A little off the top

 

 

The hard part is probably deciding the level of pixel graphics that looks both complex and artistic, yet visually pops from the background. I’m not trying to recreate handheld titles such as Link’s Awakening or Four Swords, but I am making a game that will probably end up looking a lot like them.

Since the Dullahan will often be without a head – the largest and most notable part of any sprite – I will have to be careful to make the rest of the body stand out against the background. The shield will provide the most distinction, so I will probably need to iterate on its size and color.

 

I quite enjoy mechanics that cause characters to gain or loose graphical parts, so I’d like to make the Dulla head toss as useful as possible.

Retro Aesthetic or Obsolete Sensibility

As happy as I am to be working on sprites, I keep needing to remind myself that they weren’t considered novel back when I had a GBC – they were simply the only graphics the system could manage. Experiments with resolution, Photoshop filters and layer styles have pushed me to re-imagine a bit of what my childhood could have looked like without resolution and memory constraints that plagued handheld systems.

 

It’ll take some more work, but I hope to both acknowledge the old masters at Nintendo, while managing to also show what I saw while I played those old games – Link’s Awakening, Metroid, Castlevania and WarioLand to name just a few. I think I’ll stick to 16 bit though, there are lot of good memories confined to that resolution.

Down to the Pixel

 

I’ve spent most of my adult life editing, remixing and touching up files in Photoshop. Throughout that time, I have done certain fine art pieces with the help of tablets, but it was always in place of pen and paper. Now, I’m turning to Photoshop to accomplish art that only a computer can do : pixel graphics.

Excuse for a minute – let me extol the virtues of nearest neighbor interpolation and the Offset filter. These two settings alone have really opened my eyes to the wide variety of projects Photoshop can naturally be used for. In addition to cutting away ivy, smoothing out wrinkles and blending pimples, Photoshop is helping me make my own little nostalgia trip. I made both of this little sprite concepts at 16p x 16p, and can scale them to whatever resolution I want, without all that nasty anti-aliasing and Bicubic weirdness. And that’s pretty cool for me.

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