/vr/ - Retro Games

>>2150675
All of that sexy pixel art was first scanned, then imported so the art director and programmers could dither/crop/whatever. I can't fathom the difficulty of drawing these images pixel-by-pixel, which themselves would have been stored in the form of disconnected tile bitmaps needing reconstitution within the game program. Pic related's an example of both scanning-in and, I'm going to infer, low-level pixel editing to replace the philosophers of the School of Athens with schoolgirls.

Games from developers like Artdink or Hokusho take a different approach: tile graphics of structures and terrain are built pixel-by-pixel, then drawn in-game atop standard graphics layers (as opposed to drawing a full image, its parts locked together). For historical sims, this means you can generate arbitrary quantities of graphics based on minimums and maximums; the skyscrapers in Tokio are very detailed, having been designed through a computer graphics application before Artdink tested how they would look in-engine.