Looking for 80s/90s style visual novel illustrations

[InvertMouse]

Hello there . Hope you are doing well. I am looking for an artist who can mimic the style of visual novels from the 80s and 90s. Something like:

 

 

It will be paid work. If anyone is interested, please let me know via a reply here or a direct message. Some samples would be preferred though I understand it might be an unusual style. Thank you!

[Pudding321]

8-bit visual novels?

[Down]

Hello there . Hope you are doing well. I am looking for an artist who can mimic the style of visual novels from the 80s and 90s.

I don't know what exactly you intend to do but I'm buying 3 copies of your next game, man.

 

Good luck in your quest.

[Kendjin]

Invertmouse, testing our loyalties again. Very interested to see where the plan is going for an 8bit style of game.

[Narcosis]

Ah, the early days of eroge. Games, which ran on NEC PC's - PC-8801 and PC-9801 respectively. PC-8801 was an 8bit machine with incredible graphics capabilities - far ahead of any other 8-bit computers. The 16bit PC-9801 was even better:

 

 

How far do you want to emulate the art? If you're looking for near-perfect imitation, it will require some hardware knowledge and decent pixel art skills; most games from the beggining of the NEC era ran in a couple of different graphic modes - each of them having different characteristics. The resolution was mostly 640x400, with color display of 8 out of 16 colors in total. It was later expanded to display 8 out of 256 colors and even more. You'll have to take these limitations into consideration, to make the art look retro-realistic. It's actually quite hard to imitate as well; back then art was mostly hand drawn, in a lot cases pixel by pixel; it's time consuming and requires a lot of work to get decent results.

 

If it's only the specific anime artstyle of 80's you're looking for, the reference screenshot is rather misleading.

 

I've been working on something similiar, although I'm using C64 as a base. Graphics are an exact interpretation of VIC-II graphic chipset's capabilities, along with perks and limitations. The art is 160x200, 16 color pallette, running in multicolor mode. Whole screen is divided into 1000 attribute cells and each can only hold 4 colors at once. The final game will not only look, but sound and even run like a C64 game. Tricky, but worth the effort.

 

I can only wish you luck and hope you'll find a good artist; good pixel art skills are really valuable nowadays.

[InvertMouse]

Thanks for the responses folks ! I am actually working on something that includes a bit of throwback graphics, but it will not look like that for the entire game *hides /(>w<)\*.

 

Accuracy wise, I won't be demanding a perfect replica of those games you guys have shared. So long as it gives the retro vibe, I am okay with it. Thanks!