Wow, looks super cool. I would totally play a mech game that had these graphics. If it had customization like weapon hardpoints I'd play it every day xD

Oh awesome, thanks. You've got me hooked for sure.

individual equipment are rather small but the unit as a whole is rather big

I like it looks great. And who ever said HD has to be big..

That's very cool. Isn't that really just higher resolution pixel art? I don't think whether or not something is "HD" can define it as being pixel art or not. Really, pixel art is any art that is created on the pixel level. In other words, when you are creating it, you have the zoom up so high, so as to see the individual pixels. Even if the final product looked photo-realistic, if you created it entirely on the pixel level, it's still pixel art!

That said, I would question whether or not it is truly worth it to create pixel art at such high resolutions. Typically, pixel art is created to give a pixelated art style, not be very detailed. If you are going for seamless, high resolution graphics, then you might as well start with vector tools, or perhaps render stills of 3D models for something like that. I think that would be the more efficient path to take, if you have experience in 3D modeling. Once you model all of the areas that stand out, you can apply all kinds of materials, textures, and paints to the model, so that when it's rendered it has a level of detail that just about matches anything you could do with pixel art at the same level of resolution. There are also several benefits to using 3D models. In pixel art, you have to "pixel" together a whole new image for every frame of movement. With 3D models, if you want it in a different angle, all you have to do is rotate it and click render! If you wanted to get technical with it, you can even use "bone rigging" for more advanced forms of movement. Again, you just angle the part you want to move and click render. You could even write a script that does it for you, if you were really talented.

Also, how long did it even take to make that one piece of pixel art, which would only represent a single frame, of a single direction, of a single mob? At that resolution, each mob could take a week to fully pixel all of the frames. You would need a large workforce of artists (maybe 20 at least) to produce any reasonable number of sprites for such a game in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not trying to kill any ideas here; I'm just trying to be honest. That looks like a sprite from a game which would require a commercial level army of artists to piece together (possibly a studio of over 100). Think of Square Enix, for example. They produced games at about that resolution in pixel art (before the complete shift to 3D), and at the time, they literally had an army of artists working on their games. So, I just don't see that as being realistic for a team of say 4 or 5 people. That's why I think 3D modeling is the right solution. If you know what you are doing, you can get about 5 times more done in the same time with virtually the same or greater quality than HD pixel art. I think the problem is that rasterized pixel art is just the wrong tool for the job, when designing something at that resolution, and the returns are just not worth the great effort it takes to produce something of good quality. I believe there's a point in image resolution where one needs to draw the line. At lower resolutions, pixel based art works great, because it keeps the vibrant colors, looks better when done by hand, and is efficient to produce. You wouldn't want to use vector tools for something that will ultimately have a very low resolution, just like you wouldn't use raster tools for something that's HD. It's just the wrong tool for the job in my opinion.

Now as for BYOND blurring the map with anti-aliasing (which also happens to make pixel art at HD resolutions virtually pointless), I believe it can be worked around by increasing the size of either the world.view or client.view vars, and also increasing the number of tiles that make up each sprite. I think, but I'm not 100% sure that having the same graphics displayed over an increased number of viewable tiles will actually trick the rendering engine into raising the apparent clarity of the map as a whole. Of course the disadvantage is that you are then potentially bloating the resource with an increased number of actual tiles.

I realize this may be a bit hard to understand. It's not exactly the same thing going on, but the concept is similar with the icons NEStalgia uses, for example, but it's happening at a much lower resolution than what I was describing. I have done some pixel art for NEStalgia myself, so I know how it works. In reality, the number of visible pixels that make up each tile in NEStalgia is 16X16, however, that gets scaled up to 32X32 (default icon size) before it goes into the game. The purpose of this is to counteract the effects of the rendering engine's blurry anti-aliasing, which is not good for a game that needs an 8-bit resolution. In the same way, when dealing with sprites of much larger sizes, that take up multiple tiles, you would scale the sprites up so that they take up more of the actual map tiles. However, the goal is not to have the image appear relatively larger, so the scaling has to be "renormalized". This is where world.view or client.view comes in. By increasing the number of actual map tiles visible on the screen at once, you will "scale" the sprites back down to normal without all of the bluriness that would normally result if you were working with real native resolutions.

I hope all of this makes sense, and my logic isn't flawed somehow. You can test the theory out if you like. I would be interested in knowing just how effectively it could counteract the blurring of the rendering engine. To test this you would need to compare BYOND's built-in F2 map screenshots, with screenshots taken via the Print Screen key, which will show how the map really looks during gameplay. The closer you can get those two screen captures, the better.

More or less, its pixel art, with a coated quality.

@Ishuri: Hi Ishuri, don't forget, you're dead man...

You couldnt be more wrong. Pixel art implies that careful consideration was taken in the placement of each pixel. These where made with Photoshop brushes, which DOES NOT constitute as pixel art. The process involves taking a pixelated later,importing it to photoshop and using various brushes to complete the sprite.

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about as the process takes a maximum of 30 minutes to an hour each each. the perspective means I'm only making ONE direction. for every sprite. The process is not nearly time consuming as you would assume.

Ive played around with 3d models and post processing effects which just took too long so i went with different brush effects. This is NOT pixel art

I'm pretty sure this is for a Mech game which was mentioned in the past and had other videos and icons displayed.

I don't think they plan to integrate this much sci-fi into Spirit age, That's something i would do with my messed up whacky rpg world, but Spirit age seems to very much set in stone with the style :P but.. they could always have a mech/alien invasion :D.. i would have something like that :D

Well it is like Tech vs Elements I think? So I was just curious and I do remember something about the Armored Units game.