Quote: Original post by Sneftel
The primary tool at the time was DeluxePaint. Ahhh, the memories.......

Try the World Creator commercial version.
The render engine doesn't use a photo realistic approach and has a real classic 'gamey' hand pixeled artwork style.
Look in their galleries and forum for more.
Link: http://www.inet2inet.com/main/main.htm

If you have gimp, you could try the filter->blur->pixelize function and see if that does you enough justice, which will do pretty much the same as taking a big image and mapping it to a smaller area.

Quote: Original post by ravyne2001
Generally they'd do the broad strokes with less precise tools then go in and add details by the pixel. It takes time, to be sure, but they didn't actually go pixel-to-pixel for everything like you might think.

You might be able to get similar results by doing the source work in a larger format, sample it down, and then reduce the color pallete to 256 colors, possibly with dithering. That should look close, but not as good. Maybe 75% of the result with 25% of the effort?

You could also build up a toolset of various backdrops and objects for some things to ease your workload.

Yeah, photoshopping a larger version then sizing it down would work, I'm pretty sure that's similar to how the OP's 2nd scene was made, those houses in the are too well anti-aliased for timely art. They would be fairly easy to do by hand and then scanned into an art program and modified, however. The fence on the left looks fuzzy enough to be painted while the fruit would be added in later.

The first scene looks like it could be all-computer or based off of scanned-in line art, or combination of that and the technique I talked about above

I've made a step by step pixel art creation tutorial on my developer's journal, if you want see how it's done(or how I do it)