Hijacking this top thread to clarify something I’ve stated further down - this is, for the foreseeable future, just my shader project and portfolio piece as a technical artist.
My thread title is probably misleading, though I meant it sincerely - there’s a huge sentiment among the reddit pokemon community to bring back pixel art for pokemon games, mainly a 2DHD style like Octopath Traveler. This is my attempt at presenting a third option, something that preserves pixel art in its intentionality and vibrancy while retaining the volume of 3D.
At the end of the day, if they can prove you knowingly released a product that has a "likelihood of confusion" or that the owner publicly acknowledged was resemblant of the trademark owner's product... you likely lose everything.
Kind reminder that Digimon and Chinpokomon also exist, so maybe you just need to find your own catchy name for these little critters (although I’m sure you can come up with something even more creative than *mon). Good luck with your project!
I don’t know who would be less scary to provoke, the IRS or Nintendo’s lawyers. Nintendo’s lawyers have gone after kids for hosting a “just for fun” neighborhood tournament.
If you aren’t aware of what happened with Pokémon Uranium, you might want to read up on that. A multi-year long project that got destroyed by Nintendo’s lawyers a week after its release.
Without looking it up, don’t quote me on this, I’m pretty sure the original developer team complied with takedown notices they received from Nintendo a week after the game’s official release and then the game’s been hosted and reuploaded by the fans of the game.
Point is, develop a Pokémon fan anything that gains widespread attention, and Nintendo will eat you for breakfast.
To my knowledge, the Uranium developers shut down their main site as a preemptive move after other distribution sites received Nintendo’s takedown notice for Uranium. Still scary, but there’s that slight distinction.
Uranium crossed a few lines at once, I think - not only being a high-profile fangame that directly used the pokemon brand name, but also did things that tarnished the brand image like, er, the whole nuclear pokemon thing. Other highly protective companies like Disney have the same sort of stipulations in keeping their IP’s image squeaky clean. Plenty of pokemon fangames have been well and thriving over the years, though I’ll elect not to name them here.
More relevantly you have the other pokemon-likes out there - Temtem, Coromon, Nexomon, and (in terms of art style) Palworld. They’re legally distinct, and they’re doing alright. Pokemon is strict with their IP, no doubt, but they’re not cannibalizing the entire monster collector genre as some would believe.
Still - this singular shot is just my art project as a technical artist, and a chance to put my own fakemon designs into 3D. If I develop a game using this art style, I’m not touching my designs that were deliberately designed in pokemon’s art style (moreso out of artistic integrity than legal fears). I probably won’t even do a monster collector; the genre’s scope is pretty monstrous for an indie developer.
Good point! I have to admit, this phrasing was mainly for the endorphin (or serotonin?) kick from seeing the familiar phrase against new graphics. If I develop this, it’s gotta be something different. And thank you!
What if you had unique appearance messages for each 'mon? Maybe it could even give clues as to its nature (if your including that) or other stats.
Ex. "An angry _______ stomped out of the bushes!"
Incidentally, I’ve been doing this for my fanmade pokemon designs on instagram!
- A [vampire bat] emerges from the shadows
- A [mossy titan] awakens
I based it more on the character intros in Smash, but yes, unique encounter messages not only add nice flavor, they’re really fun to think up.
And incorporating stats into it is an excellent idea. That’s so good.
Really cool looking man,something i always though would be cool is if in the background you'd have passerby pokemon sort of seeing whats going on out of curiosity then scattering away,idk but i love the art though
Thanks! And yea I considered having those like angry yellow eyes staring out of dark spots in the grass and bushes. Not too distracting, but still suggestive of wildlife. Juuust need to figure out how to place them
idk what types of pokemon (idk if we should continue using that term,i dont want nintendo to find this thread) but maybe a bug type that blends in and out the enviroment? Or something like the stick insect where it imitates the environment but is only seen being moved during battle perhaps? idk just spitballing here
Thanks! This is actually just an art piece for now - I’m interested in the developing the rest, but man, that’s gotta take time (and a budget I don’t have). Someday…
I think this is awesome and I'd love to help you develop some of the game mechanics. I can't art but i can code. lemme know if you'd like some help on making it playable!
Long story! A few key points:
- Lower the render resolution (this is 400x350)
- Toon shaders for everything…
- …And posterize everything else (like the depth fog)
- The characters’ pixel outline could be its own article, it’s by far the hardest part. In a nutshell, it’s done with a full screen shader that compares depth values.
Looks cool! Personally though I would change the text font to something other than the Pokemon text font to further distinguish your game as its own game. Who knows, maybe you'll find a font that will add a lot of charm to the games style
Thanks! Good note - and believe it or not, I made this text without reference, and realized it still coincided too much with pokemon’s text font (I work with their font a lot for my pokemon spriting hobby, think the letters got baked into my brain).
But yes, gonna keep trying. Font is especially tough at this size, I think my best bet is to look at other games and draw from multiple fonts.
Yes! I added dithering to my shader, but couldn’t find a way to use it for this shot - pokemon uses dithering mainly for fur, which none of these guys have
Maybe in my next post? I’m eager to show it off, dithering does look kinda good when pulled off correctly
I'll hijack this and add that you probably need to animate differently. objects with little animation in the back look very good, animated in the front look bad. probably because the animation is 3d like. instead you could change it to be relative to position of the camera, making them less "noisy"
No unfortunately…this is the one shot I’ve been working on for now! This is primarily a deep dive into 3D pixel art, coming from my background as a hobbying pokemon spriter.
