That's sick. Who made it?

Kind of cool, but looks like AI.

Looks like Leetch is playing with a mini stick lol

We’ll fix it.

I will give AI pixel art credit though, it is very clean. I've always said that it can be a good tool for proof of concept and rough work that can be refined into something great - but the more realism you try and inject, the worse it gets.

In this case, it could be awesome. I thought about creating pixel portraits with some AI assistance, similar to the look of old arcade games, and on the same vein as @von Ozbourne 's custom ROMS - that basically cartoonify player faces, seeing as everything else is that way (including Ron Barr).

When you reduce it to 320x224 and SEGA 16 colours, it's actually pretty good!



Clean up the fuzzy pixels, and it's solid.

15 hours ago, Drezz said:

I will give AI pixel art credit though, it is very clean. I've always said that it can be a good tool for proof of concept and rough work that can be refined into something great - but the more realism you try and inject, the worse it gets.

In this case, it could be awesome. I thought about creating pixel portraits with some AI assistance, similar to the look of old arcade games, and on the same vein as @von Ozbourne 's custom ROMS - that basically cartoonify player faces, seeing as everything else is that way (including Ron Barr).

I'm not a tech bro so I mainly see the problems with AI as vastly outweighing the benefits, especially in the visual art sphere. But you do raise a good point with the player photos. I did mainly convert the player photos and a few other assets from Baseball Stars 1, 2 and Pro to make the Hockey equivalent, but that was the parameters of the design choice I'd set for myself to make it look as much like it was made by those development teams as possible. Even at that, I was doing a lot of mixing and matching and making a few custom assets using bits of the originals as a design base, and that still took a long time. And actually even though it could use a clean up, your conversion to real 16-colour kind of hid some of the ultra-clean shininess that makes the original pixel art look like it's sitting in that AI uncanny valley.

Knowing what I know from experience and seeing how professionals did those redrawn sprite images back in the day, the prospect of redrawing 26 player photos, per team, is daunting. And now that I've pretty much rolled slapshot's 34-Team mod as my exclusive base ROM of choice, that means a total of 884 photos. Even with streamlining the process, just converting photos to 8-bit already takes a while, never mind redrawing every single one. Maybe if I was being paid for this, I might engage in that level of insanity, but given that I've done my best to meet the eligibility requirements to maintain my amateur status, I have also thought about seeing if I might employ AI to convert my photos for me.
I actually have a back-burner project that would be perfect for this art direction if it can work [the justification being that I would only be stealing work from an unpaid intern]