3 hours later
An evening in the life of an after-hours pixel artist
Retronator Editorial
I’m insanely bad at giving time estimates. I aimed at getting the rest of the coloring for my new pixel art poster done in 3 days, but it’s clearly not going to happen at this rate. Just now I spent 3 hours to color a building and some scenery for what could seemingly get done with a paint bucket in 15 minutes. And I’m only 5% closer to the goal.
I mean, I guess this is what might make the end result good, because I can easily spend 3 hours staring at the screen, and figuring out shadows pixel by pixel, and drawing small little tank guys, and moving shit around back and forth to make things perfect … At least until the next time I see it when I’ll notice it’s far from perfect and more like shit. By the time I was done writing (and re-writing) this I already saw a couple of things, like it needs darker greens on the shadow side of the tank guys and maybe bolder shadows on the scafolding platforms in general. But I digress.
While such patience is good for the end result (and maybe even necessary for pixel art), it will also be the end of me, because I’ll be spending 250 hours on a poster that was supposed to take me 100.
Well, Tribute (pictured below) was also around 200h, and it was done spread out over about 3–4 months (technically over 7 years, first two in 2005, last two in 2012). With Spectropolis I’m at about 2 months with around 150 hours put in.
More stats: Spectropolis has 206,280 pixels, Tribute has 594,000. So by putting in about the same amount of time, the detail density will be 3 times as much. This means way less empty space that is filled in 1 second with a paint bucket and way more small little characters that are a pain to make and cover a mere 10x10 pixels.
I guess how eBoy achieve their insane amount of details is due to a couple of things: it’s three of them, it’s their full time job, and over the years they have built a huge library of these small sprites like characters, vehicles, street junk and other props that they use to populate their scenes with. The majority of their cityscapes are of course still custom done, but filling in those gaps to achieve a huge detail density is way more efficient with a library of reusable things. Maybe I shouldn’t take them as inspiration and comparison with my scenes, haha. Or well, they’re just smarter than me with their approach.
Aaaaanyway, let’s end with some self motivation from this quote by Shigeru Miyamoto:
“A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.”
At least I hope so.
— Retro
