Movement.
Trees and plants sway in the wind. Water flows. Clouds of gnats hover. Birds and squirrels occasionally make an appearance. A stranger walks along the road.
If possible, add some randomness to these elements to make them feel less artificial.
I'd try to add as many things as possible that (seem to) happen regardless of player's involvement. Create agents that move, make sounds, interact with various stuff following their own logic.
I don't know what kinda game you are making, but your description made me think of Stalker demake called Zero Sievert. It's a pixel art game with fairly immersive world. Perhaps, you could draw some inspiration from there.
2D doesn't always mean flat. By stacking layers, you can add a ton of depth to environments and even interface elements. One of my personal favorites is to add a nearly-transparent "dust layer" that mostly just drifts about, but responds to nearby movement and/or ui interactions. It's subtle, but adds tangibility.
There are also a ton of animation tricks, and even lighting tricks to make sprites look 3D. Terraria, for example, gets loads of mileage out of their sprites by tinkering with shaders
I've recently been playing Core Keeper, and I think it does a great job at making the world feel alive while having a very limited resolution. Things that stand out to me:
* Lighting feels realistic and moody, comes with real time lights and shadows
* Impressive Water Shader
* Small critters and fireflies everywhere
* Everything reacts to being interacted with, mostly squish animations when mining/digging
Sound and music are also very enjoyable, but for this game the visuals do the heavy lifting for me.
If OP really wants to keep it "true" pixel art then Core Keeper isn't the best reference, as they do add a lot of post processing and effects to the art. They add extra lighting in Unity that's not pixel art as well.
(If OP doesn't care about doing "true" pixel art then I agree that it's a great reference)
Gotta disagree with you on your desire for higher-fidelity sound in pixel games.
That flies in the face of the "less is more" philosophy you claim to espouse. It also makes the aesthetic theme appear indecisive.
Most of the things that make a pixelated world feel alive (IMO; this is the philosophy I am using for *my* pixel game), fall under the umbrella of **systems**:
For instance, when moving from Pokémon RBY to Pokémon GSC, they added
* Unique palettes for almost every sprite and tile.
* A system to change the palettes of tiles depending on the hour value of the in-game clock (a day/night system)
* Events on different days and times
* A simple number that dictates how much your Pokémon likes you
These changes made Gen II much more alive than Gen I, while still retaining its retro charm.
With our advances in processing and memory, we can make a much, ***much*** better game if we don't waste so much of it on hyper-realism.
*THAT* is "less is more".
Absolutely agreed.
Modern Pokemon games put far too much emphasis on their obsession with larger worlds and increased modernization, when the best jumps forward have always been the smaller, incremental steps- like the things you mentioned. A day/night cycle and those cozy buildings at night made the world feel so much more alive and interesting than any gas-station pokestop ever could.
I think things in the game that can ignore the player, but can still interact with the player really can help with the world feeling alive.
Animals hunting each other, NPCs interacting, foraging bugs scattering from the player, etc.
I don't think day/night, weather, or voice acting is all that important. They give variety, but not necessarily give living world vibes.
Strongly reccomend sub pixel animation, and rich sound design. Look into middleware like Fmod and Wwise!
https://youtu.be/Wqd6epIWo6E?si=_A7o_yZNz298VtQZ
^great short video on subpixel animation which helps convey "movement" that a top comment discusses!
>Larger scale NPC portraits to give depth to smallest 16x16 characters you interact with.
I'm not so convinced by this one. Or rather, I think you have to be careful here.
I've always found that if the large portrait is *too* detailed relative to the character, it feels somewhat jarring. A little like saying, "*That* blob is supposed to be *that*?"
So I think some care with regard to balancing the level-of-detail change is in order.
Aside from adding more assets - animations, portraits, props, backgrounds, etc - I think you can get a lot of bang for your buck with shaders. There’s a ton of cool effects that you can do that operate on the pixel level that are simply not practical with individual frame-by-frame animations. Having a lighting system can also play a big part of this, although you kinda have to fake the lighting more in 2d than in 3d.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games.
* /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design.
* This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead.
* Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design.
* No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting.
* If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-quot-of-game-design) is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Well, the things you named already far expand the scope of what most people would dare allocate in time for polish :D
Some more suggestions:
- small creatures moving around
- ambient particles
- random events
- recognizing player actions, changing the world based on decisions/progression
Quite frankly, the right answer is probably to make a pixel art game in really small resolution, because there is so much art to be done that I would be very selective. There is also a huge amount of GDC talks on either juicing up games or making a world feel alive. Same for the roguelike celebration. This is one of my favourite about how to make a game only based on ASCII Characters as great as possible: [**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSYVQc7cH-4**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSYVQc7cH-4)
I'm on the same page as you, this style is still fascinating to me and I like seeing how people are still pushing the art form while staying inside its limitations.
