Why I Almost Changed My Entire Game Over One Pixel
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 เม.ย. 2024
- Graphics are annoying. In this episode of bird game I learn that all over again. Turns out my game is not pixel perfect and I almost changed all of the graphics because of that, but then I remembered that I actually want to finish this game. So I am going to focus on making my game fun instead of being a perfectionist about the way it looks.
Join the New Discord Server
/ discord
GMTK Video
• I just changed my enti...
Fog Video
• Create Parallax Fog an...
Parallax Video
• The Perfect Pixel Art ...
Pixelated Particles
• Unity Shader Graph - P...
discussions.unity.com/t/how-d...
Canvas Size
• Pixel Art Class - What... - เกม
The shader that pixelates the particles does not work when they are being scaled. I'll probably just make them manually
To be honest... I kinda like the jitter.... it's your game so you do you
Here is also an idea... instead of downscailing then upscaling everything... just downscail the background (each layer), particals, and fog seperately... then upscale it to then get their pixelated counterparts... and replace the high resolution images with the lower resolution images... problem fixed hopefully
Have u made this on gdevelop ? Or did the whole coding yourself?
@@atulshukla9776 unity
@@Scudmaster11 The jitter made me nauseous when watching the video, so it definitely wouldn't be playable for many people.
I might be alone in this, but I don't think I am: The feet don't move at the same rate that the bird moves, which is anti-juice.
You're not alone. I know it's literally a superficial matter but movement animations where the feet don't sync to the actual movement speed annoy me, too.
... to clarify, it also depends on the aesthetic of the animation itself. If the walking animation is rather abstract then it doesn't feel different whether it syncs or not, but when the walking animation feels more or less realistic then we're inclined to assume it will sync up.
yes, I've changed the move speed multiple times and the bird has a little bit of momentum. I haven't updated the animation to reflect that. Maybe I'll look into changing the framerate of the animation based on the speed or just update it when I am 100% sure how fast it's going to move.
@@Stratelier In a game that is 33% running, 33% jumping and 33% attacking (repeating of course) I don't think that it's unfair to say that if any of those three things aren't perfect then the game has a critical flaw!
I wouldn't normally be so difficult about it, but we're talking about something that takes months or years to create. Let's get it right!
Rabbit hole time! Inverse Kinematics!
@@DemmyDemon If he's not creating his own game engine from scratch, how good could it possibly be?
For standing between pixels, a solution I've used in the past is to round the character's position while the character is standing still, but let it be non-integer during movement. This addresses the main problem point (how obvious it looks when standing still) while leaving the rest alone. For effects, idk if it's the same in your engine, but in Godot there are ways to render certain objects to a different surface and pixelate specifically that layer
I was about to comment on this. It's a good fix, and I've used it for a few of my games.
Yep. If you want a game to be truly pixel perfect, nothing beats rendering it to a lower-resolution layer first and THEN upscaling that to whatever resolution you're displaying the game overall at.
(I used this trick to play Monster Hunter World on a laptop below the game's listed minimum specs. It still suffered _some_ slowdown, but it was directly proportional to the overall render resolution.)
This is the best solution. If you go from “this pixel is misaligned” to “I’m going to change the entire game”, you’re probably overlooking a simple solution. This is true for all software development: don’t make problems bigger than they are.
I like this. I will give it a try
This was my solution for my game as well in a totally different engine. It works effectively to hide half-pixels and is super simple to implement.
One thing I will recommend though, is to round in the opposite direction of the character's movement. If they were moving to the right and the player happened to stop one pixel before a fall/hazard but the game rounded up anyway, it would make the game feel unresponsive. The same for if the game rounded down while going left.
Recently I feel in a similar problem, I was too focused on minor details. Focus on gameplay and making your game fun to play, then focus on the minor stuff, beware of over-scoping that ruined a lot of projects for me and wasted a lot of my time.
You should look into the Astortion devlogs. The creator made a pixelated renderer that essentially puts an extra border of pixels on the side, so the camera moves not pixel perfect but everything else can be.
