Why are sprite-based games so shit these days? Back in the PS2

>>384116729
Devs realized what's the minimum amount of effort and money needed for assets so it looks ok in screenshots and short demo vids.

>>384117135

I think you might be right. Somehow standards have fallen drastically in this department, to the point where only lowly indie devs and maybe single-A studios try for it at all.

It's too bad too, because stuff like the newer Disgaea games prove that sharp crisp sprites can be a lot more aesthetically pleasing than some half-assed 3D.

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Flay is clearly American.

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It's almost like hardware got better and allowed for better looking 3D graphics.
#whoa #wow

>>384117661

But that doesn't inherently mean that 2D sprites need to decay in quality do they?

Some are still fine, but a vast majority of sprite-based games look like total garbage.

It's a lot harder and more time consuming to make really good 2D spritework compared to making some really good 3D shit.

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>>384117813
Less big players in the game, smaller budgets, less quality artwork.
>a vast majority of sprite-based games look like total garbage.
Hey, just like the old days.

>>384117903

They need to start copying ArcSys' method.

>>384117813
It does, because the most of the western developers left doing sprites are indie hipster hacks trying to exploit the sprite aesthetic for sheckels.

Classifying games on whether they use sprites is bizarre anyway. A triple-A studio will be able to hire a top-grade spriter, but they won't, because they don't make sprite games. Meanwhile, the japs are perfectly fine with their sprites, they have tons of skilled spriters, even their indie games look great.

>>384116729
>>384117627

Most PS2-era Gust games were generic JRPG shit filled with the most irrirating cliches... how is it possible that Mana Khemia was actually good?

>>384118548

MK was ahead of its time. With a stupidly robust turn-based battle system and neat crafting combined with GOAT soundtrack.

It's not perfect (that voice acting comes to mind) but at least it had Jap-voices built in.

>>384116729
>Why are sprite-based games so shit these days?
Who are you quoting?
>>384118548
>how is it possible that Mana Khemia was actually good?
It wasn't.
It's a terrible, generic game on everything but le ebin metal soundtrack and over the top shounenshit make people forget about the horrible cast, terrible story and garbage gameplay easy.

>>384119304
>Who are you quoting?
He's not quoting anyone. Wtf is wrong with you?

>>384119304

I don't think OP is making a quote, but asking a question.

>>384117337
>single A

Can anyone tell me where I can find a chart of those ranks?

>>384119304
>It wasn't.

Provably incorrect. The heavy focus on turn manipulation, timed effects and planing ahead ment that a good player could beat enemies far above them with the right strategy and abilities.

The soundtrack is subjective and I know a lot of people who didn't like it, but tons of people loved it.

The story is essentially Harry Potter animu edition, but the cast was a fun bunch and the sheer stupid amounts of customization and ways to fight made the game a really overlooked gem.

Seriously, hating Mana Khemia is some of the lowest tastes imaginable.

>thread is slowly turning into Mana Khemia thread
I can dig it.

Also with a soundtrack like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLD8fySAj6Q it might seriously be time to contemplate suicide if you don't like this game.

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>>384117661
with better looking 3D graphics do you mean shitty filters and effects everywhere so you feel like you have myopia?

>>384119304
>soundtrack
Literally stop.

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>>384119668
>>384119769
>>384119489
>animu-fags come out of the woodwork

Fuck off fags. Game's shit. Look at this edgefaggot.

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>>384119761
Yeah.
Wait, no, I don't. WTF are you talking about?

>>384119489
see now i'm very much confused about the game, it felt cheap and cliché but i really enjoyed the battle system and that levelling required you to craft everything. I remember finishing it without a discernible answer to 'is it good'

>>384119902
>creative weapon
>no emo-fringe
>behaves like a normal human

>>384119974

Maybe you just didn't like it THAT much? Everything isn't for everyone, but if it managed to keep your attention for the 40+ hours it takes to beat it's gotta' have done something right.

Did you play the PS2 or the PSP version?

>>384119489
The story is genuinely terrible though. The start of the game when there's no real plot and you just do school things is fine, but when it tries to bring the story in towards the end it's just really bad. It'd be a lot better off with no main plot at all.

>>384119761

How long are PCfags going to tote Crysis? Shit's old and stale.

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>>384120574
As longs it triggers /v/

>>384120552

I kinda' liked it, but it's clear we have different tastes. I felt the relaxing school-feeling added to the weight when the plot kicked into high gear later.

Sure it takes a while, but it wouldn't have felt as good when it did if the game hadn't gone out of its way to put you in a comfy school setting.

That being said, I'm the type of guy who enjoyed TiTS1 almost BECAUSE it took its sweet time with the world-building and the relaxing adventure feeling.

