Skill-Building Series: Pixel Art and Animation in the Hi-Bit Age

[Music] hello folks and welcome to gbc 2020 summer conference this talk is part of the skill building series and is pixel art and animation in the high bit age our host is tyrique noted pixel artist with some sharp looking titles under his belt i am joel couture and i will be moderator for this session now tyrique here's the floor hello i am tyrik plummer i make games um i have a few goals for this session because i have a lot of thoughts and feelings about pixel art and animation in the hybrid age which is why i named the talk that uh the first goal is to kind of lay out the role of pixel art in modern games and define what it means to be in the hybrid age the second goal is to provide some examples of contemporary pixel art that i think are pushing the medium and its aesthetic potential forward and the final goal is to give specific technical insight and

advice into how to actually make pixel art with a live demonstration but first who am i uh i'm a game designer and artist who's been making pixel art since i was a wee lad i've done pixel art for a number of games including 4ds epic mickey power of illusion adventure time explore the dungeon because i don't know most recently i've done work on cadence of hyrule and ufo 50 and i've also spent a not insignificant portion of my soul working for an unhealthy number of years on my platformer roguelike catacomb kids all this is to say i really like pixel art and i think i'm not terrible at it which is about the highest praise i'm willing to afford myself so that's pretty good um all that being said what is high bit art um oops i forget to go forward this is cadence of hyrule a game i worked on uh this is catacomb kids my game my beloved precious baby um what is

hybit art uh the term was coined by simon anderson also known as snake who is an incredibly skilled pixel artist and the creator of owlboy he coined the term to describe modern pixel art that his quote pushed beyond the limitations of the old formats and quote operates beyond the limitations of the old 8 16 and 30 bit uh 32-bit consoles uh when i tell people i do pixel art even people within the games industry a lot of times they're like oh you mean like 16-bit stuff or like snes type stuff and increasingly these comparisons just don't make sense anymore because we as pixel artists aren't confined by the hardware limitations of those old systems of 16 and 18 bit hardware so to say i do that kind of art would kind of be a lie or a misnomer there's a tendency to think that pixel art immediately equates to nostalgia and while that is kind of a large part of its appeal to a lot of people uh i think that to assume that nostalgia is the primary force behind pixel

aesthetics ignores all the work done by pixel artists in the meantime to push the medium forward in the intervening stretch of time between nostalgia and now like that whole time period existed and pixel artists did too and they've been making progress for a long time the first thing to understand is that pixel art isn't just a style of art it's a medium and like any medium it can contain and convey a multitude of styles and aesthetics and equally importantly like any medium pixel art has continued to evolve alongside newer technologies and tools in the same way that photography didn't make painting obsolete but shifted its context the computation the computing power that has made high resolution and complex 3d art and games possible hasn't made pixel art obsolete but it has shifted its context uh so that's the end of the preamble with out of the way let's look at some examples of hybrid uh modern art

and uh at this point uh joel if you have any questions about the particular games that i'm bringing up feel free to ask away um will do so this is uh retro city rampage uh a lot of so even though i know i just said that nostalgia isn't the primary driving force behind pixel art it is still a big part of of uh what what people find appealing about it and some games some modern games really play into that uh that perception uh this being one of them uh retro city rampage uh yeah it's just it looks looks old it kind of emulates the aesthetic of old nes games uh to evoke those same feelings of of the hardware limitations i think there's actually even a version of retro city rampage that will run on an nes but um that's not to say that it hasn't taken the lessons uh that pixel artists have learned and the techniques that they've

developed uh since the time of the nes and incorporated them into their aesthetic as well uh always awakening is another example of a modern retro looking game that uses pixel art very much in the sort of zelda 2 style looking uh uh ufo 50 which is a game that i'm working on uh is an another game that sort of leans into the the perception of pixel art as having a retro uh association and aesthetic to it uh so for ufo 50 we're working with a made-up restrictions for an imaginary console essentially um but you know sometimes we can bend and break those restrictions because we're not actually working with the hardware uh you know so we can we give ourselves a little leeway