Too much colors for me, like the mushrooms catch more my eye than the enemy monster.
Also is that so important that we see the trainer? Like if he is customizable ok, if not... maybe that's not important. He takes more space on the screen that your monster.
Good feedback, thanks. I think I made the mushrooms a bit too saturated, but also they’re the most detail-dense and high-contrast objects on screen, especially compared to my choice of monsters here (two of my simplest designs).
For the trainer, I guess I was just itching to put it in frame somewhere - I first modeled it to experiment with a procedural climbing system, then got waaaaay sidetracked into this pixel shader project right here. If I develop a full project, the trainer’s gonna go way behind.
Oh congrats! Yeah normal-based edges are kinda screwy - I gave up on mine after tweaking it for weeks. Hell, t3ssel8r himself (who codified this entire 3D pixel art style) admitted that it was a matter of adding variables and tweaking like crazy till it stabilized.
I suspect that for organic shapes drawn in perspective view, it’s simply not possible to have normal-based outlines that stabilize. Differences between normals can just vary too widely, especially on low- to mid-poly models.
I love this so far! But maybe you could add a little "intro" animation when you run into a wild *legally distinct creature*? Like how Pokemon will bounce or call out at you, it's really cute and infuses a lot of personality into the various critters. *personally I could see Cauldred doing a little dance like it's going to topple and spill the contents of its... head?*
Yes! Outside of technical shader stuff, this is the first thing I’m keen to add. Reason I haven’t gotten to it yet is uh…I’ve been lazy to model Cauldred’s mouth and tongue…but it should make a great video clip!
Thanks for the suggestion, really helps paint the picture. Spilling will be hard to pull off (the “liquid” here is just sphere particles) but I’ll see what I can do!
It looks low res rather than pixelarty. I would try rendering everything in highres and just pixelate objects in a shader. That way you will get smoother animations but it seems tricky to do. The basic idea is that your displayed pixel is really a block of 2x2 or 3x3 real pixels in size. Then, while animating the whole block can be moved by a single pixel instead of a whole block's length. So you will have smooth pixel movements without the jaggednes. Take a look at DeliSpace (my game) - my game pixels are 3x3 real pixels so when I animate things - stuff moves fluently instead of jumpy (like on the cauldron's face).
Alternatively, much more easily you could try adjusting your shader to use sub-pixel animation (google it) which will also make the movements of the objects less "rendered" and more hand-animated.
Aditionally, take a look at how Return of the Obra Dinn was rendered (there are devlogs on YT). You could use Lucas Pope's tricks to force render certain key parts of your characters. For instance - cauldron's mouth falls in and out of existance which makes a really noisy and unpleasant result - it should be always rendered.
I suppose it would be easier to do this \^ than to fight the edge detection algorithm but it is just a theory.
Overal it looks great - the backgrounds, cell shading, color palette and character design.
Thanks very much for the detailed feedback, this is super helpful. Your game and Obra Dinn are both great references, I’ll look into them! I do think the mouth here is problematic, if there’s a known fix then man I’m excited.
And I was somehow under the impression that sub-pixel animation was only possible with an orthographic camera - but I’ll look into that too. Thanks again!
Maybe dial down the amount of text. For example we already know a wild xyz appeared because it's right there. Plus right now it looks too much like Pokemon because it's exactly the same text and font. Cheers it looks really great!
Something I always want these sort of low-resolution / retro filters is the option to add actual scanlines / quadlines (if emulating a small GBA/DS screen) that match the pixel count.
When the image is that clean but pixelated, it feels like we're trying to reproduce some nostalgia asthetics that didn't exist.
But hey I spent way too much time modding old consoles for RGB outputs / getting period-accurate displays for each gens of consoles; I think I belong to an extreme minority. This looks great nonetheless!
Man I forgot that those lines also existed for GBA and DS screens! I only ever see implementations of them for classic black-and-green gameboy-style games. Adding this one to my to-do list.
Also not sure if anyone has said this, but make sure your individual creatures don't represent the 'mons too much. Your purple guy reminds me of Shedinja from the back.
Well you caught it - this is really a shader experimentation project for me, and the monsters are just my fakemon designs. The angel here definitely took many cues from Shedinja. If I started developing a game, it wouldn’t be these guys…probably back to the drawing board for that!
Looks great, love the designs. The outlines especially help bring it together.
I don't have anything close to a solve for this, but because the lighting is so dynamic you get individual pixels that change too smoothly, which makes it feel a lot more pixellated 3D than a generated 2D effect (which could be your intention). If there were some way to do like a blend with the previous 3 frames of light data, that might help keep the shading *slightly* more static and help sell the 2D-ness (or at least stop sudden steps of light).
I think the shadows themselves are a little inconsistent in hue. The shading on the human goes to a cooler tone, while the trees go to a warmer tone, and the purple thing just goes straight to a darker purple. You could probably give an environmental tint to the shader that would bring everything to a more consistent darkness.
You do have a consistent light source, but that's not necessarily highlighting what you want to look at. A rim light might help make some of the details pop, but consider adding in some non-real lighting to make the scene more dramatic.
