Why the whole Chibi large head and unrealistic trend?

This is not meant to be taken to serious, just the ramblings of a coder running in to the art barrier again.

I am coding a game, top down, sprite based. Nice. Works, runs. Love it. Time to replace the placeholder bits with some more acceptable art. Let's look around to see what's available. Hmm, nothing much, but then google works a bit of magic and provides me with stuff like this....



And the asset store provides me with this;



Now, I am not putting down the artist that made those. They are far more talented for creating those things then I will most likely ever be. But why the humongous heads? And the over the top body dimensions? It doesn't look, well, 'serious'. And I don't mean serious as dark and gritty and such, but realistic so to say. I loved Don't Starve Alone and that head the ridiculously large heads. And Darkest Dungeon's characters are not realistic, but the proportions are more in line with what I'd want.

Short story, I'd love a character type like this;


Maybe a tad darker or more detailed, maybe not.

Guess I am looking in the wrong places. But charactesr, perhaps like those in Baldur's Gate, where could a coder that runs headlong in to the art barrier find those. Anyone knows?

 

The proportions are more readable on small devices and the simple paper doll nature of them makes them easy and inexpensive to animate. If you want something else, go to a site like polycount and hire an artist.

 

Big head = all about facial expressions. When you have small character and small head, the only thing you can play with is exaggerated jaw and/or eyebrow-movement tops. If you have small body large head you can facilitate more readable facial expressions so you can communicate more feelings and craft better experience for the player if it is something you're looking for.

 

Large faces/heads are an easy way to convey emotion and varied expression quickly and with less animation. The also hold up with a higher camera. To convey emotions on a more normal proportion body you have to do more body animation which is a bit more complex.

 

I've come to realise that those with less experience and practise can achieve an acceptable result sooner using the Chibi style vs well, pretty much anything more realistic, because it's quite hard to ruin something that's basically a formless baby with some features.

 

It's a drawing style from Japan that got popular?

 

It's not really though. The big head "trend" is not really that much influenced by Chibi style.

 

Oh yeah. Sure they're TOTALLY unrelated.

 

Glad we agree.

 

The world cuts down ignorance in time, you know. Tic tok.

 

Well, hopefully you'll be okay.

 

Thanks for your concern, love, next time bring me flowers.

Edit: I had a chibi character in the first manga I wrote, if that helps the actual thread.

 

@BlankDeed @AcidArrow get a room!

 

I get what you mean. I have looked for art many times and although I do buy some I rarely put it to use due to simply not having enough art that works together well.

I would buy a lot more if I found styles I liked. Like you... I don't care for all of the characters with oversized heads or other styles that seem like they are intended for an audience of young children. I call these basically "mobile game art" as these styles seem to be very common in mobile games.

I used to think that I didn't care much about graphics in games at all but over the past year I have come to realize that perhaps I am in fact more picky than most. Lol

Everyone has their own preferences of course. I would prefer playing games using simple rectangles and other primitive shapes over games using a lot of the art I see. And a lot of that is also just because I like to see "something different" and so much art all looks the same to me.

Anyway @Murgilod is right. Your most efficient way forward is to locate artists who you can work with to produce the style of art you want at a price that works for both you & them. It's a waste of time to keep looking for assets. I have wasted far too much time on it myself. And I have also hired artists many times to create custom art for me. Crazily most of those projects have never been released and instead the bulk of stuff I have put out over time is mainly my own programmer art. Lol

Some places I have hired artists... game dev forums and art forums. If pixel art you can find very skilled and very affordable artists at PixelJoint and Pixelation. If 3D check out polycount. You can also locate artists and do a cheap test using fiverr. Twitter is another great place to find artists.

Basically years ago it was a real beast but all of this greater accessibility in game engines and Indie movement has made it so there are just masses of artists available to create art for your games now. Truly the last two times I advertised for artists I quickly received dozens of quality interested people. Much like game devs themselves there are so many artists trying to make money through creating game art prices have dropped a lot in the past years as well.

