The End (post 6)

Well, the genius project is over. I feel like I've said something very similar to that in a previous blog post but oh well. What have I been doing over the break after the TED talk? Well, I've taken this time to return to some of my previous attempts to try to improve them and further develop my style. I also worked on some more characters and farther developed my style, adding more colors and slightly enlarging the sprites and I think that the result (you can see a bandit that I drew below) has come out better than anything else. I also revisited landscapes during this time and improved on the sunset that I had created previously. I changed the techniques that I used to create the transitions in the background and redrew the buildings. Once again, I ended up creating larger sized images then before and I think that the result was much better. So while it may be kind of late to change up my style so dramatically I'm really happy with the last bit of progress that I made this week. Other than that I don't really have that much to say this week, I didn't really pursue anything new as much as revisiting old drawings and trying to improve them, but it was still was a really good way to practice and see my improvement. Anyway, I guess that just about does it for the blog posts. Overall I'm really happy with the progress that I made over these past few weeks and I think that this was a fantastic opportunity for me to pursue something that I otherwise wouldn't have considered. Here's some of the drawings that I worked with this week:

 Robotic bandit

 Another robot, that seemed to be a common theme this week

The new and improved skyline, although there are some weird dots now that I've put it on Blogger, those aren't there in the actual file

That's the interesting stuff that I did, the rest was just more variations on those characters and backgrounds

Progress Update 5: Coming to a Close (+ Video) (post 5)

Well look at that, its the final blog post. This week I attempted animations using aesprite (keyword "attempted") and learned a lot of stuff along the way. I also finally posted my interview with Aleks, developer of the upcoming Unworthy game, which you can find in my last blog post. He had a lot of interesting things to say about pixel art and it was very interesting for me. Animation brought up a very interesting challenge for me, as you have to draw the same sprite over and over and over again, and make sure that each tiny change looks fluid. This can be 5 to 10 times the work of creating a single sprite, and these things took forever to do compared to the stills. That's why I used a simple sword in the video, because it didn't require a ton of animating and I was pressed on time! This blog post is going to be a lot shorter than normal due to the video, so I'd like to take this time to share with you a little bit of what I learned about pixel art during this process, elaborating on what I said in the brief video below. The main things that I learned during this time were choosing colors and making shapes. Sam Keddy has a very useful tutorial about this on his website and this is one of the first resources that I used. Essentially, small differences in pixels can result in things looking off for inexplicable reasons, as I mentioned in my video and this website goes into great depth about that. For this week's full update and a neat time-lapse of me making one of the animations, check out the video below:

The video requires Flash to run but it's kind of glitchy, you can find it on Google Drive here

And of course I couldn't go without showing off some of the stuff that I made this week. I spent some time revisiting one of my landscapes by popular request after getting fed up with animation and I think that if I spent even more time adding detail it could look really good.

Not my proudest character sprite...

Yes these are tiny, no I'm not sure how to resize an animated .gif with aseprite.

Interview with Aleks Kuzmanovic, creator of Unworthy

Promotional art for the upcoming game Unworthy

Wait a minute, I thought you were interviewing someone else! That is true, however his busy schedule has prevented that from happening. Luckily I got the opportunity to talk to reddit user /u/AleksandarK, a game developer who is in the process of launching a pretty cool game called Unworthy that features fantastic pixel art. I've seen Aleks' posts on the reddit pixel art community for a while now, so naturally I'm pleased to have gotten this interview. I'll post the full exchange in a separate post, but these are some of the highlights.


What got you interested in learning pixel art?

Aleks: "I actually started out trying to do 3D and HD art, but found that it wasn't very efficient for small team projects. I really jumped into pixel art because out of necessity. It's still very doable to work on a solo game project (more or less) when working in the pixel art medium."

Interestingly enough, this is also the reason that I became interested in pixel art, since I was complete trash at making "normal" drawings

What was your biggest inspiration for the art direction of your game?

Aleks: "The original B&W idea was actually inspired by an LDJAM entry by a friend of mine (Benjamin Anderson). I saw the potential in using silhouettes to create meaningful images while leaving a lot of room for mental extrapolation / imagination on the player's end in order to fill the holes."