>>384120687
No, I mean the story is actually bad. Your character's backstory is really stupid. Your character's powers are really stupid and inconsistent. I don't have a problem with the plot kicking into high gear, I have a problem with the writing being bad.

>>384120881

It doesn't really sound like I'm going to convince you, but I liked it a lot. Though I will concede that I might just have been blinded by the combat and the cast.

>>384120945
It did have a good cast. I'm basically just mad because they establish your character has magic powers that can do anything, and yet he never fixes his friend's terminal illness. I mean, what the fuck? Did the writers just not think about that or something? He'll resurrect a tree but he won't do anything about the girl he sees every day. And the powers are used subconsciously too, so it's not a matter of him forgetting or anything. It's just that he doesn't give a shit.
That alone was enough to completely kill the story for me and make me hate it. I will never stop hating it.

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>aniumshit thread

>>384116729
Look at Owlboy and how it flopped hard, good sprites don't give money anymore because everyone will call your game "indieshit" and pretend the game to cost around 15 bucks.

That's why people have small budgets on sprite art.

>>384121440
>160k sales
>overwhelmingly positive scores from reviewers and users
>flop

You're gonna' have to explain this one to me.

>>384121319
>And the powers are used subconsciously too
That's why. A death you suddenly see with your own eyes is far more shocking than one you know will come eventually, but not anytime soon. Also, he does offer to cure her at one point and she's the one who refuses. After that he loses his wish-fulfilling power and in her ending spends his entire life searching for a cure.

>>384118223
arcsys method is even much harder than just doing 3d man..it is like telling them to litreally made anime

>>384122473
He still could have done it. If he wants it to happen it should happen. Having her refuse makes no sense since it's not like he has any choice. It just doesn't make sense.
It should never have even been a problem anyway. Vayne was created by the guy that gave her the illness because he wanted to delete himself. Why didn't he just use Vayne to fix his mistake instead? That way the problem is actually solved. Instead he makes a being that can do anything and just uses him in the most elaborate suicide ever. Why the fuck did he go to so much effort when there are like a million other more simple ways to kill himself? It's just stupid.

The game really would have been better if dropped the stupid plot and was just school shenanigans the whole way through. I liked the school shenanigans. Just stick with them.

>>384121591

160k sales is garbage.

what game op?

>>384123972

Not OP, but Mana Khemia my nigga'. Shit's fun af.

>>384123972
Like >>384124036 said, Mana Khemia. The first one, specifically, with the widescreen patch and on PCSX2.

Runs like a dream and the gameplay is pure fun.

>>384123972
Ever wonder what would happen if Harry Potter had to do actual school-work, alchemy specifically, and got grades that mattered and fought monsters? Try Mana Khemia. Shit's way better than this thread gives it credit for.

>>384123227
>Having her refuse makes no sense since it's not like he has any choice
Because at that point he had conscious control over his power.
>Why the fuck did he go to so much effort when there are like a million other more simple ways to kill himself?
Wasn't it implied that he was pretty much immortal? He made Vayne precisely because he couldn't find any other way to kill himself.
I will concede that not using Vayne to cure her was dumb. I guess he just went insane during the long years of research and forgot why he even started looking for a way to kill himself because he had never failed in his life before and the first time he did it ruined him, but that's a dumb excuse regardless.

From a guy that recently found a great source of income in doing sprite stuff for other people:

Here's why: Animation budget. For a 3D shit you can have one skeleton and set of anims animating 200 characters in your shitty 3D game where everyone has the same weight to their actions and such... but it saves time AND money given there's readily available packages for all of that.

Now for a sprite artist if you make a character and you want him well animated, be prepared to sit on your arse for hours no end animating them. I can do a keyframe in less than an hour and the tweens in 15-30 mins depending on complexity but that is pretty much next to nothing if the character needs 200 frames of animations. That pretty much means I would have to sit few days animating a single character. It's just not cost viable.

Sprites do look better in a lot of applications if you have talented sprite artists, which are hard to find and each brings in their own aesthetics with them, so you need either an art director or some beta schmuck that will do the tweens and not yap.

In 3D it's much easier to establish a unified look and follow it, cause subtleties can be easily ironed out.

So yeah, sprite games are insanely harder to do these days.

1) A lot of developers are lazy

2)Retro-styled games are popular

3)Any shitty indie dev can crank something out

>>384125725

That's actually kinda' neat info Anon. Could you post some of your sprite work? I'd love to see it.

>>384120657
is that a duke mod?

This might not be the place to ask, but I just started playing Mana Khemia and I have a quick question:

My HP and SP are restored when I leave a dungeon, but how does that effect the "time" I have? Like will I drain time by grinding, leaving, for HP, then coming back again?

Also, can I run out of time in day? I don't really understand how time flows in this game or when I transition to a new week in-game.