Personally, unless you're specifically going for a retro experience, being pixel perfect isn't as important as having consistent pixels. Look at games like Stardew Valley. All of the assets are pixel art, but sprites move smoothly across the screen and rotate. In this day and age, truly pixel perfect games feel a bit out of place imo.
Additionally to this, the SNES had rotation and scaling so even retro games weren't always pixel perfect as people tend to think of them.
In a foggy forest the trees that are further back should slowly start to blend into the sky color. So the further back the trees are the bluer they should become
One thing I noticed that stood out was that the bird has an outline and the tiles don't, also some of the bird effects are by hand and some aren't witch can break the continuity.
This is pretty common in a lot of games. Outlines tend to draw the eye so adding an outline to everything can cause a lot of visual noise. But I will agree that his tiles should have a little more contrast and a better pallete that indicates a better separation between the character and the environment using saturation and other parameters. TLDR: not outlining tiles but outlining characters is a common and often desirable choice but his pallete and color selection could definitely be better
Edit: I missed a "not" in there
The bird being able to stand between pixels is fine imo, it's better than snapping the movement. As for rendering, pixel art games often break the the pixel art looks for lighting, and let smooth 2d lights or glow masks add effects on top, and that very often looks really good. For a spooky dark forest lanterns, fires, and other light effects would be amazing.
For the fog, take a look at a game called "Kingdom", their game is super atmospheric pixel art, and the fog looks really pretty. It's a combination of smooth gradients in the back, with the fog being denser lower below instead of completely random noise, and some pixely clouds in front part of a front parallax layer, with the pixels being larger, simulating perspective and adding depth. Also remember fog is volumetric, it would help your scene a ton if the parallax trees faded more and more into your fogs color.
Another game i would recommend looking at for the vibe i think you are aiming for, is Hollow knight. Not a pixel game, but their use of parallax layers to create a claustrophobic spooky environment is wonderful.
For the fire effect, since it's such an important part of the game with the phoenix theme, I think it just deserves some hand made pixel art particles. It would solve the problem of it looking out of place too.
I think you should make the gameplay more final before worrying too much about the graphics and how the game looks, also good video btw.
seconded. Focus on the 20% that makes the game unique and get mechanics in an locked before worrying about a pixel..
I mean, not usually wrong. It's completely fine to run around with placeholder assets and such.
But it's important to get certain aspects of the graphics right first.
For pixel art specifically, the resolution thing is incredibly important and he's lucky he happened to have it right. That sort of thing can destroy or change an entire project if it's noticed too late.
Why? Because the scale of your entities matter for how your game feels. Lowering the resolution makes things take up more screen space. And it's not always possible to downscale things to fit in ways that make it clear enough, depending on the type of game.
Compare this to the other video he references in this video. One got lucky and happened to be running in the right resolution. The other had to stop using pixel art entirely because it wasn't.
And for other types of games, it's also important to know what kind of graphical features you can even implement before starting. I started making a voxel game in Godot and I would literally not start working on the game if I couldn't systematically apply normal map bevels to the edges of the cubes. Because it's that important to the design of the game, that working on it would've been a waste of time if I couldn't. I still haven't made the actual textures for the voxels themselves, nor am I going to worry about things like player models and such until I need to. But certain aspects of graphics do need to be figured out early.
hey man! I actually like the fact that the pixels go over the players.
It would make sense if the bird walks in tall grass and we couldn't see their feet.
makes the game feel more realistic/feel fuller.
Just wanted to share a few suggestions that would drastically improve the game feel and will probably not require too much effort on your part:
The bird fellow is orange (as well as the fire effect, kinda) so I would suggest using trees in bluish-purple hues to make it pop a little more.
color blind folk would appreciate it tremendously but also it would help you in future stages when working with color palettes.
Think Ori and the blind forest, Hollow knight, even Limbo. When the player walks through certain areas the character is hidden by objects that are "closer to the camera", like trees, leaves, etc. It really takes the whole parallax thing to a whole new level and makes the game feel more alive.
The animation of the fire at the top left corner is way to fast and takes too much attention/focus from the player. I would suggest using something slower and smoother.
That way when something fast DOES happen in the gameplay (like a boss fight for example, or even a cutscene), the player won't get distracted.