Anyway just check out any of those links above. Oh of course here I think Unity has that Connect. I have never used it. I used to hire artists here back when they had job forums for that. Connect I really don't understand it and like I said there are so many other ways of locating artists I didn't see the need to waste my time getting into Connect.

 

It's the millennials fault as usual

 

While learning 3D art, all i was fascinated about was hyper realism. So that was what i tried to achieve. When i got confident enough to post my work online, this was one of my first works. It was from Polycount character challenge of June 2015 https://polycount.com/discussion/153556/the-monthly-character-art-challenge-june-2015/p4. At the time it took me one month of serious work to complete this troll (based on concept by Magnus Noren). Link to more images on artstation https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4952W
It is far for perfect, i had many mistakes with UV map and rig, and topology and pretty much everything. I was still learning at the time... But if you look at this from 2015 and think what type of characters i would create today, you might think i continued down this path of realism. You would be wrong. Basically i got "pulled" to Chibish style cause that is what people asked from me from the moment i started to get first payed freelance work offers. This troll stands almost 4 years now online. The amount of time someone contacted me with job offer based on this troll = 0.
It is easier and faster to create less realistic chibi style characters. Easier and faster = cheaper.... That might be the bottom line answer to your question "why everything is chibi". In my opinion very few indies can afford to pay artist to spend so much time on one character creation, cause creating realistic character will take more time, and will require more skill. Therefore it will cost more

 

Well this is very true and I can see that happening that even if someone prefers creating art in different styles it would be far too time consuming (=far too costly) to make it reasonable to do so.

Have you ever considered trying a middle ground? Keep realistic proportions and go ultra low poly on the model and perhaps even simple flat shading as well. Just asking because there imo anyway is a huge difference between something like a AAA style (which is immediately what your troll reminds me of) and chibi style. A lot of middle ground in there.

 

Big headed cartoonish characters are cute. Chibi is a Japanese version of it, and we know they like to make cute characters, but making large heads on cartoon characters has been around a while. For instance, the large headed kids of the Peanuts comic strip. Their heads are roughly the size of their torsos, and their arms and legs may be even stubbier than the typical Chibi character. I don't know when the Chibi style began, but the Peanuts characters have been around since 1950.

Betty Boop, with her enormous head, debuted in 1930. I'm not sure how far back big headed characters go, but it's a cartoon thing.

Oh, and from an artist's perspective, hands and feet are difficult and time consuming to draw, so just make them small and emphasize the head for expression.

EDIT: And for what it's worth, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck have heads much larger than proportional for their bodies.

 

In addition to easier-to-read facial expressions on small sprites, it also lets you save dramatically on the number of animation frames. If the limbs are tiny, it's harder to tell that the walk cycle only uses 4 frames. With larger, longer limbs, you might need 8 frames, which doubles the amount of work (and cost). (Reading back through this thread, the very first reply by Murgilod said this even more succintly.)

Also, the store icon is critical for mobile games. I'm sure you've noticed that most mobile game icons feature only a headshot. Big-headed sprites give you visual parity with your store icon.

@Reloque - Since it's easier to find realistically-proportioned 3D models, you could make 2D spritesheets out of renders of 3D models.

 

That is very reasonable. Having more different styles in portfolio would certainly be beneficial. Planning to add more variety in portfolio in the future

 

Guess I am not the only one running into this. As for realism, I am not looking for photo realism, but real within it's own scope, consider this picture;



That is the bounty hunter from Darkest Dungeon. That is not, by a long shot, a realistic image as far as photo realism is concerned. But, it's realistic in it's own scope. The limbs, head and pose don't seem cartoonish or out of place. Such a style, would be far preferable for me then the whole 'happy baby head' style as someone put it.

It doesn't look 'cute', it doesn't look childish, it doesn't look happy, it does look good. I realize that such 'simplicity' is probably harder then it looks.

