Pixel art and the curse of reality in flash games
Lately I'm working on a small and easy game in my spare time, which has pixel art style graphics. Usually I favor vector graphics with nice gradients, bells and whistles, but now I have chosen pixels for a time-limit reason. Not that producing quality pixel art would take less time than producing quality art of different styles, however the trick lies in user perception and the so-called curse of reality...
Curse of reality and game graphics
The expression curse of reality is applied in the movie world in connection with animated movies and refers to the observation that the closer an animation is to reality, the more sensitive are the watchers to small production errors. This is quite understandable, since we live in the reality, and once someone approaches our domain we are sure to spot the glitches. At the opposite end, if graphics is far from reality, why should we care if it fails to resemble it?
The same principle can be applied to game graphics - when producing pixel art, you are not producing "cheaper" art or "easier" art, but an art of a different style which is less related to reality than others. Therefore your players rely less on their senses but more on their imagination to build up their inner image of the game - and moving the imagination of players is a powerful consequence! Remember the games on the ZX Spectrum? Some of the actors in the games were mere blobs of pixels but the player felt excited nevertheless.
Don't break consistency
While I'm not great at graphics, my general goal is to produce consistent artwork where the parts fit together. I prefer a less detailed but self-consistent style than a style with more detail at some parts but less at others, because the latter inconsistency alerts the player that something fishy is going on and interferes with expanding his or her free imagination.
This is the beginning of my journey to the pixel art world, and I'm curious to explore the hidden treasures.
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