Thimbleweed Park, a new old point and click by Ron Gilbert

[Snarky]

Sniped by Problem!

the graphics are not real pixel but vector based. For example when characters walk far their singular pixel are scaled down and this isn't pixel graphic in my opinion.

It's not vector based, that's something entirely different. What they're doing is displaying low-resolution pixel graphics in a high-resolution game using modern hardware rendering developed for 3D games. That means they can scale them to various resolutions and rotate the pixel blocks, but they're still pixel graphics.

In fact, you can do something like this in AGS as well, though not with the same flexibility. A general term for this style is mixed resolution.

Also the game is forced to 16:9 so there's no way to display it on CRT monitor.

There are 16:9 CRT monitors (and 4:3 LCD monitors), and I'm sure the game will display fine, with black bars.

I should have been developed with AGS, not Unity

It was not developed in Unity, but in a custom engine written by Ron Gilbert.

[KONEY]

OK, the way it's _drawn_ is pixel graphic but the way it's _displayed_ is vector based. This is what I meant.

My guess is Unity because the scrolling is jerky like in other fake-pixel games I've seen made in unity. If every pixel is a polygon moving all of them sometimes is not very precise. So just my guess

[Problem]

Scrolling is perfectly smooth for me. And "every pixel is a polygon", seriously? This is not how it works. More like: Every background/character/object is a (textured) polygon.

[CaesarCub]

I guess the main issue is how "retro" a game should be.
Should the game be in 320x200 for a non square pixel 4:3 ratio screen when most devices now are 16:9 and have a hard time showing non-square pixels correctly?
Now, if you decide not to use the exact old resultion, then the question is should you take advantage of all the other stuff you can or keep the self imposed limitations?
I do find that they went a little too far in some things for my taste, mostly when rotating things that would make the "pixels" look at odd angles.
But most of the other effects used worked.
I might have liked it to be a little bit more retro, but they have stated several times that the idea was to make a game like you "remembered" the old games, that is enhancing everything they could but keeping a retro aesthetic.

Btw, if you play the game in a 4:3 resolution it will work fine, but like a 16:9 movie it will be letterboxed.

[KONEY]

You have a point but what I say is that with a few options they could have done it right for everyone. 16:9 or 4:3? Fixed pixel or 3D effect? This was not difficult.

What is happening is that people owning the right display for old games see it wrong and people with the wrong display see it correctly... there's something wrong here.

At this point I'm very glad I didn't bake it on Kickstarter

[Crimson Wizard]

Scrolling is perfectly smooth for me. And "every pixel is a polygon", seriously? This is not how it works. More like: Every background/character/object is a (textured) polygon.

I think I can guess what KONEY means, although he does not use correct terminology. The thing is that when you work with textures, you no longer have guaranteed 1:1 relation between different layers, in terms of original pixels. So when characters move along the screen, they may end up standing at 0.5 pixel of background.

But then again, this is just a guess, because I haven't played the game yet.

[KONEY]

Maybe it's like you say object instead of pixel but the point is that it lacks consistency on the pixel dimension.

Scrolling is perfectly smooth for me. And "every pixel is a polygon", seriously? This is not how it works. More like: Every background/character/object is a (textured) polygon.

[KONEY]

Exactly but now I found the term and it's LACK OF CONSISTENCY IN PIXEL DIMENSIONS

I think I can guess what KONEY means, although he does not use correct terminology. The thing is that when you work with textures, you no longer have guaranteed 1:1 relation between different layers, in terms of original pixels. So when characters move along the screen, they may end up standing at 0.5 pixel of background.

[CaesarCub]

What is happening is that people owning the right display for old games see it wrong and people with the wrong display see it correctly... there's something wrong here.

Well I think that the issue is that Thimbleweed Park is not meant to be an old game. It is a modern game that borrows the aesthetic of the older games, made for modern day hardware and modern day displays.
I find it funny that there are no complains about the audio quality being also "wrong" or the music not being done in MIDI instead.