I really like this theme and you're clearly on the right track to creating this enchanted forest feel.
Plus the playable character has a balanced combination of tough and cute. this would totally be a game I'd like to chill to on weekends.
Hope this feedback works for you. good luck man!
Thanks for the feedback. I will make note to adjust the colors to better accommodate for color blindness or add an alternate palette/setting.
I did have some foreground trees, but it hid the player a bit too much. I will probably do that with smaller objects like in the games you mentioned.
I will also make note to reevaluate the fire/hp animations in the future.
@@HazixDev for some reason you can't see the words I've written in bold. Not only color blindness, the focus should be on color contrast so it's a good practice in general (design wise).
As for the foreground, you could add objects that hide the player very briefly, like explorable area without many (or any) enemies. Also I've noticed some games adding a silhouette, like a white outline or lighter shade of the object hiding the player, so that the player can still know where his character is. Just a thought
@@HazixDev I agree that maybe you should try either smaller objects that won't hide much or, I think slightly preferably, a few large things that do block large chunks of the screen but only in areas where that won't cause problems, like in Hollow Knight (almost, grr) every time something majorly blocks your view there is zero chance you're gonna get hit by an enemy or fall down a hole or anything like that.
But, if you don't want to have any calm exploratory areas like that, then yeah maybe no large foreground objects. Ooh, or do some really thin ones! Like tiny leafless saplings or a vine or something
Been there done that. It especially hurts when your game is in a super low resolution, since the snapping of the camera is extremely obvious.
Personally I do like my pixels to be pixel perfect, to the point I don't even use the alpha channel, and I'm especially not a fan of things like mixels or rotating pixels. But to be honest, 99% of people won't notice or care about those things. And the background not jittering is much better for the player than it being "correct". I'd say as long as you don't mix pixel sizes the game will be alright.
I like your take on this!
I definitely think smoothness is better than pixel perfection. Pixel perfect parallax would be awesome, but it seems like too much work for too little gain to do on this project specifically. I'm certain it could be done, but I feel like that would require sort of a bespoke effect rather than something you can turn on in settings or even whip up in what I would consider a reasonable amount of time.
That's actually something I'd like to ask about, if anyone has experience with it, how would you create that kind of effect? Would it require coding in a lot of individual frames for each background layer, an algorithm to decide which pixels should turn on and off as the "real" background moves behind them, or what?
Almost no pixel art games are actually pixel perfect and sprites will stand between pixels all the time, forcing pixel perfection honestly makes the game look much worse unless the art was specifically designed to be perfect from the get go, so ur all good man :)
making a true pixel perfect style is really challenging, so I'd honestly put my efforts towards learning new pixel art techniques and becoming even more advanced with the style in general, in order to become a more versatile game artist(not to say u aren't already ofc, but we never stop learning as artists)
rly great video, hope to see more soon ^ - ^
I wouldn't say "almost no". There's a ton of pixel perfect games out there.
Hi, thanks for the video, great as always.
One thing that i think AdamCYounis does to fix some of these issues in "Insignia" is using stack cameras, this way he can use the camera's culling mask to render only the particles pixel-perfect and merge with the main camera that's not, i think this should work for the particles.
Came across this randomly and decided to binge all your videos. Wanted to drop some of the mental notes I was taking while watching.
- I wouldn't worry too much about visuals, just focus on getting gameplay feeling good first. Making features look pretty tends to be a wasted effort if you end up removing those features down the line because you find out too late that they aren't fun or feel out of place. Make stuff that is good enough for now.
- Having the ashes of the phoenix blow away with the wind and collecting at a checkpoint could be a cool visual detail
- Playing more with aerial moves might be a good direction for a bird based game, making the ground fire attack give more height for quick ascents and maybe adding an aileron roll attack that dashes you a distance vertically but maintains height. Another is making the fire twister knock you backwards slightly for more dodge/movement options
- Bird Feet Grab Move?