uh when it comes to certain aspects of like oh this will just make the game better or make make this more readable or make this make more sense and that sort of thing uh so there aren't any like like we're roughly following some color color restrictions and that sort of thing in terms of how many colors per tile we can use um and we try to keep you know sprites to a relative minimum uh because old old hardware had uh limited sprites per scan line and that sort of thing which caused the flickering that happened uh but we don't really have those limitations so they're really self-enforced and if we don't enforce them then the game just is what it is another this is another ufo 50 game um so beyond the games that sort of lean into the retro aesthetic i think there are also a number of games that sort of display a virtuosic uh nature to pixel art where it's just

really dang good just normal pixel art nothing super fancy going on uh this is hartforth alicia alicia one of those um currently in development um another sort of long running development game that makes me feel more at home with catacomb kids which i've been working on for a very long time um but this is just a really good looking game that just has very good pixel art and i think that is another sort of trend of modern pixel art games is that people have taken the lessons that have been learned over the past decades of of uh techniques and and and uh sort of introspection into the medium and taken them to their natural heights more heart for felicia i'm really looking forward to that game um uh icon class would be another example that i would say falls into that category it's just it doesn't do a whole lot that's extremely fancy it's just very good um and

you can see that the screen size for this is like significantly larger than a lot of other pixel art games and this the real estate uh to match modern displays uh so that's another another trend that's that's kind of happening to uh modern pixel art is that the artists are having to adapt to more modern displays that aren't like you know tiny crts or very small like mobile phone screens and that sort of thing so we have a lot more real estate to work with and sometimes that can be a challenge because when you have more real estate to work with you have to work harder to make it interesting and fill it up in ways that are aesthetically pleasing owlboy as mentioned created by uh the uh coin coiner coiner coiner of the term high bit uh is another example of just virtuosic uh pixel art very pretty game

and then we have things that that um combine uh pixel art with other sort of uh medium so this is octopath traveler which combines pixel art with um 3d and you can see it does something like combining pixel art with 3d isn't super new that's been a thing since you know playstation one era and i think breath of wild four uh had a really good look look about it uh but you can see this is using a lot more modern techniques like using the depth of field to blur the background and a lot of like really soft lighting effects and kind of a the vignetting at the edge of the screen um that gives it a really unique look and appearance uh the the all the textures you can see on the in the environment are still uh pixeled uh which keeps them uh which keeps everything feeling grounded in the same same sort of style

now this is another example of a game in development called zealot which combines pixel art with um 3d uh environments and this is a game called uh the last night which is also in development it looks kind of crazy but you can definitely see there's there's pixel pixels happening and um this is kind of a combination of i think like virtuosic talent and and and aesthetic with the um extremely modern like combination combination of 3d and depth of field and all the lighting effects and all that sort of thing i've never really seen anything like this so i'm curious to see how this actually turns out once it's finished there's also a game developer named chloe also super blizzard on twitter who combines again sort of combining the two things of nostalgia and retro

aesthetics with uh 3d art this picture is really tiny i'm sorry let me see if i can make it bigger there we go there we go um uh so yeah like combining 3d with these retro aesthetics and keeping everything quite chunky and i think i think this is a really fun good look more work by the same same developer tyrique if you don't mind me interrupting um you've shown quite a bit of flexibility with this style for uh very different things uh what draws you to continually work in pixel art and to use it in so many unique ways um that's a great question i find the limitations of working in low res resolution um kind of conducive to creativity

um working in lower resolutions uh like sort of limits my decision space when it comes to to certain things but at the same time as you said there is a lot of flexibility in it and so i feel like a lot of times i have to come up with creative solutions uh and creative uh creative ways to solve visual problems in pixel art that uh in other media there's a little more leeway and so those restrictions are kind of uh harder not harder to come by like you can always make restrictions for yourself but i find the the particular restrictions of of pixel art are are engaging to me in the way that they force you to think about the way you use details and uh how to represent uh things in such a small real estate um and as well i think that as i'm showing that there's still a lot of exploration in the space to be done and i want to be a part of that process

