Cart Life: "The only thing that changed was me"

[Administrator]

Richard Hofmeier is about to go on a rant. A very polite rant, as it happens. A rant so polite, in fact, that he starts - as all good rants don't - with an apology. "Bear with me, this is going to be a rant," he announces, "so I'm sorry."
"This IGF nomination has made me real snooty," Hofmeier continues. "It's going to get bad here for a second. The idea of Cart Life and the reason I wanted to use the pixel aesthetic is not arbitrary and it's not entirely nostalgic. Pixels - the large, rectangular hallmark of pixel art - do something that parallels what the rest of the game does in its gesture.
"You have the human eye, infinitely complex and mysterious and beautiful, represented by a single black dot. That simplification, as profane as it is, taking all that nuance and beauty and summating it with a single black rectangle, and then getting entire expressions for these characters this way? The difference between the human face and this pixel grid is infinite, but we can bridge the gap. We can fill in their details with our own lives. This is why I wanted to use pixels for the game.
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