I feel like I need to shout out aseprite here: https://www.aseprite.org/

It's a really good pixel art tool, but I think their licensing strategy is particularly interesting to the hn audience. The tool is open source, but they don't distribute binaries for free. So if you just want to use it, you can buy a copy like normal software, but if you've got the technical ability to do so, you could just build a binary yourself from source. Always struck me as such a good compromise.

I picked up this book and enjoyed it just for the process, https://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Own-Pixel-Art/dp/1593278861. (Not an artist, just a programmer who has tried to make a few tiny pieces.) Uses aseprite.

Aseprite started out open source, went closed source and back to open source. It's nice to see them opensource again/ Libresprite was built out of Aseprite close sourcing future versions. I honestly wasn't aware it was open source again.

https://dev.aseprite.org/2016/09/01/new-source-code-license/ Here is the actual information. and a quote from it "Aseprite is non-free software from now on"

there's also libresprite, a fork of aseprite from when they changed their license

Except it hasn't been updated and Aseprite has.

They say that's because they are re-writing it from scratch. That's just looking at their website, though, I'd never heard of it before and happy with Aesprite.

Aseprite recently added some truly unique features for creating tessellated tiles. I have always struggled with creating good looking tiles, and the process is much easier for me now.

Is this in the beta branch? I feel like the main branch hasn't gotten a lot of updates in ages. I haven't used aseprite for a while but I did finally switch to the beta since it has been getting most of the love lately.

Yes, the 1.3 beta branch has tile layers, and they are fantastic. I should have been more specific.

I love Pixel Art - yet I often don‘t like how a lot of games try to approach it in a „modern“ way so I started to create my own dream pixel art game (working ob it >5 years now):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/541310/Tiny_Thor/

Beautiful design. The feel reminds me of my childhood, some of the best 2d platformers came out mid/end of 90’s right around the 3d hype. Rayman, Yoshi’s Island...

Yes, that's right. Yoshi's Island, for example, is a great inspiration for me.

That looks great. Some of the outdoor backgrounds remind me of Rastan.

I didn't know Rastan at all. It's kind of crazy, you always think you know all the games from that time and yet you stumble across one every now and then where you think, that would have been my thing back then :)

looks fantastic and now on my wishlist. As just starting out developing a game myself, what engine are you using?

The engine I'm using is based on this one with lots of customizations:

https://github.com/blitz-research/monkey

Looks beautiful

This has made me super nostalgic, thanks for sharing this!

I definitely look fondly back on the days of the old phpBB forums. So much knowledge shared freely and without any motive other than sharing knowledge and wisdom with their community.

Of course I’m a biased since those were my teenage years and the world in your teenage years is always the best lol.

I love pixel art and I wish I had this artistic talent!

Folks that like this post might be interested in this web-based tool I made for making pixel art as ASCII art:

https://memalign.github.io/m/pceimage/index.html

A bit of self-promotion, but hey, that's pretty cool!

I don't know how many times I have read this set of forum posts on pixel art throughout the years. It is always one of my go to resources when I get that urge to build a 2d pixel game. Well, I haven't finished a game and I can't do pixel art, but it still is a great resource to go back to, at least for the memories.

Thanks for sharing!

The Pixel Art subreddit is a great source of inspiration:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelart

A tip to ease anyone interested in making pixel art: instead of starting from scratch (very hard), for beginners it's much easier to take a high res image and down sampling it as a template. The down sampling algorithm will create many issues as mentioned in this guide, but you can then edit on a single pixel level following the principles of the guide.

I've been something like this with Pixaki on the iPad - that allows for a reference layer which means you don't need to downsample, just fit the pixels where you want them to be accordingly. Helps in the learning of "how would this translate to pixels?" too.

+1 for Pixaki -- its line tools are the first thing I'd ever used that made pixel art fun (rather than a constant struggle against jaggies).

Wow - pixel joint still exists.

I spent several years in that community ca. 2004-2008.

If this type of art is something that you would like to do, I would highly recommend hanging around there. They do challenges and share tricks about how they do what they do. They also have very strict policies, which makes it a game of it’s own.

There's been recent innovation in the pixel field...

Astortion brings skeletal animation and texture mapping to the world of pixel art, in a way that is very convincing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsOKwUwL1bE

I finished my game development graduation now in May. My graduation project was a pixel art based beat-em up as we used to have in the 80s and 90s (like double dragon and crime). I loved to work with pixel art and I feel that I can draw (and animate) pretty much everthing that I want/need.

However I would like to pursue any kind of graduation in that area, online for sure, but not certifications like udemy, coursera and etc, mainly because I like the loop: learn, homework, feedback, improve work, feedback and so on. I would like to learn "Art" but with Pixel art as main topic. There is such thing?

If you’re interested in some spriting work for a science fiction visual novel / RPG, send me an email at thomas (dot) spader (at) gmail (dot) com

I’d love to see your portfolio!

I love pixel art, when I was a teen I drew a number of famous football (soccer) players in pixel art style: https://www.deviantart.com/iglobear/art/International-soccer....

They ended up in the gaame Sensational Soccer as unlockables. (Score three goals in a match and you get Zlatan). I was honoured.

In the mid 2000s there was a whole community of pixel art for signatures in forums about Runescape. I don't know if this community still exists today (the game certainly does), but it was quite something. Random examples:

https://i.imgur.com/eEZtmJd.png

https://i.imgur.com/P8HfrIv.png

On the note of pixel art, anyone have any interesting techniques for 3D -> 2D Pixel Art?

Of course the difficulty here is producing good quality pixel art from three dimensions. Often it simply ends up worse. Nonetheless i've been researching this and toying with it for a while. Notably for producing art in different isometric projections which would be very difficult to do by hand.

I've had to wing it in a number of situations where I'd needed to draw a small sprite or touch up a picture by placing individual pixels. I now see that I've fallen into the pit of hugging banding quite often, which explains why my edits were sufficient, but always lacked something undefinable. Thanks for sharing!

One interesting thing about neural net generation of images is that up until recently, pixel art didn't work at all. Attempts at using GANs to learn Pokemon pixel art etc always failed miserably. The release of CLIP turned out to enable pretty good pixel art generation, and it's only gotten better - DALL-E 2 also can just do pixel art.

eg https://github.com/pixray/pixray (see https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532197896090681344 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532129051434958851 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1531478055344082944 )

https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uswf2r/pixel_art_of... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/upf93v/a_raccoon_le... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ulh07q/spaceships_2... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uh8sep/pixel_art_of... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uav52t/tileset_of_f... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uc4jnv/spritesheet_... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ufb564/cherry_bloss... https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1531545772420132865