uh so this is a game uh still in development called acid knife by the developers of crawl um and as you can see it's got a lot going on in terms of like there's a lot of like shader effects that are kind of melting and blending the world around in in in the the dark sections like that's not video artifacting that's just how the game looks um which i find really fascinating is the idea of taking pixel art and then manipulating it after the fact with these post-processing effects that still uh maintain the aesthetic and stay in the style and resolution of these games but while uh expanding what's what's possible and beyond what what you know could be normally done by just human hands working on it on single frames of game and that sort of thing there's another still shot of the game uh radio universe radio the universe is another sort of

game that has a lot of post-processing effects and glitchy sort of styling to it also still in development a lot of these games are still in development i guess i just like games that aren't out yet but um yeah i think this is a really good example of of a game that just takes the pixel aesthetic and sort of twists it and and like leans really heavily into it while still being its own completely unique thing uh you can see it looks like it went through like a lot of like photoshop filters and what have you there's some chromatic aberration on the numbers where the rgb channels are kind of slightly separated um uh megasphere is i think what i would say is another sort of combination of virtuosic uh pixel art combined with a lot of like these shader effects and whatnot um it uses like normal

mapping to to use lighting on the actual environment and characters and there's a lot of uh you can see like there's a lot of like glowing lights that aren't strictly in um in the uh resolution as the sprites and and stuff um and i think this is one of the few games i've seen that does like resolution mixing in that way really well in a way that isn't detrimental so yeah i think it looks kind of kind of wild and really good um more of it uh carrion is another game that um uses the pixel aesthetic and pixel art but combines it with a highly procedurally animated uh like main character protagonist kind of hesitant to call it

that your big meat blob that goes around killing things and escaping labs and what have you um but yeah you can see like like this this meat blob is very procedurally animated like all the tentacles and such are just kind of whipping and lashing out in various ways willy-nilly uh but it's all still within the same sort of uh lower resolution pixel aesthetic and you can also see that the uh the lighting coming through the windows is is sort of something that wouldn't have necessarily existed in uh older old older hardware and on pixel art games uh pathway yet another example i think of uh virtuosic mixing with modern technology technology the um as far as i understand it like the this game has uh like a whole lighting engine where basically they

combine uh pixel art with voxels so to to make the the uh tiles and and and elements in the game have actual volume volumetric lighting uh which is something i've never seen before and it's really fascinating to so like all these walls and characters cast actual shadows because they're technically voxel bodies that just aren't being drawn and instead are being drawn as pixel art uh which i think is a really clever solution to that and uh so that's the end of that's kind of the end of of that sort of uh look over existing existing um games that are they're doing things there's a lot more out there there's by by no means a uh all-encompassing extensive list um and uh yeah i just wanted to kind of run through a few of those things before i started getting into the actual practical application of of the pixels so

any questions about any of that or what's what's up oh we've got some about uh what's your favorite software to use for developing high bit modern art ah fantastic question and an excellent segue so there are a number of programs that exist for uh pixel art my personal favorite is graphic scale which is free it used to not be it used to be 20 bucks and i got it when it was when it wasn't free but it's free now um i like it a lot i've used it for like a decade over a decade which is kind of weird to say um that i've been doing this for that long uh but um you can see it right now because this is if you want to go back to my screen um this is a character that i drew a while ago uh the giraffian because he's a giraffe

and a ruffian hahaha i'm proud of that um and so i was like i need something to pixel for this dang stream so uh for this this talk rather um so i chose this guy and i made a little tiny sprite of him and this is what graphic scale looks like um there are a lot of other uh programs uh that exist um uh a sprite is one of them that i know a lot of people use uh it's a more recent one um uh i really like the timeline in a sprite for like animating and that sort of thing it's much more akin to i think like a flash timeline if you're familiar with that um and it also lets you like separate multiple uh different animations without having to have completely separate files for them so that that's one another one is pixel edit which i've only used a very little bit of um but seems really promising and i

