Instead of keeping my latest little tech demo as just a tech demo, I thought that it would be a good idea to put in the work to make it a complete product.

I have been using new game as an opportunity to work on my pixel art skills. One of the major shortcomings that I previously had was with environments and backgrounds. With my work in Cursed Squire the backgrounds were made by just tiling a single geometric shape, it was crude but effective and it looked like the early NES style I was trying to evoke with that game.

While those background were good for what I was doing I still wanted to improve my ability to make environment artwork with this new project. Conveniently I happened to discover this tutorial by Sadface. Using the techniques in that guide, I took a couple of cracks at making a rock formation background. My early ones were very crude, and honestly didn’t look very good, but I kept at it and made little improvements with each iteration.

The other major area that I need to improve my pixel art skills with was with character design and animation. Previously I have used a technique called skeletal animation where body parts are drawn individually and then animated using another piece of software like Spriter. This technique is good for getting something done quickly with minimal effort, but wouldn’t really help me improve my drawing skills if I did it again, so I wanted to try to do this the old fashion way.

I took a couple attempts at creating a player character that would fit in with this style of game and environment, something loosely inspired by the Spelunky character and Indiana Jones.

That style of pixel art, which I first saw used in Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery, clashed with my backgrounds. I needed the character to have a little bit more girth, which was going to make the animation a little bit more challenging for me, but after a couple more attempts I came up with this design.

With the concept finished it was time to then move onto animating a simple 8 frame run cycle. This was probably the most challenging thing I have done, in my game development career, to date. After several failed attempts I followed an 8 frame run cycle animation guide by Heartbeast and managed to come up with a run cycle that I think is probably the best that I have ever done.

Taking the lessons learned from working on this player, I have been able to apply similar lessons to the enemies that I have been working on for this game. One that I am quite proud of is this Skeleton.

I am quite pleased about the progress of this new game and hopefully have more to show off soon.

Until Next Time
– Steven