 

True all. And at the scale I work at now, facial expressions are not really an issue. I guess for now 3d models to 2d sprite sheets, perhaps with the new 2d tools, seems to the best option. Then again, I'd have to find those first.

Considering I am more a 'professional hobbyist' then a dedicated game designer, I'll have to make do. Funny enough, I know about doze developer, coder type people that happily throw in their time and effort on various hobby projects to learn how to do stuff. One artist buddy of mine was completely flabbergasted by that. He believes that the creative types he hangs with would never do that.

 

There are programmers the same way who will never donate their time to another person's project. Just wanted to mention although it might seem like it sometimes it's not only artists that don't seem willing to work "for the fun of it".

You can find artists occasionally who are actively looking for a project to simply contribute to. You will find their threads on game dev and game portal forums. Unfortunately you probably won't find any here because there are no such forums anymore. Check out GameJolt forums, itch.io forums, forums for other game engines (probably want to be up front you are using Unity there because sometimes people do it in the spirit of the community surrounding those particular game engines).

Now keep in mind the majority of the time these people who are actively looking for a game project to work on for free are generally beginner to intermediate level and probably not even able to reach the quality of something like that character you showed above. I am not an artist but that looks like high quality work by someone very experienced obviously knows what they are doing. Once they are at that level odds are they are either employed making art for a company, offering their services for pay, using their skills on their own game or any combination of these.

Quite simply there is no reason for them to devote their time for free to someone else's project. I know there are a lot of very experienced programmers who do have full-time jobs and spend a lot of their free time on open source projects but I guess maybe that is just a sort of cultural difference between these professions.

 

Quite true. I've not found some sort of 'open source' artist equivalent. And yes, there are quite some devs that couldn't care less about others projects.

On the other hand there are humongous galleries on the net where artist showcase what they have made and give it away for free as well. Blendswap comes to mind, Game-Icons.net, opengameart,org and itch.io as well as others. It's not so much as that artist want to share less then devs, but perhaps the way in which they share. Devs like to code and build towards a game. Artists maybe like to draw and color and not be tied to a game or goal. Or maybe I am oversimplifying it.

 

.https://opengameart.org/
https://openclipart.org/

Might be the biggest places artists submit art to.

Not sure but they do have a lot of stuff and a person could probably create a game around content available. Finding exactly what you are looking for... never in my experience.

Sometimes I think that would be a fun way to go. Stop having ideas for games first... go browse through art and then think of games that can be made.

 

Someone linked to this one in another thread. It's has both free and paid assets.

https://itch.io/game-assets

 

Yeah that is very good and I browse through it often. What I posted are the only completely "open" free game art sites I know of. There are probably more out there somewhere.

Itch has some great stuff games and dev stuff. Have bought several tools and such there as well. All kinds of cool stuff. Itch is my favorite site by far for both games and dev stuff.

 

It seems big headed characters in political cartoons and caricatures go back to roughly the mid 1800s.

Here's a political cartoon of Bismark from 1871, for example.

 

I think people get that it is a valid style and the OP was just asking why are people making art in that particular style so much more than in other (even somewhat) more realistic styles. Like when looking for characters in HD this huge head art style is very common across all asset stores that I have checked at least. Sounds like the answer is basically just that it's easier and therefore cheaper to produce.

 

Yeah, combined with a bit of mild frustration at the art barrier thing I mean, I am making a casual game as well, somewhat more cartoony and there it would fit.

But, for the more sword and sorcery type game I am making now, I'd like it to be more Dark Sun, or Darklands style. Ultima Underworld perhaps. A bit more updated to fit the modern capabilities, but still somewhat more real. It's all so brightish, cartoonish and just plain happy these days. Everything is somewhat joking or humorous, or worse, slapstick comedy. So flavorless. An art-world full of sameness. And I have in my head another view, idea, for what I want with my game.

 

LOL! That's amazing I think you are the only other person I have heard say that. That's how game art looks to me in general... so many games and so much art looks basically all the same.

