They touch up all the anims, and the rest is indeed 2D, Getting a good 3D to 2D is quite dificult live.

Jokes on you, I can't draw for sh*z

Hand drawn is harder than pixel art if you try drawing actual good art.

Owlboy is a super high bit game

So far I've found them similarly difficult to animate, just because Drawing takes a lot more animation frames to look right whereas a small sprite only needs 1 or 2 frames for the same action

Yes, this is absolutely true, I should have noted this, good of you to point it out. animating handdrawn is a horrible experience whereas animating in pixel art is actually kind of fun :)

@12feetup Personally I don't think it's my style, though it sounds interesting!

@@Nonsensical2D I've starting practicing pixel art recently, bought cheap a good course of it in Udemy, paused a bit at the start to just experiment with the initial stuff and see what could I make with my current limitations and already made 2 simple animations, more gifs than anything, nothing fancy but I did enjoyed the proccess quite a loot, while my previous attempt and hand drawn bassics where just frustrating.

As a profesional pixel artist i have to thats not exacttly right if You look Games like shovel knight sure. Yet if You look for more hi bit Games like berzeke boy or blasphemust the bigger the Sprite the harder and more time Will take to do animations i work with sprites. Bigger than 100*100 for animations and i found My selft like doing frame by frame and drawing from scrash many frames

@@RaphaWasHere since I'm here might has well take this opportunity, do you know where can I find good examples of pixel art to copy and have a practice? I've been searching for myself but I would be lying if I told you I'm not afraid if biting more than I can chew right now.

Agree i like to do pixel art but when is bigger si like man how can i make u undersstand that if You ask for good qualitty art and fast ? They are not exacttly going toguetter

Womp womp

As someone who isn't an artist and thinks making art for a game seems like an almost insurmountable obstacle I agree with this. It seems like there are a lot of pixel art games out there that seem like they had the same problem I have and decided to pick pixel art because they thought it would be easier and that just seems crazy too me. I've tried making some pixel art and it looks significantly worse than when I try to do hand drawn art. As was stated in the video pixel art is extremely punishing and at least for me is is very hard to identify exactly where the problematic element of an image is when using pixel art.

I agree, I don't like how the video seems to claim that hand drawn is easier though. I feel like this video swung all the way in the other direction claiming that simpler hand drawn styles are easy and don't need much effort to look good.

I agree, so the logical conclusion is that pixel art is EASIER than handrawing. By far. I've done both. This video is ridiculous. It's smelling their own farts. Yeah it limites the colors, shapes, lineart and many things but that also make it easier as your range of choice is... limited! I repeat, I've done both. No fucking way pixel art is easier. i'm sorry. This is echo-chamber thinking. This is gamedev subreddit in 2012-2014 when lots of morons used to post titles like "gamedev is the most difficult thing in the world" "john carmack had to quit gamedev fulltime to spend time crafting rocket... so rocket science is easier than game development!" Stupid, stupid way of thinking. There's a reason pixel art is the first choice of indie devs. Because hand drawing requires thousands of hours to practice to start being decent unless your're naturealy gifted. I was naturally gifted but I still had to practice. The excuse the dude on this video gave is "you have to apply the same principles, fundamentals in pixel art as in traditional art" yeah, but it still implies you have to apply those fundamentals in traditional art, per the same argument. Whatever you have to use in pixel art, you have to do so too in a piece of paper/tablet free drawing with your hand, but the latter is way harder.

@@Afreshio Interesting, if i wanted to learn pixel art, where do you think i should start ? I am not an artist, but i am a fast learner. Thanks!

@@Afreshio. Pixels are easier to make thats why many indies make pixel games and guess what they look shitty as fuck but pixel art is fucking difficult to master. There is not many pixel artist that can make owl boy level of pixel art. it takes forever... In handrawing art you have shit tons of space to work. You can do a lot of great cluster with just brushes alone. In High quality pixel art its you that need to create the texture via pixels. You make the cluster not the brush... Imagine how hard to do high quality pixel art.

C n

Using a large brush is exactly how it is suggested to approach loose painting styles like impressionism, or to achieve a looser style. As an artist that has drawn pixel art, painted impressionism, and hand drawn hyper-realism, I agree with you.

