Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese industry
Article is missing one of the coolest screenshots showing how powerful it was the Sonic team using real TVs to test the game.Just got this one with an image search:https://i.stack.imgur.com/5FX88.pngThe version where you see "stripes" of blue, is the raw pixels, when you play on emulator you see that, for many years since I could only play on emulators, I thought the game art was weird and an a bizarre stylistic choice (the cartoon also had bizarre art so that was easy to believe).The first time I saw photos of people playing on CRT I was amazed, on how skilled the artists were, figuring out you could make a transparent waterfall by using vertical stripes if the user had a certain TV + Cable combo (I think the classic coaxial cable was the one most likely to produce this effect if I remember it correctly, seemly that cable worked in a way that it inherently always mixed two columns next to each other).Also many "retro" games make me sad, with them abusing "pixel art" without realizing that it was never about the pixels, some even go ahead and scale up their game to force pixels to be visible even on CRTs (stardewvalley for example scales the game up forcefully 4x, I did some modding of that game and tested what happen with the scaling disabled, the game could be much more beautiful).Also lots of people forgetting pixels weren't necessarily square, and just copy-pasting old games art and then not understanding why shields now are oval...EDIT: lots of hostility to my post it seems.1. I never said "all" retro games makes me sad, not even "most" of them, I said "many". I am a gamedev myself and understand the appeal of pixel art, including cheaper costs (it is much cheaper to draw pixel art than hightly detailed art).2. There are pixel-retro games that have really, really good art, even with no blurring or dithering, I never said there weren't.3. I didn't said all pixels were not square, I said pixels werent "necessarily" square, some of them were rectangular, some were triangular even! And some weren't even pixels at all (Vectrex for example).What bothers me is just many people could do better, but they just blunder ahead without understanding what they are trying to replicate, it doesn't make me "angry", just sad, because I see lots of great artists wasting their potential.Some mediums allow a lot of interesting things, for example when Donkey Kong came out, Nintendo loved the pre-rendered 3D look, and demanded their next game be that way, Myamoto (that was orignally hired by Nintendo as artist, NOT as game designer), then made Yoshi Island to be the extreme opposite: art that is obviously 2D, with a painted look. I just want to see more people pulling that sort of stuff, instead of replicating something they don't understand, when they clearly have skills to do better.