Even for the other art styles it is more or less that way. It's great quality just that it often looks like it could have been the same artist(s) that made the art for thousands of games across different genres even. Doesn't really stand out to me anyway. Sometimes one does but it is just the nature of the beast. People have made so many games with very nice quality art and umpteen FX applied and then Juice It added on top that games kind of all end up looking more or less the same after a while.

If you are interested in creating your own art.... if you don't hate low rez pixel art you could try your hand at it. Going low rez and simplistic. Focusing more on the animations instead of the overall fidelity of any one image.

There's a lot of Indies trying different styles. I find those more visually interesting. Whether going ultra low rez like I am or going a sort of abstract HD or focusing a lot on the colors being used etc. Heck even a sort of HD stickman style might work for your game and help bring it more attention. Just something to think about.

 

I'm just about the cliche coder, I often confuse purple with blue and I have the drawing skill of a below average chimpanzee. But I am getting into blender, that works for me.

As for Indies, Darkest Dungeon, what a style, what a way to go. Or INSIDE and Limbo. And Bastion did the 'cute' thing in a way that it works. But yeah, it's a golden age of gaming, but not for game art.

 

Good art is typically expensive.

 

So is good code. Good enough code is shared freely enough by most devs and game enthusiasts. Good enough art, I am having some more issues finding. And that's my frustration with the art barrier.

Let's be clear, if this was a professional setting, I'd hire an artist and tell them what I'd expect and work from there. That has been the case in most of my professional live. This, this thing is hobby. Like welding, I also do that, also a hobby. Hobbies can cost money, that's fine. But I am reluctant to pay somebody to do the hobby for me so to say. So like with welding, I'll pay to enroll in courses, pay for the equipment and raw materials I use. If there is a particular difficult piece I need done, hobby wise, I'll ask for help, perhaps take some classes. I'll not pay somebody to that difficult bit for me. Kind of defeats the purpose of the hobby.

Now, for game development, that's kinda of different. I mean artwork is so massively different from code development that I will most likely not be able to get that skill set. Akin to rebuilding my motorbike. I can do the electronics, I can do some bodywork and am not half bad with sourcing parts. However, I will not become skilled enough to work with brakes or have the equipment to clean the carburetors. So, yeah for that part of the hobby I'll pay someone. With games, the artwork is that part. I don't have the tools nor the skills. So either I accept that my games don't look as good as they could, try to find better assets from other hobbyists willing to share or pay for the assets. Since this is a hobby, I'll chose option 1 and 2. Option 3 doesn't seem right for that.

 

If you honestly believe this, you have an incredibly low standard for "good code."

 

I wasn't trying to make a point. I was just chasing down a detail. That's all. Carry on!

 

There is a very easy explanation for this. For the majority of cases selling code comes with the expectation that support will be provided for it. Support is expensive and time consuming and unless they want to make it one of their business products it can be more cost effective to just give it away for free.

By comparison the cost of art is tied almost entirely to the cost of creating it and not to the cost of support it. Thus there is virtually no reason not to sell it. Some people may give their art away but that's more because they want to give it away than there is a compelling reason for them to do so.

 

You should read the 'good enough' bit. Also, there are tons of opensource projects that I do consider 'good' without reservations. And the things people sometimes share on Stack Exchange, for free, are often quite good.

 

Good point. Often it's not even selling code, but service. That's even more work after the initial costs. With say, a painting, once it's painted and sold, you're done. I do not really service stuff that I build at no charge no.

As for the "giving away" bit, the difference between artist and coder might have more reasons. I just observed that while I get plenty of help on both art and code on the internet; coders often looks at the bits provided and make whole solutions. Artists generally look at the process you use and suggest improvements there. Different approach, different style perhaps.

 

Look, all I'm getting from you is that you really hate the idea of paying for a service you need. I know it's nice to go "yay, I didn't have to pay for this" but artists need to eat.

