Why Use Pixel Art? Choosing a Great Art Style for Your Game

Photo: ila fox

If you’ve played an independent game title, the kind made by one developer working part time with a dream, then chances are you’ve seen a game made using pixel art.  For the uninitiated, pixel art is where the artwork and art assets in a game are drawn pixel by pixel, in the style of classic 8-bit or 16-bit video games.  Of course all games use pixels in truth, but art pixel games tend to exaggerate the size of them and stick to a limited color palette.  Spelunky is a recent indie game that uses this style:

Image: Derek Yu

Your gut reaction to these games is probably one of two things:

1. Those games look bizarre and ugly.  Why would anyone make a game that looks like it’s from the 80’s?  Isn’t this the 21st century?  Hello, photoshop?
2. These games look beautiful!  What simplicity, what style, what grace!  I wish I could make games that look like that!

If you fall in the first category you are (gasp!) with the vast majority of people and even video game players.  To many indie developers, this may sound strange because they are so immersed by it, pixel art seems so obvious; why would anyone think it’s ugly?  This is a classic case of ostrich-head-in-the-sand syndrome, getting too immersed in what is going on in your tiny community and overlooking what is happening in the world at large.

My goal with this article isn’t to stop people from using pixel art in their games, or even to say that pixel art is in any way inferior to other art styles. My goal is to help developers understand what choices they are making.  Once you understand why you are or aren’t deciding to use pixel art, then you are a step above the rest in really understanding your game and your audience.  Just doing it because everyone else is doing it doesn’t help you grow as a game developer.

Why Pixel Art is so Popular with Indie Developers

There are a few factors that contribute to pixel art being so popular with the indie crowd.

The Nostalgia Factor. First, many of the major indie developers today are in their mid 20’s and mid 30’s.  This isn’t an exhaustively researched statistic, but it’s safe to say that most of the major players, the ones making the hit indie titles, are around that age group (myself included).  What this means is that when this group was growing up, then we played a lot of games that could be considered using a classic style of art, pixel art.  Super Mario Bros. 3, Sonic the Hedgehog, so on and so forth.  This wasn’t really a style choice by the designers.  It was a technological limitation.  Games had to look like that, because that’s all that the processors could handle.

But what has that got to do with anything?  As I mentioned, many of these indie game developers today grew up on those games, during a time that I like to call the “Dark Ages”.  This is a period of life usually from age 5 to age 12, when games (or any media for that matter) capture the player’s heart.  When you play games at that age, you don’t just play them, you fall in love with them.  You draw pictures of the characters, dress up like the characters, and make maps of the worlds.  This attachment in the the Dark Ages has a lasting effect; for the rest of that person’s life, they will always look back on whatever games they played at that time with great fondness.  Now that these kids have grown up and are making games of their own, the art styles of their favorite childhood memories are one of the first out of the bucket when they’re thinking of a game.

Lack of Funding/Professional Artists. The second reason that pixel art is so popular with independent developers is that it is easier to pull off.  Note that I didn’t say it is easy, I said it is easier to pull off in comparison to other art styles in terms of formal training required and time needed to deliver assets.  You can actually quantify this by the cost of hiring an artist to do a game in pixel art style vs. hiring an artist to do it in a different style.  The latter will be more expensive.

A dedicated programmer or designer can put together some pretty outstanding pixel art.  This won’t blow the main stream world away, but it will certainly get the job done, look respectable, and allow them to focus on what they love: the design and programming of the game.

Of course there are artists who specialize in this style and their work is even more breathtaking, but as you start to go up the art ladder and into the professional game industry, you see less and less pixel art.  The reason for this is that large companies have money to burn, and so they like to push the envelope with what can be done and how their game is represented.  Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Insider Story of courses uses pixels to draw their art, but they do not attempt to recreate the retro look of art pixel games.  Instead they choose a bouncy, playful style that matched the feel of the game.

A Well Worn Path.

Lastly, pixel art is a well understood art choice, which is to say that there have been so many thousands of games done in this style.  This makes art with pixels an easy guide.  Want to represent snow?  That’s been done, see how they do it.  Want to represent someone eminating power?  Water?  A rock?  All of these things have much reference.

In other art styles, the vocabulary isn’t as wide and deep in terms of what’s been done before.  You might need to dig deeper to see how things were done in other games.  Representing a sword swipe can be done many different ways in a game; find the one that works for you.

Selecting an Art Style that Complements Your Game

So what does all of this mean?  Does it mean that pixel art is bad?  That you should contract a freelance artist and change how your game looks?

No.  Not necessarily.

All you need to do is be aware that the art style you choose for your game should match the feel of the game itself.  What this means is that pixel art does some very specific things.  It focuses on simplicity.  It gives the game a nostalgia factor for players who grew up on the old Nintendo Entertainment System.  It conveys a world of concreteness and well defined boundaries.

This is fine if all these things match your game, however if your game is about fluidity and softness, for example, then pixel art might not be the best.  Flow was a game that needed to convey these aesthetics, and so they choose a clouded vector art style to match the soothing gameplay.

Similarly, Braid was a game about the beauty of a relationship, the sound of the music, and the passage of time.  For this reason, pixel art wouldn’t have made as much sense, because the art needed to likewise convey the incredibly ornate beauty of the environment in a way that matched the complicated violins and puzzles.

Both of these games would have been made worse if they had been done in art pixel, because that style doesn’t match what’s actually happening in the game.  The choices they did make convey the feeling of the game and allow for a more consistent experience.

In a future post, I’ll discuss different art styles that are easily available to indie artists.  Until then, pick an art style that matches the mood of your game, and you’ll be golden!