How did you find a personal style when creating Unworthy?

Aleks: "Honestly... I kind of just went with it. Took a mouse and fired away in an image editing software and away it went."

I actually like this advice. I seem to be overthinking the whole style thing, and I realize now that it has to be something you find naturally.

How long did it take you to create the sprites for your game? Do you go through a lot of revisions?

Aleks: "The background and prop sprites are pretty straightforward and I have a reliable workflow for those, so I don't really go through that many revisions (often it's out on the first bang). The animated enemies are very time consuming though and often go through several revisions. I use a really high frame count to achieve smooth animations since I can leverage the fact that the sprites are a single color (sometimes 2) to create animations relatively efficiently. As mentioned I go through several revisions with animations since sometimes the timing just doesn't fit the game balance so I have to remove or add frames in order to fill the holes."

What was the most challenging obstacle to overcome in Unworthy's development?

Aleks: "Honestly... the most challenging is just staying disciplined and motivated to work every day. When you're working the same hours, on your own project, seeing the same thing day in and day out, it can be emotionally and mentally exhausting. Other than that, everything is just about putting the time into it."

Motivation is also my biggest personal weakness. This is definitely relate-able.

What would you recommend for a beginner just starting out?

Aleks: "If you are completely starting out I would encourage copying all the sprites you can. Obviously do not put these out publicly and claim as your own work or something. When you copy, make sure you think about every pixel. Why did the artist put it there? what would be the consequence if it were a different color? what would be the consequence if it were moved or just deleted? how would this impact the form and silhouette? If you're copying and answering these questions, at a certain point you'll begin to understand the process or create one of your own. Honestly the hardest part is discovering what works for you."

This was very useful advice, and when pursuing pixel art in the future I will definitely keep this in mind.


That's all to see here. If your interested in reading our entire exchange check out the link here. I'll also take this time to link to Aleks' game, which was recently Greenlit on Steam here. For those of you interested in the short video and pixel art that I created this week that post will be coming later tonight.

Progress Update 3: Backgrounds and Preparation (post 4)

This has been a fairly busy week for my project. Creating these backgrounds took a lot more time than I initially planned, so there isn't as much content to stare at as other weeks but I'm still fairly happy with what I produced. I spent a lot of time on color this week, trying to create the best combinations I could, rather than focusing on hundreds of intricate details in each piece. Behind the scenes, however, I've been doing a lot more. After reaching out to three people, an independent game developer has agreed to do an interview with me and I've sent him the questions, so there should be a blog post popping up some time in the next week with his answers and some of his art. I really like his personal style and color choice. [Edit: I have interviewed someone else due to the busy schedule of the original developer] Additionally, I've began looking into the more technical side of my project, and I've started with a few of the tips I hear a lot. People online will frequently talk about avoiding floating pixels and choosing the right colors, but why do pieces that adhere to these rules look better? I'll be taking a deeper look at this over the course of the week and will be able to include my findings in post 4 or 5. Anyway, I think it's about time to wrap this up. I'd like to take this time to remind you to vote in the poll in the right column, whenever I run out of ideas I always take a look at that poll and it heavily influences what I draw each week. Don't forget to check back for the interview, and I'll see you again next week.

A collection of all my backgrounds:

And as usual, here they are at 2x scale:

Progress Update 2: Objects, etc. (post 3)

Animation planning tutorial from Pedro Medeiros

Another week or so has passed and its time for another blog post. This week my focus was objects. Thanks to a submission in the poll on the bottom of the site (highly recommend voting, by the way) I worked almost exclusively on sci-fi and some fantasy themed objects. I created helmets, ray guns, even a kinda cool looking bow and arrow thing in both realistic and sci-fi style. These were some of my best pieces yet, and I think the often simple nature of these objects allowed me a lot of freedom with their design. I focused mainly on a very minimal, small style and I think that the object's I drew, with simple features, really lent themselves to this kind of interpretation. I really enjoyed the theme this week and had a lot of fun creating these objects, so I'm opening up another poll for next week, which can be found right below my name to the left. The main challenge that I faced this week was coloring. The objects that I drew had very simple shapes, so that wasn't as much of a concern this time around. Instead, choosing the right colors became vitally important and I still don't think that I got the colors quite right on a few of them. Next week when I work on full landscapes having a central color scheme will be critically important and I hope to improve myself there. I also did some reading on animations using these handy little .gifs that Pedro Medeiros has created
(you can see one over to the side). While they are small, these animations do a good job of both explaining and illustrating the process and I will definitely be looking back at them once I get to the animation stage (just a few weeks away).