Thanks, great feedback! Lighting and colors are my weakest area, this helps a lot.
Oddly, the shadow colors are already all the same cool purple - I say oddly because I felt exactly what you said, and tried to aggressively tune up the purpleness on the tree bark, but it looked no different. Does purple just not show up well against brown…? And yeah, same for the angel’s purple hair. I’ll see what I can do with the tint.
On the dynamic light issue, I guess you’re talking especially about areas like the angel’s hair, where the shadows warp like crazy? Bold suggestion on preserving the light data, not sure if that’s possible! My next step is to try just baking custom normals onto the hair, like from a flat plane.
And could you help clarify what non-real lighting means? Would it be like a per-object fake light where you can adjust the direction/color/intensity for each object?
Right, that might be the thing on the shadows. The light is yellow, the environment is green/brown, and the shadows are purple, so there's this disconnect between the three that makes them sit not quite right. Having more properly purple cues in the environment would help tie it in (but change the feel of the environment), but otherwise you can tint the shadows toward brown to help it blend a little better. Side note, I usually find that a shadow on a lighter colour (like the skin) needs less of a saturation push than something on a dark surface (like the tree). Also because the tree is brown and the shadow is purple (opposite colours), they're really going to clash and make it hard to bring out the purple.
The angel's hair, yes, but also under the rim of the Cauldred. It's just a potential solution, I have no idea if it'd work, but you'd just be writing the lighting at 30-70% opacity over the top of the light data, just to kind of force a blend over time. Normal maps would definitely help, especially if your outline shader uses normal data.
Yeah, exactly that. Like, you don't *have* to be bound to one fixed light and light direction for the whole scene. You might have a scene-based key and fill lights, then a per object kicker and rim lights (look up a 5 point light setup). Sure it won't be realistic natural lighting, but this way you can light each object so they always look their best.
Thanks very much for the pointers. I'm partially colorblind so I've gone about my artist life kinda negligent about colors, and this really helps. For this scene I tried to coast by with general "tips" about pixel art like "use cool shadows and warm highlights to automatically improve your sprites", but detailed practical advice like yours is something I can genuinely learn from.
Ah yeah, that strip above Cauldred's eye...Your lighting solution, honestly, could be revolutionary if it works - that's genius. I'm very keen to try it out some time.
And yes, I think custom fake lighting is an excellent suggestion. That's probably one of my concrete next moves coming out of this thread. Thank you!
I actually really like this aesthetic, do you mind sharing what you're doing? Is it like a fullscreen down res shader, or something else, and if so what resolution are you doing?
I read in your other comments it's applied over some toon shaders.
Hey! Happy to share - so I don't down res anything via shader, I instead lower the render resolution directly to 400x350. Seems like this leads to some people here not being sold on the effect, apparently it causes things like Cauldred's mouth glitching in and out of existence. Gonna look into whether down res fixes this.
If you just want the results of the environment here, then a lowered resolution (be it shader or your game window) + toon shaders will get you there quickly. The character outlines are a different story though - that's the fullscreen shader, which draws only the single-pixel outline on characters, colored by the main light. It applies only on the characters (and not other opaques) thanks to stencil buffers.
You should immediately consider scrubbing any history of this game being directly inspired by Pokemon to avoid a lawsuit. Everything should be just-off from the original work.
Hey hello! I am developing a game also with pixel art and cellshading. I do have a problem with shadows though, do you bake yours? How you manage baked shadows on toon shaders?
Huh, great question! Can't believe I haven't touched on lightmaps for this, everything shown is realtime lit. Away from my workstation atm so I can't verify this, but shader graph has a Baked GI node -- maybe use that and apply a Step function?
Thanks :D I did start on this hoping to offer something better than the usual pixel shaders. Based on the feedback here, there’s quite some work to be done still, but I like where it’s at so far. Glad you do too!!
I really like it, amazing work!
If you want to focus ok the two monsters, maybe moving the player to the side a little bit could help. He seems a bit too close
https://preview.redd.it/8d4pj38lni6d1.png?width=110&format=png&auto=webp&s=7af2f6894a82385fa20c15bac2badb510966ebee
I would try to make lines not to break with the shader, is what for me breaks the illusion of a sprite made from 3d model. a hand painted sprite will have a line, not some unconnected dots, but movement, animations, colors looks really good :)
Yes, definitely! I’m a pixel artist myself and I wasn’t happy with the breakages here, tore my hair out trying to improve them before deciding to just post the current state. I’ll keep looking for solutions. Thanks!
Maybe little particle effects. Things like small wisps of wind around the pink creature and noxious gas coming out the cauldron one. But this looks fantastic.
I wouldn't change anything, love the 3D pixel art!
Also looked through your posts and I gotta say, I like your design much more than any of the recent Pokemon designs lol, keep at it I'd play for sure play this.
Hahah thanks very much! And I appreciate you checking out my stuff - let’s just say, I felt like making those designs because I wasn’t into the recent mons either…Such is the struggle of the fakemon art scene.
It looks nice, however it always rubs me the wrong way when people call this « pixel art shader ». It’s a pet peeve, admittedly, but those never ever remotely look or feel like pixel art. Can we just agree to just call them pixelation shaders ?