might actually consider transferring to that if if i uh put enough work and effort into learning how it works uh it has some neat features like being able to move around uh layers in an animated fashion so that you can like animate a face and then like have it stick to the character and then if you want to make a change to the face you'd only have to change one frame and then it changes on every frame it has some really neat features like that so pixel at it spelled with a y p y x e l um if you're looking for software that might be one to check out um another one promotion i've heard is is one that people use i've never personally used it but um i've heard it's decent and good and has been around for quite a while uh similar to how graphic scale has so yeah there's a lot of software out there uh graphics cl is one i use just because it's what i'm most familiar with yeah

and i figured if i'm going to be doing this live i should use the one use the program that i'm that i'm quickest in so let's do some animating and i can answer some questions if if anybody has them oh so another more actually i have more to say about this so i made this made this draft guy uh and i was like oh yeah let me just animate this guy and i was like wait a second this is a lot of detail i don't know if i can do this in 45 minutes now around 20. so um i like simplified the shading and i was like ah that's not actually going to help that much so we'll see how far i get with this um but i think one of the one of the important things to to understand about pixel art is that like the lack and and presence of certain details can really like uh make and break a sprite like

as an example like um if i had like a ball about like that big let's say let's say like this is my entire sprite right like i just got like a little ball this big um and i want him to have buttons on his belly you know like let's say let's say this is a little happy face right here um one thing like about pixel art is is the um the fact that you're working with such small resolutions means that the uh units of size are like significant relative to the to the scale of the entire piece so like these these buttons here if i want them to have like a curved belly like these buttons like a single pixel is all i need to get that impression across right um and so the same the same applies for like these these larger sprites and that sort of thing like i if i come back uh if i come back here you can see like

i this is supposed to be like a little pocket zipper thing uh that i just kind of alternated darker and lighter pixels on to get the zipper effect across but if i'm going to have to be working on this and animating it i don't want to necessarily have to render that every frame so i just simplified it to a single line there's a lot of anti-aliasing around his edges and that sort of thing that if i'm going to be rendering is going to take time uh it's not going to actually affect the process of animating it because animation is uh like more focused on on the the actual like present detail so like if i want to make animating him easier i would probably get rid of this zipper so that i wouldn't have to have do the secondary animation on that sort of thing flopping around um and like i wouldn't give him shoelaces because that would be another thing to animate uh but i kind of think of animation and rendering as sort of separate processes so simplifying this uh made the rendering process easier but the animation process is still gonna

be roughly if i'd say equally as difficult or easy whatever the case may be all right we do have a couple more questions um for someone who's just starting to get into making pixel art what courses are youtube channels can you point us at for learning the basics um so i know derek you had a pixel art tutorial for a long time um and he just recently updated it i would recommend checking that out it's a quite good tutorial there are a lot of um good tutorials that exist um i would also recommend um uh checking out or joining a um a community uh pixlr community um uh pixel joint is is a good one um it's quite friendly to to beginners and it has like a whole like gallery gallery section to it that you can um

check out other people's works on and post your own work on and get critiques and feedback and pixelation is another one which is i think at wayofthepixel.net or if you just google pixelation form it'll pop up know it's not a youtube channel uh i don't you i don't not not super aware of like specific uh youtube channels and video series and that sort of thing that that uh tutorialize um pixel art as much but i found the most valuable thing to be actually engaging with other uh pixel artists and and getting their feedback and and giving them feedback because if you can learn how to critique something then it'll help you uh improve yourself by leagues as well um personally i also uh stream uh very often i have a twitch stream that i that i stream on uh it's at a four bit friday um on tw

twitch um and i usually do programming stuff but i also occasionally will just do pixel art and i'm uh quite happy to if you have you know questions uh if you stop by there and i'll i'll you know answer them to the best of my ability or if you have work that you want feedback on i can do that as well or just hit me up on twitter at four bit friday i'm forbid friday everywhere do you use a tablet when creating pixel art yes i do use a tablet i used a wacom intuos for a while and then it broke after like many years of abuse so now i'm currently using a he he yeah i don't know how to pronounce it it's h-u-i-o-n it was way cheaper than wacom and it works perfectly fine uh but yes i i do prefer using using tablets for my art in all forms