Definitely agree, I think Ori was the first modern metroidvania that I played as well. I think it is probably still my favorite (blind forest that is, I weirdly enough kind of preferred it to will o' the wisp). and I agree, there are lots of pixel art games and styles that I am really fond of, but I really don't want people to be afraid to pick up hand drawn :)

yooo carrion mention

I definitely should have mentioned animations, because as you say it is signicantly easier to do animations. But I think that is also why a lot of people do rigged animations in 2D instead of frame by frame, its an interesting topic which would have been nice talking about :) I personally really don't like making particle effects in pixel art compared to hand drawn (but it is probably just personal bias there)

Depends how complex the hand drawn sprite is. If it is the same complexity as a pixel sprite, I would say it takes about the same amount of time to animate. There is skeletal puppet animation if needed. Also, think about skill level and how that effects the speed of how long it takes you to animate or draw a sprite.

Hey I have a question if you don’t mind, I have no artistic skill whatsoever but I’m trying to make a pixel art game. Not because I think it’s easier but just because, to me, it’ll express the game better. Also, pixel art games have been one of my favorites since forever ago and that really motivated me to make one. I have a full story ready. I have boss ideas ready. My coding skills are… nonexistent really haha… but it’s been super super fun learning coding. I’m trying to make a 2d pixel art game, and so I’m here to ask, should I continue with pixel art? I have some people who are willing to help draw things and make it easier. Coding will be a pain. Everything will be a pain since I’m really a freshman to all this almost. Is pixel art the way to do it? I’m keen on doing this, and I honestly believe that I have a semi-enjoyable story. I’ll work on it, make it better of course, and have people review it, but I do think I have some good “lore.”

@@EEEEEE-wx6wp I understand that you want to make a Pixel Art game because you feel that's the correct aesthetic for your game, but with your limited confidence in your artistic skill, it's definitely better to hand-draw your assets. You will get a lot more mileage out of your creativity if you just hand draw cute little characters, and backgrounds, and etc. Pixel art requires a lot more precision and skill than people understand. Anyone can hand draw assets that look passable, but bad pixel art is glaringly obvious. I truly believe that the only advantage that pixel art gives you is that it's incredibly easy to make very fluid, dynamic, and seamless animations with it compared to hand-drawn. If you have limited artistic skill, don't care as much about seamless animations, and have truly no experience with pixel art, then I would recommend just doodling out your characters. You might even find that you like it more. If you're still sold on Pixel Art for your game then the other option would be to either 1. Hire artists, 2. Buy assets online, or 3. Find free assets online, and then take those assets and learn to animate them yourself. Because the hard part of Pixel Art is creating it. After it has been created it is very easy to animate it. Give it a shot, watch some animation tutorials. I'm sure you can pull it off. The animations don't even need to be that complicated.

@@Vesdus Thank you for replying. Pixel art seems like the way to go for me. I’ll definitely check the other styles there are, as in hand drawing things, to see what I like best. Animating will be fun to learn, I’ve seen some interesting things and I’m excited to learn that. I see the characters vividly and clearly in my head, I just need to… well.. express it artistically. It’s like having story but no words to write a book with. I just need to learn “words,” metaphorically speaking. Thank you, this has helped me a lot.

I process information pretty quickly in general, i watch most videos at speeds of 1,25 to sometimes even 1,75. I've never had any problems following your explanations, even though i'm pretty unfamiliar with gamedev lingo. Your explanation, pronunciation and pacing is really solid. You do make a lot of points in quick succesion but by coming back to the main point often it becomes clear imo. All of this to say that for me the videos are great. For people with less proficient English it might be different though.

Thanks for the input!

@@Nonsensical2D I agree, if it would be past, people can stop it or slow it down. I personally learned Blender from Lazy Tutorials of Ian Hubert, which are 1 minute videos shrinking several hours of content, and without them I am sure I'd have never learned blender. So fast pacing is never bad :D

Thanks for informing, I checked it vs the original and it is a small audio bug I say "the same environment" but 'same' got cut out when exporting I think. Ye, I think handanimating is generally not advisable in terms of speed xD. But rigging is generally quite a decent approach in terms of speed if doing HD. But I should definitely have mentioned it in the video.

@@Nonsensical2D The Cut-Out/Rigging/Skeletal Animation could be an interesting topic to explore. Have you done a video on that or is that something you are less interested in? Thank you!