As an avid pixel artist myself, I’m actually with you on this, but I was hoping my shader would begin to pass the mark…welp. For me, the demarcators are:
- Does each frame look plausibly drawn in pixel art? (Which means having few colors, which means using step and posterize functions everywhere)
- Is there intentionality in the use of pixels? (Which means single-pixel outlines as shown here)
This is what makes [Acerola’s pixel art shader](https://youtu.be/8wOUe32Pt-E?si=-qP6qmaefV6CvsPU) not sit right with me (though his vids are otherwise fantastic), while [t3ssel8r’s work](https://youtu.be/ZsMHY4LDyRE?si=DmPz150fSEE5YQY-) gets a solid pass.
I’m aware that my gradiented godrays violate the first rule here, but everywhere else I try to uphold my two rules. There’s still issues in places, especially thin areas like Cauldred’s mouth, and I’ll be working on those.
Looking at t3ssel8r’s exemplary work though, there’s probably a lot more that feeds into everyone’s instincts for pixel art - an orthographic camera to keep everything drawn consistently, and also frame-by-frame animations on even tiny details like foliage.
I think if you want to achieve a genuine pixel style, the animation should be clamped to a certain frame rate (12-24 fps max) and the steps have to always be the same so that clamping should be baked and not realtime, so that the animation is the same every loop. This also goes for camera movements.
This is probably it. And just as well, I think the foliage (grass + tree leaves) all need to be camera-facing billboards of animated spritesheets, rather than the standard foliage shaders that I've toon shaded here. I realize it's a massive part what sells t3ssel8r's visual style.
Yeah, the only pixelart shader was the one developed for the return of the Obra Dinn xD
It's not even a pixelart shader. It is just a cell shaded render in a low resolution. I too don't get it why people consider it to be the same quality as pixelart. We really need a decent shader or whole render pipeline.
I just think slapping a shader, no matter how good it is, and calling it a day is never going to cut it. If you want to have a cheated pixel art style, you need to implement a complete production pipeline around achieving that style, like Motion Twin has done for Dead Cells.
Yeah about this - it’s just a big discussion topic over at r/pokemon, about what modern pokemon games should look like (given their uh…questionable graphics quality and art style in the past few games).
There’s a significant number of people clamoring for a return to 2D, or maybe Octopath Traveler’s brand of 2DHD. This little project of mine is a proof-of-concept for an in-between option - something that retains the intentionality and vibrancy of pixel art, while having the versatility of 3D animations and camera angles.
Looks good, but I hope that player character is placeholder lol. The flat block colours compared to the details in the creatures textures makes it stick out in a bad way.
I would push the hue-shifting further, particularly on purplemon.
Also, the background could be more background-y. Less visually important, I mean. The pixel pokemon games are good at this, the abstract backgrounds make the creatures the clear objects of focus. Washing out the background some more would draw less attention
A lawyer. lol jk. This is beautiful, hope you go far with it.
Good thing I designed my own monsters heh - thanks!!
Doesn't matter how different your monsters are if you keep using the copyrighted Pokémon brand for your promotions
Guys he said dokemon OK. I dunno what you read.
Conisdering Digimon got away with it, that's probably enough, just don't copy anything word for word, or use the same made up words.
Hijacking this top thread to clarify something I’ve stated further down - this is, for the foreseeable future, just my shader project and portfolio piece as a technical artist. My thread title is probably misleading, though I meant it sincerely - there’s a huge sentiment among the reddit pokemon community to bring back pixel art for pokemon games, mainly a 2DHD style like Octopath Traveler. This is my attempt at presenting a third option, something that preserves pixel art in its intentionality and vibrancy while retaining the volume of 3D.
I have to be honest, to me this just looks like it's low quality instead of intentional.
Hey don’t make fun of my dyslexia
It's not illegal to say the name of a brand, especially when most people just refer to the entire genre as pokemon
Yes but you use the brand for your promotion so I'd be careful.
At the end of the day, if they can prove you knowingly released a product that has a "likelihood of confusion" or that the owner publicly acknowledged was resemblant of the trademark owner's product... you likely lose everything.
Kind reminder that Digimon and Chinpokomon also exist, so maybe you just need to find your own catchy name for these little critters (although I’m sure you can come up with something even more creative than *mon). Good luck with your project!
TemTem!
Chinpokomon is a South Park episode, not an actual product
Well it’s not just a single episode, it’s already all over their franchise including the official video games
I don’t know who would be less scary to provoke, the IRS or Nintendo’s lawyers. Nintendo’s lawyers have gone after kids for hosting a “just for fun” neighborhood tournament.
If you aren’t aware of what happened with Pokémon Uranium, you might want to read up on that. A multi-year long project that got destroyed by Nintendo’s lawyers a week after its release.
I played it recently so it hasn't been that destroyed
Without looking it up, don’t quote me on this, I’m pretty sure the original developer team complied with takedown notices they received from Nintendo a week after the game’s official release and then the game’s been hosted and reuploaded by the fans of the game. Point is, develop a Pokémon fan anything that gains widespread attention, and Nintendo will eat you for breakfast.
