Misc. NES-like graphics

I've been on a bit of NES graphics trip for a while.
Most are unfinished and likely to stay that way.
Some play rather fast-and-loose with the law.
Most are available here.

AMAZING work! I have major respect for artists that can draw graphics this nice with so few colors without resorting to dithering. Not that dithered graphics can't be amazing too, but since dithering can create weird effects when encoded to NTSC, non-dithered art ends up winning most of the time. I don't think it's possible for NES games to look any better than what you have here. Congratulations!

If it helps any, the EGA was actually a little more powerful than what you have: when running in the high resolution (640x350) mode, it had one fully selectable palette of 16 colors, selected from the same 64 color master palette as the SMS.

The CGA palette was enforced for all modes with 200 scanlines.

(Pixel aspect ratio was 320x200: 6/7, 640x200: 3/7, 640x350: 3/4 ) The EGA lasted for so little time before the VGA came out that people didn't really explore its capabilities much. The EGA could easily have made a bunch of other resolutions, between its four pixel clocks and two different horizontal sync rates: 360x200, 720x200, 288x350, 320x350, 576x350)

Excellent work! My favorites are darknes, jumpngun, cavernes, and harpys_son3, with darknes being the one I like most of all because of how colorful it is. I'm a fan of hue shifting.

Fantastic! Congratulations!

Man, these look nice! I really really really REALLY would like to play an NES game with graphics like these, but sadly such a thing is just out of reach.

Very nice, thanks for posting them.

Wow! Really great stuff there!

Are you looking for a coder for one of these projects?

Not particularly but if someone's interested I might be able to stir up the motivation to work more on one of these. And of course anyone's free to use the stuff on OGA.

All modes in the CGA have 200 scanlines though, even text mode... (there's a fake 160×100 mode but it's that, fake)

Let me repherase what I think was meant: EGA enforced the 16-color CGA palette for all 200-line EGA modes.

Nice picture! It's interesting to see the different environments all in the same map. Having black as the universal color does make things a bit easier, but it still looks incredibly cool.

Someone needs to immortalize your work in a homebrew. So much variety, and all of it top shelf!

Most people would rather opt for a faux-retro game with none of the limitations, much faster development, and a much easier language. That said, something this nice and detailed would be amazing to see in an NES game, since as Tepples discovered with the reception to his Cookie Clicker port, people think the NES had blocky, low fidelity graphics like Nintendo's earlier games.

Ideally, followed by an NES port. That philosophy (prototype in high-level language, then port to NES) worked well for STREEMERZ.

But then you'd have all of the limitations again, don't you? (otherwise you'd be forced to trim down on stuff when porting to the NES)

The idea is that you develop the game with the NES' graphical and sound limitations in mind, and treating them as a guideline. The game would have to look a certain way since you can only show 8 sprites on a line without them flickering, and your stages might resemble a Hanna-Barbera backdrop since you only have 256 unique tiles at a certain time. Those need to be taken into consideration to make the best possible use of graphics.

Sound is similar, sound effects need to be designed so that only two or so channels are used at a time. Retro City Rampage uses a lot of channels for sound effects, but seeing how it has some 'features' that the MMC5 might use, they probably would be made with the two extra square waves. Even better, the music is 2A03 only, so the sound effects won't be much of an issue for the MMC5. Some released NES games have dedicated sound effects channels, such as Vic Tokai games using only two square waves for music, and the triangle and noise for sound effects. A more extreme case would be Robocop 3, which has only one square wave for the music.

More abandonment:

Awesome! Thanks for sharing!

Excellent work on the assets

Noice! Reminds me of Mega Man and Gargoyle's Quest 2.

(Is it me, or does the village on the bottom look like it's underwater...)

Amazing, as usual! The top image is very Mega Man, indeed.


It doesn't really look like that to me, but I get why one could see it that way, considering the image that's above the one with the village.

That's pretty much spot on.

I usually read these forums on mobile with images disabled, so this is my first time to see these. Your backgrounds are really good, and I love some of your palette choices.

Looks very nice. I really like it!

I like it, gives me lots of inspiration!

These are all fantastic, and the way they're all connected makes them feel like one weird, connected world. They're so vivid I can't help but start imagining how they'd work with gameplay. Is it possible to go down the well or only climb up out of it?