Wrong. There are principles like perspective and fundamentals in anatomy, and something like shape design to help you get the proportions and perspective right. You can play with that if you're experience enough, but that's another thing. Cartoonist do this everyday. But it's noticeable when there's a mistake in perspective and anatomy that makes it look off if you account first for the art style of the artist in question. If you have your eyes training is glaringly obvious. I'm seeing this shit take on AI "artists" outputting crap and saying is the best shit ever, not even noticing the glaring mistakes. But that's on them for not studying some fundamentals first and thinking writing some prompts makes them an artist. BTW I know what you mean by using more geometry and perfect shapes in pixel art. But you can do so in traditional art. You just lack the know-how and knowledge in art history for example, but there's definitely a plethora of artist that use them. There are tools to draw them, in digital and traditionals arts (like rulers!). But I also get it that many people start with hand drawing and traditional art (especially is using color, which is another dimension by itself) and can feel the world is too fuzzy, there are not many guidelines (which is a given in pixel art: the super small damn grid), and it can look intimidating. It just takes practice and knowledge of fundamentals. Then you'll know how to draw your own guidelines, grids (if you want), special tools, etc.

If you do pixel art, your game will most likely be ignored by 99% of people, unless you become godly good at it which takes like 5-10 years. Whereas, hand drawn people will flock to your game even if your hand drawn isn't super good, but just passable.

Ye, this is pretty much my stance as well. Weirdly enough I kind of get choice paralysis when doing pixel art, I think some of it is just practice :) Yes I'd be totally fine with you recreating it :) , I do want to note one of the important aspects though which is time, the scene is still quite far below what I would consider 'the best I could do', but I really don't like the idea of releasing stuff that is so worked on that you couldn't possibly make a game out of it. I think having a mentality of quick but decent enough is quite important as a 'solo game artist'.

from what I've read the upfront costs are a bit high. and that kind of makes sense, 3D in general tend to have moderately high up front costs, but the benefits generally come with scale. So for games like dead cells it makes total sense, they need to make an insane amount of animations, lots of different weapons and types of attacks, lots of different enemies and making those animation by hand would be insane just due to the sheer volume. But if you have very simple enemies with attack animation consisting of only three frames, then I think that doing them by hand would be significantly faster. So i would approach it from a "expected time" to develop. If we assume the 3d model and system takes 200 hours to develop and if for my entire game I only needed to make about 120 animation frames, then I would probably do it by hand in aseprite, since I could make 120 frames in less than 100 hours. but If I needed to make something like a 1000 frames, then that upfront cost of 200 would eventually pay off, plus it will be significantly more flexible once you have it.

Ohh, thanks :) I appreciate it ^^

Ye, I agree there aren't that many that do hand drawn, you have Nic the Thick (who does more devlog style), Andrew & Giacomo Pinnical (who do a mix), and then Trent Kainuga, but I agree, there are a bit too few both games and game developers that seem to want to do hand drawn :)

Ye, it is a matter of taste and preference, I just don't think people should skip going for hand drawn out of fear that it would be too difficult :)

As a player I'm personally not very forgiving of "bad" pixel art (or any kind of art style I don't like). I'll get over it if the rest of the game is engaging enough, but I won't say "oh it's pixel art so I don't care". However, making something look decent doesn't have to be that difficult. Here's what I want you to keep in mind constantly: - readability, both from a gameplay standpoint of things not blending together, having contrast or any way of telling things apart at a glance, and from a recognizability standpoint, someone who isn't you needs to be able to understand what you're representing and you need to know what the object would look like realistically in your head. - consistency, assets need to have a consistent resolution, there needs to be a logic to how you draw things and what things you draw in what style. Understanding the rules of how you drew something (outline, shading, texturing) and them applying them consistently so things look harmonious.

For me its the reverse. With hand drawn you need to draw every individual frame. With pixelart you can build off the next frame by using the first

@@Mewdo45 Well, that's a good point. But the same thing can actually be applied for hand-drawn animation. The neat trick when I animate my assets is I sketch the key pose first, duplicate the frames and use the selection tool to adjust parts of the sprite's body to match the animation of my choice. The only time the process gets long is when I start outlining and coloring the animation.

Both is hard, but only one looks incredibly good looking and smooth while the other looks like garbage in my opinion. I am talking about pixel art, it looks like garbage and any game made with it I avoid playing lol.

