
8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video] - tbirdz
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023586/8-Bit-8-Bitish-Graphics
======
corysama
Actually leveraging the power of palletized graphics has been a lost art for
well over a decade. Mark Ferrari is the only person I know of that I can call
a master of that art.

When I was working on PlayStation 2 games, it was frustrating that all of the
artists I worked with were creating textures that would ultimately end up
palletized, but none of them had any concept of the techniques presented here
even then. These days GPUs are getting powerful enough that I occasionally see
kids reinventing these techniques using tricky shaders from first principles
without knowing that they used to be the only way to get things done.

In the HN circles you have a chance to be familiar with Ferrari's work through
[1][2]

[1]
[http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890267)

But, in gaming circles, you might be more familiar with his work in Loom,
Secret of Monkey Isle and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

~~~
exlurker
Mark Ferrari also teamed up with Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick (et al) to
create a new 2D adventure game called Thimbleweed Park[1] (No affiliation!) -
awesome backgrounds by Ferrari!

[https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/](https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/)

~~~
city41
In this talk he goes into detail about the Thimbleweed Park art he made and
how he uses Photoshop to pull off pixel art techniques far more efficiently.

~~~
tcdent
I think efficiency is the wrong term.

Palatte shifting and limited color palates were born from the necessity of
effeciency. Now he has to use an emulated DOS program to edit them. He uses an
experimental web app to display palate shifting projects he created years ago
and looks forward to the upcomming release of a pixel editor from the same
author.

Additionally, he expresses extensive configuration necessary, mostly disabling
anti-aliasing within multiple tools, which makes his process possible in
Photoshop. He also has removed the limitation of color palate to make the
final product more pleasing, regardless of weight and efficiency, as the
concern is minimal on modern hardware.

His technique in Photoshop makes heavy use of the pencil tool one pixel at a
time and even falls back to antiquated software (or manual technique) when he
needs to implement dithered gradients.

I did not get the inpression that he was happy to be using Photoshop, but that
it is currently the best option he has.

~~~
city41
I took away something different. He emphasized several times how Photoshop
enables him to pull off pixel art style but without having to individually
drop in pixels. He said that about the lighting templates, the dithering
template, and the anti aliasing technique. I'd argue the mere mention of the
word "template" supports this. In all cases, "not having to do one pixel at a
time" seemed to be the primary advantage.

It's true he also said sometimes he still has to manually put in pixels, but
that seemed to exception to me.

~~~
tcdent
The selection wand is nothing revolutionary, and likely works better for his
purposes in the obsolete software. PS anti-aliases selections by default, so
there's a specific example of a tool he's had to tune for his style of art.

The dithering template only exists because dithering is not a concept in PS;
the DOS application has a dedicated dithered gradient tool.

------
dalke
I almost overlooked this link. The presentation is very nice. It starts with
an evolution of 8 bit (256 color palette/EGA) images at Lucas Games, from
simple to dithered to more advanced (and impressive) animations based on
palette-shifting.

It then uses the metaphor of "Renaissance" vs. "Renaissance Faire" to talk
about an 8-bit style, which doesn't have to reproduce the exact details of
8-bit colors, but rather the aesthetic - "8-bitish art". Followed by details
of how to do it.

~~~
city41
I feel you omitted one of the best parts of the talk. When he is explaining
the palette techniques used in the X-Men Storm game where a single image can
be clouds, trees or a cityscape with just a palette swap. I actually let out a
small gasp when he went over that, really impressive.

(this part is about 12 minutes in)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Amusingly, like a much more advanced version of the super mario cloud/bush
pallet swap

[http://www.todayifoundout.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/01/tod...](http://www.todayifoundout.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/01/today-i-found-out-mario.jpg)

------
mattl
It seems with graphics and especially with games, there are two uses of "8-bit
graphics"

\- One, like this, refers to 256 color (or less) graphics

\- The other, refers to graphics made using the constraints of real world
common 8-bit computers (in the US, the Apple ][ or C64, in Europe, the ZX
Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, etc) or 8-bit consoles, such as the NES and Sega
Master System.

There are a lot of games which try to emulate these styles, and there are very
few true accurate 8-bit (or 16-bit in the case of SNES, Genesis/Mega Drive,
Amiga, ST) games. I always appreciated the constraints of having small amounts
of memory and so few colors to play with when I was messing around with my
Amstrad CPC as a kid.

~~~
beschizza
Amstrad CPC!

Just the other day I cooked up a legit Mode 0 "Monster Land" mockup after
rediscovering the appalling Spectrum-port original.

[http://boingboing.net/wp-
content/uploads/2016/04/wonderboy-a...](http://boingboing.net/wp-
content/uploads/2016/04/wonderboy-amstrad.gif)

Working with true 8-bit pallettes is fun; working with 2x1 pixels is "fun"

------
skardan
Thanks for submission. Inspiring also outside 8bit and 8bitish art:

    
    
      Environment was small enough that you actually could think about it.
    
      8bit art is mentally and creatively manageable space to work in.
    

It is not the first time I hear this advice. If you want to be creative, work
under constraints.

~~~
archagon
I think it's no accident that one of the most renown and influential works of
classical music ever made — the Well-Tempered Klavier — was mostly written for
3-4 voices, for an instrument with very limited expressiveness, and under the
incredibly strict rules of counterpoint. To echo what Mark is saying, this is
probably one of the reasons we find classical video game music so memorable.
When you only have access to a sine wave, a saw wave, and a noise channel, you
get really, really good at inventively utilizing these resources to their
fullest. I can't remember most of the over-orchestrated, insipid soundtracks
in AAA games today, but music from my favorite NES, SNES, and DOS games has
never left my mind.