To my knowledge, the Uranium developers shut down their main site as a preemptive move after other distribution sites received Nintendo’s takedown notice for Uranium. Still scary, but there’s that slight distinction. Uranium crossed a few lines at once, I think - not only being a high-profile fangame that directly used the pokemon brand name, but also did things that tarnished the brand image like, er, the whole nuclear pokemon thing. Other highly protective companies like Disney have the same sort of stipulations in keeping their IP’s image squeaky clean. Plenty of pokemon fangames have been well and thriving over the years, though I’ll elect not to name them here. More relevantly you have the other pokemon-likes out there - Temtem, Coromon, Nexomon, and (in terms of art style) Palworld. They’re legally distinct, and they’re doing alright. Pokemon is strict with their IP, no doubt, but they’re not cannibalizing the entire monster collector genre as some would believe. Still - this singular shot is just my art project as a technical artist, and a chance to put my own fakemon designs into 3D. If I develop a game using this art style, I’m not touching my designs that were deliberately designed in pokemon’s art style (moreso out of artistic integrity than legal fears). I probably won’t even do a monster collector; the genre’s scope is pretty monstrous for an indie developer.
I don’t blame you, that’s years of your life if you aimed for some kind of “full-length” game. Super cool stuff by the way, love the style!
Yeah, though I’m sure we’d all agree, it’s nice to dream! And thanks!!
lol I came here to say that. “You need to add the look Of your face when gamefreak sues the very loving shot outta you.”
I would change the text so it isn't 1:1 with "A wild \_ appeared!" This looks good and deserves to be its own thing.
Good point! I have to admit, this phrasing was mainly for the endorphin (or serotonin?) kick from seeing the familiar phrase against new graphics. If I develop this, it’s gotta be something different. And thank you!
What if you had unique appearance messages for each 'mon? Maybe it could even give clues as to its nature (if your including that) or other stats. Ex. "An angry _______ stomped out of the bushes!"
This is exactly what I was going to suggest.
This is an EXCELLENT idea! You could pair it with monster type, terrain type, time of day... the possibilities (and associated work) are endless!
Could go further and use descriptors based on the monsters stats if they can have random stats. "A strong..." "An agile..." "A sickly..."
Love it, I would definitely prefer this approach. Don’t really need to see the same phrases to get this nostalgia hit
Incidentally, I’ve been doing this for my fanmade pokemon designs on instagram! - A [vampire bat] emerges from the shadows - A [mossy titan] awakens I based it more on the character intros in Smash, but yes, unique encounter messages not only add nice flavor, they’re really fun to think up. And incorporating stats into it is an excellent idea. That’s so good.
not lookin good if these comments ever show up in a court case lol
"A wild cauldred popped up"
"A civilised cauldred showed it's face"
An undomesticated cauldrop manifested.
Really cool looking man,something i always though would be cool is if in the background you'd have passerby pokemon sort of seeing whats going on out of curiosity then scattering away,idk but i love the art though
Thanks! And yea I considered having those like angry yellow eyes staring out of dark spots in the grass and bushes. Not too distracting, but still suggestive of wildlife. Juuust need to figure out how to place them
idk what types of pokemon (idk if we should continue using that term,i dont want nintendo to find this thread) but maybe a bug type that blends in and out the enviroment? Or something like the stick insect where it imitates the environment but is only seen being moved during battle perhaps? idk just spitballing here
(We’re good for now, pokemon is litigious but not insane) Yeah these are fun ideas! As long as they’re small and subtle, it could definitely work
Are you going to add any other mechanics or is it legit just a Pokemon clone? It looks really nice!
Thanks! This is actually just an art piece for now - I’m interested in the developing the rest, but man, that’s gotta take time (and a budget I don’t have). Someday…
I think this is awesome and I'd love to help you develop some of the game mechanics. I can't art but i can code. lemme know if you'd like some help on making it playable!
Well I mean battle tactic type game have existed before pokemon
How did you make this pixel render? Looks really cool
Long story! A few key points: - Lower the render resolution (this is 400x350) - Toon shaders for everything… - …And posterize everything else (like the depth fog) - The characters’ pixel outline could be its own article, it’s by far the hardest part. In a nutshell, it’s done with a full screen shader that compares depth values.
Very nice, thank you
Looks cool! Personally though I would change the text font to something other than the Pokemon text font to further distinguish your game as its own game. Who knows, maybe you'll find a font that will add a lot of charm to the games style
Thanks! Good note - and believe it or not, I made this text without reference, and realized it still coincided too much with pokemon’s text font (I work with their font a lot for my pokemon spriting hobby, think the letters got baked into my brain). But yes, gonna keep trying. Font is especially tough at this size, I think my best bet is to look at other games and draw from multiple fonts.
this looks great!
Had you considered ✨𝒹𝒾𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓇𝒾𝓃𝑔✨?
Yes! I added dithering to my shader, but couldn’t find a way to use it for this shot - pokemon uses dithering mainly for fur, which none of these guys have Maybe in my next post? I’m eager to show it off, dithering does look kinda good when pulled off correctly
Stepped animations instead of interpolated ones.
Yeah this is a big one! I’ll get to it.
I'll hijack this and add that you probably need to animate differently. objects with little animation in the back look very good, animated in the front look bad. probably because the animation is 3d like. instead you could change it to be relative to position of the camera, making them less "noisy"
You mean going straight to key frames?
