[jaimebuelta]

The interesting bit about this kind of games is that you don't need state-of-the-art tech, and art at this point is mostly about choices, not necessarily about what's technically feasible. The best example is the usage of orchestral music, according to the post.

I mean, for an 2D adventure game, you are basically animating characters. The objective is to create something like an animation movie, in whatever art style you want. It doesn't need to push the tech in the same style that the first games where.

Which is great! I want them to be spending their efforts in the game, artwork, narrative, puzzles, jokes, etc, not on how to create a background that looks OK if you have an EGA screen and a recognisable melody in a PC speaker.

Whether is pixel art or not is irrelevant to me, as long as it's well drawn and animated. I just hope that they end with a fantastic result. I'll sure buy it and play it when it's out.

[cptskippy]

> The interesting bit about this kind of games is that you don't need state-of-the-art tech, and art at this point is mostly about choices, not necessarily about what's technically feasible.

Certain types of games exist and thrive due to what's technically feasible at the time they're created, just like any other form of art.

An example, Cuphead isn't radically different from something like Metroid in terms of gameplay and yet Cuphead was technically impossible when Metroid was all the rage. Similarly Metroid's asthetic is a product of it's era and wouldn't be received today in the same way.

Games are art, they simultaneously drive the medium while being limited by it.

[seba_dos1]

> and art at this point is mostly about choices, not necessarily about what's technically feasible. The best example is the usage of orchestral music, according to the post.

Usage of real recorded instruments can still be technically challenging today if you want to do what Monkey Island 2 did with its audio via iMuse - synchronization between music and in-game events (easier) and smooth background music transitions between rooms (harder). MI2 Special Edition recorded its soundtrack with real instruments and while it did a pretty good job at it, it still noticeably simplified some transitions the original version had, because they were much easier to achieve back when it was using MIDI.

[Tyr42]

One interesting innovation is in Octopath traveller. It has set up the music before the boss fights where it is ready to jump into the boss theme at any point you finish the dialog boxes.

https://youtu.be/b7Zc3f8cPnU?t=215

[seba_dos1]

That's one of the things Monkey Island 2 did. It also had the track seamlessly changing cues and adding/removing layers as you entered various sections of a location, had multiple transitions between the same tracks that were chosen depending on when did you trigger them and in-game events were often timed to wait for the beat to synchronize them with music. Later games with similarly dynamic sampled music that I'm aware about (The Curse of Monkey Island, MI2:SE, Portal 2 and now Octopath Traveler) did some of these things, but none of them came close to the level of complexity in the original Monkey Island 2.

Although one reason for that (other than the obvious MIDI vs. sampled one) could be that in MI2, a lot of effort went into this music system which ended up working great, but... not many people actually noticed ;)