WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT PIXELATED SPRITES ON A HD BACKGROUND?

Can be pulled off, but very difficult to manage without it looking like a horrible mess. Definitely requires art direction and intentional choice, so it doesn't end up looking like "I just threw together some assets I had lying around because I am too lazy to make my game look good."

Good advice above. However, here's what not to do:





Pier Solar and the Great Architects was a terrible game all-around, but on top of the shit gameplay it had this stupid aesthetic choice

author=Sooz
Can be pulled off, but very difficult to manage without it looking like a horrible mess. Definitely requires art direction and intentional choice, so it doesn't end up looking like "I just threw together some assets I had lying around because I am too lazy to make my game look good."

i second sooz. Besides, i don't see a point in meshing two completely different rendering methods for art in the same game, unless there's a very specific reason you want to do that.
(the reason in FFRK is that it's a mobile game which needs to be stretched up and down, a naturally terrible medium for pixel art. the character sprites look like shit on my old phone but the backgrounds and animations all look great because of that)

The best looking 3D with pixel sprites games are the ones that don't scale the sprites 40000x and render the 3D models in ultra high resolution, aka the ones where one pixel from a character is the same size as one pixel from the background.

That can be done by rendering the game on a low resolution, such as 320x180 or 640x360 or PSP's resolution which is inbetween etc. then stretching the window to fit your monitor etc.


this for instance looks amazing but it pulls off because there's no pixel density disparity between sprite and background.

the biggest problem in this screen is that it itself is screwed up, perhaps by being resized or poor emulation, because xenogears does not have all these scaling artifacts

I think that in most cases it tends to look kind of tacky and/or out of place. That's not to say that it can never be done well, but it's hard to do that.

PS1 games had the worst graphics. SaGa Frontier and Suikoden used the same graphics engine as Xenogears for their battles, and all of them look so bad.



But yeah emulators make it worse. If there's anything being rendered via polygons, the emulator will render it in HD, instead of the original PSX resolution. In games that are entirely 3D, this looks fine - it's basically the same thing that HD releases do. But a lot of PSX games are in that really awful transition era where some graphics were rendered in 3D and others were 2D sprites, because 3D was still really expensive to make, and having even just parts of the screen be 3D was still a real wow factor for players.

Anyway, Ghaleon, don't do whatever it is you're thinking about doing.

I dunno, it all looks pretty good to me. but then again I'm a PS baby

but if anyone was making a game with these graphics here I wwould still be impressed