The pixel shader looks very good, but the noisiness on the cauldron's face as it moves around still gives me a headache.
This is useful to know! Another commenter below suggested a possible fix for this, I’m keen to look into it.
Looks pretty cool!
This looks great! Did you make the shader yourself or is it an asset?
Thanks, and it’s mine! This whole piece is pretty much for deepening my shader knowledge as a tech artist
This is dope! Do you have anything else you can share from the game??
No unfortunately…this is the one shot I’ve been working on for now! This is primarily a deep dive into 3D pixel art, coming from my background as a hobbying pokemon spriter.
DAYUM
Too much colors for me, like the mushrooms catch more my eye than the enemy monster. Also is that so important that we see the trainer? Like if he is customizable ok, if not... maybe that's not important. He takes more space on the screen that your monster.
Good feedback, thanks. I think I made the mushrooms a bit too saturated, but also they’re the most detail-dense and high-contrast objects on screen, especially compared to my choice of monsters here (two of my simplest designs). For the trainer, I guess I was just itching to put it in frame somewhere - I first modeled it to experiment with a procedural climbing system, then got waaaaay sidetracked into this pixel shader project right here. If I develop a full project, the trainer’s gonna go way behind.
Great pixel perfect edge shader. I managed something similar with depth detection. Doing on normal-based edges is much harder!
Oh congrats! Yeah normal-based edges are kinda screwy - I gave up on mine after tweaking it for weeks. Hell, t3ssel8r himself (who codified this entire 3D pixel art style) admitted that it was a matter of adding variables and tweaking like crazy till it stabilized. I suspect that for organic shapes drawn in perspective view, it’s simply not possible to have normal-based outlines that stabilize. Differences between normals can just vary too widely, especially on low- to mid-poly models.
I love this so far! But maybe you could add a little "intro" animation when you run into a wild *legally distinct creature*? Like how Pokemon will bounce or call out at you, it's really cute and infuses a lot of personality into the various critters. *personally I could see Cauldred doing a little dance like it's going to topple and spill the contents of its... head?*
Yes! Outside of technical shader stuff, this is the first thing I’m keen to add. Reason I haven’t gotten to it yet is uh…I’ve been lazy to model Cauldred’s mouth and tongue…but it should make a great video clip! Thanks for the suggestion, really helps paint the picture. Spilling will be hard to pull off (the “liquid” here is just sphere particles) but I’ll see what I can do!
It looks low res rather than pixelarty. I would try rendering everything in highres and just pixelate objects in a shader. That way you will get smoother animations but it seems tricky to do. The basic idea is that your displayed pixel is really a block of 2x2 or 3x3 real pixels in size. Then, while animating the whole block can be moved by a single pixel instead of a whole block's length. So you will have smooth pixel movements without the jaggednes. Take a look at DeliSpace (my game) - my game pixels are 3x3 real pixels so when I animate things - stuff moves fluently instead of jumpy (like on the cauldron's face). Alternatively, much more easily you could try adjusting your shader to use sub-pixel animation (google it) which will also make the movements of the objects less "rendered" and more hand-animated. Aditionally, take a look at how Return of the Obra Dinn was rendered (there are devlogs on YT). You could use Lucas Pope's tricks to force render certain key parts of your characters. For instance - cauldron's mouth falls in and out of existance which makes a really noisy and unpleasant result - it should be always rendered. I suppose it would be easier to do this \^ than to fight the edge detection algorithm but it is just a theory. Overal it looks great - the backgrounds, cell shading, color palette and character design.
Thanks very much for the detailed feedback, this is super helpful. Your game and Obra Dinn are both great references, I’ll look into them! I do think the mouth here is problematic, if there’s a known fix then man I’m excited. And I was somehow under the impression that sub-pixel animation was only possible with an orthographic camera - but I’ll look into that too. Thanks again!
I'm not an artist so my suggestion may be very personal, but try making pixels larger so they look more like pixel art rather than just aliasing
Make the animations low frame rate to make it feel more like hand made pixel art animations. Don’t forget to turn off lerping.
Yup this is a big one, keen to make this work. Thanks!
That shader looks great! Did you make it yourself?
Yup it’s mine! Full screen shader for the outlines, on top of toon shaders for everything. Took me a while.
Nice. I've been doing some Unity Development lately, and I might look into something like that.
I really really like this! I think the shader looks great even if you wind up repurposing it! You're inspiring me :)
Golly, thanks!! Much appreciated :D
Maybe dial down the amount of text. For example we already know a wild xyz appeared because it's right there. Plus right now it looks too much like Pokemon because it's exactly the same text and font. Cheers it looks really great!
Good points - and the top comment thread gave some solid suggestions on how to change the text to something more meaningful. Thanks!
Something I always want these sort of low-resolution / retro filters is the option to add actual scanlines / quadlines (if emulating a small GBA/DS screen) that match the pixel count. When the image is that clean but pixelated, it feels like we're trying to reproduce some nostalgia asthetics that didn't exist. But hey I spent way too much time modding old consoles for RGB outputs / getting period-accurate displays for each gens of consoles; I think I belong to an extreme minority. This looks great nonetheless!
Man I forgot that those lines also existed for GBA and DS screens! I only ever see implementations of them for classic black-and-green gameboy-style games. Adding this one to my to-do list.
