Author: by Dan Vader, Mike Nguyen & Vic Nguyen

[A deep look at the decidedly non-retro pixel art direction for Capy Games' Super Time Force Ultra. Written by designer and writer Dan Vader, and artists and animators Mike Nguyen and Vic Nguyen.]

With next-next-gen graphical realism and the hype of gamers strapping on helmets to gaze into the future with virtual reality, it's often asked "why stick with pixel art?" It seems that in 2015 the choice to string together thousands of little colored squares presents players with a litmus test of sorts: Their reaction to it determines what is and isn't acceptable in the medium's downhill slalom through the uncanny valley.

For us, the choice to render the relatively complicated mechanics of Super Time Force in pixels wasn't any kind of statement or rejection of the general direction of the industry. It also wasn't motivated by nostalgia or a desire to wear the "retro" label. As we'll explain, the choice to adopt pixel art was first born of necessity, and then slowly evolved over the course of the project to become not only the best fit for Super Time Force Ultra, but the most natural way for us to showcase the personality of our studio, Capy.

Before they were a Force, they were a Squad

Super Time Force got its start in a three-day game jam project created by three Capy teammates, brother-artists Mike and Vic Nguyen, and programmer Kenneth Yeung. In fact, back then it wasn't even Super Time Force, it was Super Time Squad.

The constraints of a game jam on well, time, means you don't have the luxury of spending much of it on developing the art style. You're just trying to get something, anything on screen. Mike and Vic had worked in pixel art across dozens of small games for not-smartphones as well as other game jams, so they knew they could use it to maximum effect.

The other thing they had going for them is that they're twins and have an unspoken shorthand when it comes to working. Yup, as Mike and Vic tell it, Twin Power is real! They've always done everything together: same school, same college, same job, they even got married around the same time and all live together in one big house! Their partner in jamming, Kenneth, also started with them at Capy around the same time nice years ago, and they've always jammed together -- they're basically the game jam triplets!

Ken coded all the crazy replay mechanics. Mike made all the environments and background art. Vic animated the characters. Bam! Three days later, they had Super Time Squad!

This might be a real game, guys

Super Time Squad ended up far exceeding their modest expectations. They brought it back to the studio and minds were blown. Everyone who gave it a whirl went through the same process, the three stages of Super Time Force Acceptance, you could call it:

The team at Capy agreed that they should keep working on it (and change the title to Super Time Force) and maybe even make it the studio's next game. Where before they had used pixel art for its convenience, now they wanted to use it to develop a hallmark style. But at no point was there ever any discussion of NOT making it in pixels.

Up to that point, Mike and Vic had used the medium of "pixel" art in chameleonic ways to match the demands of a given project. But now the field was wide open. They could shape and mold those pixels into anything they wanted. But what did they want?

The Sworcery of Superbrothers and simple squares

It wasn't until our studio collaborated with artist/designer Superbrothers on Sword & Sworcery EP, that we fully grasped the versatility of pixels. It was probably Superbrothers' art that made everyone realize this -- in our opinion, he's ground-zero for the pixel art resurgence.

He became a massive influence on Mike and Vic. They were in awe of his art. They loved that he expressed so much with so little. They felt a kinship with the way he enhanced the boxy shape of pixels and made it the signature of his work. He didn't know it, but he set a high bar for them, and spurred them on to take the pixel process and come up with something that was uniquely theirs.

Craig Adams' artwork on Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP

Troubleshooting the visual chaos

What quickly became apparent -- even in the jam version -- was that the game's concept led to a lot of visual chaos. Its central time-travel mechanic pushes you to create this chaos, and it was exponential. It was the game's reason for being. In fact, most of the art considerations throughout the project involved getting out of the way of the action. Super Time Force is an intense, chaotic, heaping pile of stuff happening all at once. You've got bullets, enemies, explosions, 30+ versions of yourself jumping around. Interacting with ALL of your past actions at once demands a whole other layer of focus from players above and beyond the demands of any platformer. When you "get it" the experience is exhilarating and powerful. If you don't… the game is a locomotive and it's left you behind at the station. Every department, especially Mike and Vic (and later Kelly) of the art team tried to help where we could.

Early test level

Finished game level

One of the biggest hurdles was making STF readable and cohesive while sticking to its colourful, over-the-top style. The environments of each level had to be as bold as the crew of characters blowing it to shit, but couldn't overwhelm the central action. Mike would create the backdrops and then progressively tinker with them to decrease their contrast, fade them out and make them more pastel-y without losing a sense of the space.

Background progression from initial block in of shapes to almost final render. Click for enlarged versions

Another example of background progression. Click for enlarged version

In the jam version, the backgrounds were made out of squares and diagonals -- sharp-edged patterns that helped make Vic's more rounded pixel characters pop out and be readable. Initially, they thought they could continue to push the linear visuals of the jam game by having every object made of either straight lines or diagonals. But after a lot of experimentation they found the diagonals were actually contributing to the visual noise we were trying our best to combat.

Diagonals in pixel form naturally have what only can be described as "jag." The squares that form diagonal shapes don't blend seamlessly; they instead ascend or descend in a stepped pattern that lays "jag" across the screen. To solve this problem, they shifted gears and tried to limit diagonals and instead kept things boxy, square and as flat as possible. It helped with the visual noise -- and on top of that looked FREAKIN' good! This solution to one problem ended up opening a path towards creating STF's own signature style.

Perspective changed to help visuals be more blocky

How we learned to stop worrying and love the blocks

Much like our friend Superbrothers had used pixels in a very idiosyncratic way, we too were looking to distinguish the art of Super Time Force and move it further away from a simply "retro" aesthetic.

Quite a lot of pixel art trades in nostalgia. The goal seems to be to make you believe that a contemporary game could have nestled in comfortably between your Castlevania and Chrono Trigger cartridges. We were never interested in that, though. To us, Super Time Force was less like a game you could've played as a kid, and more like a fever dream of that game.

Remember the feeling of playing a game before bed and then shutting off the lights and still having its shapes painting themselves across the black screen of your eyelids until you fitfully drifted off to sleep? To us, that was Super Time Force. One foot in the past, sure -- but the other foot trying to find purchase in the shifting ground of our own tastes and imaginations.

Another big reason why we weren't all that interested in flying the banner of  "retro" was that the format of showing games on HD screens has fundamentally changed the way pixels are rendered on screen. Achieving the look of classic pixel games is quite difficult without the use of complicated shaders or post-processing that threaten to tip the game into nostalgia pastiche.

Back in the old days of grainy CRT televisions and arcade cabinets, pixels were rendered softer and fuzzier, and thus they were applied by creators in much rounder, smoother shapes. If you look at old screens of classic games, they aren't typically as blocky as the modern games being hailed as "retro-inspired."

In fact, if you load up an old 8 or 16-bit game and play it on your fancy HD monitor, it won't even look the same as you remember it -- the sharper HD technology has changed the aesthetic of these games in ways that the creators likely never intended. Rather than perpetuating this disconnect of using sharp pixels to try to realize rounded shapes, we instead embraced the look of HD pixels. Mike and Vic allowed the sharper pixels to inform their blocky designs.