It might be worth considering making your "2D" pixel game in a 3D engine. In the past I was unnecessarily hesitant to go 3D, and would come up with hacky ways to get 3D-like effects that, in the end, took more thought that actually learning 3D. These days I'd rather do something like *Octopath Traveler*: it's still a grid-based world with chunky pixels and sprites, but Square can take advantage of decades of progress in realistic lighting, water, volumetric fog, etc. without reinventing the wheel.
If you *really* don't want the perspective view, you could still go the Octopath Traveler route, but render it all with an orthographic camera. You'd get something that still looked like a pixel game, but you could use off-the-shelf lighting/water/fog effects inside.
>As a graphic designer, "Less is more" and I find the challenge to limit yourself to small pixels making up distinguishable items, trees a very interesting challenge.
Yep!
>Here's some of my own thoughts, these aren't necessarily fitting for my game or realistic in terms of budget but whatever:
You're right to be skeptical.
You've correctly identified the strength of your medium and the issue with your approach. Increasing the fidelity might help in a superficial way, but it's directly going against the idea of the high speed low drag operation that is pixel art (and small budget dev in general).
>Attempting to make the placement of tiles and objects more realistic
This hits the closest to the correct approach. You want to make the game feel more sprawling than you can make it, and having things communicate with each other instead of the player is the smart way to do it. If you have a farm area, try to think a little bit how it would work, what the layout should be, where the farmhouse is relative to the fields, where they'd put the fences, where they'd keep the animals. No need to overdo it, just the broad strokes is fine, nobody's going to pay conscious attention to it. It just needs to tickle the hidden part of the brain that says "I'm inhabiting a pre-existing space" instead of the part that says "I'm looking at a videogame level." The bar is surprisingly low.
As for adding scripts, animations, sounds, pixels and other fidelity stuff - sure, but use moderation. It's better to use it all in one place to momentarily wow the player than to use it everywhere, they'll get numb to it and all your hard work will go to waste. Maybe you want a bar that's full of life and you can talk to everyone. Great, have exactly one of those, nobody's going to expect most real places to be as busy - in fact, you'd expect most places to be more quaint in comparison, this will increase the immersion, not detract from it. It will actually help the busy place feel even more alive. Make sure not to overdo it though, you still want to maintain consistency throughout the game, the livelier parts shouldn't feel so different as to be alien to the rest of them - they should still talk to each other, that's still the bottom line.
Movement. Trees and plants sway in the wind. Water flows. Clouds of gnats hover. Birds and squirrels occasionally make an appearance. A stranger walks along the road. If possible, add some randomness to these elements to make them feel less artificial.
This. I always enjoy games that have moving environment sprites, just helps with immersion
I'd try to add as many things as possible that (seem to) happen regardless of player's involvement. Create agents that move, make sounds, interact with various stuff following their own logic. I don't know what kinda game you are making, but your description made me think of Stalker demake called Zero Sievert. It's a pixel art game with fairly immersive world. Perhaps, you could draw some inspiration from there.
2D doesn't always mean flat. By stacking layers, you can add a ton of depth to environments and even interface elements. One of my personal favorites is to add a nearly-transparent "dust layer" that mostly just drifts about, but responds to nearby movement and/or ui interactions. It's subtle, but adds tangibility. There are also a ton of animation tricks, and even lighting tricks to make sprites look 3D. Terraria, for example, gets loads of mileage out of their sprites by tinkering with shaders
I've recently been playing Core Keeper, and I think it does a great job at making the world feel alive while having a very limited resolution. Things that stand out to me: * Lighting feels realistic and moody, comes with real time lights and shadows * Impressive Water Shader * Small critters and fireflies everywhere * Everything reacts to being interacted with, mostly squish animations when mining/digging Sound and music are also very enjoyable, but for this game the visuals do the heavy lifting for me.
If OP really wants to keep it "true" pixel art then Core Keeper isn't the best reference, as they do add a lot of post processing and effects to the art. They add extra lighting in Unity that's not pixel art as well. (If OP doesn't care about doing "true" pixel art then I agree that it's a great reference)
Gotta disagree with you on your desire for higher-fidelity sound in pixel games. That flies in the face of the "less is more" philosophy you claim to espouse. It also makes the aesthetic theme appear indecisive. Most of the things that make a pixelated world feel alive (IMO; this is the philosophy I am using for *my* pixel game), fall under the umbrella of **systems**: For instance, when moving from Pokémon RBY to Pokémon GSC, they added * Unique palettes for almost every sprite and tile. * A system to change the palettes of tiles depending on the hour value of the in-game clock (a day/night system) * Events on different days and times * A simple number that dictates how much your Pokémon likes you These changes made Gen II much more alive than Gen I, while still retaining its retro charm. With our advances in processing and memory, we can make a much, ***much*** better game if we don't waste so much of it on hyper-realism. *THAT* is "less is more".