I think I can guess what KONEY means, although he does not use correct terminology. The thing is that when you work with textures, you no longer have guaranteed 1:1 relation between different layers, in terms of original pixels. So when characters move along the screen, they may end up standing at 0.5 pixel of background.

Yeah, I understand this, but the game has a lot of effects done in a higher resolution on top of them, including "sub-pixel" resizing of characters when they are far away, so I bet it would have been a huge pain in the ass to try and implement "pixel-perfect" scrolling and positioning.

[Problem]

Yeah, and that's just a stylistic choice. But it has nothing to do with jerky scrolling. In fact, "sub-pixel" scrolling is usually smoother. Of course, they still could have done "pixel snapping" if they wanted it. It's not like this isn't possible, many games make use of modern graphics hardware and still keep a consistent retro resolution.

When I saw the first screenshots, I didn't like the mixed pixel resolutions either. But when I saw the game in motion, it was clear why they did this. They decided against a full retro look to make certain effects possible, and result is that you will have a hard time finding two elements that share the same pixel size. If it was just the scaled characters having a different resolution compared to everything else in the game, it would have been much more distracting for me. But the game is scaling and rotating the pixel art all over the place, so it's somehow "consistently inconsistent"

[KONEY]

All I'd say is that the way the game celebrates pixel art is at the same time denying it too and I really dislike like it Is anyone sharing my opinion? This was the question in the first instance

[Problem]

Nope, I don't share this opinion. They celebrate pixel art by using it in a modern context, doing things they probably would have done, but couldn't do back in the 80s. They couldn't do voice acting, but you can do it now. They couldn't have digital music, but you can have it now. They couldn't display more than 16 colours, but now you can. Pixel art is one thing, retro hardware is another thing. This game is a pixel art game, but not a retro game.

[Snarky]

I think I can guess what KONEY means, although he does not use correct terminology. The thing is that when you work with textures, you no longer have guaranteed 1:1 relation between different layers, in terms of original pixels. So when characters move along the screen, they may end up standing at 0.5 pixel of background.

But then again, this is just a guess, because I haven't played the game yet.

Yes, this happens with the characters (and when they scale, their pixel size no longer matches the background, so there's no way to make them align), but for the parallax effect it seems to be designed in a pixel-perfect way: while in motion the layers slide smoothly (and therefore don't align), but they always end up in alignment when they stop.

result is that you will have a hard time finding two elements that share the same pixel size. If it was just the scaled characters having a different resolution compared to everything else in the game, it would have been much more distracting for me. But the game is scaling and rotating the pixel art all over the place, so it's somehow "consistently inconsistent"

I didn't even think the pixel rotation was that bad in most cases (e.g. when they wiggle the inventory items, or the fireflies by the creek), though on my computer it seemed a little glitchy in other cases. On the other hand, I actually think the "consistent inconsistency" makes it look pretty bad. My worst annoyance is that even if you choose "retro font", the font is a different "retro" resolution than the (background) graphics, and the font outline is yet another resolution on top of that. I would be much happier if the "pixel resolution" was consistent, and then they just added high-res effects, smooth fonts, and rotation and smooth parallax on top of that (whether to resample and snap the characters to the pixel grid so that there really is only one pixel resolution throughout could then be an option).

[Crimson Wizard]

Speaking of pixel art in contemporary games, this is something I am playing rn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIRYAPwdSY8

The game combines lower and higher resolution sprites, which sometimes look weird, but the backgrounds and stuff looks amazing.

[KONEY]

Question was not about sound because pixel art carries some aesthetics within which require 1:1 in my opinion.

BTW digitized voices are on adv since ages and most games had 256 colors, not 16. AND pixel art today exists because back in the 80s they couldn't do in a different way

[Problem]

BTW digitized voices are on adv since ages and most games had 256 colors, not 16. AND pixel art today exists because back in the 80s they couldn't do in a different way

Thimbleweed Park was developed as a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion, so no speech and 16 colours would be the reference here. But yes, as soon as 256 colours were available, they used it. Later, more colours were possible, and they used that too. "The Dig" had 3D rendered cut-scenes, because they could do it.
This is also the case with some commercial AGS games. Some titles from Wadjet Eye Games for example mix different pixel resolutions (higher resolution portraits and lower resolution backgrounds, fonts having a different resolution than the backgrounds, sub-pixel scaling of characters etc.) You don't have to like what Thimbleweed Park does, but it's still pixel art.
On the other hand, most of Monkey Island 2 wasn't pixel art - it was scanned paintings. So Thimbleweed Park actually has more real pixel art than Monkey Island 2.