Holy shit, I just now realized all of them are connected together O_O

Sort of like "The Great Maze" at the end of "The Subspace Emissary" in Super Smash Bros. Brawl?

The difference is that this one looks like it would be fun to play.

Some Generic tiles I don't think I posted before:


Originally based on Kenney's platformer stuff:


Bunch of miscelaneous crap (most available on my CC0 Scraps thread on OGA):

Forgot to reply before. Very nice work! Some of that miscelaneous crap looks amazing!

I hadn't seen this thread before. I think they are all amazing and absolutely inspiring. I'd advise everyone to not overlook them, take your time and look at each tile please.

makes my stuff look like shit ;_;

great job! i really like the blue metallic stuff with the screws and wire fences.

I like all of this artwork, but I don't know why and it's bothering me.

Well, I can list the things I like about his work and maybe you'll agree with me:

- The use of colors other than black to connect things, like purple. This reduces the overall contrast and makes the common color to be interpreted differently depending on the surrounding colors, creating the illusion of more colors.

- The use of non obvious colors for shading, like pink highlighting stones or magenta darkening brown. This gives the environments more realistic lighting than using different shades of the safe hue like many NES games do, and also contributes to the illusion of more colors.

- The use of irregular shapes in blocks and patterns make things look less predictable and more organic. Even 1-bit silhouettes in the background gain a lot of depth because of this.

- Very efficient shading and highlighting, even without dedicated colors or in areas with only 2 colors. Everything appears to have depth, even when the hardware limitations make this hard.

There are certainly more reasons for why I like surt's art so much, but the masterful use of color is certainly one of the most prominent. The surreal environments are also very captivating, much more so than attempts at more realistic settings.

Please keep the awesome art coming, surt!

…?

gunnes.png uses 8x8 attributes (I do understand that there is a mapper that supports this, but it doesn't look right), implausibly/impossibly high tile counts, etc.

Oh. I was thinking more in terms of licensing/sourcing issues.

That's absurdly gorgeous! Are you doing these on yy-chr or some similar program? I see the color restrictions are respected, but are the tile restrictions respected too? It looks fantastic, especially that forest one.

Just using Pro Motion.
Pro Motion doesn't enforce restrictions. It does have a colour constraint checking feature, but mostly just do it by eye.
So quite possibly a few minor restriction breaking errors, tile counts are probably a bit high too, but should be adaptable to the real thing with few tweaks.

Nice work! I applaud the bold use of colours and pretty distinct & even usage ratio between them.

Does look like it could fit tile restrictions to me. Maybe a border case, it's actually very hard to assess!

It's not hard to assess when you have a tool to assess for you! (I did have to black out sprite areas manually)

2/4 palettes.

3/4 palettes.

4/4 palettes.

3/4 palettes.

2/4 palettes.

None are even close on tile count. It might even be possible to get tile counts slightly lower by rearranging the palettes. (Though it was done in a "smart" way for all but the forest.) Great work as always, surt!

Awesome! I had no idea if it was actually close to limit or not, nice to see there's PLENTY of room for more tiles.

Really cool!

Hot dang. Great work!

How do you do it? Any advice for aspiring pixel artists?

NES specifically: use lots of black shadows to join different attributes and boost contrast, all the best looking NES games make heavy use of black, experiment with different colour combinations, I mostly just stumble on the stuff that works through trial and error.
Pixel art generally: have other things to do, so pixeling makes for good procrastination, spend countless hours ogling at screenshots and maps, practice for a quarter of a century.

Must get around to that sometime

What kind of tool do you use?

I use my own tool called I-CHR.

great job! as for me, it's very useful. thank you!

Holy moly! These backgrounds are excellent! I'm going to be studying these in depth when I get closer to level design! Thank you for sharing!

This is really awesome, as usual. Were you going for a brush style like yoshi's island? Very cool. Are you working on any homebrews? It feels like a waste to not have these turned into games.
edit: I see on twitter at least some of these are already in a game. Nice!

Just a mix of scribbling with stylus with pixel-clean line and spray tool with 2x2 brush.

Wow nice, were you the person who make the art for TWIN DRAGON? or this is more like overhauled /revamped sprites of TWIN DRAGON?
I really really love your style. Amazing artwork btw, huge respect.

The color tone reminds me about C64 for some reason. Very nicely done

I made that which was the basis of most of what glutock used in his compo entry. The post-compo game used a different artist.

All these pictures are so good.