Well, here's what I made this week. I messing around with some environment stuff in preparation for next week.

And here it is at 2x scale:

I'm very interested in feedback this week since I tried quite a lot of different styles, so leave your thoughts below!

Progress Update 1: Characters (post 2)

Well, the first cycle is done and I've created quite a bit of pixel art during that time. I have laid out a simple guideline of what I will be working on week by week, and this week I focused on characters, and I've created quite a few of these tiny people. I learned a lot about shape technique this week, taking inspiration from the work of "Hopoo" (who I am reaching out to for an interview) and Pedro Medeiros, whose numerous, short, informative tutorials have helped me greatly learn about creating these characters. I have also experimented with various styles (some of which can be seen on the blog header, in fact) and replicating other pieces of art with modified shape, colors, or shading to help hone my skills and compare my work with that of other, more established artists. However, I haven't gotten done as many of these drawings as I would like, and hope to increase my output in the coming weeks by spending more time daily working on the project. All in all, I have seen some progression from my very first piece (the wizard in the top left) to the last (the giant golem in the bottom right), but not as much improvement as I would have hoped. The only thing to do is practice more next time, I suppose. I have also began to develop a style over the course of the week, as I found that some of my favorite pieces that I worked on were the super tiny ones, often just a few pixels tall. The small size restricts me to some quite minimalist design decisions, which I like, but also means that it can take a surprising amount of tweaking to get one looking just right, because even a small change between positioning of colors can have a huge effect on the overall design of the character. This means that there are many, many revisions of these little guys with slightly longer arms, shorter legs, some extra bend in the arm, etc.

Below is the .png file I drew all my all of my art on. I like the idea of creating one per week and just expanding it whenever I run out of room, so that I can see a clear progression of my style and quality. It should be noted that there are some side-by-side comparisons in there, with another artist's work beside my own interpretation.

And if that's too tiny for you, here's one at 2x scale:

Starting Small (post 1)

Hello, I'm Matt Daly. I've enjoyed attempting to create decent looking pixel art in the past just for fun, but I have never been very good at it. This project has given me an excuse to pursue this interest further and hopefully improve my general art skills along the way. I have laid out a specific plan for what I will be tackling over the coming weeks. Carrying out this plan will hopefully result in significant improvement to my pixel art skills and allow me to produce subjectively better looking pixel art more efficiently and with my own personal style. While it may be hard to measure these goals in terms of subjective appearance, I can measure my efficiency when using the program and ability to produce quality work quickly.

The focus of my project will be improving my pixel art, and the only way to do this is through constant practice. For this reason I will be practicing every day for at least an hour hopefully producing multiple images and variations on images during that time. I will also spend additional time fleshing out previous drawings that I liked, and trying to create a few highly polished pieces per week to showcase in the progress update. I will also be focusing on a variety of different objects when drawing, spending about one week on each:

Week 1: Characters (people, robots, creatures, things like that)

Week 2: Props and Miscellaneous objects (swords, treasure, boxes, etc.)

Week 3: Backgrounds (landscapes, skylines, interiors)

Week 4: Animated Characters (more characters, but with a few frames of animation for each)

Week 5: Animated Scenes (characters, props, backgrounds all with subtle animations)

Week 6: Return to Favorite Themes (return to objects I had previously enjoyed drawing and work on them some more)

Along the way I will be finding resources online from people with experience creating pixel art to learn new techniques and styles. At some point during this timeline an interview will also go up, which I am looking into conducting currently. I will be returning here with weekly blog posts outlining my progress during the week and hopefully showing improvement over time, see you then!