Flawless, lovely little pice of pixel. Aerial perspective is dope. Respect <3

w o w !

Sorry, but that's AI generated and attempt to cover it with fake creation steps.

Super nice piece. Amazing depth, atmosphere and details.

ilmenit: Kindly show some respect for one of the world's best pixel artists, who's been doing this since 1992.

@ilmenit show some respect,Mades pieces go way back quality pixel wizardry now and in the past. <3

excellent

Thanks to this image, I now understand why the CAPTCHA asks for a traffic lights, or buses :D. @Menace and Exit, you expect respect for Made, and I expect respect for Misha, Vasyl, Prowler, Toms, and others. Each of them put in 20, 30, 40+ hours of manual pixel work... and lost to AI :/.

Piesiu: The problem is you guys took one look, and concluded, and that's now all you see. I fully believe Made has the skills to make this picture by hand. And I see nowhere a confirmation that ai tools was used? Just your opinion, that you now present as truth.

So what I'm saying, until any proof apart from your opinion exists, Made's history speaks for itself. I fully believe this was handcrafted, and I see no proof or even indication of the opposite.

A piece of Art with a great "A" ... like Amiga !!!

menace: The steps consist of filling area by area, each pixel apparently is only touched once. No re-coloring or refining or correcting of shapes or colors in later stages. No artist I have ever seen works like this.

Made has skills and did amazing work pre-AI, I don't neglect it. However the more you look at the picture, the more you see issues of AI generated images: the details make no sense (here - direction of cars, traffic lights, all left side of the picture near the taxi, area around the bus stop).

@ilmenit: the only thing i find weird, now that i think of it, is the direction of the cars. which other details make no sense in your opinion?

I have to agree. The more I inspect the image I see more 'bizarre' stuff. Like the bus having next to no length (with really weird inside), the taxi having no driver, the traffic direction, the amount of visual noise that is constant present in LLM-generated pictures (Look at the left side of the street at the sidewalk), and the biggest telling - inconsistent perspective (buildings on the left).

Sure there's no solid proof like in Facet's case, but the way the image was constructed (which as someone put it was 'ass-backwards') reminded me of Facet's and Critikill's faked stages.

If Made wants to sunk their previous achievements in such style, they're more than welcomed to do so.

BTW: The ZIP file doesn't contain any stages, just the finished image. The only way to view stages is by Revision stream.

I see this comment from Menace: "Made's history speaks for itself.". Meanwhile, Made's history: http://www.kameli.net/nocopy/noc16.htm

@rexbeng - That was 30 years ago. We all went through a phase where we copied our graphical heroes. That's how you learn and evolve.
We're past that now.
I - for one - like to believe this is pure handmade pixel work as I see no evidence for the contrary.

Yes, what was 30 years ago is, indeed, history. :)

@CP - I don't think those are fake steps, I believe it was painted like shown in work-stages by him. But it was almost surely not original picture/idea/composition.

It's almost impossible for human to draw pixelart picture from start to finish in predefined palette, without changing neither composition nor palette the way it was done here. Especially topic like here, with complex perspective shortcuts, almost perfect palette and contrast and shitloads of details.

Thats not a process of creation but recreation.

I would assume that sketch it was done over the layer with reference - with already baked palette.
And then 'filled' part by part from ref.(most likely AI) with little to none adjustments.

Still proper pixel art, masterfully rendered but many little details (pixel-scale deformations, especially on cars with tricky perspective shortcuts*) hint's that its not original 8bit pixelart (This won oldschool gfx compo) work like shown during the compo - but merly recreation of reference done in completely different environment.

Which is opposite to what did Vasyl, Prowler, Misha, CP etc.

The best way is to ask for author for honest answer (and original reference file) imho.
And to do proper digging - shame that there are no stages in archive to look closely.

*Also look at the tree for example - which is clearly out of place here and looks bad, doesn't make too much sense from side of 3d form, light and colors compared to the rest
(for me this would be clue for AI reference)

Maybe in isolation I could have doubts, but take a look at https://demozoo.org/graphics/389841/ and zoom-in at the "AI hand" that wasn't even fixed.

I don’t see any ai hand here
Btw - I don’t doubt that made hand-pixelled this picture
Where I see the problem is how original idea was created.
Because I have no problem (like most artists) with using references to help with creative process - you have an idea, create some concepts or sketches and sometimes you use reference/s for part of YOUR composition.
But what if your only idea IS reference? And say AI generated one, with perfect contrast, composition, palette etc.
Not saying it necessarily happened here, but it looks very much so

Bizarre traffic light. What seems to be a hallucinated ghost car in mid air just left of the bus can be seen.

I think you’re making a pretty convincing case for why you have no future. Anyone who creates something of value, anything that could serve as even a little inspiration, is constantly torn down. Mediocrity and conformity.

Did you lose another 60 euros in prize money? ;-)

I think you’re making a pretty convincing case for why you have no future. Anyone who creates something of value, anything that could serve as even a little inspiration, is constantly torn down. Mediocrity and conformity.

What an awesome piece again @Made. Love the composing, usage of the restricted OCS palette and masterfully handcrafted pixel-dithering.
After your Japan visit, this is the 3rd pixel work I saw from you, inspired by Tokyo, Kyoto, Oskaka. And it made my day when I saw it.

Your entry was by far the best in the Revision compo.

Looking at it closely, I also thing AI was used as base. Too many wrong pixels a handpixeled picture would no have. But nevertheless it is a nice picture and there is a lot of great art which contains "errors" if looked at it closely.