Using claymation instead of pixel art for a NES game.

Greetings! I am new in this forum and since i first touched an Atari 2600 jr, i wanted to make a game. My best option is NES due this huge and well made forum and wikia. My main question is if possible to use claymation (clay animation with stop motion), instead of pixel art? I ask this because i am terrible at pixel art and i am pretty fair skilled with clay. Thanks. Also english is not my native language so i must apologize for my grammar mistakes.

I don't think claymation (or anything photorealistic for that matter) would work well on the NES, due to the limited color palettes. I think clay relies too much on shading and texture to be well interpreted, and there's only so much you can do with 3 colors + transparency. You might get passable results if you use monochrome palettes (e.g. 3 shades of green), but monochrome objects would be way too boring IMO. Digitized real world images also tend to require more unique tiles than hand-made graphics, because artists can intentionally add some redundancy to their art. You'd need a lot of editing if you wanted to reduce the tile count of photorealistic images.

Even the SNES, which is leagues better the the NES in terms of colors and tile count, displayed very questionable results in its few claymation games. Take a look at the Donkey Kong Country games on the Game Boy Color to get a feel of what volumetric objects look like when scaled down to 3 colors + transparency (spoiler alert: it's not pretty).

Would it look like Claymates or Clayfighter (both SNES games)? Yeah... they don't look very impressive, even on SNES, let alone NES.

That being said. I did model the main character of my ninja game originally* in clay, posed him in different moves. Took photos of each. Then drew sketches of each picture. Then scanned those sketches and edited them in photoshop.

I think there is some merit to the idea. (EDIT). But there isn't enough memory to do more than a few seconds of animations. Graphics on the NES are pre rendered and very limited. The frame rate will have to be reduced and the size of animations fairly small, like 16px x 32px or similar.



*originally = the 3rd and final version of the main character.

Do the box art in clay.

Thank you guys for your kind replies. I saw the GBC game and it looks like vomit. Also the idea of making the clay model and then drawing it is pretty good. Anyway, my current skills with pen and paper are not that polished. I am grateful for the answers to my question.

Using clay models could help tremendously for squash/stretching in animation. Of course, this would require more tiles.

Goro from Mortal Kombat was sculpted as a "clay" model. Do the pirate NES ports of Mortal Kombat games include Goro, Kintaro, or Sheeva?

In any case, if you're skilled at working with stop-motion sculpting, then you can model your character's animation in stop-motion and then trace over that with pixels. It'll at least help you get the angles right if you're trying to do (say) 30-some degrees up for an isometric game.

I don't think any of the clay games on the SNES do a good job representing the potential of claymation or other digitized photography on the SNES. It's funny you mention Donkey Kong Country, because the graphics process is similar and the results are much better than any SNES claymation game. Of course, DKC probably had 10x the budget of Claymates and Clayfighters 1 & 2 put together, and obviously had a much more talented team developing it.

I mentioned DKC on the GBC as an example of how awful claymation would look on the NES. Not that I think DKC on the SNES looks great (the low resolution and lack of transparency alpha haven't aged well IMO), but it's not terrible either.

I know you were talking about DKC on the GBC, but you were also talking about claymation/digitized images on the SNES for a brief moment, and the SNES version of DKC is relevant to that. Surprised to hear you feel even that level of distain towards the graphics; I wouldn't compare them favorably to Irem (lol) or mid to late 90's Capcom pixel art, but compared to the pixel art of your average SNES game, I say there's no contest.

Surely DKC on the SNES looks better than crappy pixel art, but good pixel art has the potential to look much better than any digitized graphics on the SNES. The DKC games are still among my favorites on the SNES, but stylistically speaking, the console wasn't ready for those kinds of graphics, IMO.

It's perfectly possible and - if you have the skills - they can look very good on 8-bit NES.

I agree that clay animation is bound to have the same problem as 3d models, and it's refreshing to hear I'm not the only one so considers DKC graphics to be overrated or TBH just plain awful.