regardless of whether it's pixel or not although sometimes i will switch to mouse if i'm doing like a really tiny sprite uh but even then i'll usually sketch it out with a tablet before i like go into the nitty-gritty details uh with a mouse and then sometimes i'll be working with a mouse and i'm like why am i using this mouse i hate using a mouse i'm just going to use a tablet oh boy this isn't i haven't made any progress this is going slowly all right let's let's see keep them coming are there any types of techniques you find particularly effective or common in making good high-bit pixel wires um uh i think so i think um there are a lot of things that uh like

in graphics scale specifically that i really like that that sort of uh streamline my workflow um uh so for instance uh one thing that i really like to do if i have something to outline uh let me stop this animation again um if i have a blob that i need to need to outline like let's say this is you know a thing of some sort let's yeah let's make this let's make this a little happy guy again right um this guy he's back with his buttons uh let's say i have to like outline this entire shape one thing that i that i find really really helpful about uh graphic sales it has the color replace tool which lets me like draw um oh i'm on the wrong layer uh classic artist problem um the color replace tool lets me like draw freely without without uh but only only replacing the color that i have selected to to replace and what that allows me to do in

addition to just recoloring things if i decide i don't like the color of it is outline things very easily because i can choose like a large sort of brush size and just go around the edges um and that like is much faster outlining than having to like place each individual single pixel uh and that sort of thing uh i'm not sure which other pixel art programs have the color place tool um but it's probably one of my like most used tools um another thing to note might be that um if you're doing uh if you're doing pixel art and you're using it in a game and it's going to be rotated uh a lot and that sort of thing um it's good to note that straight lines uh that is to say lines in one of the four uh cardinal directions rotate much more cleanly than diagonal lines so

if you're having to rotate any pixel art in a in a game uh and you like and you're keeping it in resolution and not resolution mixing and that sort of thing um you can see if i have like this diagonal line and try to rotate it uh there we go it gets real nasty you see it gets like if i even if i just rotate it to to a cardinal direction it gets real real real grody and and just kind of like all it breaks up and that sort of thing but uh if you have straight lines they tend to keep keep their form a lot better like you can see the the uh the sides of them aren't like breaking up even if i make this uh one one thick a single single line thick um so yeah i'd say like keep keep keep your

if you have stuff to rotate try and keep it cardinal by default as much as possible um yeah that that helps a lot to keep to keep things looking looking much cleaner um yeah so there's a lot like that those sorts of things are they're the kind of things that you kind of like have to pay attention to especially when you're working in pixel art if you want it to look good throughout these like all these transformations and things that are becoming more common in um in modern uh games that use pixel aesthetics and that sort of thing um i'm sure i could probably think of more i will try to keep thinking of of those sorts of like little details and mention them if i can remember whenever i can all right uh when creating a character for a pixel art game do you normally go straight into creating pixel sprites or do you create your concepts in different me in a different medium and then translate it into pixel art it depends on the game

and the style um for larger sprites like and in higher resolutions i'll usually try to do a larger uh higher resolution concept beforehand for smaller sprites i will usually just jump straight into uh straight into doing it as as pixel art um yeah that that's about it and also so you usually more often than not i will i will just jump straight into the pixel art aspect of it before before concepting anything else and if i'm if i'm struggling with it then i might go back to the concept phase and and be like oh this needs this needs work and solvent all right another question what dart board size do you use slash how do you know how to scale properly what what board size uh it says dartboard dartboard

do they mean artboard probably okay um again so this is this is something that comes down to is this going to be on a game by game basis i'm hesitant to like just make generalizations uh about like what's what's good and what's bad and what's best and all that sort of thing because it's gonna vary so much from game to game um and from from project to project um i kind of oscillate between enjoying working in really large sizes like relative to pixel art like 128 by 128 96 by 96 i really like those sizes um and uh really uh really tiny like 16 by 16 8x8 is kind of annoying but but i i oscillate between enjoying like working in in the various sizes because they offer different uh challenges and different um uh opportunities and and and and sort of just senses of of