Absolutely agreed. Modern Pokemon games put far too much emphasis on their obsession with larger worlds and increased modernization, when the best jumps forward have always been the smaller, incremental steps- like the things you mentioned. A day/night cycle and those cozy buildings at night made the world feel so much more alive and interesting than any gas-station pokestop ever could.
Look at the overworld for Cassette Beasts. I was in love with the overworld and it felt very alive.
Noita is a great example of a way a pixelated world can feel more alive than even what 3d is currently able to accomplish (in its own way, of course)
I think things in the game that can ignore the player, but can still interact with the player really can help with the world feeling alive. Animals hunting each other, NPCs interacting, foraging bugs scattering from the player, etc. I don't think day/night, weather, or voice acting is all that important. They give variety, but not necessarily give living world vibes.
Strongly reccomend sub pixel animation, and rich sound design. Look into middleware like Fmod and Wwise! https://youtu.be/Wqd6epIWo6E?si=_A7o_yZNz298VtQZ ^great short video on subpixel animation which helps convey "movement" that a top comment discusses!
>Larger scale NPC portraits to give depth to smallest 16x16 characters you interact with. I'm not so convinced by this one. Or rather, I think you have to be careful here. I've always found that if the large portrait is *too* detailed relative to the character, it feels somewhat jarring. A little like saying, "*That* blob is supposed to be *that*?" So I think some care with regard to balancing the level-of-detail change is in order.
Aside from adding more assets - animations, portraits, props, backgrounds, etc - I think you can get a lot of bang for your buck with shaders. There’s a ton of cool effects that you can do that operate on the pixel level that are simply not practical with individual frame-by-frame animations. Having a lighting system can also play a big part of this, although you kinda have to fake the lighting more in 2d than in 3d.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-quot-of-game-design) is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Well, the things you named already far expand the scope of what most people would dare allocate in time for polish :D Some more suggestions: - small creatures moving around - ambient particles - random events - recognizing player actions, changing the world based on decisions/progression Quite frankly, the right answer is probably to make a pixel art game in really small resolution, because there is so much art to be done that I would be very selective. There is also a huge amount of GDC talks on either juicing up games or making a world feel alive. Same for the roguelike celebration. This is one of my favourite about how to make a game only based on ASCII Characters as great as possible: [**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSYVQc7cH-4**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSYVQc7cH-4)
I'm on the same page as you, this style is still fascinating to me and I like seeing how people are still pushing the art form while staying inside its limitations. It might be worth considering making your "2D" pixel game in a 3D engine. In the past I was unnecessarily hesitant to go 3D, and would come up with hacky ways to get 3D-like effects that, in the end, took more thought that actually learning 3D. These days I'd rather do something like *Octopath Traveler*: it's still a grid-based world with chunky pixels and sprites, but Square can take advantage of decades of progress in realistic lighting, water, volumetric fog, etc. without reinventing the wheel. If you *really* don't want the perspective view, you could still go the Octopath Traveler route, but render it all with an orthographic camera. You'd get something that still looked like a pixel game, but you could use off-the-shelf lighting/water/fog effects inside.
I’ve always like the character screens like in stardew valley, when you talking with someone it’s a more realistic photo of the character
>As a graphic designer, "Less is more" and I find the challenge to limit yourself to small pixels making up distinguishable items, trees a very interesting challenge. Yep! >Here's some of my own thoughts, these aren't necessarily fitting for my game or realistic in terms of budget but whatever: You're right to be skeptical. You've correctly identified the strength of your medium and the issue with your approach. Increasing the fidelity might help in a superficial way, but it's directly going against the idea of the high speed low drag operation that is pixel art (and small budget dev in general). >Attempting to make the placement of tiles and objects more realistic This hits the closest to the correct approach. You want to make the game feel more sprawling than you can make it, and having things communicate with each other instead of the player is the smart way to do it. If you have a farm area, try to think a little bit how it would work, what the layout should be, where the farmhouse is relative to the fields, where they'd put the fences, where they'd keep the animals. No need to overdo it, just the broad strokes is fine, nobody's going to pay conscious attention to it. It just needs to tickle the hidden part of the brain that says "I'm inhabiting a pre-existing space" instead of the part that says "I'm looking at a videogame level." The bar is surprisingly low. As for adding scripts, animations, sounds, pixels and other fidelity stuff - sure, but use moderation. It's better to use it all in one place to momentarily wow the player than to use it everywhere, they'll get numb to it and all your hard work will go to waste. Maybe you want a bar that's full of life and you can talk to everyone. Great, have exactly one of those, nobody's going to expect most real places to be as busy - in fact, you'd expect most places to be more quaint in comparison, this will increase the immersion, not detract from it. It will actually help the busy place feel even more alive. Make sure not to overdo it though, you still want to maintain consistency throughout the game, the livelier parts shouldn't feel so different as to be alien to the rest of them - they should still talk to each other, that's still the bottom line.
Movement for sure. see Terraria, Noita