I'm from Perth, Western Australia. Look it up, if you're ever bored enough to do so. Being Australian, this city has a high standard of living, which I appreciate muchly, but is known for being quite backward and boring in terms of things to do. It's fine though, I'm never bored. If I went and saw every good movie and went to every art exhibition and ate at every nice little place and STILL had a thirst for more to do, then yeah, I might complain. Why am I telling you this? Why not.

Anyway, I'm no pixel artist. I discovered pixeljoint last year sometime and never really came back until recently. I have a feeling that I might actually want to try and develop some pixel-skills sometime in the near future, but I generally don't have the patience for these sorts of things. I think pixel art is amazing though, and the quality and the detail in so much pixeljoints gallery blows my mind every time. I reckon it's best used for games though, where the detail and crispness and joy of pixel art can come to life, where your mind instinctively reads everything on screen as something real and happening inside the game-world, instead of reading it as a work of just plain good pallette choice, good composition or smooth animation, which is the case when you look at a piece of pixel art on pixeljoint right? You sort of just see it immediately as you would any drawing. It's something that somebody decided to draw. But in a game, it's something that feels more real because you're in amongst it, it gives it more gravity I think. I think the art side of it is important, and amazing, but I guess I see it as a bit of a waste when so much of it stays in these galleries, and not out in their own little worlds, being interacted with by anyone who plays the game. Gaming is more widely appreciated than just plain pixel-art, so it's sort of a huge gain in my opinion. There are so many fantastic browser games and freeware games out there with really clever and well thought out concepts behind them, that look and handle rather abominably because of the sloppy vectory type graphics. I have never had this problem with a pixel-art based game, and in general, games made with pixel-art are reliably much better. I think the fact that you have to place each pixel one by one lends itself to looking sharper and having more of an attention to details. Collisions are much more accurate for example, because the border is right there, it's either touching the pixel or not, and you can see it clearly. I think that if you're a game designer and you want to make a game, see if you can get a pixel artist to collaborate with you, and make it worthwhile, don't spend hours on some game that'll just float around on a couple of obscure pixel-art threads, or never make it out of the basement. Make it a solid game, with a purpose behind every pixel and every line of code. I think the creator of Braid, a perfect example of designer/artist collaboration, has the right philosophy. A philosophy of treating each players time and energy as important, and leaving no filler in the game. Each puzzle was unique and meticulously thought out, and the artwork was made afterwards, and looked fantastic because it was the artists only task. The designer didn't have to tack it on themselves, with no real artistic skill.

So yeah, I'd like to see less mock-ups, and more real games being made! We have the power of such amazing communication with these well-kept forums. Challenges happen every week here on this site, so how hard could it be to have game collaboration challenges too? At least a few a year maybe? There are some out there I'm sure anyway, but you know, I'm just sayin'.