Can anyone explain some of this to noob?

>>384116729
Some ps2 titles also looked shitty like Ar Tonelico and other JRPGS.
Nowadays making 2d that looks good on HD resolution is expensive and time consuming as fuck, it also has a lot of disadvantages thanks to how less flexible they're compared to 3d so a lot of devs avoid using them.
Indies still use them but they usually look simpler, this is because you need a shit ton of experience, time and artists to make it look well. Most 2d titles that looked amazing had plenty of veterans working at them, in the case of SNK, Capcom and other game companies these artists were also trained by higher ups before working on a title.

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>>384126128

Old mockup I did for one of the game dev threads on /v/. A lot of the recent stuff I'm not gonna post given they're secret project related.

I need to sit down on my arse and get a better folio done. I've learnt animations from Richard Williams book, because lot of sprite tutorials online fucks up the timing giving a really weird sense of weight to for example running, like having the runner be in the air for several frames while having the "feet on the ground" frame lasting 1-2 frames.

Just better go back and look how Williams did it.

>>384116729

Mana Khemia was so comfy. The battle system was great and Alchemy was cool. Loved the grow book system. One of my favourite games of all time.

>>384126734

That's really comfy. I didn't know sprites were such a science. I just thought you put some pixels together and hoped for the best.

It's almost surreal that there even exists a variable that dictates the amount of frames needed to add weight to a players step.

>>384121591
For the development hell it went through, wouldn't be surprised if they barely paid the expenses.

It's almost like 2d games back them were made by entire teams backed by publishers and stuff and professionals rather than a single indiedev on his mom's basement doing everything on his own while he's also working a 9/5 to not starve.

>>384127013

They are science. The problem it's like a lost art if anything, if you go back to look at Amiga or SNES sprites, the limited palette forced you to do a very stylized colour range that built up the mood. Mood was very important in those games. If you go and look at Chaos Engine or Speedball or hell Gods, you will see a metal & Brass aesthetic with a lot of Browns/Blue Grays

If you go back to Chrono Trigger you have a very anime palette, but if you look at Mana series game, everything is a bit muted and dreamlike. Makes sense right? Right now basically the average spriter thinks "I have 16.7mil colours, I'm gonna use them all", well that's the trap - it makes the game look like rainbow puke. If you look at a game like Party Hard, it's really hard to see anything but "Babies first spriting attempt" because the palettes are all over the place.

If you look at Owlboy or most of JP spriting scene, they're dead on with palettes and building a mood through colour.

>>384127128

This is of course true. When you have 10 people working on a sprite it will of course mean that a lot more time and energy can be saved by splitting up the work.

Where things fall apart. Is when one basementdweller tries to make pixel art and it takes him 9 months to do a single character.

One thing I liked about Mana Khemia was that none of the abilities ever felt like they did just one thing.

Like the protag, I don't remember the edgelords name, but he had the analyze ability. Now in all other games analyze would just feed you info about your target, but in Mana Khemia analyze was a full-combo attack.

A lot of the spells and abilities left cards in attack order which you then had to plan around and manipulate. I loved that.

Why the fuck hasn't anyone ripped off this battle system yet?

>>384127013

As for the weight, it's mostly timing - since we're seeing motion as a blur given our eyesight has limited capabilities. Now if you try to redo that with sprites, you can't really do the motion 50 frames per second and you need to basically show keyframes of an action. For example if you're jumping from a place, if you think about it, it's a whole build up for a single release. If your game is running at lets say 50ms cycles (That's about 20 frames per second) you could squish the animation into 6 frames to play it out. Let's say the animation is crouch and then leap up. frames 1 to 3 is croching, 4 is the moment where the guy is ready to jump, 5 is him springing up, 6 is the transition into a jump frame.

So if you were to do it in animation since crouching is slow and jump is fast in those 20 frames available, I'd do it like this

1-1-1-2-2-2-3-3-3-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-5-5-6-6

Timing is everything.

>>384127968
>>384127369

Jesus you're kinda' blowing my mind here. I thought this was such a simple process, but you're right about the mood.

I'm going to start looking for stuff like this in pixel-games now.

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shitty ue4 gamedev here

I want to make an action RPG that's aesthetically like the games posted here, mainly I got the idea from breath of fire 3, that is sprite characters in a 3D model world

in your opinion, what are some games that I definitely need to play for """inspiration"""?

>>384128501

Shining Force 3 comes to my mind. A lot of Saturn RPGs uses that aesthetic if I recall. If you want to do that, please for the love of god, don't have the sprites look blurry as fuck. If you're going the the PS1 Aesthetic, they should be sharp. Use coloured lighting sparesly if at all. The only console from that era that took full advantage of coloured lighting was N64 and it does not work well with sprites.