- Moving the fog to a background layer might be better, can help add that enchanted forest look but doesn't obscure the players view. Another option is masking a gradient of the fog around the player so the fog grows denser outside the light of your flames. (Potentially your hp can effect this distance but that might be more annoying then anything)
-Another solution to adding background detail might just be adding more layers of background tiles like you have before, having the background fade into darker tiles until it reaches complete darkness with more light bleeding through as you ascend, then just adding some tile variance like different shaped leaves, flowers or branches.
I peeeersonally don't think the standing-between-pixels thing is an issue. For me it kinda looks like it adds depth by separating the character from the background. Makes it clearer what you're controlling is separate from the environment
But ultimately it's up to you and whatever feels right
I personally don't mind in-between pixels, it makes the movement smoother and the point of pixelart is the artstyle, not the actual old hardware restriction.
There's this one guy making an office roguelike who made the position of his characters snap to a pixel sized grid, keeping it consistent
Good stuff man, this looks pretty cool.
Nice video mate, i will be following your journey now, have a nice day
Don't over-scope.
Don't over-scope.
You have almost all of the features I'd suggest having. Create a vertical slice and see how fun it actually is. If it sucks, you haven't wasted that much time yet.
Yes!
"Programming is chaotic magic. There are no rules. You ask a game dev “Can the player summon a giant demon that bursts from the ground in an explosion of lava?” and they’ll say “sure, that’s easy” and then you’ll ask “can the player wear a scarf?” and they’ll go “oof”"
Hey just a little tip I think might help. Make the fire orb move less, it is part of the UI so it should be kinda blending in with the game not angrily standing out.
NGL one of the most under rated game devs. Love the vids :)
Love these videos man.
I think the bird and background being able to be “between” pixels makes the game feel more smooth on general. I like it
Wow this video has gotten so many views!!! Congrats bro❤❤
Free game engines didn't give people the opportunity to make indie games ...
... they gave people the opportunity to experience the unmatched game dev struggle.
I think that for many people it's very important that the game runs smoothly and doesn't jitter, especially with the jittering being pixel-sized in the pixel-graphics game 🙂Being able to stand in-between pixels, instead of forcefully forcing character into alignment will also be much smoother and less wonky, some people would probably have a feeling that the movement "is weird" with forcing the pixel precision.
Thus, I think that *No jitter > pixel perfect* : smoother movement, background and most importantly better control and "feeling" of how the character moves or the game behaves! ♥
pixel misalignment and pixel resolution mismatch (especially when pixel art is scaled at a resolution higher than the art itself) are among my biggest pet peeves in indie games and I wish more people cared about it. however the truth is most people don't care so you can definitely get away with not having it. you've got to decide if it's worth the effort to you. but it's something that I rarely see handled well in indie games, so I always notice and greatly appreciate when someone cares as much as I do.
Great video, i like your explanations! Tho, even if you probably know it already, i have to say the tileset feels a bit bland in comparison to the background or the bird itself, great game tho, love to see more from you
Don't think anyone else has mentioned this: you could try using camera stacking or overlay cameras with different pixel perfect settings. If you set the background to render through an overlay camera without pixel perfect it will fix the jittering, and you can keep pixel perfect on the rest of the scene.
its always fun to watch indie devs show their work process and how they workaround problems and find solutions, game dev was always about solving problems and making a fun game in the end!
btw pls give me the song name of the intro, ive been hearing it used in a lot of videos but never got the name, thanks in advance! ^^
The fog could possibly be done in such a way so that different thicknesses cover each parallax tree in the background instead of just an overlay on the screen, which would fix the non-pixel art noise and make it look a bit more like the images provided in the video
It's up to the style you want for the game. But if you want pixel particles, on your Particle system, check the box for Texture Sheet Animation. and change the mode to Sprites, underneath you can add in sprites to replace the particles. You could then have the particles as squares to represent individual pixels or create a fire sprite to emit.
Note: Make a fun game first, then start stressing over all these small details. It's insane to try and make it look beautiful first
I think the solution to your problem is quantization, in old games they would keep track of an extra byte that would actually do anything but after it exceeded 255 it would overflow into something that does mean something like position in pixels, people often call this "subpixels". I don't know if this would 100% solve your problem but if the camera, player and background are only moving in whole "pixel" increments it should prevent most of the "jitter", that and the scroll speed for the background layers should be an integer multiple or harmonic fraction of the main layer. e.g. 1x, 2x, 3x, 1/2x, 1/3x, 1/4x etc. As long as you have some sort of "subpixel" value it shouldn't effect game feel.