@@Mk2kRaven Nah, there are a lot of pixel art games that look a lot better than some hand-drawn games out there. This one might be subjective, but a game like Iconoclasts has beautiful pixel art that fits the theme of the game. 🙂

Ye, my previous video before this one called how to learn game art covers quite a bit on how to get started.

I might perhaps use short snippets of it in general videos. But I am becoming more wary of doing art analysis of single games, They generally require the most amount of work of any videos and people usually don't want to watch them. It's definitely an interesting game though so I'm considering buying it.

Ye, I think this is a huge aspect of it feeling easier. For me personally I have worked on those things so much when doing hand drawn that when I do pixel art I just get annoyed because what I think "should work" (according to my hand drawn intuition) simply doesn't work that well in pixel art, my intuition is sort of thrown off.

​@@Nonsensical2D Speaking of characters, can you make a dedicated video on character design in HD? There's very few tutorials about how to draw a good full HD style character because everything the light touches is pixel art haha. Just some tips and some technical details such as the size of the character etc would be great, thanks so much for all of the cool content.

I do have two videos on how I designed both the demon and the mushroom character. But I didn't really go into technical details. I might touch on it again in the future, but I have quite a few videos I am working on already that I have to finish :)

I used aseprite to make the pixel art :)

Ye, I've only seen it refer to the character itself, so I believe the environment is drawn, but from what I've read on the 3D process it is definitely much more complex than a sprite sheet, its just more flexible once finished :) From what I recall they even started out with a sprite sheet before they made the 3D version

I have been thinking about making a video on it. I think the topic overall is quite complex. You can see quite a few interesting examples on horizon lines, wonderboy is an example that looks awesome. But the problem is often that horizonlines start to look weird as soon as you have to deal with any verticality. And platformers almost always have a lot of verticality

@@Nonsensical2D exactly, its a difficult task to handle. however without perspective things look flat and shitty so i think at least some major assets have to deal with it in some way. but many times i see things on the floor have perspective and also architecture - especially doors, windows and openings are drawn from below (we can see the bottom of window frames etc) - i see it even in hollow knight now. and its super confusing from the artist standpoint - camera will always scroll so it defies many classical rules

Hmm, I think what I generally believe in is to just try and draw/make a game and apply what you know, and then as you encounter problems you iterate and iterate until you slowly improve. This way you will largely look up how to solve problems that you are actually having, and so most of your improvements directly impact what you are making. There is a risk that when you just casually 'learn' game dev by passively looking and practicing, that you learn a lot of skills that are cool, but don't really benefit you in the game you are making. With that said, there are a few decent resources and youtube and stuff and I actually recommend watching pixel artists talk about art but then apply what they teach to handdrawn. So some examples are: AdamCYounis, Saultoons, Reece Geofroy, Pixel Overload.

@@Nonsensical2D Thank you a lot, that was really informative :)

This was also a huge issue for me as well a long time ago. But at the end of the day, some rules used for pixel art assets came in handy for hand-drawn assets, by setting up a tilemap for hand-drawn assets.

Hmm, games like hollow knight, tails of iron, or what I'm doing don't actually loop art using any parallax script. As you say it would look terrible. Instead you stage the scene by hand, carefully placing assets where it looks good. The asset itself might repeat somewhere else, but its position in the scene won't be repeated, but will have to be placed by hand. If you do this for your entire game you don't actually have to transition between scenes, but it could generally good to do so for the sake of performance anyway. (I have a video on how I do this pseudo-3D look in Godot, but in unity you would actually set up your scene in 3D space)

@@Nonsensical2D oh thank you but You Do use parallaxing on the background each scene then... right?

@@maotrax1163 Yes, for sure. but if you want to transition scenes you can just do it with a "teleport function" of sorts. but I don't think the problem of repetitiveness occurs if you hand place each asset.

I think the artstyle overall is really nice, but I think it would do better in 1080p or 4k resolution. Being able to see individual does make it a bit more unclean and childlike (the character outlines look really unsmooth since they are only a pixel thick), which can be a benefit to a style like this, but it also drags down the aesthetics (in my opinion) and I overall think the game would probably do better as HD.

@@Nonsensical2D yeah, I see why Pizza tower could look better in HD, mostly with how pizza tower's art style is mostly inspired by ren and Stimpy. But personally I think the pixel art and hand drawn combined style helps it stand out from games like Cuphead, and the art style makes the game more modding friendly, because you would not need to get high priced animation software to make custom sprites for modding the game.

