Skullgirls (2D Tag-em-outs Girly Type Fighter)

[kedawa]

Man if the animators behind Street Fighter III used this kind of animation process, I think it'd be about the best looking fighter of all time.

On technical merits, this is the best looking 2D fighter I've ever seen. It loses a few style points for the "amerimanga" art style that reminds me of too many bad Saturday morning cartoons from the early 2000s.

I don't think we watched the same video. This game looks good, but the animation is nowhere near SF3 quality, and the art style is pretty simplistic.
It's obviously better than the glut of doujin fighters and stiffly animated animu games, but let's not get carried away.

[Frogacuda]

I don't think we watched the same video. This game looks good, but the animation is nowhere near SF3 quality, and the art style is pretty simplistic.
It's obviously better than the glut of doujin fighters and stiffly animated animu games, but let's not get carried away.

Well what impresses me is that this has neither the limitations associated with pixel art nor vector/flash animation. It looks as good as it would have if they were animating it for film or TV. I feel like this is the "right" way to handle 2D animation in modern day gaming.

That's not a judgement on the quality of the animation itself, but rather the way the animation is realized, if that makes sense.

[Cheebs]

Yeah. Vectors don't work in HD because it comes out looking like a bad flash game. And pixel art seems both impossibly tedious (to the point where detail suffers) and out of place in HD. But this looks great. Game art design revolution plz. I'll take a Metal Slug in this flavor.

Am I correct in thinking that they are using art with an alpha channel at perhaps twice the resolution they need so it can easily be scaled down in-game to whatever resolution is called for?

[kedawa]

I'm going to have to guess that's not the case. Giving each quadrant of each pixel its own opacity value would be incredibly wonky.

[Cheebs]

But how would it antialias the edges if the sprites didn't have semi-transparent pixels lining the edges?

[Frogacuda]

Am I correct in thinking that they are using art with an alpha channel at perhaps twice the resolution they need so it can easily be scaled down in-game to whatever resolution is called for?

They're creating art in a way that doesn't seem particularly resolution dependent, and it seems as though they're using a proper alpha channel rather than a one-bit alpha mask like most games.

So kinda? But I don't think they're downsampling to antialias in order to get there, that shouldn't really be necessary.

[FirstBlood]

I think I'll hate the artwork significantly less once we can see the whole cast and they're hopefully not all identically deformed like the first two.

I love the cartoon chick.

[Mzo]

Yeah, that Steamboat Willy style chick is pretty cool.

[kedawa]

But how would it antialias the edges if the sprites didn't have semi-transparent pixels lining the edges?

Antialiasing on the edges using an alpha channel would be done at the same resolution as the actual artwork.
An 8bit alpha channel gives you 256 different levels of opacity to work with, which is more than enough to give the inpression of smooth edges.

[MechDeus]

I'd play this for free. Maybe. Probably not.

I still don't like the new character and the fireballs look like they were ripped out of something fan-made for Mugen. The technical aspects like what Frog was mentioning are really well done, I hope they get put to use on something else.