I think the issue is that even though you are rendering the game at a low resolution then up-scaling it, the layers aren't pixel perfect or synchronised causing the layers that are further back to update a whole pixel without the front layers updating. This is likely due to rounding as the camera moves a distance so small that it's only updating background layers that are extremely close to the half way point. If you just quantize the camera position before the rendering step then it should synchronize the backgrounds.
Pixel art is a lot of work and it requires careful planning even more so now because programs tend to fight you at every step because you just aren't meant to used for this sort of thing any more but it sure beats physically writing hex values down on paper as one used to do in the old days.
It looks great! Have you tried rounding the visual positions like the parallax effect to the size of a pixel? I think it might fix some of the issues
The "suck it up and do it properly" solution for a pixel perfect pixel-art game is to do all of the art the old fashioned way, but nobody wants to do that in the modern age . It's kind-of unreasonable, so the question becomes one of intention instead. Why do you want it to be pixel perfect? Personally, I think that as long as you're consistent it won't matter too much to players. Consider how popular the HD-2D games like Octopath Traveler are. Pixel art in 3D space works and it can work in 2D space too. Just keep a strong art direction in mind *before* you go all-in on something. It's a lot of work to fix a lot of work later in the process.
Some personal suggestions:
1. For effects you can prerender the effect to sprites and then render them as pixel-perfect sprites in game.
2. A pixel perfect foreground with a non-pixel perfect background would solve your parallax jitter without making the game lose the natural feel.
I would try to pixelate each layer separately, so that the parallax layers roll smoothly but retain the individual pixel scale relative to each other even if you adjust the sprite size based on distance
I had a similar issue with the parallax scrolling, and i found that the jitteriness was caused by my camera smoothing being too strong. When i made the camera a but more stiff once i stopped moving, it was hard to see the jitter at all
Another solution would be to increase the strength of the parallax, or reduce the number of layers. Anything to widen the gap in speeds between layers
Good stuff! My advice is not to fixate too much on the small stuff in the beginning. As it’s often said, perfect is the enemy of good. Worst case is you spend weeks perfecting some game mechanic, only to realize later it doesn’t work with the overall game at all.
Movement looks very enjoyable nonetheless!
So, if I understand it correctly, you're applying the "pixel perfect rescaling thing" to everything at once, both your pixelated art and the unity particles/shaders to make them pixelated.
If that's the case, you can separate rendering in different cameras, to apply different effects and show them together using "Render Textures". IE: Pixelate the particles and don't mess with your art.
I used this approach once on a prototype of mine, it has lava and I wanted *only* the lava to have bloom, and the rest of the game to be normal. So I render the lava on a different cam and layer it in the game. The lava is still in the game world, so it still has the colliders, but the "game cam" doesn't render it directly, it only shows the RenderTexture with the "bloomed lava".
I guess it's hard to explain... I could make a video about it but I've never youtubed before ;p
I really am excited by the progress Hazix!! I can't remember, is it one big map and you get to the top? It's reminding me of Getting Over It and A Difficupt Game About Climbing 😂 (In a good way though lolol)
Thank you, right now I just made one big map for testing, but there will most likely be different screens. Probably more like jump king, but it will probably need load screens so the enemies aren't loaded in the whole time.
@@HazixDev Oh very cool very cool. I question the need for loading screens though, would it not be possible to load the enemies when the player is nearby but still off screen? Or would it be too much to load smoothly?
Possible yes, but I think if it spawns in a lot at once the game might lag. Depends on how big each area is. I might add load screens between bosses and each area or none at all. I'll know more about what I can get away with once I start making the level properly.
You might be able to do a custom shader for the entire screen (Minus main character?) which pixellates everything.
If you render slightly outside of the visible area, you can take the float part of the offset you'd normally have and pass it to the shader to offset everything and still get the smooth movement you'd otherwise lose.