Was never impressed by DKC back in the day when it was hailed as a revolutionary step in console graphics, and indeed they haven't aged well. Still it's a mystery to me that DKC is still topping most lists of "best SNES games"... the gameplay never looked more fun than any generic platformer either.

Anyway, back to the topic: I still think any sort of modelling (be it 3d, claymation, or oldschool pen'n'paper) can totally work out as a creative prototyping tool for NES graphics. In fact, that's not far from how graphics designers did it back in the olden days, spending a lot of time away from the (quite expensive) computers working on their ideas. And concept art with classic tools is still often used even in the game industry of today.

Just keep in mind that working so far from the limitations means you might just be procrastinating the effort of making the final pixel art look good. Verify often that your design CAN work in the final setting, to avoid surprises later...

The way you worded that last sentence sounds as if you have never played it?


It's difficult to do that after you've triggered my inner fanboy.

Pretty much. I have picked up a controller attached to it on the odd occasion, but never found the gameplay exciting enough to gives it more time.

Perhaps I should give it a second chance, but I guess I'm was too biased against ugly-looking-games where the graphics were supposed to be a main selling point. Now, if it were marketed to me as a "yeah, the graphics may be sh*te, but it's actually quite a fun game if you can disregard that!", then I might have been more forgiving with it...

Now I'm not saying it isn't impressive how they fit all those 3d animation frames into a cartridge, especially considering the need to tile them for efficient levels. And the music was quite impressive as well, in how it exercised the SPC. But in general, the graphics reek of an era where next-tech would blind people's vision enough to consider beautiful hand-crafted pixel art inferior to some downscaled 3d images of 3d objects. And I keep shaking my head in disbelief, just as much as I did back when it was new and hot.

Sorry to side track this discussion even further, but while the graphics were definitely meant to be the main selling point, the gameplay is actually really solid. Nothing is innovative about it, but it does feel really polished, from the level design to the controls especially (roll jumping just feels really good).

I'm glad you see the technical merit of the game though; it's not too uncommon to find people saying the graphics are only differentiated from your average SNES game by being prerendered, which is obviously false.

I know you're a talented artist, so I'd honestly love to see a mock-up!

In the pirate Mortal Kombat games, there is Goro and Kintaro, but made as crappy pixel art. No claymation used in those bootlegs.

The graphics in the pirate Mortal Kombat games look like they've been pixeled over the digitized originals or something. To be honest, those still look way better than the official Mortal Kombat 4 on the GBC! Graphics weren't what broke the multitude of pirate fighting games on the NES, as a lot of them had decent graphics (Street Fighter III looks awesome, for example)... crappy physics and controls is what made them terrible.

Any graphics automatically or semi-automatically downgraded to NES graphics (3 colours + transparent) will look like shit. However the exeption might not be clay motion, but cell shading, which intentionally reduces the # of colours in a render. It probably still requires more colours, as I think it needs black outlines + 2 shades per colour so this effectively makes cell shading possible only with a single cell colour, or requires overlay to get more cell colours.

Donkey Kong Country on the GB was mentioned but not the NES pirate. Seems like something to look at if you are going for a particular look on the NES.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj4Qaem44HE

It could look very good if done by a skilled hand, using a clay model as a base and touching it up—but it would be an advanced progress, not a challenge I'd suggest one to take on as a shortcut.

You could use clay to build the basic look of your character, but after digitizing your artwork you'd still have to do some pixel pushing to make it look good with the NES's resolution and palette limitations.

Though I don't think they used clay, I think The Immortal is a good example of you could utilize clay models in an NES game, given a high enough resolution dedicated to the characters:

(On DKC)


Do yourself a favour and play DKC2, skipping the first game.

DKC1 is a really rough game. It's well made, but the gameplay is quite repetitive, and the challenges, though generally quite an easy game, do come across as super unfair due to the way the camera works in relation to the huge sprites.
DKC2 manages to fix all that. It has way more secrets to go for, and super fun and creative level design, and they even managed to fix the camera, and design the stages around their limitations, so it is never really an issue. DKC2 is a truly great game, and one of the best platformers of its generation.