of you know finality and of what the finished thing is going to be they they're they're both fun um yeah all right here's one i have a question not related to the games themselves what are your thoughts of pixar on pixel art content in the corporate slash commercial space through brand activation combined with ip wow that's a fun question can you repeat that sure all right uh what are your thoughts on pixel art content in the corporate slash commercial space through brand activation combined i think i see what you're saying so like like in terms of pixel art used outside of the context of games as just like an aesthetic for advertising that sort of thing i assume that's what you're talking about um i mean it's fine it's it's like i said pixel art isn't

uh necessarily a style it's a medium and it's a valid medium for advertising your stuff if you wanna um i actually was hired a few years ago to um this is kind of annoying actually i was hired a few years ago to not work on a game but to work on a credit card like they wanted a design for their credit card that was pixel art and i made a piece that i thought was really good and fun and you know charming um and they hated it and made me make some really just banal boring nonsense that i absolutely hated working on so in that sense i'm not a huge fan of those sorts of things but they did pay me eventually i had to hound them for a while but um that's that's not a great story i'm sorry but uh so in that sense like i didn't like working with that particular company but

like if you want to advertise your stuff in whatever style like that's fine i don't i'm not gonna tell you to stop or whatever um but i wouldn't do it again i fee i feel like that's i feel like the nature of that experience is probably more indicative of just being an artist in corporate culture as opposed to necessarily being a pixel artist in that particular uh you know in in in any kind of corporate culture and that sort of thing all right how does working at pixel art differ from other visual mediums um well i think there's a uh there's some misconceptions about pixel art that it's easier um specifically from gamers i think not necessarily from other game developers but i see a lot of times like you know

sometimes like uh gamers would be like oh this game is pixel art uh it's cheap they didn't have a budget for like real art or whatever and i'm like ah forget you um that's not the case at all like pixel art is not easier or cheaper necessarily than any other type of art it's can sometimes be quite a lot more time consuming than just drawing something in high resolution um uh but also a lot of times people ask me like like oh how do you do shading or how do you do how do you pick colors in pixel art and that sort of thing and that's always been kind of a strange question to me because it's like you shade like you would anything like it's just shading like light the way light works doesn't change when you move into pixel art suddenly um and the way color theory and and and you know composition and that sort of thing doesn't suddenly change uh when you move into pixel art so a lot of there's there are a lot of differences but there are also a lot of similarities and overlap and i feel like a lot of

what uh what makes pixel art sort of special and specific is the fact that like i was showing with the buttons earlier and like like on especially this is a bad example because this sprite sprite is so large but especially on smaller sprites um the um a single pixel can make such a huge difference um and that's like just a single decision that you can make and i feel like a lot of a lot of other uh art medias don't really have that kind of just strict binary of like here's a single decision i can make that changes one single pixel in this picture and completely changes the meaning of the entire thing um i feel like that's kind of what the core of pixel art comes down to uh is just like having those sorts of moments where it's like oh i'm gonna put this pixel here and it's gonna mean this whole slew of things

for the rest of the image um and i think i think another another sort of thing about pixel art is that it can be used um to like abstract um so like a lot of if you think of like a lot of like the older games that use pixlr and that sort of thing like especially on nes and those sorts of things uh a lot of the character designs the iconic character designs are were like in sprite form just like super abstract and like is that a nose is that a mustache that sort of thing um that's something that i feel like you know can still be leveraged in in art today and leaving things up to the player or viewer's mind uh of just like i don't know what i'm looking at so i'm just going to fill in the blanks and probably whatever i think of is maybe gonna end up being a lot cooler than whatever was intended maybe not what was

intended but like what what what the artist could have uh executed on their particular time frame and budget and that sort of thing which i think is a pretty pretty fun thing to play around with is mess like playing around with those spaces of abstraction and uh deliberately making certain details kind of obtuse so that people don't really know what exactly they're looking at and can fill in the blanks themselves all right next question how do i make my pixel art look good if i am not otherwise an artist practice it's the same answer as as any kind of part or endeavor that you want to be good at i will say though i and this goes for not just pixel art but for all art in general i feel like um how do i how do i phrase this i feel