I found if using a urp asset in project settings graphics and quality, then setting the scale of the urp asset to maybe 0.2 it also pixelates the scene. I don’t know maybe other shaders work as well.
honestly, i think you should invest time into making sure the particles fit the pixel grid. might be hard having to go back to fix issues with the scaling and jitteriness and whatnot, but i think the resulting effect would be worth it! i say this because one of my favorite games, heroes of hammerwatch, does this a lot and i think it looks phenomenal
standing in-between pixels is perfectly fine, so long as this doesn't happen with immovable objects, which would give the scenery a mixeled look and that's a very bad no-no
Putting the cart before the horse. You don't have a gameplay loop, why are you worried about literally anything in this video?
A few things, it seems you're in the early parts of the learning phase; appreciate that.
It may be good to collab; do some game jams, you'll find answers to these questions sometimes and questions you don't have yet. Others go through the same issues and you can learn from the work arounds if their solution would benefit you.
Not what you asked about, but I think the fog effect may work better if you have layers of it between the static parallax layers.
I might be wrong, but regarding the bird's position, you can simply round its rendered position to fit the pixels but just keep the collider between pixels. and if the movement looks jittery, you can round it only when the bird is still.
I hope this suggestion isn't too late but I recommend watching the channel "aarthificial" since he managed to fix the sudden jitteriness of the camera while still having the scene be pixel perfect even when modified by different parameters! :D This is the video name that I am talking about! :D "Next-Gen Pixel Art - Astortion Devlog #20"
This seems like it can be a very interesting game. I really enjoy the concept. For your pixel FX issues... it almost seems like doing the right thing would be to draw your own pixel effects. For fog, you can do pixel art in Photoshop and lower the opacity on certain pixels. Researching this may find easy solutions, but I'm guessing you would need to create a pattern that loops well. For the fire particle fx, in the bottom of the particle effects component somewhere, there should be a materials or some way to assign a sprite to it. With that in mind, you can use unity's native image of the 2D square as the sprite or texture of the material. Whichever way the particle system allows you to assign it. That will get you a "pixel looking" effect to the fire. It's a cheat, but is it really?
I definitely think that its okay not to be "pixel perfect". The art style is still pixel art, youre just not pretending to run on something like an NES where actual pixels are your limit.
I personally think that even if you decide the bird needs to snap to the pixels, the background not being that way is fine, and the fog not being pixel art is perfect.
I think making the effects more like pixel art is a good aim but also not a deal breaker for being a pixel art game. The important thing is that the effects are consistent in style
Also people have mentioned the running animation not lining up: I think that should be fixed in the final/release version but shouldnt be a top priority until then. But it can't hurt to workshop some ideas in the meantime. If the bird's speed will be variable, I think scaling the animation with speed is a good idea, but I'm no game designer so I'll leave that magic to you
Do your best not to fall prey to perfectionism! It might be best to find one or two (not a whole community, at least not every time!) people you know you can trust, and ask them from time to time "is this thing I'm worried about actually important, or do you think I'm being a perfectionist?"
I didn't notice about the bird standing between pixels. If it hard to fix then it may not worth the effort.
u cn keep it so the pixel perfect camera only targets objects on a certain layer. In this case it would be the fog and the particle effects
I would personally do both : turn on the pixel-perfect camera and rework the effects. I admit to being a bit of a perfectionist, though !
a pixel perfect art style *is* cool, but it's a big commitment. there's a lot of things that become a lot harder when doing them pixel perfect. jittering, fonts, movement etc. there are a lot of tricks you can use to mitigate these challenges, but there's no easy fix. there's nothing wrong with a pixel art style that isn't pixel perfect. there's tons of successful games that do this. look at terraria, for example. it has rotating particles, enemies that move between pixels, trees that move subtly in the wind and even non-pixilated text (which makes everything a lot more readable). and no one complains about terraria's graphics. the art style looks awesome. a lot of the item and enemy sprites wouldn't even work with pixel perfect graphics.
