Arne (Niklas Jansson), a pixel artist and designer, shares retro hardware redesigns, fantasy console concepts, pixel art tutorials, and the Famicube project.
HN commenters praise the site as inspiring, especially its retro hardware redesigns and fantasy console concepts, and recommend it to anyone into that kind of thing.
I'm a huge Pico-8 fan and suggest that anyone that is interested in Pico-8 watch Joseph White's (the creator) Practice (NYU game designer conference) talk about the design philosophy of Pico-8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jfTIWosBw. The TLDW of the talk is that he explicitly tried to built a "cozy" game development environment with enough constraints in place to encourage creativity without the stress of starting from a completely blank canvas.
At the end Scott Hanselman has a footnote about building or buying a physical Pico-8 console. One thing that is missing is most Pico-8 consoles focus on the play aspect of Pico-8, not the creation aspect of Pico-8 which is just as important to me if not more so. I own a PocketCHIP and the device is a decent handheld computer, but there are many aspects of it that make it painful to use, not due to the form factor but due to the quality of various components. The keyboard is bad although there are a variety of solutions, including 3D printed covers (https://www.thingiverse.com/glitchpudding/collections/pocketchip) or rubber feet (https://androidarts.com/Amiga/PRBOOM.jpg). The quality of the screen and touch is also not great, so it was hard for me to draw pixel art on the device.
I'd like to build a custom handheld computer primarily for Pico-8 development built around this display https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/hyperpixel-4-square, probably using a Raspberry Pi Zero. One of my issues with Pocketchip was that the…
The retro designs that I really want to see made real would be the ones done by "Arne"[1].
Most of the designs would be impossible, being pretty steeped in trademarks, but they've explored some interesting ideas, like alternate keyboard layouts (ABC, 4 rows etc.) and mashups of all kinds of "retro" machines.
We're also not seeing that many 16-bit faux-retro designs (i.e. not straight-forward Amiga/Atari clones). Either because they tend to be more complex, or because this follows the same trends as fashion and music, where we e.g. had 80s synthwave followed by 90s vaporwave and now more 00s sounds and looks. Since the time for that should've come by now, I think it's more the complexity angle. "Just" hooking up a 6502/z80 seems an order of magnitude easier than coming up with whatever the equivalent of custom chips would be. Never mind that because of the scale economy, you'd have to do the latter with FPGA, which is a step down on the ladder of retro authenticity.
[1]: https://androidarts.com
Regarding point #2, I've found it usually balances it a bit more and while keeping the same values, makes it more colorful. If working with a limited palette, a neutral grey can be used dually with warm or cool colors on the object to cast an opposite cool/warm shadow - which usually looks quite complementary, although I can't recall seeing a warm shadow cast from a cool-colored object very often - seems unnatural as shadows are generally cooler.
http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm - this link touches a bit on color theory from a digital-painting standpoint, though it's pretty applicable. Color and Light for the Realist Painter by James Gurney is also a good book that has some info about creating unified palettes.
thanks!
Sorry but I don't have time for something like that.. I guess general illustration and painting rules apply to matte painting as well. Realistic illumination, good perspective and nice composition.. Start from sketch and big strokes with no detail, keep refining and detailing later.. etc.
I don't know your level, but for general painting tips I love this old tutorial http://www.androidarts.com/art_tut.htm
For any specifics, don't hesitate to ask..
Neat :)
I definitely need a right-click colour picker (or shift-click) to work more easily. Can I suggest cutting back your GUI, removing that 3d look, or if you like it too much, then making the pixel art pictures also be 3d like that.
Also your palette is way too saturated. Check out something like http://androidarts.com/palette/16pal.htm for a much nicer set of colours.
This really reminds me of a lot of Niklas Jansson's concepts over at https://androidarts.com/
I love the way he thinks and distills a design to give it so much character. He does lots of retro hardware re-designs too, which are singularly cool. I bet he'd have a blast playing with TIC-80.