Next-Gen Pixel Art - Legacy Devlog #20

Thanks so much for all the nice comments, you are amazing!

FAQ

Will you release this Renderer?
Yes! Unfortunately not in the nearest feature. The main reason is time. For those of you who are new here: I'm working full time while getting my degree while developing Astortion and there are only so many hours in a day :(

Is this a new technique?
Yes and no. I was so focused on the whole parallax thing that I didn't realize applying it to a single layer was a technique on its own. And that it had been used in many different games already.

How did you get the idea?
At first, I simply wanted to pixelate 3D objects.
3D objects pixelated in perspective flicker a lot when moving.
I was able to solve that for orthographic projection though.
The problem with perspective is that objects at different distances appear to be moving at different speeds.
To solve that I would need to pixelate each distance separately.
That's not easily doable with 3D objects.
But in classical 2D parallax, objects are already nicely grouped by the distance from the camera.
And then it clicked.

How did you implement that?
It's a custom renderer for Unity's Universal Render Pipeline, designed after the built-in 2D Renderer.

Are you indie??

hmmm... not sure why you're hung up on smooth camera. i think the pixelated one looks just fine. always bugs me when i see "pixels" rotating. wtf....

Is it just me, or is your voice like... super sexy? 👀

Bro I know im A little late to this, but I was just trying to solve this issue. poping the camera to match the pixels is such a good idea. And now i feel dumb. Cool stuff!

man we should combine retro and modern things more often

dam i wonder the end game how will it look

isn't this what the URP Pixel Perfect Camera already does??

As far as I know, Godot has this feature out of the box

This is amazing! I'd like to try a replicating this in my own unity projects, but I've never done custom renderers before. I imagine there are plenty of other cool things you can do once you start digging into it. Any tips on where to start?

Isn't this pretty much how it was done (for the purpose of scrolling performance) in Commander Keen and many of the SNES games?

Wich programs you are using

God this is sooo GOOOD

you just keep getting cooler and cooler lol

I set up something similar recently in UE5 with a perspective camera - scaling the parallax layers with regards to the FOV (as unreal doesn't allow for lit sprites in orthographic mode). This is such a cool implementation of this concept though. Really slick.

I don't know how this hasn't been done before?

Hear me out

Your voice is always like "crakeling" or it's just for the video?!

This does look gorgeous

I can't wait to see the end result of this project!

This reminds me of a hack that MSX games used to give their games smooth scrolling. They would manually offset the entire screen by an amount to make it look like the entire screen was scrolling.

Hi! This is awesome, do you have any video that explains how to make a custom renderer?

I don't do pixel art, but I play videogames and I am enjoying this series very much!

this is so fucking cool

While this is and looks amazing, I personally dislike the modern style of pixel art. Especially rotation bothers it feels disconnected and not „genuinely“ pixel art

Opinions on Crosscode?

I wish my stinky brain could understand this, but maybe in the future after I get more experience I'll be able to do cool stuff like yours
Thanks!

I would like to add another group to that, being the dead cells style where 3D images are used with a pixelated filter over the top. It's jarring to me. I'm currently playing a game called Deaths Gambit, they seem to have done the same as dead cells and it jumps out at me often. Static images shouldn't have a line flicker as you move. Though it's bugging me I am going to finish the playthrough. Also when the line is broken on the edge of an object.

Cool trick. But I can't understand how you can rotate character without pixel perfect if whole game rendered 1:1 and scaled to the screen? Or each layer has own render resolution?

holy f*** I found a unicorn... for real man, truly, thank you, thank you for this gift. Can I ask your name? All of us should know your name

Now can you show how to duplicate these shader procedures in godot?

what is the actual name for the retro style? i cant find it anywhere

Can anyone point me in the direction to learn how to do this? I use pixel perfect camera in Unity and I want different pixel grid behaviors for different layers and it's driving me insane lol.

Hey, I implemented this and it works, however I snap to pixels by dividing the position by the asset ppu then rounding it and multiplying back by ppu, however I get blurry sprites on any value that's not 100, my actual ppu is 48

dude out here reinventing pixel art for the 2nd time

this guy is about to create the uraiun equivalent of pixel art

it really bothers me when Stardew has different size pixels it looks terrible

Are you still working on it. I really want to try it

Now to get my monkey brain to remember this...

cool

this man needs to work for someone. No, Someone should work for him

Looking at your work just light a flame inside my heart each time . Truly Inspiring and beautyful :)

Love the accent.

What is the best pixel art maker app?

Great video. I have massive Jitter effect using Unity's Pixel perfect Camera and enabling the Upscale Texture option. Wish I know how to do this. Should solve many users issues

Wow. This is brilliant

Thanks for this and man I just foun the perfect render style for my game concpt imagne I'm work on right now thank you... Which I only knew of the retro style before this video now I am a convert of the unfied style thank you.

Pretty sure these are some of the best explanatory videos I have seen... Extremally niche, but still frustratingly underrated

holy shit dude that is sick as shit