I would recommend having consistent pixel size though. I think the main reason people complained about the particles was that they're too detailed. if you use sprites for the effects and particles with around the same pixel size and level of detail, it would fit a lot better. just be consistent and I'm sure it'll work out :)
I don't know if Unity has a similar feature, but in Godot I setup a "gameView" subviewport that the game scene is placed inside of. The subview is set to render at 320x180 but then linearly scaled up to the desired player resolution. On-top of this I am assuming whenever the player has a wacky resolution monitor, I simply resize the subviewport's resolution to a similar ratio that their using and it'll match what the player needs. Then anything placed within this view port will be pixel-ized and snap to the pixels. The only thing I struggled with from there, was setting up the camera, and I ended up finding a custom "pixel perfect lerp" function on a github issue discussing implementing a pixel perfect camera and that works perfectly for me.
Amazing work as usual. For gameplay, add more enemies. I love enemies in games. I can make some for you if you like 👍 if you decide to use them just credit me in the next devlog. Also I can make you a new logo. also i cant join the server because i got to verify my number so can you change it please.
Not being able to stand inbetween pixles would inherently cause jitter unless you for example do a lerp smoothing if you don't perfectly match animation to movement to a pixelgrid both in air and on ground. I've never heard about games that do this but correct me if I'm wrong. For the fog you could pixelate the noise before doing anything more with it.
I've run into this problem alot, its something that plagues pixel art games with 3d components. While pixel snapping is still common in 2d games, my fix for it is to render the pixel camera onto a texture, then slide the texture around opposite to the direction the player is moving, only snapping the texture back in place after the offset becomes greater than the size of a single pixel.
I think I've seen a video about this technique, or something like it. They were after a pixel-perfect look but using isometric 3D or something, so they just managed the camera "normally", but rendered it onto a separate layer adjusted to compensate for the sub-texel positioning.
there's a video by aarthificial that goes into alot more detail on the subject. its astortion devlog #20(i think my original comment got deleted for using the link) hope this helps, good luck!
@@waterymilk2153 Yeah, YT tends to pre-emptively delete comments that contain full URLs. A quick workaround is to just post the video ID (in this case "c_3TLN2gHow") where the other person can paste it into a video URL directly.
Pixel art games not being pixel perfect drives me absolutely insane, but games like Stardew Valley and Vampire Survivors are "broken" like this and no one seems to care, so I'm not sure it really matters to most people.
i dont think half pixel positions are a problem. pixel art is a styleistic choice. while it stems from the early hardware limitations of games consoles it shouldn't dictate your process. you have to ask if the pixel perfect placement is really important to the design of the game or not. sometimes it is, other times its not.
if you're struggling to make pixel art you can try a hybrid approach, where you generate the effects either in unity or another program, render them out as frames at a low res, import into your editor of choice and tweaked.
Hate to be that guy, but there's a frame of the walking/running animation that has the bird become bald (it's missing the top row of black pixels/border above the head)
You could use the pixel art camera on just the fog and particles and overlay it ontop of the rest of the game
As others have said I think graphics are something you can worry about later but I really think the trees shouldn't be basically the same colour as the character. You'd want your character to stand out more. Also if your setting is supposed to be a winter forest the lush green platforms don't fit
To make the character not able to stand between pixels: I usually just round the x position when yVelocity is 0.
i don't think the standing inbetween pixels is bad at all
it's just a difference of how games used to be and are now
these days it's normal to have characters standing in between pixels even in pixel art games
heck if i remember right even shovel knight and celeste have it (tho i'm not sure it's from my own memory)
and perhaps even phoentopia awakening which i'm currently playing (great game btw would def recommend) tho i haven't really taken the time to notice whether or not it does that
you could consider it your own small stylistic touch, but either way, suck it up and do it the right way xD
Check out aarthifical’s devlog series. They have a similar pixel art style and they explain how they’re made in some of their vids. (can’t remember which)
Just snap the bird to pixel perfect when it stops moving (snap in the direction it was already moving, regardless of facing. Otherwise that partial pixel rewind will be obvious). The rest of the time you'll never notice.
IMO it's not noticeable at all to me when you're standing "in between pixels." I kind of see the pixel art aesthetic as just that... an aesthetic. If you really wanted to go for accuracy and stuff then you certainly could work within those limitations, but I don't think it's a bad thing to just borrow the look and nothing else.
