8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box
GDC Festival of Gaming13 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2018–2026
talk · intermediate · evergreen · 2018–2026 on HN
Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.
HN repeatedly recommends it as a master class in limited-palette pixel art and palette cycling, from an artist behind Loom and Monkey Island.
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12 comments from Hacker News
Mark was nice enough to invite me to his home studio when I was a new high school grad to talk working in games as an artist. He told me the story of the fight over dithering. I give him strong partial credit for ending up a game engine/art pipeline coder instead and got to thank him after his most excellent GDC presentation on the lost power of palettized textures ▶ this video You can see that power in action here link (Hit show options) link BTW: Deluxe Paint has been remade in Python if you want to give it a try link
He gave one of my favourite GDC talks of all time [1]! I recommend this talk to anyone who is interested in the details and history of working on limited colour palette games! [1] ▶ this video
this is incredible talk form the Background Artist of monkey island, about 8 bit and explain in details how palette cycling works, and modern way to doing the same more efficiently for modern games. 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box ▶ this video
> The original EGA background art for Loom was made by Mark Ferrari Obligatory recommendation for this talk by Mark Ferrari: ▶ this video - truly an artist
Every Deluxe Paint fan out needs to watch this video of the master of that tool explain his craft Mark Ferrari: 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box ▶ this video
If you are here and you haven’t seen Mark Ferrari’s GDC talk, you really should sit down and watch it. He is perhaps the greatest pallete animator of all time. Even if you aren’t familiar with the games he worked on, HN folks have likely seen his gallery of single-image animations linked below. ▶ this video link
If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C link you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;) If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out link (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist ▶ this video With that you can fire up link for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, link for something more modern.
You might enjoy this GDC talk by Mark Ferrari of LucasArts fame, where he goes over his pixel art technique, as well as how he did color cycling: ▶ this video
You might enjoy an entire talk on using a limited color palette for graphics in early games and how it stimulated creativity ▶ this video "In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives."
If you want to see what a master of Deluxe Paint palette cycling can do check out Mark Ferrari's link (hit "Show Options) and ▶ this video
If you want to see what a master of Deluxe Paint palette cycling can do check out Mark Ferrari's link (hit "Show Options) and ▶ this video
This is an amazing engineering and artistic achievement. I have the Live Wallpaper for Android and it's the most delightful $2 I've ever spent, even though it crashes every few days. Right now it's snowing. Yesterday night I spotted a shooting star. There's a great talk by Mark Ferrari about his work: ▶ this video