And if you go for all the "lost world" stages, some of them are insanely challenging, too.

That does indeed look very good for NES standards, but it's important to note that the characters are drawn against a black background, and there are many tricks that can be used in this case to increase the color count.

Absolutely. I would employ similar methods for making clay graphics work.

Thanks! You're very talented as well.


I think that claymotion can work if you design your characters thinking on NES limitations.
If someone design characters first and then try to adapt them to Nintendo it may be a disaster. I also believe this is not suited to any type of game - I would never make a platformer like Super Mario or Megaman on NES using prerendered stuff, for instance (I would prefer a slow paced game with few stuff on screen and characters as big as possible).

My NES work is unconventional - almost profane to some people - but I converted a Klaymen sprite using a more traditional approach (not too much sprite layering, optimized to 4:3 displays):



I also did some tests with prerendered gfx/photographs conversions in the past -- with all the nesdev-taboo-techniques (abuse of flickering, many image banks at once and sprite layering everywhere). I'll post here just to show what can be achieved if you're disposed to make a game with zillions of megabits:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/uiw88ehv3 ... e.zip/file


http://www.mediafire.com/file/easve11pp ... 0.zip/file


http://www.mediafire.com/?vb20h7p3vay050d


http://www.mediafire.com/?9qqakbaczjz1jh9

Those look pretty good, so lets reflect on this a bit: cutscenes and other non-game screens can look pretty good if you use a multitude of tricks to get more colors out of the NES, tricks such as layering, flickering and raster effects. Free-roaming in-game characters/objects on the other hand are limited to using regular sprites, so the most you can do to improve them is a little bit of layering so as to not compromise the number of objects that can appear side by side.

This means that, regardless of the approach you take, using pre-rendered/digitized material will require way too much effort to adapt in a way that gives passable results, and will likely be harder and more time consuming than traditional pixel art, effectively invalidating the use of digitized material as a kind of "shortcut" to getting graphics in your games.


WHAT THE ACTUAL F**K?

Thank you for your replies. @Macbee your work is impressive; i want that my homebrew game runs inside a real NES console, maybe some clone consoles too but mostly in the real hardware, but again i have zero skills messing around with pixel art and that kind of edition you are mentioning, i am just skilled with clay and that's all.

Thanks!

It's important to point that I don't know which kind of game NeoTorpor wants to make.
If he's interested on a visual novel or a "game show" (like Hollywood squares or Jeopardy) *maybe* these graphics full of effects could be an interesting approach.

And i did 2 more sprite conversions (this time from Clayfighters from N64). Once again I'm just using sprite layering (no super over the top tricks). They need to be resized (and definitely retouched!!) since they're way too big. Hope it helps NeoTorpor to evaluate if this technique is able to generate the results he wants.

Even if you can't deal with pixel art if you hire an artist to convert your photos his job will probably will be much easier/faster than drawing everything from scratch - so I think that claymotion on NES can be a very interesting experiment.

@Macbee, i want to make a Harvest Moon with combat options (like rune factory) or an endless dungeon crawler. There is this chinese bootleg of Harvest Moon for the NES. Which tools you use for the conversions? (blob and bad mr frosty). Thank you.

Maybe these small, top view characters won't look very good on NES with claymotion - but I think it's worth at least a try.
You can make conversions like these using photo editors like Gimp or Photoshop.

I can also suggest you to look for graphics at Open Game Art
There's nice, free stuff there - like Zoria tileset for instance https://opengameart.org/content/zoria-tileset

@Macbee, thank you. I will start with GIMP tutorials.

@everyone, thanks for the replies. I want to make a Rune Factory (Harvest Moon with swords) or maybe an endless dungeon Crawler. I know a bit of C, C++ and HTML5.