8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box

If you are here and you haven’t seen Mark Ferrari’s GDC talk, you really should sit down and watch it. He is perhaps the greatest pallete animator of all time. Even if you aren’t familiar with the games he worked on, HN folks have likely seen his gallery of single-image animations linked below. [VIDEO] [LINK]

Came across this in a thread on Reddit. It’s been discussed on HN before as well but I think it’s worthy of being resubmitted. Previous discussion: [LINK] In that discussion multiple people said that they preferred the non-stabilized dithering, and they argued that that is “how it was” on the old 1-bit Macs. “The original effect is how it's supposed to look and how it would have looked on an old computer with 1-bit graphics.” says one commenter. I think these comments are missing the forest for the trees. It’s not about faithful recreation, it’s about artistic inspiration and invoking certain feelings. See also the talk “8 Bit & ‘8 Bitish’ Graphics - Outside the Box” by artist Mark Ferrari. [VIDEO] If you artificially constrain yourself too much, your game will suffer and no-one will want to play it. On the other hand, if you can give a nod to the past and a feeling of nostalgia but at the same time acknowledge that we have had progress, and incorporate that progress in your game, then there is potential for a game that is actually fun to play.

Every Deluxe Paint fan out needs to watch this video of the master of that tool explain his craft Mark Ferrari: 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box [VIDEO]

I don't agree with that! Early personal computers also had pixel art, and it was mind-blowing what was done with it. Watch this talk from Mark Ferrari, for example: [VIDEO] [LINK] Check out what he did with color cycling in this demo: it's amazing. I recommend looking at "May - Jungle Waterfall - Rain" to see how amazing this is. That's not a gif, it's a single image, just rotating the colors. That was to deal with storage constraints. Can you imagine? The techniques of early PC and applications are worth saving , too. The art shown in that tweet is amazing, too, but it's not the same thing! It's an entirely different thing, with entirely different constraints.

There's a lot of stuff available but the problem is knowing what to look for. For example, the book "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" chronicles quite a bit of Commodore lore, and there are numerous resources for both Amiga and C64 online. Too many to mention, really, and lots of them are heavily specialized. CSDb[0] for the C64 demo and cracking scene, for example. I also recommend The Early History of Smalltalk[1] by Alan Kay himself and Mark Ferrari's talk[2] on creating pixel art for LucasArts games. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]

You might be interested in this GCD talk. The speaker was an artist on various classic adventure games. I found it really interesting how he considered himself a traditional artist and doesn't really like computers at all. The things they achieved with pallette switching were unbelievable, especially considering the limitations of their tools. It's crazy how he managed to do this stuff just in basic paint programs. Some HNers will be horrified (just write some code!) but I think it's really inspiring. [VIDEO]

> The original EGA background art for Loom was made by Mark Ferrari Obligatory recommendation for this talk by Mark Ferrari: [VIDEO] - truly an artist

If you have an interest in this kind of art, this GDC presentation by Mark Ferrari "8 Bit & 8 Bit-ish Graphics" gives lots of great detail about the art process, tools, and practices of the time (Ferrari worked on the EGA art for Monkey Island, among several others). [VIDEO]

This is very neat, but if you want to see a true (human) master at work, check out Mark Ferrari's GDC talk here: [VIDEO] I'd love to see an algorithm that could approximate this degree of mastery :)

The maker talks about it in this presentation (skipped to the part where he shows how he makes the waterfall): [VIDEO]

this is incredible talk form the Background Artist of monkey island, about 8 bit and explain in details how palette cycling works, and modern way to doing the same more efficiently for modern games. 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box [VIDEO]

This is an amazing engineering and artistic achievement. I have the Live Wallpaper for Android and it's the most delightful $2 I've ever spent, even though it crashes every few days. Right now it's snowing. Yesterday night I spotted a shooting star. There's a great talk by Mark Ferrari about his work: [VIDEO]

He gave one of my favourite GDC talks of all time [1]! I recommend this talk to anyone who is interested in the details and history of working on limited colour palette games! [1] [VIDEO]

If you want to see what a master of Deluxe Paint palette cycling can do check out Mark Ferrari's [LINK] (hit "Show Options) and [VIDEO]

If you want to see what a master of Deluxe Paint palette cycling can do check out Mark Ferrari's [LINK] (hit "Show Options) and [VIDEO]

You might enjoy an entire talk on using a limited color palette for graphics in early games and how it stimulated creativity [VIDEO] "In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives."

Mark was nice enough to invite me to his home studio when I was a new high school grad to talk working in games as an artist. He told me the story of the fight over dithering. I give him strong partial credit for ending up a game engine/art pipeline coder instead and got to thank him after his most excellent GDC presentation on the lost power of palettized textures [VIDEO] You can see that power in action here [LINK] (Hit show options) [LINK] BTW: Deluxe Paint has been remade in Python if you want to give it a try [LINK]

8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box [VIDEO] > In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation The lost art of color cycling - Animating with color [LINK] > Color cycling was born out of hardware restrictions but out of it came some beautiful artworks that characterized the 80s and 90s. In this video we will learn more about how this effect was produced and experience first hand the beautiful artwork created with it.

You might enjoy this GDC talk by Mark Ferrari of LucasArts fame, where he goes over his pixel art technique, as well as how he did color cycling: [VIDEO]

If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C [LINK] you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;) If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out [LINK] (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist [VIDEO] With that you can fire up [LINK] for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, [LINK] for something more modern.