![]() ![]() So it's not a "pixel art" game, in the way that Owlboy or Sea of Stars is. Hollow Knight's assets appear to be painted at a higher resolution and downscaled to 1080, which is how general digital artwork is made. These games also follow certain retro palette restrictions that make them feel more like NES or SNES games. Most pixel art games now use a virtual resolution of 320x180 because it can cleanly scale 6x to 1920x10p, or 12x to 3840x2160 for 4k monitors. For example, Shovel Knight has a virtual resolution of 400x240 pixels, scaled up 4.5x to 1800x10p displays. ![]() Generally, "pixel art" today means you're painting at a lower resolution (virtual resolution) than the target resolution. If you get out of platformers and look at other genres, there's Vanillaware games and Indivisible, but it's still a small pond. I can name Cuphead, The Dragon's Trap, Hollow Knight, and some of the Shantae games, which are a little more core-facing than Sonic. If they wanted to stand out from other 2D platformers, there's very little competition in that high-res hand-drawn space. I may just be outside their target though. It seems like a conservative guess of what audiences will buy, but it doesn't instantly grab me and make me think about it all the time like Wonder. What is right for Sonic specifically? What reaches the broadest audience, represents the characters faithfully, and is most legible to play, while still fitting in the $60 boxed-game-at-Christmas format? When I look at footage of Superstars, I don't see the hook in the art style. The greater complexity of the pipeline makes each asset consume more man-hours. There is a wider talent pool available for this, but the ceiling is much higher which makes proficiency harder to achieve. Working in polygons, you have to consider lighting, shaders, draw distance, level-of-detail, the whole pipeline of diffuse/specular/normal/whatever maps, and tricks like impostors. Most people do not learn skills like animating your anti-aliasing, but those that do are really good at it. Working in pixel art, you have to define a virtual resolution and palette to work in, and anything like variable device resolutions or aspect ratios is a huge headache. Everything will be difficult in its own way-it comes down to time, labor, and tech. The reality is, there's no such thing as an easy game to make. I would consider what Naoto Oshima said of Superstars' art style: The question of how difficult different types of 2D are to make comes up a lot. So you get the advantages of 2D assets while being able to adjust for nonstandard aspect ratios on PC/Mac/mobile, the way you can with 3D. High-res 2D assets have a faster turnaround than polygon models, and don't have to scale in strict integers like pixel art. Work is sparse in general 2D animation, so there's a lot of skilled animators that could be employed at what are low costs for the game industry but high wages for animators. 2D animation is cheap, yet perceived as valuable because it's rare. There would be a number of advantages to doing a hand-drawn Sonic game, even for the sharks running finance. When fans bring up Mania, my first thoughts actually go to the opening: ![]() That doesn't automatically mean 3D is the most approachable or cost-effective way of doing 2D Sonic. Pixel art is still viable, but it's a different business model than what Sega wants Sonic to be. He'll drop $20 on Mania, but not three times that. Dad will put $10 down for Undertale, but wait for a sale when he sees Shovel Knight's $40 tag. While the last decade showed second graders are quite amenable to pixel art, Sega wants 2D Sonic to be a $60 release-the bigger obstacle is convincing their parents to buy it. Taking a long view I can see where Iizuka's coming from, but I think it's the wrong premise to approach it from whether to use pixel art or not.ĢD games in general reach a broader audience than 3D, and Sonic specifically has to think about the 8-year-old that's never touched a console game before. ![]()
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