Have been going on game-dev chats and asking about tools for drawing pixels that aren't square, and getting replies of, "What do you mean, pixels are *always* square". 😅
@xinjinmeng that’s wrong and you’re wrong.
There we go. Maintained my status as the smartest person on the forum.
You might need to fake it by mimicking non-square pixel art with higher resolution assets and drawing. Which honestly sounds really cool (and tedious) when I think about it more…
That's what I've been doing, but it gets tricky. I'm the only pedant I know who cringes when they see *mixed resolutions* in a retro game. (I'm looking at you, Stardew Valley! ✊😠)
@xinjinmeng yeah. Hmmm. I doubt if current tools are designed to work beyond rectangles. And if you don’t go large enough with the resolution to make it explicit everything are, say, circles, you might wind up with fuzzy pixel art as originally dispalyed on CRTs. :/
I’m not in the space nearly enough but maybe there’s a more generic framework you can draw with? What engine/frameworks are you presently working with?
There's a large number of "pixelate" shaders available ... and all the ones that I've found only pixelate at 1:1 ratio. This is one of those things that is most likely just one extra line of code; the hard part is apparently convincing a coder to actually do it. 🤯
Ah, the Xinjinmeng experience. 🍷 What I want isn't weird, but it's weird that I want it.
@xinjinmeng if you’re using a well constructed open source shader they might have decoupled the algorithm for pixelating (which is most likely VERY basic because rects have a lot of baked in assumptions in a 2D plane).
Replace that call would be one line but the function to find points to expand upon with circles would be tricky :/