 

They are very different states of mind. If you haven't yet at one point while working on the art for your game will experience a "shift" from the engineer / technical side to the other side. I think the first time that happened for me was doing the onion drawing exercise in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's an old book. It was decades ago but so good I imagine it has been updated and re-released over the years. Might want to check it out.

I've always been wired much more for logic and technical so have spent a lot of time and work on this art side to make a small amount of progress but there is some good stuff like that book which is helpful.

Anyway there is a definite difference at least as far as the state of a brain when doing something like programming vs doing something like graphics.

I found 3D to be easier in a way because it can be approached kind of from a technical skill perspective to an extent at least.

Ultimately though as time passes I am convinced the answer lies in the humble cube and rectangle. This simple form can represent anything it needs to be.

 

Then you are reading more into this then I've written. I do not object to paying for a service I need. There, no doubt about that possible anymore.

Also, for a hobby project, I can live with the current situation, ie, placeholder and less quality of art.

Lastly, the discussion I am having is about a certain art-style being quite popular among available assets. A hypothesis on why this is so was suggested, namely; it's an easy style for artists to master perhaps. This lead to the the topic of why devs develop their skills differently, and several viewpoints on that have been offered as well.

Seems to me like a quite open debate in which nobody denies that artists got to eat as well.

 

I hear you. The 3d bit comes a lot easier to me then the 2d bit. Halfway in, I shifted to OpenSCAD because there I could code 3d models in well, code.

 

Probably because, a good number of indie game creators, and gamers
like cutesy, over the top, super cartoony looking human characters, with
unrealistic looking body proportions.

And that art style, also gives a light hearted, comedy effect, to their games too.

 

Could be. Maybe I am just getting old and jaded looking for harsh games with equally 'harsh' graphics. It is a very accessible style I guess.

 

I updated my post above.

 

See, that is what bothers me, not that I don't like comedy in my games, but lately it feels like there it's the only choice. Games need to be easy-to-digest, lighthearted, goofy things if I base it on the assets that I could fine. And that's just not the only thing that interests me.

 

I've scoured open game art sites and while here or there you might find something appealing I've never thought it was sufficient to make a game out of.

I like the "darker, grittier" art myself(such as my avatar) and only option I have found is to pay for it. I can't stand the chibi stuff and my drawing skill is a few levels below chimpanzee so I don't even try.

I don't understand why paying for art is any different then paying for any other hobby expense. If you make a game no one is going to care if you did the art or paid for it, they will care if it sucks though.

 

Yeah, I understand what you mean.

 

Maybe @Reloque the graphics don't need to be changed? Just to put a different perspective on things... if a game is truly "strong" interesting in itself... well look at Hotline Miami which has a dark gritty yet programmer friendly art style. Undertale is another great example. Sold over 3 million copies. There are loads of Indie games with far better higher quality graphics that haven't sold more than 1,000 copies. There are just numerous examples.

If your game plays very well stands on its own maybe consider putting it out there. Or even consider a Kickstarter or other crowd funding site to show what you have and say I am raising money to hire an artist to redo these graphics because I am a programmer and suck at it. I think a lot of people would completely understand and even relate to that so as long as they find the gameplay your design goals etc interesting you'd likely get funding.

I used to wrestle with this stuff a lot and basically I bounce around from using ultra low rez to hiring artists to do it all to my current view which is again NEVER LET GRAPHICS KEEP YOU FROM CREATING OR EVEN RELEASING YOUR GAME. And that is where I am now with my second paid game project. Might be similar to yours in some ways actually... a top down arcade action rpg game. I am just knocking out content to build the game. Build build build is my focus.

I have just seen many times now someone making a truly good interesting game with even the most primitive graphics get a ton of interest including sales. Sometimes being programmer art I think can actually work to your advantage to stand out from all of the many other games. You'll get comments like "I actually like the art it's different", "the graphics aren't THAT bad", "it's not for everyone but I find the art has its own charm".

Anyway I just wanted to throw that out there. Some things to think about.