/vr/ - Retro Games

Well...I guess an retro art thread. but whatever.

>tfw when no more friendly local video store

now its either big name franchises or digital distribution.

I believe this is Knights of Xenter. I remember playing a english translation as a youngster. First H-game that I beat from start to finish, it was fun in its lite RPG fashion.

>Beat off to the cat-girls so many times

Even with limited set of colours they managed to make something awesome. I really have to hand it to those early game artists.

>>1091753

It was made just like every other piece of old sprite art.

1. Draw a sketch on paper.
2. Refine the sketch on graphing paper.
3. Determine your palette limitations and make a final drawing of the sprite with the correct colors and resolution.

Then, the sprite is either coded directly into the game by a programmer, or it is created in a Paint-like program.

We got robbed. The future was suspose to be a neon lights paradise of cyber hacking and badly implemented VR programs.

>>1091794
sorry, picture didn't attach

>>1091791

>>1091794
Welp, I'm fucked.

>>1091753

A big part of the look is what's called dithering, which is when they alternate between pixels of two different colours to give the appearance of an intermediate one. Ironically it's supposed to just bleed together on a CRT so us jizzing over the delicate stippling/pointilism-like effect isn't the intention, not that the original artists' intentions should count for all that much.

Basically what you do is switch to Indexed colours and pick your palette in GIMP or photoshop, and a dithering algorithm, then clean it up by hand. You can probably produce something more special by using layers to separate blocks of shading to make it easier to make specific patterns. The rest is just learning the 80s/90s anime style.

>>1091906

Another thing that's of note is this style of chainlink colouring with 1x2 blocks of colour, common on FM Towns games like Cosmic Psycho. It's (I think) an artifact of image compression, half the lines of the picture aren't stored, the computer just alternates drawing one the same colour as the pixel above and below. Halves the size of images with a few of lines of code.

Puxelpainting is merely a technique of digital painting. If you can draw, you can do it. Some used to produce good art, because they were talented artists, while pixel-painting itself has no merits, only limutations.

>>1091786
Actually, most of them fucked up hideously. Good pixelart was incredibly rare back in the days.

>>1091941

Good pixel-painting requires good knowledge of the concepts behind stippling and pointillism. This produces a distinct look which many find very appealing, even if it only appears in these games as an artifact of the technology.

>>1091794
Go to Hong Kong.

pixel art is exhausting to say the least

you absolutely must get something like GraphicsGale or GrafX, gimp and paint are sloooow, unless you're making 50x50 pixel mario-images

but for big PC98 you're going to need to either draw really good computer line art, or have a scanner to upload drawn pictures

luckily there are a million billion pixel art colour theory, dithering, techniques tutorials on the web for free

>>1091970
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

This explains how they were able to also create effects on the Amiga and stuff by switching certain colors at the right time.

It's also just nice to look at

Emulator cuts off half the screen.

>>1091906
>Ironically it's supposed to just bleed together on a CRT so us jizzing over the delicate stippling/pointilism-like effect isn't the intention, not that the original artists' intentions should count for all that much.

I'm viewing this thread on a mid-90s era 20" CRT monitor, and I'm able to see all the bits of dithering and individual pixels.

The monitors that came with the old Japanese computers would have been slightly coarser in dot-pitch, but I think they'd still be very very sharp looking at the low resolutions used in these games.

>>1092823
Pretty much. 90s monitors are not standard def televisions. You get pretty much crystal clear displays out of the good ones.

>>1092823
And I just switched to 640x480. God damn some of these screenshots are gorgeous in full-screen low-res.

>>1091794
No thanks, I like my cities gritty and run-down, with prostitutes on every corner and drug dealers in every alley.

The reason for the heavy, heavy dithering in PC-98 games is that the computer doesn't display many colors. It does like 16. Compared to, say, the Genesis, at 63 (which is low for a 16bit console). However, because the PC-98 can display in a higher resolution, they just add all that dithering in, and voila, superior graphics.

>>1091970

sauce?

>>1092943

Ushinawareta Rakuen, apparently. I grabbed it from one of these threads so iunno.

I wonder what they did with all the original paintings from the countless h-games that were made this way.