like you can get away with a lot as long as you're consistent and um that's why that's like a game with art that is bad in all the same way i think is visually compelling as compared to a game with art that is sometimes bad and sometimes good because to me to me it kind of comes down to like a sense of intentionality um and i feel like if art is you know mostly good but then sometimes bad the bad art is gonna feel really unintentional and it's gonna make the whole thing feel worse to me this is just my personal feelings uh but if everything is equally bad then it's gonna be like oh they knew what they were doing you know they meant to do all this stuff

wrong sorry that didn't answer the question at all the answer to the question is practice and um do it do it do it a lot make make a bunch of stuff study study uh art that you like pixel art that you like uh looking examples of of um of games that you that you like would like to approach the style and quality of and see what they do and how they do it um it's the like i said it's the same the same set of steps for learning any kind of art or craft is just practice and and practice and study it yeah all right here's possibly a lighter one do you ever dream in pixels i don't know that i'd dream in pixels necessarily but i've definitely dreamed in games that were pixeled

um like i've never i've never had a dream that was like uh oh i'm going through like a real life situation now but everything's pixel art it's always been like oh i'm dreaming i'm in this really cool game and i dreamt i dreamt once that i made the best game in the world and it got put in the museum and it was really amazing and then i woke up and couldn't remember what the game was and i was really sad about that one yeah all right uh another question when hiring a pixel artist what should we expect to pay um personally i tend to charge between forty and fifty dollars an hour um for pixel art stuff um that's just sort of like my baseline and any like compensation that i do that's below that i try to make sure it's of at least that value um it depends on the artist though uh i

know some some some artists who will charge like 60 an hour i know a lot of artists who greatly undercharge um and that's not cool uh so yeah i would say like just try and try and compensate them fairly like i said i i usually try and be around 40 to 50 an hour which is honestly probably a little low lower than i should be but it's uh it's it's it's it's where i'm at i i'll probably ask for more eventually but i'll get there um oh yeah all right i believe we have time for one more i didn't get anywhere with this guy man i'm sorry about that i was i was having such high high expectations of myself i was like oh yeah i'm gonna have like a whole rough of this guy's swing and follow through and everything and it's just not happening he's still winding up

all right well let's see if we can squeeze this last one in yeah what kinds of games might benefit most from a pixel aesthetic um well obviously there's a as i mentioned kind of a nostalgia factor so like if you want to play into that then you can definitely use that and and that sort of thing um but i feel like a lot of younger people never really experienced the era of gaming when pixel art was a necessary hardware restriction uh so they have kind of a different context for uh for the uh for their you know their their uh experience of pixel art um which is maybe more akin to like you know kids you know liking really liking music from the 80s and that sort of thing when they were like or like like synth wave and that sort of thing where it's like 80s aesthetic but sort of completely disconnected from

from uh the experienced uh time frame um so like you can you can um play into that and that sort of thing um but even even even aside from you know the whole historical uh aspect of pixel art and its place in in you know gaming uh gaming aesthetic uh i think uh pixel art can be used to communicate things about the game itself like you might be able to use pixlr to communicate like oh some this game is uh kind of a purity of design i think can be communicated via pixel art where like you look at uh you know some 3d game you're like i don't really know how to play that it looks fun but i don't know what's happening necessarily but i feel like sometimes you can look at like a pixlr game and be like i can kind of tell what's going on here you know it it it's i think the the nature of pixel art and the way it sort of enforces a uh simplification of

design and uh and and uh visual elements uh also tends to lend itself well to uh being quickly readable uh and and and um and and uh especially if you if you use the because pixelate has like the the sort of built-in visual language of the entire history of video games in it like you know like if you see like a photo realistic uh 3d game then your your comparisons might be closer to like oh this looks kind of like a movie but if you see a pixel art image of anything you're gonna have the association with video games and you can leverage that to communicate certain video game uh tropes and language in terms of like oh this is a platformer this is you know shoot them up and that sort of thing um so yeah i think that that's kind of a way to use either you can maybe use pixel art um if you're not explicitly tapping into

the like remembered history of of of the style of the medium and that sort of thing um yeah maybe that all right tiger with that we're out of time okay i got i got two and a half frames done nope not even done thanks all right thank you all for coming out again this is tyreek plummer and thanks again for attending