Independent in pixels
Retronator Games Watchlist
Pixel art is no stranger to the IGF—the Independent Games Festival—which highlights the start of the Game Developers Conference annually in San Francisco. This year the Wednesday opening day falls on March 1st and I’m happy to announce Retronator Magazine will be there to cover the pixel art scene. The nominees for the awards have just been released and it’s as good an excuse as any to look at some phenomenal art.
(Btw, if you want to put some great atmospheric music on while you read, how about the soundtrack to Hyper Light Drifter? You’ll understand.)
The Independent Games Festival goes back to 1998 when it was created as the Sundance of video games—to cherish innovation, experimentation; to pay respect to being quirky and weird and bold.
Often times when you’re watching the awards you’re forced to question your expectations of what video games are like, or indeed what they even are.
The reason independent games got known for achieving this is that they didn’t play by the rules of the industry. Internet allowed small teams and individuals to create and distribute games without giving control to a publisher or adhering to what Walmart thinks will sell well on their shelves. You simply posted to an online forum and you could reach players directly.
Be it professionals selling their titles on Xbox Live Arcade, or hobbyists discussing their creations on TIGForums, independent developers created what we call indie games, a movement of games not driven by profits, but artistic vision.
Returning to the production style of the early developers (a.k.a. the bedroom coders), the very personal involvement allowed individual expression and forced creative navigation around the constraints of limited resources.
The visual styles chosen to illustrate indie games are as diverse as gameplay, from lovely hand-drawn art to low-poly 3D, from abstract shapes to colorful renditions with lush detail. Pixel art represents only a tiny fraction of games featured in the IGF, but they are nonetheless strongly represented among the winners.
Awards are given across numerous categories, but from 2011 to 2014, the main category itself, the $30,000 worth Seumas McNally Grand Prize, fell into the hands of squares and cubes.
It all started with Minecraft in 2011, and followed by FEZ (2012), Cart Life (2013), and Papers, Please (2014).
This year, two pixel art games are nominated for the highest honors: Stardew Valley and Hyper Light Drifter. But let’s start where the IGF starts itself, with the Student section.
Bamboo Heart (nominated for Best Student Game) is one third of a small collection of games called Bamboo EP. It’s freshly available for Windows on Steam and Itch.io and the three games, Bamboo Ball, Bamboo Moon (which is basically the game’s menu), and Bamboo Heart, all share one obvious thing. It’s, well, bamboo.
The nominated Bamboo Heart is basically House of the Flying Daggers meets anthropomorphized animals. In other words, beautiful poetry of swordsmanship, or as the Dutch collective Sokpop would say itself:
a never-ending quest in search for your original heart — but you will never succeed. Instead, you turn into the cold-blooded killer you were afraid of becoming.
I told you IGF is a bit … different.
Next up is Best Audio where Hyper Light Drifter got nominated for its music and sound design. Deservedly so. If you took me up on my suggestion you should be listening to the soundtrack right now. Its author, Rich ‘Disasterpeace’ Vreeland, has already stood on the winning podium previously when he made his name with the soundtrack to FEZ. In fact, Rich said this OST was the spiritual successor to the FEZ and It Follows soundtracks. (We’ll get to the visuals of Hyper Light Drifter in the main category.)
Two games of interest to the pixel scene have also landed in the Best Audio section with honorable mentions. Kingdom: New Lands is the much-extended version of Kingdom, a side-scrolling strategy gem you can read about in greater detail in this very magazine.
One more reason to check out Kingdom besides its gorgeous audiovisual experience? The original version was nominated for Excellence in Design last year.
Second of the honorable mentions is Dropsy, a point-and-click adventure about a clown that wants to hug everybody.
It lives up to the bizarreness expectation of IGF with high merit. Don’t be fooled though; the game holds overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam.
To find out if Dropsy is your kind of clown, why not sing along to the Sing-A-Long edition of the game’s trailer. The game is mentioned in the Best Audio category after all.
Yup, you didn’t see that one coming.
2017 submissions have seen a trend of games based around discovering someone’s life through the person’s digital footprint.
It’s the aftershock from last year. In Nuovo Award-winning Cibele, you explored the online relationship of the game’s author Nina Freeman—Nuovo being the award for the most unconventionally innovative game among already innovative festival selection. (Fun fact, Nina will be hosting this year’s IGF.) Additionally, in last year’s main Grand Prize winner Her Story, you were solving a crime based on an archive of police interviews in similar fashion.