Yes, the channel "makin' stuff look good' has a really nice and quick write-up on it as well for those curious to learn more about it :)

I think generally you don't want to build your art step by step with building blocks which you might do with pixel art and Minecraft buildings (though I don't recommend this for pixel art either). I think generally you want to try and just throw something onto the screen, avoid having a blank canvas, and then you step by step fix it by redrawing or drawing on top of what you have already done. What I'm essentially saying is just start with a sketch, don't worry about it being ugly, it's kind of supposed to be. It's easier to fix something when you have something to fix.

Hmm, why do you feel like setting the canvas size is bad? With that said, if i am making several drawings in the same document i sometimes turn on the grid feature so that you get a grid with 256x256 squares to draw inside. I have a video on kind of this topic called ”what size should your assets be”.

@@Nonsensical2D Good point, I should've elaborated :) Basically what I meant is that if I set the canvas size to 256x256 to draw a bush, for example, I only see that bush and I can't work on composition of the scene. Whereas with vector graphics, I can have my whole scene on the same canvas, and I can adjust the size of each element individually. The grid sounds like a useful tool! There probably isn't a way to make something snap to it though, right? I.e, still need to eyeball the outer areas to make sure you are not "painting outside the lines" (although I guess you can get pretty close still)

There are snap to grid features that should be able to help in most drawing softwares. As for having your whole scene on the same canvas, I personally don't think it works that well with raster graphics, I do quite often have them in the same canvas, but I generally avoid setting up the scene due to scaling issues as you mentioned. But I think that if you just set up your scene really early on, then you can go constantly back and forth between the scene and the drawing and kind of get a similar effect, it won't be perfect though. But you can see me do it quite often. I think my "ghost song art analysis" video mentions how I do it in practice. @@CherryPoppinz

Lovely, thank you very much for the reply and the insights :) I realize I am probably making "perfect" out to be the enemy of "good enough". I'll try and watch that video and follow your other tips! Thank you for the content as well, there's not that much out there in this space, much appreciated! @@Nonsensical2D

I tend to start with 7-10 for the base of the scene. It tends to be enough to get the vibe kind of where I want it. On occasion you might need a few more to add some details or unique assets, but at that point you know what you need and why. Starting small tends to make it easier to ensure that you reuse assets as much as possible and it also helps keep the scene unified.

@@Nonsensical2D do you have LinkedIn or any other social media because I would like to show my concept art of my game so.

I have a reddit account with the same username as this

Oh! Just realized someone else made a similar comment, sorry about that!

That's the tough part. You'd have to invest a lot of money in a scanner or invest a lot of money in a drawing tablet.

Ye, I realize in hindsight that perhaps I should have talked about it, but I didn't think about it at the time. As far as I've understood the article, the background is still hand drawn , and the animations are 3D models exported into sprites (it reads that way at least). but regardless, the workflow for the animations would be entirely different so its not that good of an example.

Cuphead is a bit of an outlier in a sense but kind of also make my point. Pixel art often adds a lot of restrictions that can be hard to follow, and the ability to skip those restrictions when doing hand drawn can often make hand drawn easier. But the creators of cuphead went kind of insane and added a lot of restrictions to hand drawn instead, and literally do traditional paper animations, I actually kind of can't believe they managed to put it all together as well as they did xD

I know the character is made using a 3D workflow, but from the article I read about it by "gamedeveloper" the model gets light adjustments which are then precomputed and exported into sprites, and I think the background itself is fully 2D with a 2d workflow (but I haven't seen any articles on it).

it just depends on the pixel resolution you want, but you generally want to pick a resolution that will scale well with 720, 1080, 1440 and 4k. Because those resolutions tend to be the resolutions of our monitors. (if you pick other sizes your pixels will scale unevenly)

I mean I definitely don't have that much experience with it. but once again, I don't think you should go for "the best quality you can make". Chrono trigger, final fantasy 6 etc, were made by teams, even though I could probably do that type of art, I wouldn't finish a game like that all alone. We can argue that my pixel art looks bad, but it looks bad and is more difficult for me to do than my hand drawn art. Chrono trigger style would just be infinitely more difficult and time consuming, and if I spent that time on hand drawn, then I could probably get really good results there as well.