Im pixel artist and I love games..

[s0]

yeah, shovel knight is not the best pixelart at times. For example some background bricks have 5 colors for no reason and some graphics looks like it belongs on pc engine.

otoh its better than most retro platformers with "good" pixel art. i mean obviously as a dev you have to sort out your priorities and shovel knight is a fair compromise between good game and good looking (to me) art.

also i don't really understand why it has to be 100% authentic to some ancient console's limitations to be good pixel art. if NES devs had had the ability to use 5 colors for backgrounds, you can bet they would have used them. people making modern shit inspired by old styles have the benefit of hindsight.

[Schoq]

some games (like later megaman games) would use a sprite overlay for background elements with five or six colours
of course it'd lag the game and flicker like shit but they still did it.

[J-Snake]

also i don't really understand why it has to be 100% authentic to some ancient console's limitations to be good pixel art.

I personally don't have much sympathy for the nes but I can explain the nature of the involved mindset here. It's a kind of sport to work within limitations, possibly mixed with a bit of nostalgia. On a similar note, the demo scene made it a sport to drive impressive 3D effect shows by only few kbytes of code. You can often achieve far better effects with conventional methods which eat a lot more ressources, but from the sportive point of view it isn't an impressive feat.

[s0]

fair enough.

[zilluss]

They deliberately chose not to participate in this sport: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidDAngelo/20140625/219383/Breaking_the_NES_for_Shovel_Knight.php

some games (like later megaman games) would use a sprite overlay for background elements with five or six colours
of course it'd lag the game and flicker like shit but they still did it.

Mega Man (5, and probably some others) on Gameboy managed to achieve this on a gray scale 

[s0]

They deliberately chose not to participate in this sport:

yeah i know. that's what i meant with devs having to sort out priorities. either you can stick to limitations and make a game that impresses the small handful of nerds who actually care about that (nothing WRONG with that btw) or you can choose to break limitations when needed because it's more practical.

i mean to me, retro games are best when they "remix" or update elements from the past or explore things older games only touched upon (la mulana would be an example). like i said, benefit of hindsight. most of the time, if i wanted to play an old game (which i dont do often anyways), i would just play an actual old game rather than an "authentic" retro game.

[Kolba]

It's not just the aspect of "sport" which entices some people to work within limitations. It's an oft-used adage that limtitations breed creativity, and many artists would agree with it. Many iconic character designs were born of memory limitations that restricted the artist's available palette, the most famous being Mario. Composers had few sound channels and only chip sounds, or low quality samples, which forced the crafting of strong, memorable melodies. These have mostly been lost in non-indie modern titles, with their filmy orchestral bombast. And limitations fed into the game design itself; this is mentioned in the Shovel Knight post, where the developers kept the sprite count low - originally a NES restriction - which contributed to the distilled purity of the gameplay, then and now.

One thing does annoy me about retro-fetishism, and it's that designers are liable to eschew innovation in favour of nostalgia: they'd sooner recreate the past, than simply borrow from the past in creating something original.

[J-Snake]

It's not just the aspect of "sport" which entices some people to work within limitations. It's an oft-used adage that limtitations breed creativity

Well, that's the sport;)

[Superb Joe]

megaman sucks shit and it's a moral victory that the people who gave that japanese guy millions of dollars to rip off his own game suddenly went WHuhh... WGhat the fheck??? this game is bad! when they changed the robot a bit and now they all cry daily

[Schoq]

what I enjoy the most is watching them construct elaborate conspiracy theories in order to somehow blame the failure on the fact that the community manager wasn't a man/asian

[Superb Joe]

what I enjoy the most is watching them construct elaborate conspiracy theories in order to somehow blame the failure on the fact that the community manager wasn't a man/asian

i dont know anything about this but any body who gave mega number 9 money is my ideological enemy

[Koobazaur]

I feel that some games, because of the technology and freedom begin to abuse it too much and sometimes lose creativity. You look at Mega Man's design, he has more than 4 colors which were the limit for sprites. So they programmed the game to draw another sprite for his face. Shovel Knight on the other hand has some colors the NES could never emulate.

I think it would be fun making a game under the late 80s/early 90s era of gaming. Just to see how it would effect my choices when constructing gameplay, since the sky really is the limit today.

I'm actually reading Masters of Doom which is the story of id Software going all the way to John Carmack and Romero's childhood, and it's cool to read how the technological development inspired their design. "Holy crap we figured out how to do first person in 3D, WHAT CAN WE DO WITH IT?"

It's true that processing power is no longer a limiting factor for most indies and, as you say, with great power comes great responsibility. But it's also harder for devs simply because of TOO much freedom (look up paradox of choice). Myself, I have like 10+ fleshed out game design docs ready for production, but knowing each one will take months of dedicated work makes it difficult to choose. Especially when eventual self-doubt and "what if the other one was better?" sets in.

i also don't have a particular fondness for "simplicity" or 2d games. my first ever system was a a gameboy and even on that my favorites tended to be the mechanically more "complex" games like zelda link's awakening or pokemon. i never thought 2d platformers were be all end all, i just played them because there were so many of them that it was almost unavoidable. i wasn't that enthusiastic about videogames as a small kid and didn't really become a "gamer" until i first played mario 64.

You're not the only one, I dont play sidescrollers for that reason, and even sandboxing of Skyrim and GTA starts to bore me quickly. Some of my favorites are Troika's Arcanum and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines for their sheer complexity and depth. Terribly flawed gems, sure, but gems nonetheless.

[s0]

bloodlines is the freaking best. i got bloodlines and half life 2 the same week and guess which one i played more? this was pre-fan patches too.

anyway i noticed my post comes off as kinda hating platformers lol. that's not that case at all, there are plenty of platformers i like a lot. i just don't really care about them as a genre. like, for instance, i won't check out a new game just because it's a platformer the way i do with roguelikes.

[Sik]

(EDIT: wtf is there a way to link to videos without them getting embedded?!)

I'm actually reading Masters of Doom which is the story of id Software going all the way to John Carmack and Romero's childhood, and it's cool to read how the technological development inspired their design. "Holy crap we figured out how to do first person in 3D, WHAT CAN WE DO WITH IT?"

That's literally the logic that went behind

and

, come up with a dumb effect then find some use for it.

But yeah, limitations are fun, it's just that people are bad at coming up with interesting limitations on modern hardware =P I mean, something like coming up with an unorthodox way to make graphics could probably make for a good set of limitations and look novel.