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I share your preferences, but it's a rock and a hard place. Performing any of the tasks you listed by hand is extremely labour-intensive. Doing without those fe

I share your preferences, but it's a rock and a hard place. Performing any of the tasks you listed by hand is extremely labour-intensive. Doing without those features is a harsh creative limitation - in my experience, the result isn't "this game feels retro", but instead "this game feels oddly flat, repetitive and static", which is much less forgivable. I've worked on a game which aimed for authentically retro pixel art, but in hindsight I think it was a silly misallocation of resources. There's a reason it's so uncommon nowadays. If I were to try again, I'd at least include high-resolution 2D transforms in the engine, and possibly dynamic lighting too. I briefly explored the possibility of developing a style-preserving realtime rotation algorithm for sprites, but it's a hard problem.

moth-fuzz 4y ago
how exactly is it a hard problem? You don’t have to rotate the sprite by sining and cosining pixels by hand, you can just render to the same resolution as your sprites and it’ll look fine. The problem is that most indie games render at 2x or 3x or more natively.
- fleabitdev 4y ago
  Nearest-neighbour, low-resolution rotation produces unpleasant results when the sprite contains fine details with a thickness of one or two pixels, e.g. outlines: https://imgur.com/a/UiAZ49z https://imgur.com/a/UiAZ49z Artistic preferences are subjective, but I expect most players would find that rotated sprite unappealing. This is especially true when the rotation is animated - the aliasing causes a distracting, staticky, random-noise effect which gives the impression that the sprite's fine details are chaotically changing. It's almost the aesthetic opposite of what most pixel artists are aiming for.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Back in the day I found Privateer's in-game rotations jarring and hideous. Modern games and remasters should at least use higher resolution frame buffers, even if they downscale back to OG--ideally using high color and alpha channels. And I think higher resolution rendering is fine too.
  - flobosg 4y ago
    > Nearest-neighbour, low-resolution rotation produces unpleasant results… That’s the reason why some games use versions of the rotated sprites that have been tweaked by hand. See also tools like RotSprite (http://info.sonicretro.org/RotSprite http://info.sonicretro.org/RotSprite).

moth-fuzz 4y ago

how exactly is it a hard problem? You don’t have to rotate the sprite by sining and cosining pixels by hand, you can just render to the same resolution as your sprites and it’ll look fine. The problem is that most indie games render at 2x or 3x or more natively.

fleabitdev 4y ago
Nearest-neighbour, low-resolution rotation produces unpleasant results when the sprite contains fine details with a thickness of one or two pixels, e.g. outlines: https://imgur.com/a/UiAZ49z https://imgur.com/a/UiAZ49z Artistic preferences are subjective, but I expect most players would find that rotated sprite unappealing. This is especially true when the rotation is animated - the aliasing causes a distracting, staticky, random-noise effect which gives the impression that the sprite's fine details are chaotically changing. It's almost the aesthetic opposite of what most pixel artists are aiming for.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Back in the day I found Privateer's in-game rotations jarring and hideous. Modern games and remasters should at least use higher resolution frame buffers, even if they downscale back to OG--ideally using high color and alpha channels. And I think higher resolution rendering is fine too.
- flobosg 4y ago
  > Nearest-neighbour, low-resolution rotation produces unpleasant results… That’s the reason why some games use versions of the rotated sprites that have been tweaked by hand. See also tools like RotSprite (http://info.sonicretro.org/RotSprite http://info.sonicretro.org/RotSprite).