Also not sure if anyone has said this, but make sure your individual creatures don't represent the 'mons too much. Your purple guy reminds me of Shedinja from the back.
Well you caught it - this is really a shader experimentation project for me, and the monsters are just my fakemon designs. The angel here definitely took many cues from Shedinja. If I started developing a game, it wouldn’t be these guys…probably back to the drawing board for that!
Looks great, love the designs. The outlines especially help bring it together. I don't have anything close to a solve for this, but because the lighting is so dynamic you get individual pixels that change too smoothly, which makes it feel a lot more pixellated 3D than a generated 2D effect (which could be your intention). If there were some way to do like a blend with the previous 3 frames of light data, that might help keep the shading *slightly* more static and help sell the 2D-ness (or at least stop sudden steps of light). I think the shadows themselves are a little inconsistent in hue. The shading on the human goes to a cooler tone, while the trees go to a warmer tone, and the purple thing just goes straight to a darker purple. You could probably give an environmental tint to the shader that would bring everything to a more consistent darkness. You do have a consistent light source, but that's not necessarily highlighting what you want to look at. A rim light might help make some of the details pop, but consider adding in some non-real lighting to make the scene more dramatic.
Thanks, great feedback! Lighting and colors are my weakest area, this helps a lot. Oddly, the shadow colors are already all the same cool purple - I say oddly because I felt exactly what you said, and tried to aggressively tune up the purpleness on the tree bark, but it looked no different. Does purple just not show up well against brown…? And yeah, same for the angel’s purple hair. I’ll see what I can do with the tint. On the dynamic light issue, I guess you’re talking especially about areas like the angel’s hair, where the shadows warp like crazy? Bold suggestion on preserving the light data, not sure if that’s possible! My next step is to try just baking custom normals onto the hair, like from a flat plane. And could you help clarify what non-real lighting means? Would it be like a per-object fake light where you can adjust the direction/color/intensity for each object?
Right, that might be the thing on the shadows. The light is yellow, the environment is green/brown, and the shadows are purple, so there's this disconnect between the three that makes them sit not quite right. Having more properly purple cues in the environment would help tie it in (but change the feel of the environment), but otherwise you can tint the shadows toward brown to help it blend a little better. Side note, I usually find that a shadow on a lighter colour (like the skin) needs less of a saturation push than something on a dark surface (like the tree). Also because the tree is brown and the shadow is purple (opposite colours), they're really going to clash and make it hard to bring out the purple. The angel's hair, yes, but also under the rim of the Cauldred. It's just a potential solution, I have no idea if it'd work, but you'd just be writing the lighting at 30-70% opacity over the top of the light data, just to kind of force a blend over time. Normal maps would definitely help, especially if your outline shader uses normal data. Yeah, exactly that. Like, you don't *have* to be bound to one fixed light and light direction for the whole scene. You might have a scene-based key and fill lights, then a per object kicker and rim lights (look up a 5 point light setup). Sure it won't be realistic natural lighting, but this way you can light each object so they always look their best.
Thanks very much for the pointers. I'm partially colorblind so I've gone about my artist life kinda negligent about colors, and this really helps. For this scene I tried to coast by with general "tips" about pixel art like "use cool shadows and warm highlights to automatically improve your sprites", but detailed practical advice like yours is something I can genuinely learn from. Ah yeah, that strip above Cauldred's eye...Your lighting solution, honestly, could be revolutionary if it works - that's genius. I'm very keen to try it out some time. And yes, I think custom fake lighting is an excellent suggestion. That's probably one of my concrete next moves coming out of this thread. Thank you!
Where can I follow this project?
I actually really like this aesthetic, do you mind sharing what you're doing? Is it like a fullscreen down res shader, or something else, and if so what resolution are you doing? I read in your other comments it's applied over some toon shaders.
Hey! Happy to share - so I don't down res anything via shader, I instead lower the render resolution directly to 400x350. Seems like this leads to some people here not being sold on the effect, apparently it causes things like Cauldred's mouth glitching in and out of existence. Gonna look into whether down res fixes this. If you just want the results of the environment here, then a lowered resolution (be it shader or your game window) + toon shaders will get you there quickly. The character outlines are a different story though - that's the fullscreen shader, which draws only the single-pixel outline on characters, colored by the main light. It applies only on the characters (and not other opaques) thanks to stencil buffers.
You should immediately consider scrubbing any history of this game being directly inspired by Pokemon to avoid a lawsuit. Everything should be just-off from the original work.
Hey hello! I am developing a game also with pixel art and cellshading. I do have a problem with shadows though, do you bake yours? How you manage baked shadows on toon shaders?
Huh, great question! Can't believe I haven't touched on lightmaps for this, everything shown is realtime lit. Away from my workstation atm so I can't verify this, but shader graph has a Baked GI node -- maybe use that and apply a Step function?
Yeah i tried but no good results yet!
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY
It's so pritty!! I'm not usually into pixel shaders but this one looks so cute??? Good work!!
Thanks :D I did start on this hoping to offer something better than the usual pixel shaders. Based on the feedback here, there’s quite some work to be done still, but I like where it’s at so far. Glad you do too!!