[KONEY]

Back in the days they had low resolution to cope with, if they had higher resolutions they would have drawn stuff in hd, not in low res and scaled the pixels in different ways. They definitely wouldn't have done it this way.

FM Town version of Zak McCraken has 256 colors so Maniac Mansion is the only Lucasarts ADV with only 16 colors. Definitely sets a standard

[Gurok]

All I'd say is that the way the game celebrates pixel art is at the same time denying it too and I really dislike like it Is anyone sharing my opinion? This was the question in the first instance

Inconsistent pixel sizes annoy me and they're definitely not my taste. Same goes for subpixel positioning.

I didn't back Thimbleweed park, but I thought it was sold as something more authentic than Broken Age. It's a bit disappointing that they didn't clamp movement to pixel boundaries or keep a consistent resolution. I think it's probably them deciding it's not important, but then with such an emphasis on the 80s throughout the game, it's a puzzling and disappointing decision.

I'll probably still pick it up when it's cheap. They've made some bad choices, but no deal breakers. I can think of games that are worse. The Last Door, for instance, has two different pixel sizes for two different areas of the screen and a third for the cursor. It also has terrible art. Thimbleweed Park's art is very good and I think I'm a bit less averse to these things when the art is good.

Can someone confirm for me that the characters don't slide when they move? What I mean by this is that they move by pixels matching their resolution at the frame rate of their animation, rather than moving by pixels matching the screen's native resolution at 30/60 FPS. The latter would really bother me because I know that's laziness and not a design choice.

[Problem]

Back in the days they had low resolution to cope with, if they had higher resolutions they would have drawn stuff in hd, not in low res and scaled the pixels in different ways. They definitely wouldn't have done it this way.

In the 90s when SVGA became a thing there were games that had low resolution graphics with (sometimes optional) higher resolution elements (Portraits, GUI etc.).

Can someone confirm for me that the characters don't slide when they move? What I mean by this is that they move by pixels matching their resolution at the frame rate of their animation, rather than moving by pixels matching the screen's native resolution at 30/60 FPS. The latter would really bother me because I know that's laziness and not a design choice.

I think they are "gliding", but it's hard to tell, because the animations are pretty fast. But I disagree that it's laziness - I usually prefer the "gliding" mode in AGS games, unless the frame rate of the animation is high enough to result in smooth movement and scrolling.

[Snarky]

I think I can guess what KONEY means, although he does not use correct terminology. The thing is that when you work with textures, you no longer have guaranteed 1:1 relation between different layers, in terms of original pixels. So when characters move along the screen, they may end up standing at 0.5 pixel of background.

But then again, this is just a guess, because I haven't played the game yet.

Yes, this happens with the characters (and when they scale, their pixel size no longer matches the background, so there's no way to make them align), but for the parallax effect it seems to be designed in a pixel-perfect way: while in motion the layers slide smoothly (and therefore don't align), but they always end up in alignment when they stop.

After playing around a little, I need to correct myself: when you're at 100% scaling, the character pixels do always line up with the background pixels. In other words, positions are snapped to the pixel grid. I'm pretty sure any misalignment comes from scaling to other sizes, where because of the mixed resolutions there's no way to get the pixels to align (the pivot is probably still snapped).

As for the glide/non-glide walking, I can't tell for sure either. Walking along a scrolling background so that the character stays in the same position, I think there is a tiny bit of juddering as the background scrolls smoothly but the character only moves (retro) pixel-by-pixel, but it can't be more than a retro-pixel, so if the animation is non-glide they have one walking frame per pixel of movement (in AGS terms, the MovementSpeed is 1). The animation is very fast, anyway.