In what is now becoming a genre, the games usually feature a simulated user interface of an operating system, letting the players snoop around folders and chat logs. You can understand the sudden appeal.
The Lion’s Song (honorable mention for Excellence in Narrative) could have easily been in the visual category by my standards.
Spanned across 4 episodes with 3 different characters, decisions from each part will leave lasting effects on the lives of all three protagonists. The fourth episode will pull their early 20th century Austria-based stories into a grand finale.
The characters—a composer, a painter, and a mathematician—are relatable to any artistic or creative soul. The first episode of Lion’s Song is another of the releases with overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam.
Finally, we come to the main category. Seumas McNally Grand Prize is named after the late graphics programmer of 90s’ favorite breakout clone, DX Ball. He also created its sequel DX Ball 2, and more importantly Tread Marks, for which he won the IGF Grand Prize in 2000. As he passed away soon after, the award was renamed in his honor.
Stardew Valley was one of the biggest hits of 2016. It’s been too long since Harvest Moon left its mark on gaming and Stardew Valley filled an insatiable desire for the farming RPG genre, bringing thousands and thousands of newcomers under the spell of just-one-more-day alongside it.
Estimated to have made close to 25 million dollars in revenue (with close to 2 million players), it’s more than anything an independent developer can hope for. And I’m not talking a team of coders and artists and a guy for music and a gal for sound … Stardew Valley is made by one person, Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone. Art, code, music—all of it!
Eric developed the RPG in his spare time over 4 years in what started as a Harvest Moon clone for him to improve at programming. He’s never done pixel art before. If you’re here because you’re interested in becoming a pixel artist, or making video games, or thinking that because you can’t code, all is lost … read the interview with him in PC Gamer. It’s very inspirational.
I’m baffled by his determination to do this alongside his part-time job of being a theater usher, after not being able to get work as a coder coming out of school with a computer science degree. His story ties the knot with Notch of Minecraft fame and how a single person can reach millions of people. You just have to keep churning.
In the end we come back to Hyper Light Drifter (is the soundtrack still on?). It was created and pixeled by Alex Preston, with a small team behind him for code, writing, sound, animation and music.
The vision and reason behind the game is, again, very personal. Being in and out of hospitals, Alex’s health issues and limitations on physical activities led him into gaming and art. In games, after all, you can be free of the constraints of this world.
After being a freelancer for some time, another stay at the hospital made Alex realize it’s time to put his personal art forward and make a game out of it.
Hyper Light Drifter makes you feel the weight of a weak heart, even if you know nothing about the author’s condition. Every time the main character coughs up blood, you appreciate, just a little bit more, the time given to you in life.
In gameplay, Hyper Life Drifter mixes Zelda-like exploration with intense, close quarters combat. The dashing mechanic—quickly sliding across the screen to jump over gaps or evade projectiles—is iconic for the game and spawned its inclusion into many subsequent indie action RPGs and platformers.
The purple visual aesthetic has likewise imprinted on the minds of budding game developers. No wonder the game is also nominated for Excellence in Visual Art, besides Audio and overall awesomeness.
Hyper Light Drifter has already seen success with its Kickstarter campaign in 2013 when it got over $600k in funding. The reception after its release has gathered critical acclaim as well. Can it take the IGF victory as well?
The competition is diverse as always. Most of the games can hardly be sufficiently summarized with a genre label. They range from a cyberpunk hacking heist (Quadrilatelal Cowboy) to developing a relationship with a lonely spaceship computer (Event[0]). Be it a cooking puzzler (Overcooked) or a mysterious action adventure (INSIDE), you can be sure that any of the Grand Prize finalists—and any IGF nominee in general—is in one way or another breathing new soul into what we call video games.
Welcome to the new year with Retronator Magazine! I’ve been writing about pixel art for one year and a half now, and I am so happy to see more and more of you read these articles. You made it possible for me to go to the Game Developers Conference on this behalf. I’ve only seen the IGF twice in person (2008 and 2015) and I’m excited to do it again this year. I hope everyone else will join on the livestream from the event. I’ll definitely keep you updated on everything through Twitter.
Happy New Pixels 2017 everyone!
—Retro
