I've begun a refresh of the art from the rolling preview; I thought this time I'd take a bit of a look at that process.

First off, here's a before and (work-in-progress!) after of the first image I've been working on:

In retrospect, the "before" image is such a horrible mess - and not just because of my rushed jam art (I'm slow at the best of times!). For whatever reason I wanted a "pixelart" look, and had convinced myself that the best/fastest approach with my limited pixelart chops was to paint things up with my preferred methods and then try to fake something via post-processing. In retrospect it was absolutely a mistake, and my slapped-together downsampler applied a (non-generative AI) "pixelize" filter... It worked better (or sucked less) for some images than others, and I tried to hand-correct it a little as time (barely) allowed... But the results weren't very good.

Oh well - time to fix it!

I knew I wanted a better solution, so after the 2024 jam I wrote my own downsampling tool, which just uses plain old home-grown image filtering. I'm sure it's nothing new, but part of what it does is use a custom outline-extractor to bias the sampling (and automatic palette reduction) in favour of edges, which helps an awful lot for blocky-colour art with distinct outlines - and works surprisingly well for most other image types too. Maybe that time would've been better spent getting better at pixelart. Hmmn. ...Anyway! The image above isn't the best example; I might show what I mean in more detail in another devlog, or save that for when/if I release the tool itself.

This time around I'm no longer trying to fake the artstyle - in the first place, as much as I love good (real) pixelart, plenty of classic DOS games had scanned art. Mine's usually digital, so it's not technically scanned, but it's a much closer analogue. I probably shouldn't worry so much about "the done thing", but when it comes to developing a game for a retro platform, I find myself wanting to capture echoes of nostalgia at least to some extent.

Anyway, so my first step has been to go back to the source art in ArtRage and fix it up a bit. For this one I looked back at my incremental saves and branched off at an earlier point; so it's not a complete repaint, but not too far off. I'm not completely satisfied with the "final" result here so I'll definitely keep working on it... Later on, with fresh eyes.

From there it gets cropped and fed into my tool for downsampling and palette extraction. I make sure to leave some room at the top of the palette in these images for fonts and such...

If you're looking carefully you might notice the timelapse above uses an older version of the image. I mentioned in the last devlog that the most important aspect of this tool is its non-destructive nature; it means I can update the source high-res image separately to the sampling filters/palette. This includes dithering, although I'm not using dithering for this image; and possibly not in Equilibria as a whole - I don't think it really suits the style as it stands.

Now onto the rest of the images - thankfully there aren't many. Next time hopefully I'll have some voxel animation to talk about!