That being said, muno's suggestion about rounding to integers while standing still is a great solution.
You should try to make the phoenix reach the sun, I feel like that would be more fitting.
Personally I would go all in one way or the other.
If you want everything to be pixel perfect, make sure it all is.
If not... Well, the world is your oyster, youre just using it as a stylistic thing, so go ham on the graphics. Use shaders, all kinds of effects. Until everything looks coherent.
In fact cohesion is more important than the technical details.
Standing perfectly centered over every pixel REALLY doesn't matter. Look at terraria. The movement and combat in that game feels very satisfying because it doesn't limit the player as to where they are able to stand or move. The movement is very smooth and fluid, and that is a result of allowing the player to stand on any part of any pixel they wish.
You can always make it look better, but I think the pixel perfect FX should be low on your list of priorities. Get minimal placeholder effects working that are needed to communicate info to the player (taking damage, healing, etc) and move on for the time being. New devs often spend a lot of time working on "juice" for its own sake early on and it's a big waste of time IMO if you haven't built out the rest of the game yet. Optimization for instance is way more important than "juice" but nobody wants to talk about that. Unless your goal is to blow up on social media then you gotta make it look as flashy as possible lol
I would keep the normal mist but make pixel art for the particles instead of using a node.
It may or may not be too late to impart these tips on you, but for anyone else who reads this and is thinking of getting into designing their own game I'll leave this comment here.
- Don't do pixel art for a first game because it's exceedingly difficult to get right and you'll drive yourself nuts.
- Use placeholder graphics when first developing the game and focus on getting the gameplay perfect before making better graphics.
- If your game is story-based, then fully flesh that out before you do anything else.
- If you are a perfectionist then try to rid yourself of this trait as it will inhibit you from finishing.
- Take breaks so you don't burn out.
While not a tip per se, I would still suggest that if at all possible that more people should aim for multi-platform support and if they're writing their own engine to open source it or if you're using a prebuilt engine to use one that is already open source. Feel free to ignore this suggestion, but if you care about game preservation then at least consider it. The assets can always be separated from the engine and sold separately, although it would take extra work to reason about how to do that if you're not a professional developer.
I think the jitteriness is a lot worse then the no pixels. The non pixel effects give the game some personality and gives it a chance to stand out compared to most pixel art games. Idk, that's just my opinion.
Celeste is a pixel art game that isnt pixel perfect! I see no problem with the bird stepping between pixels as long as the art style remains consistent
Could you allow non-pixel perfect movement, but then snap to the closest pixel when the bird stops?
Godot solves all of your issues straight out of the box
add outlines to the other things so the bird fits in better
unity doesnt have a sprite rendering for particles? it would be easier if your particles were just pixel shape instead of round wouldnt it?
I feel some drawn fog would look much better rather than a shader!
double the resolution of the art (1 pixel - 4 pixels) then shift the bird one pixel
Personally, having the player be "in between" pixels is not an issue. It happens in Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. Just to name a few off the top of my head. So it's not really an issue. The gameplay isn't grid based, so why should the movement be?
music at end of video?
In my opinion, you should keep the pixel perfect option. Maybe its just me being a pixel artist, but I can't stand those mixels (inconsistent pixel size/position), and the pros outweigh the cons here.
I like this video
what is that intro song
couldn't you have pixel perfect camera deactivate and activate if the player is moving or standing respecively? :P
I gotta say that i hate when pixel art games don't conform to the pixel grid
Make the fire die out as your deplete the bar
For the particles, why not just use pixel art sprites for the particles?
I'm confused, are you wanting the feet to be inbewteen the grass or no?
just make the particles sprite also pixel art?
In Super Mario Maker you can stand in between pixels so that doesn't bother me
i like the game a lot, but the black outline on the phoenix clashes with the rest of the game too hard
I feel like the "real solution" is just to hand-craft pixel art for effects and fog. Just literally draw some pixel fog, lower the opacity, and do a tween animation of it moving across the screen. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but I"m also sure it's not much more complicated than that.
yeah, the shaders worked for the fog, but the pixel effect gets distorted when the particles get scaled. I'll make sprites for the particles at some point.