As an aside, I think Disasterpeace is doing for chiptune-style music today
what Mark Ferrari has done for 8-bit graphics:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB-
pG7wEnzM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB-pG7wEnzM)

------
fossuser
Another example of how constraints drive creativity, interesting ideas and
algorithms.

It's always interesting to me where this appears - you see a ton of it from
Carmack in "Masters of Doom" and it's happening again with current hardware in
VR.

There's probably something to be said for purposefully setting up constraints
that otherwise wouldn't need to exist in order come up with something
interesting - and learn more faster.

------
syncsynchalt
An amazing talk, especially if you were gaming at the time.

I can't believe how little crowd reaction there is to some of the things he's
showing, eg. the cityscape reveal in the Storm game screens.

~~~
aidenn0
Deluxe Paint II enhanced had a demo of two images in one with palette shifting
that shipped with it.

It really is a phenomenal program. I had to do some pixel-art drawing c.a.
2000 and found nothing remotely as good; fortunately I still had a machine
that would boot to dos and my copy of DPII.

~~~
EyeballKid
You're not the only one who thinks fondly of DPaint!

shameless plug: here's the paint program I've been working on:

[http://evilpixie.scumways.com/](http://evilpixie.scumways.com/)

(the most up-to-date code is the 'rgba' branch in github:
[https://github.com/bcampbell/evilpixie/tree/rgba](https://github.com/bcampbell/evilpixie/tree/rgba)
)

~~~
kitsunesoba
Checking this out now and seeing if it compiles on OS X. In case you weren’t
aware, your source code download link is missing a colon.

~~~
EyeballKid
Oop - thanks!

I've had it running on OSX, but haven't tried it recently. I'd expect there to
be a few hiccups, but nothing fundamental.

------
aidenn0
He mentions Deluxe Paint II; I was fortunate among my PC owning friends to
have that rather than PC Paintbrush. It was one of those rare tools that was
so well made for its purpose as to make it hard to describe what was so good
about it. Plus it shipped with several tutorials and a very complete manual.

~~~
vidarh
My favourite feature, and I suspect of many others given how often I saw this
at demo parties etc.:

The split screen, pixel perfect zoom.

I've been looking for paint apps for Android for years, and one of my pet
hates is that finding one that didn't do bilinear filtering was incredibly
hard (I finally found one I like reasonably well called "Artflow").

But even without filtering, having a _quick and easy_ (one keypress) zoom that
keeps the un-zoomed image visible on one side, and shows the zoomed region on
the other, was vital to me, because it was one of the most frequent
operations. Pretty much every paint app I see either complicates this with
multiple separate views in separate windows, or by showing only a zoomed in
view.

I find one of the biggest problem with modern paint applications is that they
crowd the screen and don't surface the most important paint tools very well -
they try to be too many things.

When I used Deluxe Paint, I wanted as little clutter as possible. I'd paint
with everything off except when I wanted to change a tool, or change colour -
and this to was one keypress away.

Though (relatively) low-res pixel art also tends to lend itself to using far
fewer tools. I tended to mostly use the "spray can", smooth, and zoom in and
draw individual pixels.

------
Dateki
Just for sake of completeness, I mention here another unmatched pixel art
legend, Paul Robertson.

His recent work:
[http://probertson.tumblr.com/](http://probertson.tumblr.com/)

His animation, called "Kings of Power 4 Billion%":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZy5S-jUIlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZy5S-jUIlw)

If you have a chance, watch without YouTube's compression artifacts.

~~~
Ardren
You can get the source version from:
[http://mirror.8chan.net/probertson/kop4b.avi](http://mirror.8chan.net/probertson/kop4b.avi)

Other original mirrors (most 404):
[http://probertson.livejournal.com/23973.html](http://probertson.livejournal.com/23973.html)

(Ausgamers and culture.crypt.cx appear to be still up)

------
shawndumas

      $ youtube-dl http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023586/8-Bit-8 Bitish-Graphics
      [GDCVault] 8-Bit-8-Bitish-Graphics: Downloading webpage
      [GDCVault] 8-Bit-8-Bitish-Graphics: Downloading XML
      [download] Destination: 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box-1023586.mp4
      [download]  61.0% of 714.86MiB at 12.99MiB/s ETA 00:21

~~~
raziel2p
I would not have thought that youtube-dl worked on random websites. Thanks,
the HTML5 player was buffering like crazy for me.

~~~
wingerlang
Here is a list of supported websites. [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-
dl/supportedsites.html](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html)

------
Lich
Thanks for the submission. One thing I'm confused about. So, he said that in
the animated scenes, the animation was done with palette shifting, and not
separate components/layers. I understand that bit. However, how would the
animation be done in the game? Does he mean that the palette shifting is
implemented within the game, or is the palette shifting technique to easily
and quickly produce art assets?

~~~
roywiggins
Video cards supported swapping palettes out in real time.

[http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5)

> Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette
> of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at
> will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was
> fast, and took virtually no memory. Thus began the era of color cycling.

~~~
kd5bjo
The technique is even older than that -- most graphics modes on the 8-bit
Ataris only supported a 4-color palette. To get more colors on the screen, you
had to take an interrupt partway through the frame to swap out some of the
colors and then put them back during the vertical blank to be ready for the
next frame.

------
mchahn
It bothers me when popular culture uses the term 8-bit graphics for low-
resolution no matter what the pallette. They see pixelization and
automatically use the term.

------
dragontamer
Interesting, thanks for the link!

------
jdmoreira
Wow. Thanks so much for this!

------
nlawalker
[Video presentation]

~~~
dang
Added to title.