I really like it, amazing work! If you want to focus ok the two monsters, maybe moving the player to the side a little bit could help. He seems a bit too close
I really like the animation on the Cauldred looks sick !
https://preview.redd.it/8d4pj38lni6d1.png?width=110&format=png&auto=webp&s=7af2f6894a82385fa20c15bac2badb510966ebee I would try to make lines not to break with the shader, is what for me breaks the illusion of a sprite made from 3d model. a hand painted sprite will have a line, not some unconnected dots, but movement, animations, colors looks really good :)
Yes, definitely! I’m a pixel artist myself and I wasn’t happy with the breakages here, tore my hair out trying to improve them before deciding to just post the current state. I’ll keep looking for solutions. Thanks!
Maybe little particle effects. Things like small wisps of wind around the pink creature and noxious gas coming out the cauldron one. But this looks fantastic.
I wouldn't change anything, love the 3D pixel art! Also looked through your posts and I gotta say, I like your design much more than any of the recent Pokemon designs lol, keep at it I'd play for sure play this.
Hahah thanks very much! And I appreciate you checking out my stuff - let’s just say, I felt like making those designs because I wasn’t into the recent mons either…Such is the struggle of the fakemon art scene.
I wouldn't say it was '3d pixel art shaders' you are just rendering at a lower res.
It looks nice, however it always rubs me the wrong way when people call this « pixel art shader ». It’s a pet peeve, admittedly, but those never ever remotely look or feel like pixel art. Can we just agree to just call them pixelation shaders ?
As an avid pixel artist myself, I’m actually with you on this, but I was hoping my shader would begin to pass the mark…welp. For me, the demarcators are: - Does each frame look plausibly drawn in pixel art? (Which means having few colors, which means using step and posterize functions everywhere) - Is there intentionality in the use of pixels? (Which means single-pixel outlines as shown here) This is what makes [Acerola’s pixel art shader](https://youtu.be/8wOUe32Pt-E?si=-qP6qmaefV6CvsPU) not sit right with me (though his vids are otherwise fantastic), while [t3ssel8r’s work](https://youtu.be/ZsMHY4LDyRE?si=DmPz150fSEE5YQY-) gets a solid pass. I’m aware that my gradiented godrays violate the first rule here, but everywhere else I try to uphold my two rules. There’s still issues in places, especially thin areas like Cauldred’s mouth, and I’ll be working on those. Looking at t3ssel8r’s exemplary work though, there’s probably a lot more that feeds into everyone’s instincts for pixel art - an orthographic camera to keep everything drawn consistently, and also frame-by-frame animations on even tiny details like foliage.
I think if you want to achieve a genuine pixel style, the animation should be clamped to a certain frame rate (12-24 fps max) and the steps have to always be the same so that clamping should be baked and not realtime, so that the animation is the same every loop. This also goes for camera movements.
This is probably it. And just as well, I think the foliage (grass + tree leaves) all need to be camera-facing billboards of animated spritesheets, rather than the standard foliage shaders that I've toon shaded here. I realize it's a massive part what sells t3ssel8r's visual style.
Yeah, the only pixelart shader was the one developed for the return of the Obra Dinn xD It's not even a pixelart shader. It is just a cell shaded render in a low resolution. I too don't get it why people consider it to be the same quality as pixelart. We really need a decent shader or whole render pipeline.
I just think slapping a shader, no matter how good it is, and calling it a day is never going to cut it. If you want to have a cheated pixel art style, you need to implement a complete production pipeline around achieving that style, like Motion Twin has done for Dead Cells.
less dialogue
This looks nice, how are you handling attack animations?
upvote
Looks amazing
It looks nice but I dont get how its supposed to be a modern version
Yeah about this - it’s just a big discussion topic over at r/pokemon, about what modern pokemon games should look like (given their uh…questionable graphics quality and art style in the past few games). There’s a significant number of people clamoring for a return to 2D, or maybe Octopath Traveler’s brand of 2DHD. This little project of mine is a proof-of-concept for an in-between option - something that retains the intentionality and vibrancy of pixel art, while having the versatility of 3D animations and camera angles.
a law firm
its great but u have to distance a lot from pokemon. meaning fonts etc. if it reminds of pokemon too dtrongly they can lawyer u down
It gives me less of a pixelart vibe and more of compressed models, 3ds low resolution vibe. It still looks cool though
Looks cool but the way the pixels move during animation hurts my eyes.
I have a message for Mr Xelshade, "Do you really wanna do this son?" - 9/10dope.
art is fantastic. Maybe in future titles just call it your pocket monster battling game :p
Add a lawyer or 2.3 billion
Amazing
Looks good, but I hope that player character is placeholder lol. The flat block colours compared to the details in the creatures textures makes it stick out in a bad way.
Looks awesome! Would definitely be interested in seeing how you made it! :)
Missingno or it sucks
Make the HUD a little unique. Love the artsyle though and everything else though, its eye candy.
Holy moly, this looks incredible. :o
DMCA IN 3....2.....1.....
I would push the hue-shifting further, particularly on purplemon. Also, the background could be more background-y. Less visually important, I mean. The pixel pokemon games are good at this, the abstract backgrounds make the creatures the clear objects of focus. Washing out the background some more would draw less attention
A wild lawsuit just spawned
Already more frames and style than the switch pokemon games
Wow, this looks incredible! Mad kudos for executing the visuals of a 3D pokemon game better than GF